Introductory description

This module introduces students to the world literary form of "proletarian literature," which emerged in the early-20th century and became a major literary, intellectual, and political movement across the 20th century. It explores how literary texts from across the globe responded to the formation of the socialist world across Russia, Asia, and Africa, as well as the explosion of anticapitalist and anticolonial movements within the US and Western Europe. It aims to help students develop an understanding of how overlapping and inter-related social struggles get taken up at the level of form and content in literary works.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1

Week 1 Introduction: Michael Denning “Novelists’ International” Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004)
David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg “Introduction” Red October and the Black Atlantic
(2021)
Amelia Glaser and Steven Lee “Introduction” Comintern Aesthetics (2020)

Week 2 Gladkov Cement (1925)

Selected secondary reading: Granville Hicks “Revolution and the Novel” New Masses (April 1934) and John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich, “Laboratory of dreams : the Russian avant-garde and cultural experiment” (1996)

Week 3 Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood (1960)

Selected secondary reading: Rossen Djagalov From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds (2020), Monica Popescu At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War (2022), Georg M. Gugelberger Marxism and African Literature (1986)

Unit 1: Ports

Week 4 Claude McKay Banjo (1929)

Selected Secondary Reading: Joel Nickels World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance (esp ch 2 “Nonstate Internationalism”) (2018), Steven Lee The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (2016), Winston James “To the East Turn: The Russian Revolution and the Black. Radical Imagination in the United States, 1917–1924" (2021), Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (2002), William Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (1999),

Week 5 Selection of short stories by James Hanley, George Garrett, and Eric Walrond

Selected Secondary Reading: Holger Weiss A Global Radical Waterfront
The International Propaganda Committee of Transport Workers and the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers, 1921–1937 (2021), Deb Cowan The Deadly Life of Logistics (2014), Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World (2021)

Week 7 Takiji Kobayashi Crab Cannery Ship (1929)

Selected Secondary Reading: Heather Bowen-Struyk, “Why a Boom in Proletarian Literature in Japan? The Kobayashi Takiji Memorial and The Factory Ship” (2009), Samuel Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-garde (2014)

Unit 2: Strikes

Week 8 Mary Heaton Vorse Strike! (1930)

Selected Secondary reading: Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America, “Gastonia Law” New Masses (October 2029), pp 5, and Lenin “On Working Class Literature” New Masses (October 1929), pp 7, Barbara Foley “The Collective Novel,” Radical Representations, Urgo, Joseph R. "Proletarian Literature and Feminism: The Gastonia Novels and Feminist Protest" (1985)

Week 9 Lewis Jones Cwmardy (1937)

Selected secondary reading: Anon. “The Miner’s Next Step” (1912), Elinor Taylor, The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934-1940 (2017), Dai Smith, Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales (1993)

Week 10 Patricia Galvao Industrial Park (1933)

Selected Secondary Reading: Joel Wolfe Working Women, Working Men: Sao Paulo and the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class (1993), Sarah Ann Wells, “Mass Culture and the Laboratory of Late Modernism in Patrícia Galvão’s Parque industrial” (2016), Sarah Ann Wells “The Panorama and the Pilgrimage: Brazilian Modernism, the Masses, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s” in Comintern Aesthetics (2020).

TERM 2

Unit 3: The City

Week 1 Sylvia Townsend Warner Summer Will Show

Selected Secondary Reading: Glyn Salton-Cox Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love (2018), Jack Lindsay “The Historical Novel” New Masses (1937), Chris Hopkins “Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Marxist Historical Novel” Literature & History (1995).

Week 2 Victor Serge Birth of our Power (1931)

Selected Secondary Reading: Susie Weissman Victor Serge The Course is Set on Hope (2001), Greeman, Richard. “Literary and Revolutionary Realism in Victor Serge” (1967), Adam David Morton “The Urban Revolution in Victor Serge” (2018).

