Hadjiyiannis, Christos

Welcome to Literature & Photography from the 19^th Century to
the Present, a course that
focuses on some of the many interactions between literature and photography.

From its origins in the nineteenth century through to its many
developments and reconfigurings over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
photography intrigued and invigorated literary practice, providing writers with
fresh opportunities for expression. At the same time, the coming together of
writing and photography became a lens through which theorists sought to see the
world. What has photography afforded literature? What new or different things
has photography made possible for literature to say? What joins literary
writing and photography and what keeps them apart? What useful theoretical
concepts has the study of literature and photography generated? And how has
literature and photography come together to talk about politics, race,
migration, the environment?

Moving in rough chronological order but cutting across periods and
genres, this course will begin with literature’s initial reaction to
photography and the radical new ways of seeing, representing, and constructing
the world that its invention presented; move on to consider literature’s
response to advancements in photographic throughout the twentieth century and
beyond; and at the same time show how literary and critical theorists have been
turning to photography to think about new ways of seeing and of engaging with
the world.

Welcome to Keeping it Short: Flash Fiction in the Twentieth Century and
Beyond, a course that
focuses on literary texts known as flash fiction: stories under 1000 words, and often under 500.

‘For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn’. Ernest
Hemingway’s six-word story captures how a compelling story can be told in just
a few words. Or take this very short story called ‘Judgement’ by contemporary
writer Lydia Davis: ‘Into how small a space the word judgement can be
compressed: it must fit inside the brain of a ladybug as she, before my eyes,
makes a decision.’ Tracing its roots back to Aesop’s tales and to ancient
Persian writers, very short form fiction – whether we call it ‘sudden fiction’,
‘flash fiction’, or ‘micro fiction’ – is interested in the brief, the
condensed, the stripped bare. And as these two examples cited above attest, it
can be packed with as much passion, adventure, and wisdom as much lengthier
pieces of writing.

As with many literary labels, many writers
producing these stories did not know they were writing ‘flash fiction’. We
won’t be concerned with defining this category or settling on a name; instead,
we will focus on reading works that come under 1000 words and think about
questions such as: What is gained and what is lost in fiction of extreme
brevity? Why would a writer seek the brief and the condensed? Is it true what
they say that such fiction brings us to a point of recognition and then leaves
us there, absolutely suspended? Intriguingly, and as we will come to see,
writers have often turned to hyper short fiction as a vehicle for exploring
diversity. Throughout the course, you will be asked to think how flash fiction
has been used to negotiate issues that pertain to gender, race, ethnicity,
religion, age, and orientation.

Though we will focus almost exclusively on
fiction, the story this course tells starts in the late nineteenth century,
with Baudelaire’s short prose poems, and grounds twentieth and
twenty-first-century short form fiction in modernist poetry’s experimentation,
under the influence of Japanese poetry, with short, precise, and accurate
poems. The connection between poetry should not come as a surprise. As we will
see, especially when we consider a couple of short prose poems, short form
fiction crosses the boundaries between prose and poetry, just as it blurs
distinctions between fiction and non-fiction. For the vast majority of the
semester, however, it is works of fiction that we will read. We will read
several different authors and, towards the end of the semester, we will stay
for a bit longer with Lydia Davis, perhaps the most famous practitioner of
flash fiction.

Welcome to From Impressionism to Modernism: 19th- &
20th-Century Literature and Culture, a course that will take us on a journey
through some of the most interesting and exciting modern literary movements.

In the middle
of the nineteenth century in France, a time of rapid industrialisation and
unsettling social change, painters and musicians that came to be associated
with impressionism started looking inwards. Literature would also begin to look
inwards, to a character’s mental life and their
immediate and unfiltered impressions, feelings, sensations, and emotions. There
were many reasons for that, technological, philosophical, and sociological –
all of which will be explored in this course.

Moving in rough
chronological sequence but cutting across genres and geographies, the course
will survey literature produced from the late nineteenth century to the mid
twentieth century: the period when modernism, the twentieth century’s dominant
aesthetic movement, began to take its shape.

We will begin
with the French symbolists (Baudelaire, Mallarmé) and cross the channel to
Edwardian England, where new philosophies and ideas were influencing a wide
range of writers: T. E. Hulme; Ezra Pound and his fellow Imagists; Ford Madox
Ford; and Virginia Woolf. In Ireland, W. B. Yeats was heavily influenced by the
symbolists while James Joyce would find new ways to push impressionism to its
limits, as would Samuel Beckett, considered by some the last modernist.

Welcome to Words Against War, a course that will take us through some modern
and contemporary texts that address the reality – and which take a clear
position against it.

Humanity has always been at war, and
literature has alwaysbeen
preoccupied with war. Writers were soldiers, journalists, activists, and
victims. In literature, they found the opportunity to voice the suffering and
destitute caused by war. Starting off with anti-war literature written by those
caught up in the two World Wars, the course will move on quickly to more recent
works – novels, poems, memoirs, graphic novels – that engage with armed
conflict and its many implications and consequences. Some of these texts are
postcolonial and some were written in the period after 9/11, when the US
declared its so-called ‘War on Terror’ – a war that continues to breed
displacement and injustice. We’ll read texts in their historical contexts while
we’ll also spend a lot of time close-reading texts in imaginative and
productive ways.

Over the
following 13 weeks, we will read – in rough chronological order, but sometimes
jumping back and forth – short stories, poems, novels, and one graphic novel.
We will use these texts to think about how twentieth- and twenty-first century
writers in English have approached war. This will be a joint effort: we’ll be
above all a community of readers and researchers. You will be sharing your
impressions, thoughts, feelings, as well as your informed critical analyses in
class. Energetic, committed, respectful participation is a must.

Through short
lectures, seminar-style close reading activities, and plenty of student-led
discussion, you will learn methodologies for the formal analysis of literature,
develop methods for analysing the richness and complexity of texts, appreciate
the different ways in which literature has engaged with the politics of war,
and hone you critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

Specific learning outcomes for this course

By the end of the course, you will have demonstrated:

1.
an ability to use technical terms in the
analysis of texts;

2.
a capacity to engage critically with
primary and secondary texts;

3.
competence in close linguistic analysis;

4.
an ability to identify evolving structures of expression that continue to shape
cultural modes of creative expression

5.
the ability to analyse the texts within social, cultural, and
political contexts