English

This course explores intersections between theatre and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be introduced to a range of political performance forms and the debates that surround them, from the political theatre of George Bernard Shaw, to the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht, to the provocative performances of the Black Revolutionary Theatre Movement, to the feminist performances of women’s theatre groups in the 1970s, to the recent rise of documentary and verbatim theatre. In addition, students will consider the theatricality of political protests, from die-ins to zombie walks, as well as recent protest reenactments by artists, including Jeremy Deller’s miners’ strike reenactment, The Battle of Orgreave (2001). Moving chronologically through the semester, the class will focus each week on a particular performance form, engaging with a selection of performance texts and relevant scholarship. By the end of the semester, students will be familiar with a number of influential practitioners and theorists of political theatre and performance; you will be knowledgeable about the contributions of playwrights and theatre-makers to a range of political movements; and students will be able to engage in informed debate about how various theatre and performance forms act politically. 

Through this course, students examine the cultural construction of time and temporality in the early modern period, closely reading one of Shakespeare’s plays in each week of the course. Students take an historicist approach, working toward defining an early modern temporal consciousness. Students consider the temporal conditions and contexts of early modern performance - the temporal experience of the theatre for playwrights, actors, and audience members - engaging with different critical approaches to Shakespeare’s plays that are themselves often reliant on specific constructions of time (e.g. Feminism, New Historicism, Performance Studies, Postcolonialism, Presentism, Queer Studies etc.).

The course equips students with the critical tools required to analyze the variety of British colonial representations of India in the 19th and 20th centuries. Students gain the necessary historical knowledge that enables them to contextualize a range of novels and shorter fiction, as well as key historical documents and works of historiography.

Since the Middle Ages, Germany has been part of wider transnational networks of commerce, religion, diplomacy, scholarship, exploration, tourism, and migration that have involved encounters with other peoples, languages, and customs. This course explores ways in which German literature and culture, at different points in its long history, has engaged with these networks and has imagined the resulting encounters with nations, cultures, and languages beyond its boundaries, both in Europe and further afield. Always bearing in mind that these encounters take place as much in the imagination as in reality, students study a range of texts and other forms that represent journeys, whether real or imagined, and the course considers what light can be shed on these by critical theories that explore ideas of otherness, boundaries, and identities.

This course facilitates the exploration of the construction of childhood and youth in Irish writing. Students have the opportunity to analyze texts written for adult readers as well as texts written for children. The course examines texts through the lens of "childhood and youth," and students are introduced to a series of subject areas including myth, folklore, community, education, history, postcolonialism, race, ability, genders, and sexualities. With a focus on texts from the 20th and 21st centuries, discussions are positioned within the context of broader cultural debates and incorporate a number of theoretical approaches. 

This course examines a range of African American-authored texts, including films, from the 18th century to the present to consider the relationship of race and writing, and the ways African American cultural expression contributes to and interrogates American cultural history. Issues covered include enslavement and freedom, and segregation and Civil Rights.

Why are some books considered classics while others are hardly read at all? How is the idea of the classic linked to debates about history, representation, excellence, and taste? This course answers these questions through in-depth, guided readings of a small number of major texts that have, at one time or another, been celebrated for their classic status. It considers whether literary classics must be difficult, innovative, representative, or popular; how they shape our judgements about literary tradition and value; and why they remain implicated in debates about sexuality, race, national identity, and class.

This course examines creative writing. Exploring the theoretical and practical dimensions of developing a personal creative writing practice, the course emphases writing as a mode of intellectual, historical and aesthetic engagement with the contemporary.

This course offers students the opportunity for an extensive study of one of the most important writers of the 20th century: George Orwell. Students study the representative sample of Orwell’s writing across a variety of forms and subjects, looking at Orwell as a novelist, a journalist, a memoirist, a social theorist, a political thinker and writer, and an essayist and cultural critic. 

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.