English

The world's knowledge is defined by hybridity between oral traditions and written texts. This course is an introduction to Scotland's rich oral/aural traditions of song, storytelling, instrumental music, dance, and folklore. Key concepts and theories relating to the interaction between orality and print, transmission (sharing) of oral material, and intangible cultural heritage as defined by UNESCO are explored in the context of modern (cultural) ethnology. Students learn fieldwork techniques, archival research skills and oral history interviewing. Themes can include children's song, ballads, political song, Robert Burns and Walter Scott, Highland bagpipes, Gaelic folktales, and Scottish legends, and special material is drawn from printed collections and the School of Scottish Studies Archives.

This course explores Berlin through the lens of émigré and exile literature, examining works by writers who either left Berlin or found refuge within it. Through close readings of texts spanning from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary works, students analyze how experiences of exile, migration, and displacement shape literary imagination and cultural identity. The course moves through Berlin's key historical moments—from the Russian émigré communities of the 1920s, through the forced exile of Jewish writers, to post-war Turkish-German literature and contemporary refugee narratives. By pairing literary texts with theoretical frameworks and conducting original ethnographic research, students investigate how different waves of migration have transformed both Berlin's physical spaces and its literary landscape. Special attention is paid to how writers represent specific Berlin neighborhoods and how various communities have shaped the city's cultural geography. Through engagement with memoir, fiction, poetry, and first-hand accounts, students explore themes of memory, nostalgia, linguistic displacement, cultural adaptation, and the evolving relationship between place and identity in émigré writing.

This course explores questions of memory, remembering, and time as these are refracted and represented via a range of verbal, literary, and cultural forms. The course considers the making of collective and public memory (e.g. the creation of national pasts; cultures of commemoration; oral history; testimonial forms; displacement, exile and global conflict; literatures of war) but also the question of individual and personal memory (e.g. language and identity; narrative and subjectivity; literature and psychoanalytic theory). As such, the course opens onto a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: the relation between the literary text and the history text; life-writing, autobiography and memoir; representations of childhood and ageing; engagements with the archive; the question of silenced, repressed or invisible histories; the historical, post-colonial and post-apartheid novel; discourses of trauma, truth and reconciliation; old age and forgetting; death and commemoration. Course entry requirements: At least second-year status.

This course introduces some of the fundamentals of writing short literary fiction. Read, study, and discuss contemporary short fiction reading, as well as the craft choices that shape those stories. Also engage in creative writing exercises and give and receive feedback on written work. No prior creative writing experience is necessary.

This course develops English language skills to an advanced level through reading and critical interpretation of English literature. Students read, discuss, and write about selected well-known literary fiction in English literature, ranging from traditional canonical works to contemporary science fiction. The focus of the course is to introduce essential themes as well as elements of literary form and technique, while developing the analytical skills necessary to produce sophisticated interpretations of texts. Critical reading involves reading actively and reflectively, and being able to understand, analyze, interpret, and communicate intelligently about literary works. Through a broad study of various texts, this course supports both language development and growth in critical thinking. 

This course considers how American literature explores the relationship between various American peoples and the land from the earliest colonial settlements to the present day. It ranges across genres, from philosophical writing and journalism, through the novel and poetry, to the short story and theatre, to narrate the spaces that accommodate the current U.S.A and the contingency, precarity, and fragility of human and animal life upon them. From famed urban spaces, through the plantations that perpetuated slavery, to ideas of the wilderness and the seascapes of the whaling industry, the course tracks how literary texts of the U.S. canon and countercanon manifest, and often too critique, American political projects and geographical fictions that have contributed to current environmental conditions. 

This creative writing course is intended for students with a strong interest in writing poetry and developing their artistic craft. In this course, students begin the work of critically assessing contemporary poetry as practicing poets. It explores some key concerns of contemporary poetry, including race, sexuality and the environment, and covers a range of poets working in both traditional and non-traditional forms. Using sample poems provided in class, alongside critical materials, students develop an informed critical idiom for the discussion and critique of contemporary poetry, and also work towards writing a small portfolio of their own poems. Students must be willing to produce new poems to deadline, and be prepared to have their work discussed in class. It is the responsibility of students to offer constructive and considered feedback to their peers during these weekly sessions. *Students are required to submit an application for this course. 

This course introduces students to five key Scottish ghost-fiction writers and their most memorable fantastic fictions: James Hogg, J.M. Barrie, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, and George MacDonald. It invites students to think about the role that the supernatural continues to play in Scottish writing through exploration of its representation in Romantic and Victorian fiction. Through closely analyzing excerpts from these writers and discussing the various wider cultural, social, and political anxieties and fears that can be expressed via the supernatural, students explore the historical context and literary impact of the Scottish Gothic.

This course involves studying the works of a number of poets, whose work reflects the variety of techniques used in modern and postmodern poetry. Students are asked to focus on, for example, the imagery, structure, prosody and diction used in these poems, and to experiment with these elements in their own poetry writing. Students undertake a series of writing exercises that allow them to explore these techniques and concerns.