Your mission: to compile an introductory reading list for English Literature
Time allowed? 30 minutes
Go!
Quick, get a definition.
Literature (mass noun): Written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit. ‘a great work of literature’
A web search for ‘English literature’ turns up such critical works as:
Jonathan Bate, English Literature: A Very Short Introduction(OUP,2010)
Robert Eaglestone, Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students (Routledge, 2017, 4thedition).
Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2017)
You search for, and skim-read, a website entry for the BA English degree at SOAS University of London. You catch sight of Derek Attridge’s name again, and discover that in Year 1, Ways of Reading: An Introduction to Critical Theory, students will read his and other such works.
… You will also see an emphasis on questions of the canon and a dialogue with contemporary works from our own location in London and beyond.
Studying English at SOAS offers an exciting approach that brings new voices and a global discipline to our specialist institution.
BA English students – theatre visit
The Shelf Test ….
You are standing on the top floor of SOAS University of London library, in the literature section. Beneath, on four other floors, are acres of books – including books in English – from around the world.
You pull down a copy of Ankhi Mukherjee’s What Is a Classic: Postcolonial Writing and Invention of the Canon (2014) and skim down the Table of Contents. Your eyes alight on Chapter 6: ‘hamarashakespeare.com: Shakespeare in India’, page 209:
A cartoon of William Shakespeare appears after the roll of credits in the 1981 film Angoor, the most popular of Hindi film adaptations of The Comedy of Errors … Filmgoers did not need telling about Shakespeare … familiar as they were with the classic comedy through the mediations of two popular adaptations, the Bengali Bhrāntibilāsh (The Comedy of Errors; 1963), and the Hindi Do Dooni Chār (“Two Twos Are Four”; 1968).
A floor down, by the shelves of South African literature, you stumble on an early experimental novel by J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in literature. In the Heart of the Country is narrated in 266 numbered paragraphs instead of chapters.
1. Today my father brought home his new bride. They came clip-clop across the flats in a dog-cart drawn by a horse with an ostrich-plume waving on its forehead, dusty after the long haul.
If there was more time, you’d hunt out other writers from the BA English degree at SOAS:
Brian Chikwava, Harare North
Zoë Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day
Ishtiyaq Shukri, The Silent Minaret
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel
But it’s too late, the 30 minutes are up!
An Academic’s response: Dr Kai Easton
Building on existing strengths and expertise in literatures from around the world, English at SOAS also looks to its own location and literary heritage in the heart of Bloomsbury.
Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury
Our vision is an interrogative one – cutting edge, deeply committed to interdisciplinary research and teaching across the humanities, and engaged with metropolitan, cosmopolitan and island histories. English at SOAS is truly international and the first degree of its kind in the UK.
SOAS Centre for English Studies is located in the School of Arts where there is a thriving culture of collaborative research and teaching. Award-winning writers J. M. Coetzee, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, and Meera Syal are Honorary graduates or Fellows of SOAS, and many novelists, poets, journalists, theatre directors and performers have studied here: Jung Chang, Zeinab Badawi, Saira Shah, Freya Stark, M. K. Asante, Ishtiyaq Shukri, and Willis Barnstone, among others.
BA English – field trip
Students on our BA degree study a range of canonical and contemporary texts in conversation with each other. We look at intersections, intertextuality, adaptations, life writing, graphic novels and films on modules such as Ways of Reading; Global Shakespeare; The Novel and Its Others; Fictions of History; South Asian Literature in English; Empire and the Postcolonial; Southern Spaces; Imagining Pakistan; A Special Author. Students are encouraged to undertake archival research through excursions to libraries and museums, and coursework includes innovative assignments with an emphasis on creative-critical approaches.
A sample of brief module outlines is provided below:
Global Shakespeare (year 1 core)
The course looks at a selection of Shakespeare’s plays:
Titus Andronicus
Henry IV Parts 1 and 2
King Lear
Othello
Hamlet
Much Ado About Nothing
The Tempest
It also looks at different books and films adapted from or inspired by Shakespeare from around the world, including:
Aimé Césaire, A Tempest (in English translation)
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
Toni Morrison, Desdemona
Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven
Matthew Hahn, The Robben Island Shakespeare
Ran (dir. Akira Kurosawa)
Shakespeare Wallah (Merchant Ivory)
Haider (dir. Vishal Bardwaj)
The Novel and Its Others Year 2 compulsory
Aphra Behn, Oronooko
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Jane Austen, Lady Susan
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Mirza Hadi Ruswa, Umrao Jaan Ada (in Urdu or English translation)
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
(and Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, for additional context)
Fictions of History (Years 2, 3, 4 elective/guided option)
Sara Salih (ed), The History of Mary Prince
Valerie Martin, Property
Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
J. M. Coetzee, Foe
Sally Morgan, My Place
Alexis Wright, Tracker
Henk Van Woerden, A Mouthful of Glass
Zoë Wicomb, Playing in the Light
Raghu Karnad, Farthest Field
The English Patient (dir. Anthony Minghella)
Belle (dir. Amma Asante)
A United Kingdom (dir. Amma Asante)
The New World (dir. Terrence Malick)
Mabo (dir. Rachel Perkins)
Empire and the Postcolonial: Race, Genders, and Sexualities (Year 3 elective)
