spring 2017
COURSE: CONTEMPORARY LITERATURES IN ENGLISH
CODE: NMB AN112K2
ROOM:B-118
TIME:Mon 13.40-15.10
REICHMANN ANGELIKA, PhD
e-mail:
OFFICE: B-320
OFFICE HOURS: Tue 12.45-13.30
Thu 9.15-10.00
Course description
The aim of the lectures is to present the characteristics of contemporary literatures in English, to offer theoretical, critical and analytical models which can contribute to the more efficient teaching practice of the students. Topics discussed in the lecture series include but are not restricted to factors which shape the development of contemporary literature and the concept of contemporary literature; the importance of understanding contemporary culture; the relationship between postmodernism, post-colonialism, and contemporary theories; the relationship between regionalism and globalism, the view of contemporary literature on the past; possibilities and traps formulated and experienced by contemporary literary theory.The course aims to give a survey of literary texts belonging to the second half of the twentieth and first decades of the twenty-first centuries with a special focus on the fundamental issues and dominant literary solutions of the period. These include the interpretations and use of postmodernism, post-colonialism (John Fowles, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, J. M. Coetzee, Ben Okri), magic realism, historiographic metafiction, feminist vs. women’s experience novel (Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, Esther Freud). The course also includes brief surveys of contemporary national literatures (Scottish – Irvine Welsh, A. L. Kennedy, Iain Banks; Irish – Roddy Doyle, Brian Friel, John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague), and of the ethnic diversity of post-war North American Literature (Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Walker Percy, MacLennan Hugh, Davies Robertson, Native American, African American, Asian American, Hispanic American and Jewish American Literatures)
Required readings
The required reading list for the oral exam on Contemporary Literatures in English can be downloaded from the website of the Institute of English and American Studies (
Class requirements:
Students will be subjected to an oral exam at the end of the course, the topics of which can be downloaded from the website of the Institute of English and American Studies The oral exam will also include questions pertaining to items on the reading list.
Schedule:
Section I – British Literature and Anglophone Literatures outside the US
Week 1 – (6 February): The Neo-Romantic Legacy and the Movement – Poetry in the 1950s and 1960s
Revolutions on Stage: The Angry Young Men
Week 2 – (13 February):Experimental Writing in the 1950s: Late Modernist Fiction and the Theatre of the Absurd
Early Postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction
Week 4 – (27 February):New Internationalism, Postcolonial Literatures and Magical Realism
Anglophone Literatures outside the UK and the US
From the Periphery to the Centre: Ethnic Voices in the UK
Section II – American Literature
András Tarnóc PhD
Room: B-215
Office hours:
Tuesday: 12.00-13.00
Thursday: 10.45-11.45
The purpose of the class is to familiarize students with the leading trends and figures of American literature in the period between 1945 and 1990. The era encompasses various responses to the following social and cultural phenomena: the calamity of World War Two, the suburban conformity of the 50s, the tumultuous 60s, the disillusioned 70s, and the narcissistic 1980s. During this half century American society had undergone fundamental changes reflected in literature. Accordingly, the course will cover the following trends:
Week 8 (27 March) Post-war anxieties in fiction: Saul Bellow’s existentialism, the war novel (James Jones, Irwing Shaw, Norman Mailer) nonconformist fiction (J. D. Salinger, Ken Kesey)
Post-war drama (Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, Sam Shepard)
Week 10(10 April)Poetry in the 1950s and 60s the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder) and the Confessionals (Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton)
The Postmodern Turn (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut)
Week 14(8 May) Black and ethnic cultural revival (Leroi Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Luis Valdez)
Minimalism (Raymond Carver, Anne, Beatty, Bret Easton Ellis)