English

How do we create meaning from the air we breathe and from marks on a page? How has language been exploited now and throughout history for effect, self-expression, and story-telling? In this course, students study the most intricate, powerful, and beautiful parts of our most valuable human asset - language. In three strands this course explores in detail how newspapers, adverts, and politicians all try to persuade us; how linguistic meaning and structure are key to making ourselves understood; and how the 1500-year history of English tells us about who we are and where we came from.

The course introduces students to Chaucer's THE CANTERBURY TALES, a key text of the English middle ages and one of the most accessible yet challenging works of medieval literature in English. It explores the range of individual tales, and the social and pilgrimage frameworks, that unite the whole. Topics considered include the different narrative kinds and modes employed in the tales, the focus on issues of gender, desire and marriage, and the playful yet sophisticated reflection upon the act of storytelling itself.

This course will focus on the short detective fiction of Agatha Christie (1890-1976), the most successful twentieth-century author of detective novels. While Christie developed two well-known sleuths, Hercules Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, who featured in novels and whose cases have frequently been translated into the medium of film as well into more than 100 languages, this course will concentrate on the early short stories that were published in the 1920s and that predate the Miss Marple novels. Students will be introduced to the study of character and narrative, as well as the genre conventions of detective fiction, at the same time that they will be furnished with tools to understand the various techniques used in crime fiction. Particular attention will be devoted to reading Miss Marple as a moral standard against which aberrant behavior is tested by Christie. 

This course introduces students to different methods of reading literature historically. In order to learn how to place specific textual representations in their wider social and intellectual contexts, students examine a range of literary genres, encompassing both canonical and non-canonical texts from the medieval period to the late 18th century. The texts have been selected to encourage critical engagement with the global dimensions of "English Literature." Students must have passed Literary Studies 1A and 1B (or equivalent if visiting student).

This course combines political philosophy and critical thinking and debate in English. It contains six modules: justice, order, prosperity, market, polity and civilization.

Students will learn about classical theories and the development of political philosophy, how to cultivate critical thinking, argumentative strategies and academic presentation ability and to develop incidental and implicit English acquisition in the exploration of academic subjects.

This course explores issues of crime and detection in a variety of literary texts from different historical contexts and from a variety of European and, depending on staff availability, also Latin American countries. This is done in relation to the main tropes of the genre and a range of theoretical approaches. It considers the contexts in which the texts appear and how crime fiction addresses ideological and social issues.
 

This course examines how working-class writers have represented themselves as well as how they have been represented by others. It pays due attention to the formal modes employed by working-class writing (realism, expressionism, surrealism, fantasy etc.) across a range of genres - fiction, poetry, drama, and film. The course moves from the 19th century to the present in order to understand how class identities change over time yet it also affirms how the reconstitution of class is not synonymous with its disappearance. The course focuses on key issues such as the relationship between culture and politics, the intellectual or writer as a socially mediated figure, solidarity and individuality, social mobility, gender, voice and vernacular, the politics of representation.

This course provides an introduction to early modern English literature and the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts that shaped it. It begins with an introductory lecture, outlining the chronology of the period and the major themes that will be addressed in the following weeks – the concept of renaissance, the Protestant reformation, the discovery of the so-called New World, and the English revolution. The course covers a range of genres, from across the whole period of 1500-1660, and features a number of lectures on major canonical authors combined with broader thematic concerns, which trace the development of early modern literature.

This is a historical and critical survey of modern Chinese fiction from 1917 to 1949, with emphasis on the forms of novella and short story. 

This course introduces the field of California Studies in its plurality, combining elements of literary and film studies, notions and texts from civilization studies, as well as cultural studies. Starting from the question of what constitutes a “Studies” discipline, it then examines specific works and documents – literature, film, essays, and poetry – that provide insight into the specificities of California culture and its representation. Sometimes trivialized, California has a significant place in the spheres of cultural, artistic, and economic development which has had a vast impact on not only American but also Western and global cultures. Californian representations and themes are often a perfect paradox of dominant and subcultural elements, and the course explores several works and aspects of this construction. As such, it is a perfect laboratory through which to ask broader questions about culture and cultural productions. Authors studied range from Richard Henry Dana to Kem Nunn to Frederick Kohner, and films include titles such as the independent film Humboldt County (2008). In keeping with the Puissance du mode minor thematic, not only odes the course explore this smaller Studies discipline but it also looks at alternative positions in the examination of the works discussed. Students are also encouraged to explore works or concepts linked to the topic and to relate them to their own fields of emerging specialization. This is a seminar rather than a lecture, and active participation in discussions and various activities is expected.