This module examines contemporary novelistic responses to war, focusing on the Second World War (1939-1945). It introduces students to the concept of postmemory, defined by Marianne Hirsch as being distinguished from history by a sense of profound personal connection and from memory by generational distance. The module asks students to employ this concept in analyzing several key issues: why do authors keep returning to the events of their parents? and grandparents? generations? How are their responses conditioned by cultural, social and political factors, and how are they shaped by, and how do they shape, current trends in contemporary literature? This module will interrogate the complexity and variety of recent fictional responses to war, paying particular attention to generational issues, asking what World War Two means to us now, and what these texts can tell us about the relationship of history and fiction.
 
 

Seminars 1 & 2: An Introduction to Historical Fiction and Postmemory Writing

1. Writing History: the Contemporary Historical Novel
What debates have shaped recent thinking on historical fiction? Starting with excerpts from Hirsch, Ricoeur, White and Hutcheon, we will look at the development of the postmodern historical novel, using Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001) as the core text.
2. Writing War: Contemporary Views
We have asked what an historical novel is, now, what is a war novel? Who writes them, and what do we expect from these two genres in terms of theme, style and authorial intention? Are these categories of novels useful in terms of a text such as Maus (1991) which moves between the past and the present? Can Hirsch's concept of postmemory be transferred to other second-generation trauma narratives?

Seminars 3 & 4: `The future of the past': Our haunted present.

3. `The past won't fit into memory without something left over; it must have a future' (Joseph Brodsky). Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991) and either Another World (1998) or Life Class (2007).
4. Graham Swift, Shuttlecock (1981). (The transmission of trauma to the second/third generation; troubled conceptions of masculinity.)

Seminars 5-10: Old Voices, New Perspectives: reclaiming the past.

5. Adam Thorpe, The Rules of Perspective (2005) (`The Good German'; using innovative narrative perspectives to draw the reader into a process of discovery.)
6. Liz Jensen, War Crimes for The Home (2003); OR Owen Sheers, Resistance (2007). The `home front' revisited and retold; looking at how, and why, each text reaches into the past.
7. Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (2006). A new type of second generation emerges. Reinscribing Gay and Lesbian history; narrative invention and appropriation.
8. Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004). A new 2nd generation speaks its history for the first time; expanding and complicating notions of `Britishness' and postcolonial discourse.
9. Biyi Bandele, Burma Boy (2007). The first novel to portray the experiences of African soldiers fighting for the Allies, this 2nd generation work also reminds us of a forgotten arena of the war, asking us why we remember and commemorate what we do and neglect other areas.
10. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments (1996): what is a historical novel? Questions of appropriation and authenticity from the module revisited and revised.

To introduce students to a arange of postmemory fiction from the 1980's-present day and to chart the changes in approach and content over this period.

To consider the extent to which the production and reception of postmemory fiction is conditioned by societal factors.

To introduce students to ongoing debates in contemporary historical fiction and to encourage them to carry those isights over to other areas of their study.