Course Catalogue

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Where we might traditionally think of infrastructure as the background of our daily lives, this course invites students to reread infrastructures as forms of relation. Although a pipeline, electrical cable, road or shipping route is central to the provisioning of modern life, they are also instruments of destitution that extract, drain and dispossess land and life from designated sacrifice zones and surplus populations around the globe. What lives and worlds are enabled through infrastructure? How do we read for them?  In pursuit of the joint task of reading infrastructure and reading for infrastructure, we will examine the aesthetic life of infrastructure in and against its material, political and poetic dimensions.  We focus on seven sites - the factory, the plantation, the railroad, the canal, the pipeline, the container, and the cable - to provide a political and literary history of infrastructure from the mid-19th century to the present. By reading the forms of Global Anglophone Literature as central to a dialectics of world-making and world-breaking that disproportionately tends towards the impoverishment of minoritized communities across the globe, we will further introduce students to a range of critical methods such as Black studies, world literature, postcolonial studies and environmental criticism.

1 x 1hr lecture and 1 x 1hr seminar per week over 10 weeks as scheduled on MyCampus

This is one of the Honours options in English Literature and may not run every year. The options that are running this session are available on MyCampus.

Available to all students fulfilling requirements for Honours entry into English Literature, and by arrangement to visiting students or students of other Honours programmes who qualify under the University's 25% regulation.

None

None

Essay (1500 words): 25%

Essay (2500 words): 50%

Seminar contribution: 10%

Seminar presentation of 7 minutes: 15%

This course aims to:

■ range widely across Global Anglophone literature and select individual areas of specialised enquiry 

■ study and discuss some of the key critical terms and concepts that have informed critical and creative practice of Global Anglophone Literature

■ relate literary texts to relevant cultural and historical contexts and debates of the period 

■ discuss current and possible future trends in Global Anglophone literatures 

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ identify and discuss a range of literary genres and movements from within the period studied 

■ apply key concepts in recent critical theories (e.g., critical infrastructure studies and the environmental humanities) to a wide range of literature 

■ analyse the literature of the period making reference to current issues and relevant critical concepts with an emphasis on questions of race and empire 

■ demonstrate resilience and time management through effectively planning, undertaking and submitting coursework.

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.