English

This course introduces students to a range of Victorian fiction. It addresses the content, form, and significance of the Victorian novel and how it develops amid the cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts of 19th-century Britain. It also examines the alternative form of the short story and considers what specific kinds of narrative and narrative effects this form enables. Authors to be studied may include Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Vernon Lee, Margaret Oliphant, Bram Stoker, and William Thackeray.

This course introduces the theoretical question of the relationship between literature and high culture to the (less-literary) study of popular culture. Students examine the following key terms and sets of oppositions: (i) high culture vs. low culture; (ii) pop culture vs. popular (or mass) culture (the 2 terms are not the same); (iii) popular culture as resistance vs. pop/mass culture as consumption; and (iv) class and popular culture. Topics include debates about the value of cultural texts that are not of high cultural origins and could be treated as commodities within capitalist societies. Questions include 1. What is the impact and significance of commercially produced cultural products? 2. How do sub- and counter-cultural practices attempt to form alternative values systems? 3. What happens when alternative cultural formations become transformed into the mainstream? Students engage with the debate that the course will unveil and apply concepts learned critically. The course requires students to take prerequisites

This course involves the study of major literary genres of importance for the European literary tradition in translation. It is suitable for students of Classics as well as outside Classics, because it aims to help students to read widely and to engage with a broad range of literary-critical issues. The course focuses on Homer, but also includes reference to other archaic epics (e.g. Hesiod). Issues discussed include structure, plot, and character of the epics, the role of the gods, war and battle scenes, issues of gender and social values, the reception of Homer in later ages. 

Students read four pairs of plays which open up questions of commerce gender, city limits, liminal space, underbellies and architecture in the urban space: Thomas Dekker, THE SHOEMAKER’S HOLIDAY (1599); Ben Jonson, THE ALCHEMIST (1610) Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, THE ROARING GIRL (1607-10); Ben Jonson, EPICOENE OR THE SILENT WOMAN (1609) Christopher Marlowe, THE JEW OF MALTA (1592); John Webster, THE DUCHESS OF MALFI (c. 1614) Thomas Middleton, A CHASTE MAID IN CHEAPSIDE (1611-13); William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, THE WITCH OF EDMONTON (1621) Students also read a selection of theory on the city from commentators such as Engels, Benjamin, Bachelard and Lefebvre. 

Forget about the American Dream. This course explores the nightmarish and phantasmagorical hinterlands of the American project. It covers that which is repressed, depraved, monstrous, grotesque, terrifying, disturbing, unsettling, marginal, and bizarre in its culture. Together students seek to account for the existence of these horrors, through historicizing, close reading, and conceptualizing them via the contested histories of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the US. Students are looking at different genres and the troubled worlds contained within them. Students can expect to read in any given year works in the gothic, horror, noir and neo-noir, grotesque, racial melodrama, black comedy, crime, war, dystopian, science fiction, and mystery traditions. 

This course covers the study and evaluation of the culture of English-speaking people, such as language behavior, values, and customs, so that students can become familiar with both cultures as well as the ability to use the two languages in a sympathetic manner. 

This offering of the course examines: What makes one an American? Underlying at the root of the concept of American is the belief in one’s ability to “make” oneself into the image of an ideal American, which is inextricably linked with the cultural myth of self-invention that underwrites the American Dream. In this course, we examine how various American texts from the founding of the nation to the early 1930s contribute to, challenge, and revise our understanding of the American self, and consider how these texts give voice to particular social and historical experiences—both individual and national—and how those voices simultaneously direct and question the way we read such experiences as “American.”  

Students explore how changing social and political conditions are reflected in various texts, and how these texts participate in or question the construction of national identity. In this process, we ponder the ways in which these cultural texts both articulate and participate in broader historical struggles to establish the meaning of “America” itself. 

This course introduces students to a range of 21st Century literature written in English with a focus on crisis in the contemporary moment. It equips students with critical ideas and theoretical concepts that will help them to understand the literature of their own time. Students consider examples of a range of genres: poetry, creative non-fiction, the essay, and fiction. Students are encouraged to read texts in a number of contexts and will consider writers’ responses to, for instance: displacement, environmental change, geopolitical conflict, austerity, Black Lives Matter, the contemporary archive, desire and the overarching issue of crisis. They also consider a range of aesthetic innovations, for example: the turn to creative non-fiction, the re-emergence of the political essay, the development of the prose poem. Overall, the course considers how writers are responding to crises of the present period and how, through their writing, they model modes of agency.

In this course, students draw on approaches from Cultural Studies to examine the relationship between literature as a creative industry and literature as aesthetic practice. Focusing on 20th and 21st century works by authors traditionally situated at ‘the margins’ of nation-based literary systems, students ask what role marketing and the literary industry might have to play in how a writer’s voice becomes heard. In doing so, students take up Graham Huggans’ suggestion that a boom in postcolonial literature has been accompanied by a fetishization of difference or a ‘marketing of the margins’ which is at odds with many of the positions espoused in that literature. Students move beyond the Anglophone context in order to explore the application of this idea to authors from a range of countries and texts originally written in French, German, and Spanish.

This course examines the anonymous song-poetry which stands in contrast to the 'court' tradition of panegyric and learned poetry of the 17th century. Neglected by most of the early collectors, it has been regarded by some critics as containing some of the most powerful Gaelic poetry extant. The course considers (1) questions of definition, range and subject matter, authorship and transmission; (2) the evidence of the orain luaidh, which raise all these questions in acute form; (3) the relationship between these 'sub-literary' compositions and the rest of the Gaelic tradition; and (4) the assessment of these songs from a literary point of view. The lecture in the first hour will be delivered in English. The tutorial in the second hour is available in either Gaelic or English, dependent on individual degree programs.