123221 SE Literary Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2023S)

When COVID-19 hit countries in Europe at the beginning of 2020, most governments reacted by imposing a range of restrictions to slow the spread of the virus. Chief among these restrictions was putting communities into lockdown, a measure that included social distancing and staying inside, restrictions on travel, the closing of businesses, schools, and kindergartens, as well as the widespread practice of working from home.

One effect of lockdown was a steep drop in household spending. One sector, however, offered a bright spot for retailers: book sales. Staying at home in self-isolation made people turn to reading, specifically fiction titles, an activity that enabled those affected to both escape their four walls and understand what is happening around us. It is no surprise, then, that authors rushed to publish the first novel dealing with the pandemic. The contemporary novel therefore seems to be, for readers and authors alike, a vehicle for coping with the pandemic, both in terms of escaping and facing COVID-19 (as both a cultural and a medical event) and its potential aftermath.

In this seminar, we will read three novels written or published during the lockdowns of 2020 to 2022 by an Irish, a British and an American author, respectively. In our corpus, we cover the genres of the thriller, science fiction and the realist novel and assess how each author represents and discusses lockdown and its consequences.

Issues discussed in our analysis will include:

• changing socal relations within the locked-down home, e.g. between parents and children or romantic partners;


• changing attitudes towards home spaces and home-making practices;


• the politics of lockdown, e.g. who had how much space, domestic violence, citizenship or unemployment.

The course will be project-based: after an input phase, students will be expected to develop their own research questions and, with guidance, develop, present and discuss their projects in the course of the semester, including a student conference in the final block of meetings towards the end of June.

At the end of the class, students will have gained an awareness of the critical debate surrounding lockdown measures and its literary representation (including the variety and use of genres and narrative features), will be able to define and use relevant theoretical positions reflecting the debate in the field and will be able to formulate a research question and make a clear point for their BA thesis or MA paper.

BA students will be assisted in developing relevant research questions for BA theses that use basic methodology and theoretical background. MA students are expected to rely on their more advanced knowledge of texts, theories and methodologies to develop a more independent and more critical research project, also as a way of further developing skills and competences for their MA thesis projects.