20th and 21st-century literature: looking forward, looking back

Course programme

Friday 8 July 2016

Please plan to arrive between 16:30 and 18:30. You can meet other course members in the bar which opens at 18:15. Tea and coffee making facilities are available in the study bedrooms.

19:00 Dinner
20:30 Literature- poetry and prose- and ways we construct the past: through memory, research, archives, imagination, creative writing, and ghostly Gothic returns. Copies of poems will be made available.
22:00 Terrace bar open for informal discussion

Saturday 9 July 2016

07:30 Breakfast
09:00 .S.Byatt Possession -exploring this novel as neo-Victorian Gothic , considering its ways of reimagining an era, its writers, and its values and pursuits.
10:30 Coffee
11:00 Possession-literary parallels, academic research and sleuthing.
12:30 Free
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Free
16:00 Tea
16:30 Margaret Atwood’s Stone mattress-Gothic, ghostly returns, relationships, narratives, community and family:‘Alphinland’,’Revenant’ ’I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth’, ’Lusus Naturae.’
18:30 Dinner
20:00 Possession – the film – how does this relate to the text? Students are not required to watch this film before the course.
21:30 Terrace bar open for informal discussion

Sunday 10 July 2016

07:30 Breakfast
09:00 Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress – crime, revenge and the comic.’The Dead Hand Loves You’ ’Stone Mattress’. Ian McEwan's The Children Act: 'Victorian Gothic parallels contemporary relationships'
10:30 Coffee
11:00 The Children Act, Law and life- McEwan’s prose style and analogies between the complexities and contracts of the legal system, religion, relationships and the family.
12:30 Free
12:45 Lunch

The course will disperse after lunch.