Admission requirements
Admission to the MA in Literary Studies, the research MA in Arts, Literature and Media or the ICLON two-year educational master in English.
Description
Class is a key reality in the modern-day world. In many societies, there are significant variations in wealth, material possessions, power, authority and prestige, as well as in access to education, healthcare and leisure. Class has also been a prominent and abiding theme in (English) literature, as well as in cinema. This course examines the ways in which work of literature and films have explored issues of social class, from the late eighteenth century (when debates about class in the modern meanings of the term began) to the present day.
Our main emphasis is on prose fiction, but with substantial excursions into film for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How do writers and directors use the formal languages of fiction and film to examine the meaning of class? Does a particular work of literature or film confirm or undermine class ideologies? Or is its treatment of class more elusive? How do issues of social class interact with gender and race, and with the history of colonialism? The first seminars offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for analysing social class, both as a phenomenon in the real world and as a topic in works of literature and film. Seminars 2 to 12 turn to specific literary and cinematic case studies, building on the theoretical concepts introduced in seminar one.
Course objectives
At the end of the course students will:
Be able to reflect analytically and theoretically on issues of social class, both in its real-world manifestation and its representation in literature;
Be able to offer detailed and sophisticated analysis of representations of social class in specific works of literature;
Have deepened their ability to engage in informed academic dialogue and debate with others;
Have further developed their academic presentation skills;
Have further developed their academic writing skills by means of a substantial research essay.
Timetable
The timetables are available through My Timetable.
Mode of instruction
Seminar
Research – and writing
Assessment method
• Classroom Presentation (25%)
• Research essay (4,500 words) (75%)
The deadline for submitting the research essay will be announced in class and online at the start of the semester. The essay should be presented in accordance with the MLA Stylesheet and must be uploaded to Brightspace.
The essay will be assessed according to the following criteria: your ability to come up with a ‘thesis statement’ in relation to the topic in question, one that your essay / assignment will coherently and insightfully develop; the quality and sophistication of the central argument; the depth and appropriateness of your research; the scholarliness of your referencing and presentation; the deployment of structure; the quality of the writing; and the originality and depth of your analysis. Any student who plagiarises their work will be in trouble for doing so. Plagiarism includes writing your essay using an AI large-language model-based chatbot, such as ChatGPT.
All essays will be expected in early January (date to be set later). Late / resit essays will be graded, but will not receive any comments. The date for resit essays will be set later, but will likely be late January / early February.
Students who are studying for the MA in Education should focus their essay on the ways in which you could apply what you have learnt in the course to the teaching of short stories in the classroom.
Classroom presentations
Classroom presentations will begin in week 2 of the course. Students sign up for the classroom presentations no later than week 1.
For the presentations, students will work in pairs. Approximately 10 minutes in length, presentations should offer a starting point for the seminar as a whole. In general, the two presenters introduce a small set of reading questions (most likely two to four), to be discussed during the seminar. The presenters themselves offer a first response to these questions by analysing a few important details, passages, scenes or moments in the primary sources. The aim of this analysis is not, of course, to be definitive or exhaustive but to illustrate how the reading questions can help us explore and understand the primary sources.
The presentations should also draw on ideas and concepts from relevant secondary or theoretical literature and show how these are useful in analysing the primary sources.
Please note that for some weeks, the instructions for the presentation will be a bit more specific; this will be communicated in time by the instructors.
Assessment and Weighing
The final mark for the course is established by determining the weighted average. To pass the course, the weighted average of the partial grades must be 5.5 or higher.
Resit
The date for the essay resit is 3rd February. For students, who miss their presentation due to illness, there will be an opportunity provided to ‘resit’ this.
Inspection and feedback
How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organized.
Reading list
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics).
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Penguin Classics).
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, and ‘The Life of Ma Parker in The Garden Party, and Other Stories (1922) (Penguin Classics, ed. Lorna Sage 1997 – reprinted many times since).
D. H. Lawrence,‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and ‘The Prussian Officer’ (1914) from Selected Stories (Penguin Classics, 2007, introduction by Louise Welsh – reprinted since). Lawrence’s‘Autobiographical Sketch’ will be made available via archive.org.
Jean Rhys,‘Let Them Call it Jazz’, in Collected Short Stories (Penguin, 1987 – most recent edition reprinted in 2017).
E. R. Braithwaite, To Sir, With Love (1959) (Vintage Books, 2005) (Introduction by Caryl Philips.)
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924). (Penguin Classic, ed. Pankaj Mishra, (2021)).
Pierce Brown, Red Rising (2014) (Hodderscape, 2014)
Sally Rooney, Normal People (2018) (Faber & Faber, 2019)
Links to other written material (including by bell hooks) will be made available via BrightSpace.
We will also explore the following films / TV programmes – to be watched by you on DVD, online, or via a legal streaming service. (It will be the student’s responsibility to track down the film to watch it.) (The last two of these films may be subject to change – the definitive list will be set in the weeks before teaching begins, when the course’s BrightSpace site is set up.)
James Clavell, To Sir, With Love (1967) (available to stream via Amazon and Apple TV)
Richard Broad, The Luddites (1988) (available on YouTube)
Paul Maslansky, Sugar Hill (1974) (on Archive.org)
Leon Ichaso, Sugar Hill (1994) (on YouTube)
Sean Baker, Tangerine (2015)
Chloé Zhao, Nomadland (2020)
Registration
Enrolment through MyStudyMap is mandatory.
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website
Contact
For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.
For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: Arsenaal
Remarks
Very likely we will have a preliminary meeting to sort out the presentations. Do keep an eye on BrightSpace in the weeks before the course begins, so you know what to read for the first class.