ENG32690 Writing Habits

Academic Year 2023/2024

Addiction is a highly prevalent aspect of the human condition which affects the lives of a huge proportion of people worldwide. This prevalence is reflected in the large body of literary engagement, through verse, drama, prose fiction and memoir, with the lived experience of addiction. Literary criticism, however, has been slow to engage with and respond to Addiction Literature as a distinct genre. The relatively few critical engagements which have been made tend to emphasise both the phenomenon’s supposed essential modernity and its exclusive association with the specific issue of substance-use. When looked at as a literary genre, however, the roots of the common figurative and narrative tropes of Addiction Literature can be witnessed in texts which vastly predate any modern, medicalized articulations of substance-addiction. As Barbara Christian says in her “Race for Theory,” “where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.”
This Level 3 seminar module closely examines some seminal premodern texts of Addiction Literature, considers the development of the main conventions of narrative and language which will come to define the genre, and reflects on what types of behavioural depictions and which literary periods can be considered under a generic classification of Addiction Literature.