MA English Literature and American Studies

This course utilises texts ranging from memoir to music lyrics to examine and evaluate expressions of radicalism and dissent in American culture. The course focuses on the period of the postwar to the contemporary in its exploration of American citizenship, subjectivity, community, resistance and containment through literary and expressive cultures. 
Through the works of authors such as Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson, Margaret Randall, Roseanne Dunbar Ortiz, and Thurston Moore, the first half of the term will focus on the relationship between life writing and dissent. Through themes such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, professions, and counterculture it will expose the ways in which the written word either served as an act of protest itself, fostered radical subjectivities, revolutionised a genre, or conveyed the unsuspecting rebellion of the non-normative quotidian. 
In the second half of semester, we pivot to an exploration of US hip hop culture and rap lyrics. We will consider the radical and collectivist properties in hip-hop’s subcultural formation as well as the limits of its dissent since its first development in 1970s New York at the dawning of the neoliberal era. Themes and issues include: (anti)racism, Black Lives Matter and mass incarceration; gender, sexuality and intersectionality; critical legal studies and criminalisation; enterprise, branding and hip-hop’s (anti)capitalist imperatives; questions of subcultural containment and race reaction; and class identities and inequalities.
 

• Assess the contribution of radical subcultures to American literary history.
• Develop a critical understanding of the relationship between print cultural production and radical social and artistic movements.
• Demonstrate an awareness of the transatlantic context of both radical subcultures and broader U.S. cultural production.

• Weigh up competing interpretations and arguments.
• Critically analyse a range of literary and cultural sources as well as print cultural and digital materials.
• Develop interdisciplinary arguments about radical subcultural movements and artistic production.
• Engage in archival research.

• Analyse a variety of literary and cultural texts as well as archival sources in manuscript and digital form.
• Assess the critical reception and historical context of a variety of radical literary and political movements.
• Gain experience in hands-on archival research.
• Gain experience in interdisciplinary research and argumentation.
• Devise research questions and engage with existing scholarship

• Critically analyse different kinds of texts
• Carry out independent research
• Summarize and synthesize complex arguments
• Work in groups
• Have increased confidence in communicating ideas in written and oral presentation
• Increased confidence in conducting archival research at and beyond the John Rylands Library, as well as via digital archival platforms.