English

This course focuses on the literary and cultural production that has emerged under colonial rule and its aftermath in different locations including the Caribbean, Middle East, and Latin America, as well as texts written by diasporic and repressed minorities. It discusses a theoretical approach to development studies and comparative ethno-racial studies for current considerations about the contemporary global order. 

Old English was the language spoken and preserved in written texts up to the mid-eleventh century CE in the regions of the British Isles. It developed from the languages spoken by Germanic peoples coming to Britain from the continental mainland and presents the earliest precursor of Modern English. This course focuses on Old English texts written in verse, exploring their themes, styles, meanings, and the challenges of dealing with a language surviving only in a small number of often unique and damaged manuscripts. Texts read include heroic poetry, such as Beowulf, elegies, as well as Old English versions of Biblical texts. The focus of the readings is on the question of how such texts portray concepts of gender, how they construct but also deconstruct gender roles, and how they relate to gender theory in the 21st century. Students are introduced to the grammar and pronunciation of Old English and use their knowledge to work with the original texts alongside Modern English translations.

This course dives into the history and genre of the short story by reading and analyzing several stories as well as telling short stories ourselves. Aspects and concepts such as genre, plot, beginning and endings, character, setting, point of view, narration, texture and pace, style, and reflection on the relationship between the author, the text, and the reader are examined. Academic analysis and hands-on creative writing are combined facilitating a deeper understanding of how narratives work and how they produce meanings. Peer and tutor feedback are key aspects of this course. The collection of short stories varies every year but covers a diverse range of stories and authors such as Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Chinua Achebe, Bernadine Evaristo, and Sally Rooney.

This course introduces students to key debates and texts in the field of postcolonial studies. The lectures are grouped together under headings relevant to historical and contemporary engagements with post coloniality. Each theme consists of two lectures: one that frames the conceptual, critical, and historical debates on the given topic, the other discussing a literary text. The critical and literary works scheduled for each lecture represent the focus of discussion, but related authors, themes, and texts are introduced and discussed alongside them, giving students direction for further study. In addition, and where appropriate, visual and audio material is used to illustrate as well as help generate debate.

This practice-based course develops students’ sense of nonfiction-writing as a creative act, and introduces some of the practical skills and techniques essential to a variety of forms including: memoir and the personal essay; biography; nature-writing; reportage and cultural criticism. Through studying a wide range of non-fictional texts, students explore the ways in which writers engaged in supposedly factual writing nonetheless take creative risks and make the same kinds of narrative decisions as fiction-writers. 

The course surveys the fairy tale in English from the 17th to the 21st century. Students survey the first translations of fairy tales into English by the Grimms, Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen – and explore the context of the huge popularity of these tales. Students investigate their early reception and influence, including on novels and tales written in English, before moving on to 20th and 21st century rewritings. Students also spend time on film adaptations and book illustrations. Detailed consideration is given to a range of critical approaches including psychoanalytical and feminist readings, and the classification of fairy tale plots. Close readings, comparing the language and emphasis of different versions of the same story, is also central to the course.

This course regards autotheory, autoethnography, and autofiction as critical methods, modes of inquiry, and forms of representation in anthropological research. Against the background of debates around positionality, students will learn and explore how the self even when intimate, vulnerable and ambivalent can be a public archive; that it offers a rich mode for thinking through our affective embroilments in the world. We will discuss how writing can embrace but also respond to issues of belonging, experiences of class and queerness, racial or gendered difference, de/coloniality and so on. We will read works that call into question the sharp divides between academic and other forms of writing, theory and poetry, ethnography and fiction. The course is designed to be interactive and workshop-oriented. Participants will engage in short writing exercises in class and will be encouraged to draw on their own experiences of life and learning in research.

Audiences could not get enough of the best-selling stories of bigamy, madness, and murder known as the sensation novel. This course considers the Sensation Mania of the 1860s as a literary, historical, and psychological phenomenon reflecting many of the cultural anxieties of Victorian society. To this end, students examine how a variety of sensation narratives participated in contemporary debates over sexuality and provided alternate ways of thinking about identity. Texts to be covered include the key novels to establish the genre of sensation fiction.

The course Poetry and Pop Songs reads English and American poetry from the 20th and 21st centuries Works are unraveled from a variety of older and newer music artists, ranging for example from U2 and Coldplay to Rihanna and Pink.  Students learn how to interpret poetry and popular music in a systematic and sophisticated way, and to write an in-depth analysis of a song or poem. The focus is on the analysis of the lyrics or ‘text’ of the poems and songs by using insights and tools from literary theory to find out how (specific) poems work, which effects they evoke, and what they mean. Students also apply these tools to the analysis of song texts. The course focuses on contemporary popular music, which means including other genres than just conventional pop music, such as rap, hip-hop, and rock.

This course provides an introduction to 20th Century Irish literature in English and the Irish language (in translation). It considers how writers have participated in the negotiation of modern and contemporary Irish identities. Through a close critical reading of key selected texts, it investigates the ways in which writers have imagined and reimagined Ireland and Irishness from the literary and cultural revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries through to the new millennium. Issues to be addressed include Ireland’s transition from a traditional to a modern society, language, gender, and the connections between literary production and the imagined "nation." Knowledge of Irish is not necessary for this course, as all Irish language texts are studied in English translation.