ENGL45630: Anti-Capitalist Poetics: Writing and Resisting the Modern World-System

• Students must hold a good BA degree in English or a related subject to be eligible for entry onto the MA programmes in the Department of English Studies

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• To explore anti-capitalist poetics across a range of modern and postcolonial fiction and non-fiction.
• To investigate the intersection of anti-capitalism with postcolonialism, feminist struggle, and Utopian imaginaries.
• To invite students to consider resistance and critique not only as political and sociological phenomena but also as issues of writing, form and representation.
• To study the formal and generic features of dominant Western discourses (e.g., bourgeois political economy, and colonial and nationalist historiography) along with the formal strategies developed to challenge them.

• Encompasses three broad areas: documentary and testimonial poetics, subaltern poetics, and speculative poetics.
• Embraces a chronologically, geographically and generically broad range of writing from the nineteenth-century critique of political economy, through early twentieth-century Marxist modernisms, mid-twentieth-century industrial workers testimonies, South Asian subaltern historiography, ethnography and revolutionary memoir, to contemporary world-literature and science fiction.
• Includes writers such as Karl Marx, the objectivist poets (Zukofsky, Oppen, Niedecker), Nanni Balestrini, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Roberto Bolao, Nnedi Okorafor, Namwali Serpell, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
• Combines close readings of specific literary and non-literary writing with attention to relevant historical and intellectual contexts.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students will gain an in-depth understanding of the history and range of anti-capitalist writing, not least as it intersects with questions of postcolonialism, feminism and post-capitalist imaginaries.
• Students will be able to demonstrate familiarity with key works of postcolonial and world literatures, as well as the historical and intellectual contexts in which they were produced.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• Advanced critical skills in the close reading and analysis of literary and historical texts;
• An ability to offer advanced analysis of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature;
• An ability to articulate and substantiate at a high level an imaginative response to literature;
• An ability to demonstrate an advanced understanding of the cultural, intellectual, socio-political contexts of literature;
• An ability to articulate an advanced knowledge and understanding of conceptual or theoretical literary material;
• An advanced command of a broad range of vocabulary and critical literary terminology.

Key Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• an advanced ability to analyse critically;
• an advanced ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in structured and systematic ways;
• an advanced ability to interpret complex information of diverse kinds through the distinctive skills derived from the subject;
• expertise in conventions of scholarly presentation and bibliographical skills;
• an independence of thought and judgement, and ability to assess acutely the critical ideas of others;
• sophisticated skills in critical reasoning;
• an advanced ability to handle information and argument critically;
• a competence in information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access;
• professional organisation and time-management skills.

• Students are encouraged to develop advanced conceptual abilities and analytical skills as well as the ability to communicate an advanced knowledge and conceptual understanding within seminars; the capacity for advanced independent study is demonstrated through the completion of two assessed pieces of work.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.

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