Module Information

This module will:

• introduce students to a range of post-memory fiction from the 1980's-present day and to chart the changes in approach and content over this period.
• consider the extent to which the production and reception of post-memory fiction is conditioned by societal factors.
• introduce students to ongoing debates in contemporary historical fiction and to encourage them to carry those insights over to other areas of their study.

We will examine contemporary novelistic responses to war, focusing on the Second World War (1939 - 1945). It will introduce you to the concept of post-memory, defined by Marianne Hirsch as being distinguished from history by a sense of profound personal connection and from memory by generational distance. We will ask you to employ this concept in analyzing several key issues:

• Why do authors keep returning to the events of their parents' and grandparents' generations?
• How are their responses conditioned by cultural, social and political factors, and
• How are they shaped by, and how do they shape, current trends in contemporary literature?

This module will interrogate the complexity and variety of recent fictional responses to war, paying particular attention to generational issues, asking what World War Two means to us now, and what these texts can tell us about the relationship of history and fiction.

Estimated student workload:
Contact time: 20.5 hours
Reading and preparation: 100 hours
Independent study preparing assignments 79.5 hours

Seminar 1: Writing History: the Contemporary Historical Novel
What debates have shaped recent thinking on historical fiction? Starting with excerpts from Hirsch, Ricoeur, White and Hutcheon, we will look at the development of the postmodern historical novel, using Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001) as the core text.

Seminar 2: Writing War: Contemporary Views and Art Spiegelman's Maus
We have asked what an historical novel is, now, what is a war novel? Who writes them, and what do we expect from these two genres in terms of theme, style and authorial intention? Are these categories of novels useful in terms of a text such as Maus (1991) which moves between the past and the prsent? Can Hirsch's concept of postmemory be transferred to other second-generation trauma narratives?

Seminar 3: 'The Past won't fit into memory without something left over; it must have a future' (Joseph Brodsky).
Pat Barker, regeneration (1991). What does Barker's depiction of shell shock, gender and the home front tell us about 1917 and 1991.

Seminar 4: Transgenerational Haunting. Graham Swift, Shuttlecock (1981).
The transmission of trauma to the second/third generation; troubled conceptions of masculinity.

Weeks 5 to 10: Old Voices, New Perspectives: reclaiming the past.

Seminar 5: Ways of Seeing (the War). Adam Thorpe, The Rules of Perspective (2005) 'The Good German'; using innovative narrative perspectives to draw the reder into a process of discovery.

Seminar 6: Queering the Past. Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (2006). A new type of second generation emerges. Reinscribing Gay and Lesbian history; narrative invention and appropriation.

Seminar 7: The Birth of Multicultural Britain: Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004). A new 2nd generation speaks its history for the first time; expanding and complicating notions of 'Britishness' and postcolonial discourse.

Seminar 8: What, and who, do we forget to remember? Biyi Bandele, Burma Boy (2007). The first novel to portray the experiences of African soldiers fighting for the Allies, this 2nd generation work also reminds us of a forgotten arena of the war, asking us why we remember and commemorate what we do and neglect other areas.

Seminar 9: What is a historical novel? Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments (1996): what is a historical novel? Questions of appropriation and authenticity from the module revisited and revised.

Semester 10: What can fiction do with history that history can't? Module summary and reflection. Group discussion.