This module explores the significance of three exceptional stories that have become building blocks of modern culture, across time and around the globe.

We begin with Sophocles’ Antigone, which inspired modern authors and thinkers from Hegel to Anne Carson. We consider the particularities of sacred writing, through one of the most revered and reviled books of the Christian Bible: Apocalypse. Written in response to the religious persecutions of first-century Rome, this controversial cornerstone of the Christian canon holds an enduring influence on popular culture, which is echoed, as we will explore, in Victorian speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. Finally, our module explores the canonical status of a more recent myth: Frankenstein. We will read Mary Shelley’s novel alongside Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019) and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013).

Selected from more than three thousand years of world literature, these foundational texts lead us to consider the cultural and political significance of canons. How does a story come to occupy a central role in world literature? Who chooses to (re-)read and (re-)write the classics, across the ages, and how can they illuminate our own age, and our future?

This module studies the literary canon, not as a political construct, but as a celebration of diverse, co-creative practices, which holds the power to expand the ways we think about art. Close textual analysis will shed light on this complex intertextual and trans-medial tangle. With every new (re-)reading, the classics – and the multiple contemporary aesthetic and political practices that they inspire – reveal their lasting influence, and the power of literature.

Primary texts include: Sophocles’ Antigone; the Book of Revelation; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein of the Modern Prometheus; modern re-writings, adaptations and translations, from Modernism to the present.

Preparatory Reading

Ankhi Mukherjee, "What is a Classic?" in What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford University Press, 2014)
	Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History and Civilization (New York: Random House, 2018).
Please note: This module description is accurate at the time of publication. Minor amendments may be made prior to the start of the academic year.