This course will examine the ways in which the contemporary American novel has responded to the modern rise of neuroscience.

10 weekly seminars of 2 hours

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The standard assessments for this course are:

■ 10% 1 ten-minute presentation

■ 90% 1 x 4400 word essay

If required, for instance where a disability prevents a student from undertaking a specific method of assessment, the following alternatives are available:

■ Recorded presentation (video or audio) or one-to-one presentation with staff as alternative to the Presentation

■ There is no alternative to the Essay, but extensions to the deadlines can

be offered as reasonable adjustment (students should follow the usual process for

extensions).

Further reasonable adjustments may be provided where necessary. Students are encouraged to consult with the course convenor.

The course aims to provide student with the skills to:

■ Analyse a range of major contemporary American writers in substantive literary and cultural contexts;

■ Engage with, and evaluate, the developing field of cognitive historicist critical approaches to literary texts;

■ Explore possibilities and limitations of interdisciplinary study of literary texts.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Articulate a nuanced understanding of the rise and fall of postmodern American fiction, and of the way twenty-first-century American fiction negotiates postmodernism's literary legacy;

■ Analyse and contextualise the changing forms of and rhetorical devices common to the contemporary American fiction;

■ Evaluate larger scholarly debates about literature and science, and more specific forms of cognitive literary criticism;

■ Display an ability to work with interdisciplinary materials at an advanced level.