English

This course explores the cultural impact which selected high-profile true crime narratives have had upon works of literature, non-fiction, popular literature and film. It explores the various ways in which certain real life crimes have inspired a range of cultural responses. The course incorporates weeks on classic non-fiction true crime texts as well as works of memoir, film, literary fiction and popular fiction which have been inspired by real-life cases. Additionally, students engage with the current true-crime podcasting landscape and other true crime media. 

In this course, students are introduced to a range of modernist authors from a variety of contexts and working in various genres and modes, including poetry, fic on, and the essay.  They learn how to recognize and articulate different conceptualizations of literary modernism from the early 20th century to the present. Students articulate the differences and interrelationships between some of the key figures of literary modernism across a range of cultural contexts. Students explore the debates regarding the multiple possible ways of defining literary modernisms. They gain a clear sense of how literary modernisms fit in within the literary histories of English, European, and US American literature. 

This course studies and analyzes the tradition of autobiographical writing in English. Through a diachronic study, it explores the evolution of the genre from its origins to the present. Through a synchronic study, it discusses the different manifestations and subgenres of life writing such as memoirs, diaries, lyric essays, autofiction, etc. 

This course explores masterworks of short fiction from Nobel Prize winners in Literature from across the globe.  

The course covers the following works and authors: John Steinbeck’s classic American novella about migrant workers and class struggle during the Great Depression, Of Mice and Men; the magical realism of several short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (e.g., A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings); the magical power of fiction in the service of telling gripping stories will be further illustrated by short stories from the Egyptian writer Naguib Mafouz, and the Chinese laureate Mo Yan. 

The course concludes with the most recent Nobel winner Han Kang’s work about resistance and transcendence, The Vegetarian. 

This course explores revolutionary thought and practice from the early 20th century to the present day. Reading the cultural production of anticolonial, anti-caste, feminist, indigenous, and anti-capitalist activism, students critically examine the relationship between revolutionary social movements and the autobiographies, essays, poetry, and music they produced.  Students consider the theoretical work of these revolutionary movements as essential to the development of a Marxist tradition that is rooted in praxis. The course also includes a self-organized reading group component to encourage students to extend their engagement with these ideas beyond the university.

This course suggests that the lyrics of Taylor Swift can and should be read as literature. In doing so, the course pays close attention to formal elements such as rhyme and word choice. The course also analyzes her songs with the help of key texts in critical theory and discuss the political, national, and historical contexts of her work. Queen Mary's London setting encourages students to pay particular attention to the way in which the UK, and London in particular, figures in Swift's lyrics. 

This course examines major theories of the aesthetic and aesthetic value. Commonly defined as a philosophy of Art and the way in which we judge and appreciate artistic productions, the discourse of aesthetics raises a set of compelling questions about the fraught relationship between beauty, pleasure, judgment, and value. Students will explore a range of theories on the aesthetic and aesthetic judgment, and think more broadly about the purpose of the literary in broader society. Writers considered may include Plato on Mimesis; Aristotle on Catharsis; Burke on the sublime; Kant on Hedonism; Marx on art and value; as well as more recent debates on aesthetic affects coming out of contemporary queer theory.

This course examines how linguistic forms and literary devices are related to aesthetic effects and ideological functions. It will analyze and discuss how the choice and the patterning of words, sounds and images orchestrate to embody, mediate and elicit feelings and thoughts, and views and values. Topics include: towards characterizing literary linguistics; collocation, deviation and word play; prosody, parallelism and performance; discourse into discourse; narration and representation of speech and thought; reader positioning and response.

The course focuses on the main concepts of unification-based syntax and their application to the analysis of English. It examines the features that make up sentences, syntagms, words, and grammatical morphemes.