English

This course studies literary texts from the Victorian period alongside popular culture, images, and journalism. Students are exposed to key social issues of the era, including urbanization, class and gender division, and questions of Nation and colonialism.

To what extent does our study of Irish small presses and little magazines enable us to "take the pulse of a particular period," as Frank Shovlin puts it? How much credence should we give to the claim, leveraged by Robert Kiely, that Irish "small-press publishers provide some inkling of the real dissent" within cultural discourse? In this course, students engage with the full operational remits of a diverse range of presses and publications blending archival research with close textual analysis in search of answers to these kinds of questions. Given this mixed methodological approach, the course focus alternates from week to week: between book-historical sessions on individual presses and publications operating across various periods since 1950, and sessions centered on close reading the literary products of this small-press labor against the many social, political, and economic issues to which they respond in each case. Students look at an array of archival documents, manifestos, written editorials, paratextual materials, and other ephemera pertaining to each of the presses and publications under scrutiny, in order to understand their diverse material and aesthetic circumstances. 

In this course students are exposed to reading the work of poets and narrators of the 15th century in their historical and cultural context. Provides analytical tools to recognize and identify the topics of melancholy and nostalgia in the poets of the Late Middle Ages. The course looks at the relationship between the medieval authors and the romantic artistic and literary movements of the 19th century.

This course explores the relationship between literature and technology. It begins by formulating an understanding of writing itself as a technology – that is as a cultural practice involving dedicated tools invented at a specific historical juncture (to be contrasted with spoken language, as a human universal). This encourages students to examine literature as a product of various writing technologies – from manuscript, to print, to typewriting, to a variety of electronic forms of textual production and presentation. How these modes of production can influence the form and content of literature are explored, as are the strategies used by authors to represent these different varieties of text within literature itself. Students consider the role of standardization in literature, and how and why a variety of writers have chosen to step outside the usual written standard. They consider the integration of images with text and discuss the semiotics of different forms of text.

This is a special studies course involving an internship with a corporate, public, governmental, or private organization, arranged with the Study Center Director or Liaison Officer. Specific internships vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. A substantial paper or series of reports is required. Units vary depending on the contact hours and method of assessment. The internship may be taken during one or more terms but the units cannot exceed a total of 12.0 for the year.

Literature is a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon that takes on many different forms in different periods, regions, and languages. In all of these forms, literature reflects in one way or another the society in which it emerges. This course connects the complex relations between literature and society and teaches how to write and speak about them in an academic way. The characteristics of narrative, interpretation, poetics, and textuality, and place literary texts and analyses in specific historical and cultural contexts are considered. Questions are considered via the analysis of one novel from a number of key theoretical perspectives in literary studies, such as narratology, memory studies, and reader-response theory. 

This course examines the art of writing about Hong Kong. Through the use of writing prompts, it introduces students to the different ways of writing about different social and physical environments in Hong Kong. Students will be able to discuss and articulate the feelings, thoughts and experiences evoked by these social and physical environments. They will be able to consider issues such as genre, gender and language use in relation to readership. 

This course analyses a selection of poems written by authors in English, with special emphasis on the literary and linguistic aspects of the language. It also involves the analysis of poems, the theories that feed poetic creation and its critical reception. The course will consider the status of lyric poetry in Western culture, and the history of the form in English poetry.

This course examines how literary and cultural works address the state of perpetual war of the historical present. Focusing on Third World decolonization contexts, it considers how writers and artists interrogate the gender, racial, and national ideologies that fuel violence, and how literary cultural analysis contributes towards understanding the global unevenly distributed effects of war.

This course explores the interplay of parody, rewriting, and intertextuality in eighteenth-century British fiction and will examine how authors of the period and beyond engage with each other's works and with broader cultural contexts and norms. Through close reading, analysis, and discussion students will gain an understanding of the evolution of the novel form and its relationship to other forms, texts, and contexts.