Module Information

This module introduces students to an excitingly diverse selection of contemporary writing in English, and world literature in translation. It covers a variety of forms, styles, and linguistic registers, but concentrates chiefly on the genres of poetry, the novel, and the short story. The module adopts a wide-angled perspective on the phenomenon of ‘contemporary writing’, selecting set texts from the literary cultures of Wales, Britain, North America, and the wider world. Students will be encouraged to explore the relationships between texts and their particular historical moment, and to interrogate the very idea of ‘contemporaneity’. Other topics of discussion might include: literature and terror; place and identity; nature and culture; gender and sexuality; race and class; faith and faithlessness; formal experiments; the legacies of modernism. In this way, the module will enable students to engage with a variety of topics and concepts that they will encounter at a higher level in Part Two.

Lectures 1-5; Seminars 1-3:
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Lectures 6-10; Seminars 4-5:
Owen Sheers, Resistance
Christopher Meredith, The Book of Idiots

Lectures 11-15; Seminars 6-8:
Alice Oswald, Dart
Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter

Lectures 16-20; Seminars 9-10:
Anne Enright, The Gathering
Ali Smith, There But for the