English

This course examines the golden age of English theater, involving a detailed study of a selection of tragedies by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The theatrical emphasis of the course is intended to help students respond to the plays as theatrical artifacts and not merely as literary texts.

This course examines the deeply intertwined relationship between literature and the city. On the one hand, the rise of the modern metropolis saw the production of new literary modes as writers responded to changing social and economic relations, new opportunities for self-fashioning and cultural exchange, as well as experiences of exploitation, segregation and exclusion. On the other hand, the literary imagination itself has produced indelible urban worlds and underworlds, from James Joyce’s Dublin, Virginia Woolf’s London or Claude McKay’s Marseille, to novels, short strories and speculative fictions that reimagine Singapore, Melbourne or Johannesburg. Reading widely across twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary geographies, students will engage with different genres of city writing – poetry, short story, novel, and graphic novel -- as well as read theoretical texts that explore key concepts such as the production of space, the flaneur, space and gender, the imperial/colonial metropolis and the global city.

The course situates Chaucer’s exceptionally diverse canon within the literary and historical contexts that produced them, while also considering how archival discoveries and fresh theoretical approaches make possible new understandings (or at times misunderstandings) of the medieval author and his works. Given the increasingly diverse and global readership of Chaucer’s work in 21st centuries, it is unsurprising that these works elicit such varied and often contradictory responses. As readers of Chaucer in the 21st century, students are encouraged and supported to develop their own voice and critical skills, and it is not expected that they have extensive previous experience with medieval literature. 

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.