51cg

Focusing on the representation of bodies and “the body” in literature, this course asks how the way something is written and depicted influences its meaning and its reception by readers. Each week we will look at how a particular genre or style of writing (such as the short story, the sonnet, the Gothic) depicts a type of body, and discuss how form relates to content. Lecturers will introduce students to new forms and explore how bodies are described and used in that type of writing; the subsequent workshops will allow students to undertake detailed close reading of example texts, and to generate their own analytical responses to the works. The course will ask how literature imagines and inscribes diverse examples of bodies, which may include gendered, racialised, incarcerated, starving, vulnerable and colonised bodies. It examines how texts depict the body as a site of power, suffering, and resistance, and how literary form itself echoes, fragments, and reshapes the bodies it portrays. It will also explore how bodily pleasure and erotic expression can become radical acts, forms of reclaiming agency in defiance of systems that shame, disable, regulate, or erase certain bodies. It encourages students to reflect on how normative conceptions of “the body” may be challenged, upheld and complicated by literary representation.

Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.

More Information about Week Numbers