Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

Contemporary British Writing and Culture: Mapping Austerity, Class, and Lost Futures

Following the global financial crash of 2007/8, the British Conservative party were elected to office under a promise of keeping public spending in check and tackling Britain’s debt through a range of “difficult decisions” on pay, pensions, benefits and public funding and services. Yet what was pitched under a narrative of collective sacrifice (“Keep Calm and Carry On”) amounted to the brutal dismantling of welfare and social structures for some of the most marginalized communities across the British Isles. In 2018, the New York Times noted how “Britain is looking less like the rest of Europe and more like the United States, with a shrinking welfare state and spreading poverty”. Meanwhile, a 2022 report suggested that over 330,000 excess deaths between 2012-19 can be linked to the UK government’s austerity policies.

Throughout the 2010s a range of artists and writers were already mapping the grim impacts of UK government policy on everyday life and culture. This course examines a range of 2010s British cultural forms, including literature, journalism, film, music and television, that variously detail the disproportionate impacts of austerity, explore the representation of class, and foreground alternative futures that did not materialize. We will also explore accompanying events such as the student protests and London riots of 2011, the 2012 Olympic Games, and Brexit. Finally, we will also consider the connections certain 2010s cultural objects establish with longer histories of empire, devolution, deindustrialization, and the stigmatization of working-class culture.

Grading

Materials

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