English

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.

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.