English

The 'Gothic novel', which originated in mid-18th-century England, took the world by storm as a form of weird and terrifying fiction reflecting the medieval taste of the time. There were many variations, and the most common in the early years were bizarre adventure stories, such as the tale of a maiden locked in an old castle and the young man who rescues her. Other typical variations include tales of a wise man who sells his soul to the devil and falls into hell; tales of an artificial man such as Frankenstein; tales of a man who transforms into a monster such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; vampire tales such as Dracula, and many other types. Furthermore, up to the present day, the Gothic tale continues to be reproduced and re-created in a variety of media, not limited to the novel, while further diversifying. The mystery novel, a significant genre, is one of the tributaries that branched off from the Gothic novel.

English Literature 7 and 8 traces the Gothic novel's development over a year. This course is the first half, which will begin with the beginnings of the Gothic novel in the 18th century, the medieval taste that formed its background, and the establishment of a new tourism culture. Then it moves on to the new developments of the Gothic novel in the 19th century and its relationship to psychic studies of the same period.

The New Woman, a controversial figure who became prominent in British literature in the late 19th century, challenged traditional views of femininity and represented a more radical understanding of women's nature and role in society. She was associated with a range of unconventional behavior – from smoking and bicycle-riding to sexuality outside marriage and political activism. This course examines some of the key literary texts identified with the New Woman phenomenon including women’s journalism in the period. The course’s reading are organized around central thematic concerns such as sexuality and motherhood, suffrage and politics, and career and creativity. Students consider to what extent the New Woman was a media construction or whether the term reflected the lives of progressive women in the period. 

We live in an age of multiple crisis where basic gender equality is as much under threat as the earth’s climate. Why not combine different approaches to think through the looming Armageddon in search for alternatives to humanity’s demise – or at least a better understanding of it? The course uses Cara Daggett conceptualisation of Petromasculinity (2018) as a starting point to explore the intersection of Gender Studies and Ecocriticism. We will discuss the dualism of culture and nature uncovering the importance of gender in our perception of these two organizing concepts. From there, we will turn to Energy Humanities and Ecofeminism to understand how the extraction of non-renewable energies relates to discourses of The End of Man (Joanna Zylinska 2018) and see where that path will lead us. The primary texts for the course will come predominantly from African, South Asian, and Southeast Asian creatives and where not easily accessible will be made available through a course reader.

One of the key features of postmodernist thinking is the assertion of the fuzzy boundaries between reality and fiction: the realization that in everyday lives fictions, projections or hypothesis-building constantly interact with objects and facts of life (you can call this constructivist thinking); the realization that people’s identities are negotiations between social demands and imaginary projects; the realization that people’s senses of reality are heavily influenced by certain hegemonic (dominating) posits in terms of gender, labor (and consumption), media, race and ethnicity. Brian McHale has characterized the resultant tensions, as they are enacted in literature as “worlds in collision.” Cinema, as an art of montage and suturing, seems predetermined to enact these clashes. In this seminar we will explore the fuzzy boundaries discussing postmodern obsessions such as identities, surfaces, worlds, play, parody, high & low, consumer culture, media, gender performances and difference.

This course examines short-form prose storytelling with a focus on the short story. It covers a wide range of short story forms and structures. 

This course examines Indigenous literature which presents Indigenous creative production in Aotearoa in relation to Indigenous literatures around the globe. 

Literary analyses and attempts for various interpretations of English literary works undoubtedly enrich students' general skills in English; their insight into texts, and understanding of some important cultural topics that well reflect the characteristics of human societies. This course aims to foster students' abilities of these through close reading of English literary works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This session focuses on Emily Bronte's masterpiece, "Wuthering Heights", and examines the narrative, style, and author's messages from many points of view.

This course explores how the human-animal question is approached in contemporary literature. How do contemporary literary texts portray distinctions between humans and other animals? What are the philosophical, ideological, and political implications of such portrayals? If humans are distinguished from other animals on the basis of their possession of certain qualities such as speech, then what does this mean for groups of people who are deprived of their capacity to speak? Week-by-week, students approach such questions by concentrating on literature that introduces us to rational beasts, poor beasts, migratory or colonized beasts, and of course to edible ones. In doing so, students unearth connections between animal studies and feminism, post/colonialism, scientific innovations and environmental concerns, as well as consumerism and profit-driven economic systems.

How does constrained writing paradoxically open up language? What overt and covert strategies have authors used to create work that is highly formal but also highly playful? The Paris-based literary movement OuLiPo has been the headquarters of constrained writing since its inception in the middle of the last century. The group is well-known for writers like Georges Perec and Italo Calvino but has also had a considerable presence in English, from members like Harry Matthews and Ian Monk to the Feminist OuLiPo collective, Foulipo. In this seminar we will focus on OuLiPo and OuLiPo-adjacent output in English; readings include Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature edited by Warren F. Motte.

The serialization of Wilkie Collins’s mystery novel The Woman in White in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round from 1859 to 1860 is often regarded as the birth of a new type of fiction in Victorian England that came to dominate the literary market in the 1860s: the sensation novel. Even though recent criticism has widened the remit of the genre to include examples from earlier decades, Collins’s novel of mystery, deception and murder exerted an unprecedented cultural influence: readers (like the seasoned novelist W. M. Thackeray) are reported to have sat up all night ploughing through the pages of Collins’s doorstopper in a frenzy to find out what happened next. The novel became a singular object of consumption in other respects as well: ladies with money to spare could treat themselves to Woman-in-White fashion and Woman-in-White perfume, and music lovers could dance to Woman-in-White waltzes. Other novelists followed Collins and created ever more exciting ‘novels with a secret’, and the 1860s alone saw two further genre-shaping examples with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861). This overwhelming popular success prompted conservative critics to rail against these titillating productions: the novelist Margaret Oliphant was appalled by the representation of sensation fiction’s heroines as “fleshly and unlovely”, and the Dean of St Paul’s, Henry L. Mansel, condemned sensation authors like Collins, Braddon and Charles Reade for offering cheap literary fare and – more dangerously – for “preaching to the nerves” of their readers. In this seminar, students will read two long sensation novels (The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret) and one shorter example taken from the genre of detective fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) – a form that can be fruitfully traced to the sensation novels of the 1860s. We will place these novels in their rich historical and cultural contexts and engage with the immediate responses to the genre. We will study sensation fiction’s generic predecessors (such as the Gothic romance and the silver-fork-novel) and weigh its significance for modern forms like the crime novel and the psychological thriller.