English

This team-taught course introduces students to a broad range of texts, authors, and issues in Irish writing. Students work across genres and forms, encountering canonical and less often studied works. This comparative course proposes various ways of thinking about Irish literary texts, while at the same time providing a sound knowledge of the social, cultural, and political conditions in which these texts were written, produced and read.

Scottish folk tales have always been haunted by ghosts, witches or the devil – and these creatures haunt Scottish literature up to this day. One of the most persistent is the Doppelgänger. It has always been fascinating to writers, but it certainly reached a peak in the nineteenth century. In this period of high moral standards and utilitarian business acumen, questions of how to distinguish between good and evil became more and more pertinent to society – and incidents where moral categories collapsed were as much feared as a financial break-down. In this seminar we will start with the most famous pair, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, before looking at their successors in Emma Tennant's Two Women of London and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. We will also trace their history on film.

This course focuses on the operations of narrative in modern Irish literature and drama from the 19th century to the present. Of particular importance are the roles of writers in the construction of powerful narratives of national identity at key moments in Irish history, and the subsequent interrogation of them by later generations of Irish writers. The preoccupation with the act of storytelling itself within Irish writing is also explored. Students are encouraged to engage in detail with the primary texts and to explore a range of theoretical issues in relation to narrative, postcoloniality, feminism, and cultural materialism. 

This courses focuses on the poetic movements and main poets that emerged in Great Britain from the end of WWII to the present. It examines their relationship with modernism and with the British poetic tradition in general. This course explores the connection of poetry with other cultural manifestations in the context of postmodernity. 

This course covers the organization and structure of English lexicon. It describes basic lexical and morphological concepts and introduces the structure of lexicon and the processes of word formation in English. Topics include: the structure of lexicon--kinds of words, lexeme, syntactic and semantic features, and lexical models; inflectional morphology--word forms, morpheme, morphosyntactic features, and syntactic and semantic implications; lexical morphology--word formation and syntactic and semantic implications. 

This course examines the graphic novel (book-length comics) as a relatively "new" genre of contemporary literature. It covers the “form” of the graphic novel and how it creates arguments about gender, class, sexuality and race. 

Personal dedications in book copies from this author's library are examined as documents of literary history. The form, content and dating of each individual dedication must be contextualized through extensive research in order to find out to what extent they are documents of East-West German, transnational or GDR-internal relationship networks. In the first step, we explore the bibliophilic form and variety of dedications in the “turning library” comprising several shelves from the basement of Christa and Gerhard Wolf's Pankow apartment, which, after being donated and moved, is now located at the Christa and Gerhard Wolf private library work and research center. The second step is documentation and the third is an attempt at contemporary and literary-historical contextualization.

This course engages witrh contemporary femninist thought, steering a course through the literary criticism, history, and theory of feminism. It examines the significant debates and key concept of feminist thought through a range of literary, political, and philosophical texts and encourages students to develop their own critical understanding of gender and equality issues in the contemporary period. Students are invited to explore the impact of feminism approaches on literary criticism, to understand the critical feminist project in its own terms, and to examine feminism in relation in Marxism, psychoanalysis, sexuality, post-structuralism, neo-liberalism, and international feminism.

This course examines a wide range of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragic drama, including plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Carey, Middleton, and Webster. It explores a variety of tragic modes in the period - including revenge drama, "heroic" tragedy, closet theatre, tragi-comedy, and domestic tragedy as well as the range of theatrical contexts and staging practices that developed across the 16th and 17th century. The course considers how dramatists responded to these key concerns and it also examines different critical and conceptual understandings of tragedy.

Taught in collaboration with academic staff and theatre practitioners at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, this course aims to take full advantage of the fact that we are able to study Shakespeare’s plays in the city in which they were written and first performed. Through seminars at King’s, and lectures, seminars, workshops and demonstrations at Shakespeare’s Globe, you will learn about the cultural, theatrical, political and social contexts in which plays were produced, and students will explore the extent to which Shakespeare’s plays were shaped by the environments in which he lived and worked. Focusing on the early to middle section of Shakespeare’s career, we will look at a spread of plays from different genres, such as 1 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Othello, Twelfth Night and Macbeth. In doing so, students will engage with topics such as urban place and space, social status, ideas of history and memory, immigration, race and multiculturalism, gender identity and experience, and topicality, terrorism and state control. Students will also draw on one of the most important Elizabethan works about London, John Stow’s A Survey of London Written in the Year 1598, and the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries such as Chapman, Dekker, Heywood, Jonson, Marston and Munday.