ENG32520 Ugly Feelings

Academic Year 2023/2024

Recent months have underscored a range of intense human emotions—daily joys and frustrations, fear, mourning, anger. We have only to look at the daily paper to see the ways in which familiar feelings are deployed to give meaning to local and world events.
This course will examine the changing cultural representations of emotion across a range of genres in film, media, and literature. We will consume broadly, analysing Victorian, modern, and contemporary texts for representations of individual emotions, shared public affects, bodily registers. In particular, we will investigate the forms, operations, and potentials of what we might call “ugly” feelings.
We will consider what it means to represent or create feeling through text. How are emotions historically situated and embodied? How do allowed and restrained emotions reveal or enforce patterns of power? Each week will focus on a cultural text and its portrayal of a central feeling: anger, grief, boredom, resentment, fear, disgust, envy.

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Curricular information is subject to change

Learning Outcomes:

1. Establish key theoretical and historical contexts for the study of emotions & affects.
2. Apply these concepts and contexts in close analysis of course texts.
3. Consider emotion in the particular context of power, as revealed through critical theories of sexuality, race, gender, age, and the body.
4. Complete short exercises, discussions, and a final exam demonstrating proficiency in critical concepts in the study of emotions and textual analysis.
5. Hone presentation and creative thinking via individual and group work in class.

Indicative Module Content:

Each week will focus on a cultural text (a poem, novel, film, television show, or architectural space) and its portrayal of a central feeling: anger, grief, boredom, resentment, fear, disgust, envy.

Secondary readings provide key terms in the History of Emotions (emotives, emotional communities, affect, practice, emotional regimes and refuges) and explain relations of emotional expression and regulation. The course understands emotions as culturally and historically situated, evolving, and embodied. Explorations of emotion will be situated in terms of class, gender, culture, race, age, sexuality and religion.

This course is team taught and readings will shift each semester. Readings may include:
ME Braddon, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, Edna O’Brien, Orhan Pamuk, Sally Rooney, Karin Fossum, Kamila Shamsie.
Television Series: Insecure, You’re the Worst, Great British Bake-off
Film: Selections from Bollywood and Theatre spaces
History of Emotions: Sianne Ngai, Sara Ahmed, William Reddy, Rob Boddice, Martha Nussbaum

Student Effort Hours: 
Student Effort Type Hours
Lectures

10
Seminar (or Webinar)

10
Specified Learning Activities

40
Autonomous Student Learning

50
Total

110
Approaches to Teaching and Learning:
The module will proceed with a series of short lectures, shared discussions, and short exercises in close reading and writing. *A final take-home exam will test textual analysis and concepts covered.

The module will be delivered in person.
As always, there's always a chance that a limited amount of material may be recorded in the event of faculty illness.

*For postgrad students wishing to take this module, you are welcome. Assignments have been modified for you to include longer discussion posts, a precis of a longer text, and an extended final essay on a topic appropriate to your research, structured with one of the course lecturers. 
Requirements, Exclusions and Recommendations

Not applicable to this module.


Module Requisites and Incompatibles
Not applicable to this module.
 
Assessment Strategy  
Description Timing Open Book Exam Component Scale Must Pass Component % of Final Grade
Examination: Open Book Final exam 2 hour End of Trimester Exam Yes Graded No

60
Continuous Assessment: Discussion Questions & Responses Varies over the Trimester n/a Graded No

30
Continuous Assessment: Short Writing Exercise Unspecified n/a Graded No

10

Carry forward of passed components
Yes
 
Resit In Terminal Exam
Spring No
Please see Student Jargon Buster for more information about remediation types and timing. 
Feedback Strategy/Strategies

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment
• Online automated feedback

How will my Feedback be Delivered?

After exam feedback will be offered. Feedback after short continuous assessment exercises will be offered.

As this was module changes readings annually, the full reading list will be finalized in late summer.

However, the indicative reading list for 2023-4 includes:

Selections from C19 periodicals
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars... , Cheng Tom
Calling Out for You, Karin Fossum
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
Readings in Eco Criticism TBD
Meridel LeSeuer, Carmen Maria Machado, Eula Biss, Mary McCarthy

Readings in other years have included:
ME Braddon, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, Edna O’Brien, Orhan Pamuk, Sally Rooney, Karin Fossum, Kamila Shamsie, Harriet Jacobs.
Television Series: Insecure, You’re the Worst, Great British Bake-off, Transparent
Girl, Edna O'Brien
Film: Selections from Bollywood, theater spaces
How To Keep an Alien, Sonya Kelly
History of Emotions: Sianne Ngai, Sara Ahmed, William Reddy, Rob Boddice, Martha Nussbaum

Name Role
Dr Sarah Comyn Lecturer / Co-Lecturer
Assoc Professor Sharae Deckard Lecturer / Co-Lecturer
Professor Fionnuala Dillane Lecturer / Co-Lecturer
Dr Katherine Fama Lecturer / Co-Lecturer
Dr Chloe Green Lecturer / Co-Lecturer
Assoc Professor Clare Hayes-Brady Lecturer / Co-Lecturer
Assoc Professor Jorie Lagerwey Lecturer / Co-Lecturer
Assoc Professor Anne Mulhall Lecturer / Co-Lecturer
Dr Maria Stuart Lecturer / Co-Lecturer
Timetabling information is displayed only for guidance purposes, relates to the current Academic Year only and is subject to change.
 
Autumn
      
Lecture Offering 1 Week(s) - Autumn: All Weeks Tues 12:00 - 13:50