Post-War Realisms: British and Irish Fiction, Documentary and Film Lent Term 2019 Clair Wills This course will interrogate the critical trend which reads contemporary literary fiction as a legacy of the ‘long history’ of modernism, either by revealing the ways in which current fiction writers engage with modernist forbears, or by comparing formal experiment and cultural ambition in the modernist and contemporary moments. Both approaches tend to offer a flattened version of mid-century realism, seeing it as inimical to experiment, a literary period which, with certain honourable exceptions, has been safely left behind. We will spend the semester returning to that moment, to investigate its various experiments in realism across different media. We will examine a number of 1950s and 60s realist and "documentary" writers and film-makers, including Alan Sillitoe, Colin MacInnes, John Berger, Edna O'Brien, Philip Donnellan and Doris Lessing, in the context of work by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, and debates on working-class realism, feminism, migration, and the New Left. The texts and critical materials will offer a way of thinking about the two-way relationship between documentary photojournalism, radio and film techniques and post-war fictional realism. How does, or doesn’t, familiarity with British post-war documentary realism and its cognates alter our understanding of the modes of more contemporary literary fiction? Each seminar will focus on one or two key texts [starred below], with some additional critical reading, and often a film. The syllabus lists additional readings for those who wish to follow them up. Secondary reading will be elaborated week by week. Cinema and Working-Class Culture *Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957). [This is a long text and should be read before term starts. We will focus on particular sections in the seminar]. *David Lodge, The Picturegoers (1960) Free Cinema Collective (BFI, 2006) Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, dir. Karel Reisz, 1960. John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963 (1986) Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey (1958) A Taste of Honey dir. Tony Richardson, 1961. Lindsay Anderson, ‘Get Out and Push’, in Tom Maschler ed. Declaration (1957) Race, Realism and the late 1950s *Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (1959) *Flame in the Streets dir. Roy Ward Baker, 1961 MacInnes, England, Half-English: A Polyphoto of the Fifties (1961)

MacInnes, City of Spades (1957) Sapphire, dir. Basil Dearden, 1959 Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room (1960) Realism and Commitment *John Berger, A Painter of Our Time (1958) *Universities and Left Review no. 4, ed Stuart Hall and Others (on ‘Commitment’) *Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958), Introduction and Part 3, Chapter 5, ‘Marxism and Culture’. John Berger and Jean Mohr, The Seventh Man (1973) Documentary Realism *Nell Dunn, Up the Junction (1963) *Up the Junction dir. Ken Loach (1965) Cathy Come Home dir. Jeremy Sandford, 1966 Nell Dunn, Poor Cow (1967), and film. Philip Donnellan, dir. The Irishmen, 1965 Charles Parker and Ewan McColl, BBC Radio ballads, 1957-1964. Joan Littlewood, dir. Sparrows Can’t Sing, 1963. Joan Littlewood, Joan’s Book: The Autobiography of Joan Littlewood (2003) Romanticism and Realism *Edna O’Brien, Girls in their Married Bliss (1964) (and the first two novels of the Country Girls trilogy if you have time). *Nell Dunn, Talking to Women (1965), especially interview with Edna O’Brien. I Was Happy Here dir. Desmond Davis, 1966. (Also known as Time Lost and Time Remembered). Girl with Green Eyes dir. Davis, 1964. Experimental Realism *Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962) [A long text which should be read before term starts]. *Lessing, In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary (1961) Lessing, ‘The small, personal voice’, in Maschler, ed. Declaration Harold Pinter, A Night Out (1960), and The Birthday Party (1957) Pinter, The Dwarfs (1992 [1950]) Alexander Baron, The Low-Life (1963)