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Research and Further Readings

This page offers links to and bibliographic references for resources and readings we cover in class and the other to additional secondary materials.  The images from the powerpoint presentations given in class are in the gallery at the bottom of the page along with captions citing their sources. If you missed a class and require additional notes, please email me! 

 

 

Notes from the content slides we generated in our class discussions of On Beauty and Cloud Atlas are now available for download here. The ones for Hotel World are available here.

 



​May 16th: Ian McEwan's Atonement 

 

May 23rd: Ian McEwan's Atonement

  • McEwan's Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech [full text available here, extract on class handout]: http://www.ianmcewan.com/bib/articles/jerusalemprize.html 
  • Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Ferrar, 1966. [The extract we read in class is drawn from the title essay of this collection]
  • Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis. New York: Doubleday, 1957. [Those of you in the Wednesday tutorial section will have discussed the term "mimesis" with me. This text is an important critical work on the development of realism in Western literature, and just a wonderful critical read. Auerbach wrote it using only a small suitcase full of books and his own memory when he was in exile in Turkey after he fled from Nazi Germany.]
  • Robinson, Richard. "The Modernism of Ian McEwan's Atonement." MFS 56 (3): 2010, 473-495. ​[The article mentioned in class that addresses the real modernist reviewer, Cyril Connolly, in relation to McEwan's fictionalized version of him in the rejection letter portion of the novel]. 

 



May 28th & 30th: Julian Barnes: The Sense of An Ending

Class Readings, Lecture Slides and Supplementary Materials

May 14th: Modern, Postmodern, Contemporary

  • Dictionaries of Literary Terms: there are many good and available dictionaries for this purpose, so if you have one you like from another course, please feel welcome to use it. Chris Baldick's Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford: OUP, 2008. is available for free electronically through the U of T library catalogue. It's worth having a browse through a couple of different definitions of the three terms we talked about to get a sense of how these dictionaries offer concise and simplified summaries of the movements on which we elaborated in class.
  • David Shrigley's website: http://www.davidshrigley.com/ [The artist who made the Words, Words, Words iron gate and the orange pinned to the lamppost]

Woolf, Virginia. "How it Strikes a Contemporary" [handout in class, and available as a fulltext here]: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CLASS/workshop97/gribbin/contemporary.html

June 4th and 6th: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell



June 11th and 13th: Zadie Smith's On Beauty

  • Smith, Zadie. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. London: Penguin, 2009. [A collection of Zadie Smith's literary journalism. It includes her essays on Forster as well as several related meditations on art, culture, and writing].
  • ​Smith, Zadie. Ed. The Book of Other People. London: Penguin, 2008. [An anthology edited by Smith in which writers and artists have been given the simple task of making someone up. In each of the short pieces in the collection, character takes centre-stage, and this work offers a creative answer to the question of how character is conveyed in art]. 
  • Forster, E. M. Howard's End. Garden City: New York, 1921 (originally published 1910) [Forster's novel to which On Beauty is a tribute].
  • Itakura, G. "On Beauty and Doing Justice to Art: Aesthetics and Ethics in Zadie Smith's On Beauty." Ariel ​41. 1 (2010): 27.  [Academic article addressing the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Smith's fiction]
  • Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. [The critical text from which On Beauty's title is taken, and which provides one of Smith's epigraphs]
  • ​Lopez, Gemma. "After Theory: Academia and the Death of Aesthetic Relish in Zadie Smith's On Beauty" Critique 41.1 (2010): 250-65. [Academic article that addresses (ironically enough!) Smith's portrayal of the demise of pleasure in academic contexts] 

June 18th: Me, Cheeta

June 20th: Ali Smith's Hotel World

"What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”— was that it? —“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished — how strange it was! — a few sayings like this about cabbages" (2-3).



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