This unit aims to be an advanced introduction to aspects of contemporary literature in prose and poetry. It does not aim to be comprehensive, but rather to give detailed insight into two contemporary movements, one in prose ('Reality Hunger'), the other ('Conceptual Writing') developing from - and critiquing - poetry.

By the end of the ten-week unit, the student should:

• have a specific knowledge about a range of key texts and contexts relating to writing in these two movements.
• have a knowledge and critical understanding of how that work relates to practical and theoretical debates in a variety of modernist, late modernist and postmodernist and contemporary practices.