English

This course explores why it is that the coming of age narrative is such an enduring form in US culture. It covers a range of different modes, including autobiography, fiction, film, and music and crosses over the past two centuries to capture the varied historical experience of entering into adulthood within the United States. It has a particular interest in identities, selves, and experiences whose testimonies are antagonistic to the developmental objectives of the genre in its most canonical renderings. Students are also encouraged to reflect on their own experience at university—their own coming of age tale—in order to elucidate and theorize the central critical issues of the course. 

This course traces the history of gothic, ghost stories, and science fiction literature through the 19th century, giving students the chance to consider the development of a range of dark and frightening imaginaries in this period. Exploring the political, psychological, and creative functions of these dark imaginings in writings by Charles Dickens, Hannah Crafts, George Eliot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jean Toomer and others, students consider the role and function of monsters, ghosts, werewolves, and the uncanny in 10th-century culture (and in culture at large). 

The course introduces students to the extraordinary variety of Irish literature produced during the 20th century.  Students study major writers such as James Joyce, W.B Yeats, J.M Synge, Elizabeth Bowen and Seamus Heaney, and place their work in the context of a period that included such traumatic events as colonial occupation, a war of independence, partition, civil war, and a protracted period of social violence in Northern Ireland. The course is organized thematically around significant events, cultural movements and social phenomena. No prior knowledge of Irish literature or history is assumed.  

This broadly chronological course gives students a detailed understanding of black and Asian British writing in its historical, political, and cultural contexts. It examines a range of works by black and Asian writers published in Britain. It explores how black and Asian writers shape and reflect a changing Britain and how race, gender, class, migration, and generation intersect and impact on changing notions of British identity. Students consider how these writers have shaped shifting notions of "Britishness" and engaged with a range of pressing contemporary issues including racism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, gender politics, terror, asylum-seekers, Islamophobia, and debates on free-speech.

This course provides students with insight into the origins of modern celebrity within the literary and theatrical marketplaces of the long 18th century. The course also provides a grounding in the burgeoning field of celebrity studies and encourages reflection on continuities between the 18th century’s public spheres and our own. It traces the rise of different kinds of celebrity within 18th-century Britain’s literary and theatrical marketplaces. Students examine the fame of authors, performers, criminals, politicians, and numerous, notorious others. 

The course carries a three-fold purpose: to raise our readerly patience and sensitivity, to showcase aspects of western culture, and to help enhance our English language skills. A mixture of lecture and discussion will form the main classroom activity.

In this course, we shall read five to six European novels from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, by such writers as Dostoevsky, Proust, Woolf, Kafka, and Camus. We shall consider the following questions, among others: What have these authors discovered about the self, for example, about the richness and opacity of the inner life, about self-knowledge and self-deception, about possibilities of redemption through love, art or memory? In what ways do the novels we read reflect upon—or even intimate beforehand—the unfolding of European socio-political life over the course of a crisis-laden century? How do these authors ponder questions of individual responsibility, guilt and conscience, and do they, in their largely post-Christian era, propound any alternative possibilities of transcendence? How does each writer’s art of narrative extend or transform our consciousness of time and space and help us reinterpret personal experience and collective history?

The course analyses various depictions of "heroic women" in different cultural contexts and historical times. It explores the notion of female heroism in contrast to male heroism, indicating major differences and similarities. It also deals with women writers’ responses to male writers’ depictions of female protagonists. This course introduces students to certain major representative works of literature/topics from different cultural milieux and thereby develops their literary awareness and sensitivity, with a particular emphasis on the theme of heroic women in literature across a range of cultures and periods; engages students imaginatively in the process of reading and analyzing selected culturally different texts; develops an awareness of intercultural issues by presenting set texts not only individually, but also in relation to each other.

This course examines a broad range of both poetic genres and poetic styles. It covers poetry by a diverse variety of historic literati (from the 1800s to the 2010s), with emphasis on modern trends in current poetics.

Psychoanalysis is a highly influential and contested form of 20th century discourse. This course introduces students to key Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and perspectives. By bringing these into dialogue with a wide range of literary texts, it encourages students to consider how issues of unconscious motivation, sexuality, and madness operate in and around different forms of writing. It serves as a starting point for students to engage with existing psychoanalytic literary theory but emphasizes the close reading of foundational texts alongside literary works with the hope of generating new, mutually informed readings of both psychoanalysis and literature.