Week 3 Mulk Raj Anand Untouchable (1935)

Selected Secondary Reading: Mulk Raj Anand “The Sources of Protest in My Novels” and “On the Genesis of Untouchable: A Note by Mulk Raj Anand” (2011), Katerina Clark “Mulk Raj Anand and the London Literary Left” Eurasia Without Borders (2022), Kris Manjapra, “Communist Internationalism and Transcolonial Recognition,” in Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, ed. Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (2010), “Manifesto of the Progressive Writer’s Association” (1936), Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, Benjamin Zachariah, The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917–39 (2014)

Unit 4: Home/Social Reproduction

Week 4 Selection of poetry by Una Marson “The Stone Breakers” and “At the Prison Gates, Jamaica, 1937,” Louise Bennett “Strike Day,”” Jean Rhys “Temps Perdi,” and Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”

Selected Secondary Readings: “Revolts” in Matera and Kent The Global 1930s (2017), Delia Jarrett-Macauley The Life of Una Marson (1998), Mary Lou Emery “The Poetics of Labour in Jean Rhys’s Caribbean Modernism” (2012), Carole Boyce Davies Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2007)

Week 5 Alexandra Kollontai Red Love (1927)

Selected Secondary Readings: Eds. Paula Rabinowitz, Ruth Barraclough, and Heather Bowen-Struyk Red Love Across the Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century (2015), Kristen Ghodsee Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism (2018), Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai (1977), Soma Marik “Bolsheviks and Feminists: In Cooperation and Conflict” Historical Mateiralism (2021)

Unit 5: Land

Week 7 Mariano Azuela The Underdogs (1915)

Selected Secondary Reading: Mariátegui, José Carlos “The Indigenous Question in Latin America.” in Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present: An Anthology, ed. Michael Löwy. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press.; Christina Heatherton, Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (2022)

Week 8 Mao Dun “Spring Silkworms,” “Autumn Harvest,” “Winter Ruin” (1933); Kang Kyeong-ae “Salt”

Selected Secondary Reading: Karl Marx “Marx-Zasulich Correspondence February/March 1881”, Peter Button, Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity (2009), Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (eds) Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China (1993), Mao “On Contradiction” (1937)

Unit 6: Contemporary

Week 9 Boots Riley Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Selected Secondary Reading: Martin, Michael T. and Yalie Kamara. "Boots Riley on Sorry to Bother You and the Matter of the "Good Fight" (2020)

Week 10 Heike Geissler Seasonal Associate (2018) and visit by Amazon workers from Coventry Amazon fulfillment Centre

Selected Secondary Reading: Hans J. Rindisbache “Work in the Age of Amazon: Heike Geissler’s “Seasonal Associate” and Other Low-Paid Toilers,” LA Review of Books, 2021.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Understand and demonstrate coherent and detailed subject knowledge and professional competencies in world and comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and working-class fiction, including knowledge of the most recent scholarship in these fields.
• Deploy accurately standard techniques of literary analysis and enquiry within the discipline. In particular, the student should be able to intervene in critical debates over the relationship between world literature, the socialist experiments of the early 20th century, and left international politics, as well as debates over the forms and generic conventions of proletarian writing.
• Demonstrate a conceptual understanding of, and develop sustained arguments regarding, the interrelationship of cultural production and sociopolitical revolution, including forms of anticolonial resistance and racial solidarity, as well as struggles around gender and sexual rights; maintain detailed arguments on the specific ways writers from particular geo-political contexts responded to the economic, political, social, and cultural tumult of the early 20th century.
• Appreciate the uncertainty, ambiguity and limitations of knowledge in the discipline: the student should be able to both position themselves and intervene critically in the field; they should be able to critically assess what it means to think about literature as 'proletarian', 'working-class', or 'radical' literature and to put pressure on received understandings of these terms.
• Make appropriate use of scholarly reviews and primary sources, including literary texts from the multiple locations covered on the course.
• Apply their knowledge and understanding in order to initiate and carry out an extended written project.

Indicative reading list

Reading lists can be found in Talis

Subject specific skills

The module is designed to extend and challenge students’ understanding of recent developments in the fields of world and comparative literature, postcolonial studies, working-class literature, and socialist studies. It will allow them to develop the capacity to intervene critically in these fields and to position themselves independently in relation to existing analyses of working-class/radical literature. The module will enable students to develop differently-centred models of world and comparative literature and assess the limitations of existing models. They will extend their understanding, and develop independent assessments, of the interrelationship between cultural production and struggles around class, colonial, racial, and sexual exploitation in the context of the leftist internationalisms and 'red'/'black' alliances of the early 20th century. Students will not only become familiar with, but also acquire the capacity to intervene in recent debates around the ongoing relevance and significance of early 20th-century proletarian literature to our current, analogous moment of deep socioeconomic and political crisis.

Transferable skills

Students will further enhance their ability to use and critically assess appropriate scholarly reviews and primary sources, including literary texts from the multiple locations covered on the course. They will further enhance their capacities for independent research, including of archival material. They will be able to indepedently apply their knowledge and understanding in order to initiate and carry out an extended written project.