English

This course provides a study of English literature from its origins to the mid-eighteenth century. It analyzes some of the classic poetry and prose works written in England in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.

What is “the contemporary”? How has contemporary literature since the turn of the twenty-first century engaged with some of the most pressing social, political, and cultural concerns of the current moment? This course takes the experience and representation of time as its central analytic for examining these questions. Through a range of novels written since the turn of the twenty-first century, the course introduces the emergent social, political, and cultural concerns currently occupying the contemporary imagination.

Survivors of trauma often only have fragmented memories of the overwhelming event. With its discontinuous form, its division into individual panels, some critics argue, graphic narrative may be particularly suited for representing the experiences and perspectives of traumatized people. In the course, we will investigate this connection, focusing on texts such as Fun Home, One! Hundred! Demons!, Maus, and others.

This team-taught course on gender and culture offers a series of different forms of analysis through which one can "read" gender. It is particularly suited to students who wish to develop their critical and analytical skills by learning more about specific gender-related issues and developing gender-specific approaches to engaging with a variety of cultural works across disciplines, genres and literary periods. All texts will be in English or in English translation.

This course covers technical-commercial language in English used in the field of eonology (wine-making). It covers vocabulary used to discuss sensory analysis and tasting comments. It also focuses on professional communication techniques used in presentations, writing a CV, composing emails, engaging in sales, as well as interviews and promotions. 

This series of creative workshops explores environment, climate crisis, and more-than-human/human interdependence by composing multimodal texts in response to recent Copenhagen University and international research. A background in natural sciences is not required but the course necessitates a curiosity and willingness to experiment creatively with the environmental knowledge gained thanks to independent study, classroom exchanges, field trips, and guests (scientists, activists, and artists). These creative collaborations rethink such concepts as "nature," "sustainability," and "care" by reading, listening to, and watching a variety of academic, literary, and artistic texts. The course combine science, emotion, and creative expression not only to describe environmental loss, grief, and vulnerability but also to celebrate the Earth and diversity. It encourages appreciation of the complexity of ecological processes and interactions through an individual project that investigates an environmental subject and experiments with diverse forms of communicating it to varied audiences. The course produces research-based, hybrid, multimodal works-in-progress (which may develop beyond the course) which become forms of green thinking, slow art, activism and stewardship.

This course deploys literary-critical thinking and attention to literary forms in order to interrogate the narrative of the ‘raw material’, and the histories that have emerged from it. From vital materialist accounts of the agencies and powers of nonhuman things, to Marxist analyses of the hidden labor that produces the ‘raw’ material before it can even be said to exist, students consider the ways in which the Victorian invention of raw materiality contributed to violence, environmental destruction, and ideologies of domination over the earth and its species. 

This course aims to develop students' understanding of short fiction writing. More specifically, the course focuses on the core concepts of fiction writing such as theme and plot. In addition, students produce a piece of fiction using original characters and viewpoints. The course goal is to develop students' ability to express their ideas through creative use of language.  

This course is open to ELA students who have completed their freshman ELA requirements and non-native English-speaking JLP track students who wish to further develop their English language skills. 

This course examines the city in history as represented in fiction in the particular case of Edinburgh, from the historical fiction of Scott, Hogg, and Stevenson to the genre fiction of the last two decades. It examines the construction of the city in these texts as a site of legal, religious, economic, and cultural discourse. The extent to which civic identity both contributes to and competes with national identity is a central theme, as is the internal division of the city along lines of religion, gender, and, especially, class. In addition to the skills training common to all English Literature students (essay-writing, independent reading, group discussion, oral presentation, small-group autonomous learning) this course develops the student's understanding of: (i) the ways in which urban space is constructed in the various discourses of the novel as a genre; (ii) the relation of civic identities to national identities as the novel brings them into relation; (iii) a broad understanding of the history of the novel in Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This course explores the representation of revenge across a wide selection of literary texts, some of which are read in translation. Among the topics investigated are tensions between the vengeance of the individual and the operations of law, the moral and emotional transformation of the revenger, the haunting presence of the dead, and ideas about pollution and expiation. Starting with plays from the classical period which form an essential background to revenge tragedy of the 16th and 17th centuries, students study a range of tragedies, relating individual texts to dramatic ideas of genre, to traditions and conventions of stage representation, and to the historical contexts of the period.