This module introduces students to how identity is conventionally understood in Western culture and how literature has a ‘capacity to question, defamiliarize and even transform the sense of who or what we are’ (Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle). We will examine how ‘the human’ is constructed in opposition to non-human forms (such as vampires, ghosts, animals, and machines) and what happens when ‘the human’ is thrown into uncertainty and crisis. We will also look at film adaptations of some of the literary texts in order to examine how the different forms are able or required to approach questions of identity in different ways.

On completion of the module, students should be able to demonstrate an understanding of some of the ways in which literature interrogates conventional notions of identity.

Timetabled sessions include lectures and discussion sessions where students may have the opportunity to make presentations and/or lead discussion. Sessions are normally supplemented with handouts and slides with content of a reasonable level of detail. Handouts are usually made available to students on Learning Central at least 24 hours before the session. Some sessions will make use of film clips and stills, and students will be asked to examine the precise visual qualities of these. Film clips will be subtitled whenever this is possible and appropriate. It will not be possible to provide transcripts or audio-described versions of the clips or to post clips on Learning Central.

Students will receive two weekly lectures and a supporting weekly seminar. The lectures aim to provide key knowledge and critical perspectives on all the texts on the module; the seminars provide the opportunity for closer textual analysis and small-group discussion.

The particular skills of the module bear upon reading and understanding material in a way that foregrounds the relationship between fiction and identity. This requires careful scholarship, sensitivity to language and form, and historical/contextual awareness. Employability skills include the ability to synthesise information, operating in group-based discussion involving negotiating ideas, and producing clear, informed arguments in a professional manner.

The module is assessed according to the Marking Criteria set out in the English Literature Course Guide. There are otherwise no academic or competence standards which limit the availability of adjustments or alternative assessments for students with disabilities.

Assessment Breakdown

Type

%

Qualifying Mark

Title

Duration(hrs)

Period

Week

Written Assessment

100

N/A

Reading And Identity

N/A

1

N/A

The main readings for this module are novels, poems, and films. Students should contact the module leader as early as possible if they will require readings in an alternative format. Films will be screened with subtitles whenever this is possible. It will not be possible to provide transcripts or audio-described versions of the films.

Set Texts

Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; New York: Norton, 1997).

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938; London : Virago, 2003).

(Film) Rebecca (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1940).

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979; London: Vintage, 1995).

(Film) The Company of Wolves (dir. Neil Jordan, 1984).

J.G. Ballard, Crash (1973; London: HarperPerennial, 2008).

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968; London: Gollancz, 2007).

(Film) Blade Runner: The Final Cut (dir. Ridley Scott, 2008; originally released in 1982).

NB: Please be aware that J.G. Ballard’s Crash contains passages of a violent and sexually explicit nature. You may find the text unsettling, but one of the projects of the lectures and seminars on the novel will be to theorize its extreme, potentially disturbing qualities. The assessment will not require you to write about Crash. (If you do wish to write about the novel, you will, of course, have the option to do so.)

(Indicative primary texts are outlined above under ‘Essential Reading and Resource List’.)

Indicative secondary texts:

General

Belsey, Catherine, Critical Practice, 2^nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 4^th ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2009).

---, This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Writing, Thinking (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015).

Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2^nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

Walder, Dennis, Literature in the Modern World (Oxford: Open University Press, 1991).

Dracula

Arata, Stephen. D, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonialism’, Victorian Studies 33, (1989/90), 621-45.

Auerbach, Nina, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Gelder, Ken, Reading the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

Halberstam, Judith, ‘Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula,’ in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 248-266. (Also in Victorian Studies, 36 (1993), 333-52.)

Hughes, William, ‘Fictional Vampires in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,’ in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 143-14.

Hughes, William and Andrew Smith, eds., Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).

Warwick, Alexandra, ‘Vampires and the Empire: Fears and Fictions of the 1890s,’ in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, eds. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 202-20.

Rebecca

Auerbach, Nina, Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2000)

Buse, Peter and Andrew Stott, eds., Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)

du Maurier, Daphne, The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories (London: Virago, 2004)

Hanson, Helen, Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007)

Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnick, Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan/New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998)

Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London and New York: Routledge, 1991)

Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1988)

Taylor, Helen, ed., The Daphne du Maurier Companion (London: Virago, 2007)

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and The Company of Wolves

Anwell, Maggie, ‘Lolita Meets the Werewolf: The Company of Wolves’, in The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, ed. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (London: Women’s Press, 1988), pp. 76-85

Armitt, Lucie, ‘The Fragile Frames of The Bloody Chamber’, in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997), pp. 88-99

Bacchilega, Cristina, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

Crofts, Charlotte, ‘Anagrams of Desire’: Angela Carter’s Writing for Radio, Film and Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

Makinen, Merja, ‘Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonisation of Female Sexuality’, Feminist Review, 42 (1992), 2-15

Roemer, Danielle M., and Cristina Bacchilega, eds, Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001)

Sage, Lorna, ed., Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter (London: Virago, 1994), pp. 117-35

Sheets, Robin Ann, ‘Pornography, Fairy Tales and Feminism: Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”’, in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 335-59

Crash

Ballard, J.G., A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London: Flamingo, 1997)

Bukatman, Scott, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993)

Delville, Michel, J.G. Ballard (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998)

Luckhurst, Roger, ‘The angle between two walls’: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997)

Sinclair, Iain, Crash (London: BFI, 1999)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner

Brooker, Will, ed., The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic (London: Wallflower, 2005)

Bruno, Giuliana, ‘Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner’, October 41 (1987): 61-74

Bukatman, Scott, Blade Runner (London: BFI, 1997)

Kerman, Judith B., Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 2^nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997)

Sammon, Paul M., Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (London: Orion, 1996)