English

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.

The course introduces seminal examples, key texts of game theory and relevant critical theory. Students consider the creative aspects of writing for games including: narrative and storyboards, world building, shooting/scripts, characters and avatars, players, virtuality and corporeality, queer feminist game play, play addiction, and algorithms and chance.

From sparkly vampires to blockbuster monsters, gothic tropes appear to be all-pervasive in contemporary culture. As Catherine Spooner claims in CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC (2006), like "a malevolent virus, Gothic narratives have escaped the confines of literature and spread across disciplinary boundaries to infect all kinds of media, from fashion and advertising to the way contemporary events are constructed in mass culture." This course introduces students to Gothic’s literary expression in the British 19th century, before exploring the many ways in which this dark heritage continues to affect contemporary cultural production. Focusing on three key texts from the 19th century, FRANKENSTEIN (1818), THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE (1886), and DRACULA (1897), this course discusses their adaptation, appropriation, and influence on popular narratives such as those found in fiction, film, tv, fashion, and music video.