Handbook

When we read contemporary literature, how do we know what is valuable, good or lasting?  Do we immediately recognise a "classic" work by its scope, complexity and challenge or its daring, beauty or dissidence?  How and why does the "classic" text emerge in the present?  Though "contemporary classic" sounds like a pitch used by publishers, is this a term that might enable discussion of rich and compelling literary works from the last thirty years?

The group of contemporary literary works that we might call "classic" is an intensely global one.  Globalisation has had a huge impact on literary production: literary publishing and worldly reading are now richly globalised activities for those with first-world access.  This course focusses on literary-aesthetic aspects of genre, narrative and literary language (including work in translation), as well as posing some wider questions about reception and reputation.  In tandem with key forays into global literary theory, this course will provide practical critical resources for reading, discussing, writing, reviewing and teaching global/contemporary novels, poems and plays.  We will think about prizes and we may even vote on our own contemporary "super classic".  By the end of the course, we will have thought about Barthes' "pleasures of the text" and have tested Italo Calvino's claim that "a classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off".