MA English Literature and American Studies / Course details

American Literature as a field of study was initially constituted by a constellation of so-called canonical texts which scholars suggested at once represented America’s greatest literary achievements and a uniquely American tradition. While much study of American Literature continues to centre on the canon—with lecture courses and anthologies like the Norton still fundamental to the teaching of the discipline—the rise of ethnic studies and labor studies has encouraged scholars to turn to the periphery of that canon to see how marginalized movements and counter-cultural texts might illuminate the field in new ways. And the Transnational turn in American Studies has similarly called into question studying American literature in isolation from its transatlantic and, increasingly, from its trans-hemispheric contexts. In light of these important turns in the field, this core course unit centers its attention on two key flashpoints—the radical U.S. subcultures of the late nineteenth century and the international underground of the 1960s—as a way of rethinking the transatlantic exchange at the heart of American literary production and U.S. radical culture. Drawing on the rich archival holdings at the John Rylands Library, as well as newly digitized texts, this course will introduce you to new methods for reading and rethinking social activists such as Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman, avant-garde writers such as Jeff Nuttall and William Burroughs, and artistic milieu such as 1890s New York and 1960s London as well as new approaches to print archives and political cultures. Over the course of term, we will also explore the relationship between literary experimentalism and social revolution; international attachments and political affiliations; and transatlantic collaboration and American identity.

• 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.

Indicative Secondary Reading

Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (Penguin Classics)

Emma Goldman Goldman, Living My Life (Penguin Classics)

Shelly Streeby, “Looking at State Violence: Lucy Parsons, José Marti and Haymarket” in Radical Sensations (Duke UP, 2013)

Fountain, Nigel.  Underground: The London Alternative Press, 1966-1974 (London and New

            York: Routledge, 1988).

Green, Jonathan.  Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961-1971 (London:

            Pimlico, 1998).

Larrissy, Edward ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010 (Cambridge:

            Cambridge University Press, 2016).

McMillan, John. Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of

            Alternative Media in America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Scott, Andrew Murray. Alexander Trocchi: the Making of a Monster (Edinburgh: Kennedy and

            Boyd 1991; rev. ed. 2012).

Whiteley, Gillian. “‘Sewing the ‘subversive thread of imagination’: Jeff Nuttall, Bomb

            Culture and the Radical Potential of Affect.”