ENGL2821: Hotel Stories

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• To examine the diverse ways in which the space of the hotel functions in literature of the 20th and 21st centuries.
• To explore how writers employ the hotel to think through the social and cultural conditions of the period, particularly in terms of class, gender, race, and sexuality.
• To consider how the textual space of the hotel shapes narrative form and structure.
• To introduce the hotel as a space of dynamic movement that reconfigures critical boundaries, such as those between modernist, middlebrow, and popular literature.
• To interrogate how writers contemplate theoretical and philosophical concepts such as the nature of selfhood and subjectivity through the relationship between the body and the space of the hotel.

• This module explores the diverse ways in which the space of the hotel functions across the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Often contradictory but always compelling, it situates the hotel as a space through which questions of home and belonging, transience and impermanence, privacy and refuge, anticipation and anxiety, and sexuality and desire are (sometimes simultaneously) explored.
• It combines authors writing across critical boundaries, such as those of modernist, middlebrow, and popular literature, to expose the importance of the hotel in reconfiguring these boundaries.
• It charts the individual spaces within the hotel the lobby, lounge, bedrooms, corridors, and back areas to critically consider the literary significance of each in terms of, for example, class, gender, race, sexuality, ageing, and disability.
• It examines a range of literary genres (novels, short stories, poetry, drama), and closely examines variations in the representation of the hotel across these.
• It pays close attention to narrative form and structure, and encourages students to take an innovative analytical approach through the textual space of the hotel.
• It incorporates a wide variety of theoretical approaches and methodologies, including, but not limited to: phenomenological theory; theories of embodiment; feminist theory; postcolonial theory; queer theory; Marxist theory; theories of disability; and theories of narrative and form.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students will gain a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of the history and origins of the hotel, and the corresponding histories of transport, leisure, architecture, and corporate capitalism with which it is entwined.
• Students will develop a firm grasp of appropriate critical and theoretical approaches to unpacking and interrogating the hotel in literature, including, but not limited to, theories of literary geography and textual space; theories of embodiment and space; and theories of mobility.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts.
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches.
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts.
• sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language.
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature.
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies.
• skills of effective communication and argument.
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation.
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology.
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated.

Key Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• a capacity to analyse critically.
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject.
• competence in the planning and execution of assessed work.
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others.
• skills in critical reasoning.
• an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner.
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information.
• organisation and time-management skills.

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology.
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work.
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions. In individual Special Topics, the assessment may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessment allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second assessment.

Before Assessment 1, students have an individual 15 minute consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a sheet of points relevant to the assessment and to receive oral comment on these points. Students may also if they wish, discuss their ideas for Assessment 2 at this meeting.

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