This course will examine the ways in which the contemporary American novel has responded to the modern rise of neuroscience.

10 weekly seminars of 2 hours

n/a

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10% 1 ten-minute presentation

90% 1 x 4400 word essay

The course aims to provide student with the skills to:

■ Analyse a range of major contemporary American writers in substantive literary and cultural contexts;

■ Engage with, and evaluate, the developing field of cognitive historicist critical approaches to literary texts;

■ Explore possibilities and limitations of interdisciplinary study of literary texts.

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

■ Articulate a nuanced understanding of the rise and fall of postmodern American fiction, and of the way twenty-first-century American fiction negotiates postmodernism's literary legacy;

■ Analyse and contextualise the changing forms of and rhetorical devices common to the contemporary American fiction;

■ Evaluate larger scholarly debates about literature and science, and more specific forms of cognitive literary criticism;

■ Display an ability to work with interdisciplinary materials at an advanced level.

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