Introductory description

EN9C2-30 Literature and the Lifecourse: From Infancy to the End of Life

Module web page

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.

Unit 1: Childhood (Weeks 1-3)
From J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1911); James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) ; L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Susan Hill, I’m the King of the Castle (1970)
Alice Childress, A Hero Ain’t Nothing But a Sandwich (1973)
Short stories by Joy Williams (‘Train’), Robert Penn Warren (‘Blackberry Winter’); Katherine Anne Porter (‘The Circus’)

Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year-Old Boy’ (1909); from Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1960); from Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History (1993) Unit 2: Adolescence (Weeks 4-6)

Frank Wedekind, Spring Awakening (1891)
J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
Cynthia Voight, Izzy Willy Nilly (1986)
Tarell Alvin McCraney, In Moonlight, Black Boys Look Blue (2015)

From: G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence (1904); Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968); Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain (2018)

Unit 3: Adulthood (Weeks 7-8)
Henry Green, Living; from Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room; Anne Tyler, Morgan’s Passing; Thomas Page McBee, Amateur

From: Gail Sheehy, Passages (1974); Erik Erikson, Adulthood (1978); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990)

Unit 4: Old Age (9-10)
Stories: Patrick White, ‘Five Twenty’ (1968); Toni Cade Bambara, ‘My Man Bovanne’ (1972); Alice Munro, ‘Lichen’ (1985), ‘Margaret Atwood, ‘Torching the Dusties’ (2014)
Jonas Jonasson, The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (2012)
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (2011)

From G. Stanley Hall, Senescence (1922); from Elaine Cumming and William Earl Henry, Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement (1961); Susan Sontag, ‘The Double Standard of Aging’ (1972)

Learning outcomes

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

• Through reading modern and contemporary fiction and lifewriting, interpret and evaluate its contribution to our understanding of key phases and transitions in the lifecourse
• Understand and demonstrate advanced, detailed subject knowledge and professional competencies informed by recent research/scholarship at the forefront of the discipline
• Demonstrate a conceptual understanding of age and its representations which enables the development and sustaining of an independent argument
• Critique, evaluate and advance the current debates around age and literature
• Working under their own initiative, deploy and communicate complex techniques of analysis and enquiry within the discipline
• Independently formulate an original hypothesis on representations of age, and develop an appropriate conceptual framework to pursue it
• Evaluate the uncertainty, ambiguity and limitations of knowledge in the discipline;
• Make appropriate use of criticism, theory and primary sources from different disciplines, including medicine, psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, history, genre studies,
• Engage with current scholarship on key debates relating to the cultural conception of childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age;
• Give a professional, well-structured, well-paced, well-delivered oral presentation.

Subject specific skills

No subject specific skills defined for this module.

Transferable skills

No transferable skills defined for this module.