| Unit name | Aesthetic Possibilities |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ENGL39029 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Dr. Wright |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of English |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This unit explores writing on aesthetics and ethics in relation to literary form and style between c.1790 and 1960. Topics we discuss are likely to include: the representation of beauty and artistry in literature and their bearing on ethical concerns, such as the health of the mind or the nation; the ways that texts examine the relation between social realities and imaginative possibilities; how ideas about hope and expectation are explored in texts, and how readers’ hopes and expectations are in turn shaped by text; the ways that literature has been thought culturally beneficial, and how such views fare with the advance of aestheticism, or in the face of the atrocities of war; how national, personal, or artistic ‘success’ or ‘failure’ might be defined, and to what purpose; what authors and critics have considered to be the possibilities of literary art, and how literary art explores ideas about possibility.
1 x 2000 word essay (33.3%) and 1 x 4000 word essay (66.7%)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, tbc
Alfred Tennyson, Maud (1855)
Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (1868-9)
Henry James, Roderick Hudson (1875)
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)
Christina Rossetti, A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works
