English

The course educates students in the main features of the art form, how to achieve them on the page, and how to recognize and appreciate the literary contexts out of which they emerge. Students work through their notebooks and workshops to recognize their own poetic impulses and render them with greater precision in what they write. Students are encouraged to write poems in the workshops, to be discussed by the group. 

This course offers anyone new to creative writing a chance to learn about different types of writing and to try them out with encouragement, support, and guidance. Students read and discuss inspiring examples of writing (such as poetry, short story, novel, non-fiction and drama) to find literary techniques, craft, and skills that they can apply to their own work. Writing exercises allow students to practice these skills and share their work for feedback. Students also discuss habits and ideas that help them write. Overall, this course offers a welcoming first step to the art of writing creatively.

This course focuses on comic writing for the English stage during one of its most exuberantly creative periods. Beginning with the romantic comedy of Shakespeare and concluding with some of the most daringly sceptical drama of the Restoration period, the course explores the varieties of comic theatre developed over the 17th century, including festive comedy, the carnivalesque, fable, city comedy, and different modes of satire. In doing so, it examines the comic engagement with a range of moral, social and political debates and conflicts, both of the early modern period and in our own time. It also reads the plays in the light of theories of the purposes and workings of comedy, as well as in the context of the very different social and staging conditions obtaining at either end of the century.

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?