English

This course reassesses the multi-medial and genre-averse nature of the works of Samuel Beckett. The first part of the seminar focuses on modern interpretations of Beckett’s works in areas such as disability studies, queer studies, transhumanism, and feminism. The second part examines how Beckett challenges the boundaries and norms of the written word through various cross-generic mediums.

The course focuses on the new media technologies that have emerged and spread from the time of the Second World War and onwards. A clear emphasis is on digital media and network cultures, as well as the broad influence of television. Highlighted themes are the cultural understanding of technological development, convergence culture and intermedial relations. Different aspects of media and communication as moral panic, paper bureaucracy and tourism are also discussed. Finally, the arguments of some of the most influential late 20th century media theorists such as Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan are analyzed.

This course examines the history of British radicalism, with a focus on two moments: the late 19th century around the work of William Morris, and the post-war years, up to the 1980s. It explores the intellectual, artistic, and material production both of Morris and his circle and of alternative cultures in the post-war period. The course first examines the evolutions of radicalism in post-war Britain through the development of alternative cultures and “new social movements,” while exploring intellectual debates within the British left. It pays close attention to artistic expression and cultural practices within radical cultures. The themes covered include the intellectual debates of the New Left in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the cultural politics of the underground in the 1960s; the challenges of feminism; the emergence of participatory forms of political action around “community politics” and “community arts” practices; the influence of Black and Asian political and cultural organizations on a post-colonial critique of Britain’s imperial legacies; the cultural and class politics of Punk and the question of its position in the British history of radicalism. The second part of the course focuses on the work of William Morris. NEWS FROM NOWHERE (1890), “a Utopian romance” as well as a book supporting anarchist ideology, details the radical reconstruction of society. It serves as a base for the exploration of late-Victorian aesthetics and politics, and highlights the contemporary scope and significance of William Morris’s revolutionary cultural legacy.

This course reviews one of the most influential periods of English literature: the Renaissance. A wide range of literary texts, including poetry, drama and prose are studies. How the language and form of these texts were shaped by (international) religious, cultural, and political contexts are explored.

This course is an introduction to the rich history of medieval manuscripts with a particular emphasis on Irish codices. Themes include medieval manuscript culture and codex production; insular scripts and scribal techniques; Late Medieval and humanist scripts; the Corpus of Medieval Irish manuscripts; Modern Irish manuscript tradition; digital technology and manuscript research.

This course looks at the idea of "wildness" in children’s literature. The first half of the course examines landscape wilderness as it appears in a range of different children’s texts, from Ingalls Wilder’s canonical American text Little House in the Big Woods to Nicki Singer’s environmentally/themed Island. The second half of the course focuses on depictions of wildness associated with childhood, from Emily Hughes’ picture book Wild, to David Almond’s The Savage. Throughout the course students problematize the idea of wilderness, both in connection to the landscape and to the child. Students consider the long-standing connection between the child and nature, and how this might impact on the broader understanding of childhood. 

This course studies literary texts from the Victorian period alongside popular culture, images, and journalism. Students are exposed to key social issues of the era, including urbanization, class and gender division, and questions of Nation and colonialism.

To what extent does our study of Irish small presses and little magazines enable us to "take the pulse of a particular period," as Frank Shovlin puts it? How much credence should we give to the claim, leveraged by Robert Kiely, that Irish "small-press publishers provide some inkling of the real dissent" within cultural discourse? In this course, students engage with the full operational remits of a diverse range of presses and publications blending archival research with close textual analysis in search of answers to these kinds of questions. Given this mixed methodological approach, the course focus alternates from week to week: between book-historical sessions on individual presses and publications operating across various periods since 1950, and sessions centered on close reading the literary products of this small-press labor against the many social, political, and economic issues to which they respond in each case. Students look at an array of archival documents, manifestos, written editorials, paratextual materials, and other ephemera pertaining to each of the presses and publications under scrutiny, in order to understand their diverse material and aesthetic circumstances. 

In this course students are exposed to reading the work of poets and narrators of the 15th century in their historical and cultural context. Provides analytical tools to recognize and identify the topics of melancholy and nostalgia in the poets of the Late Middle Ages. The course looks at the relationship between the medieval authors and the romantic artistic and literary movements of the 19th century.

This course explores the relationship between literature and technology. It begins by formulating an understanding of writing itself as a technology – that is as a cultural practice involving dedicated tools invented at a specific historical juncture (to be contrasted with spoken language, as a human universal). This encourages students to examine literature as a product of various writing technologies – from manuscript, to print, to typewriting, to a variety of electronic forms of textual production and presentation. How these modes of production can influence the form and content of literature are explored, as are the strategies used by authors to represent these different varieties of text within literature itself. Students consider the role of standardization in literature, and how and why a variety of writers have chosen to step outside the usual written standard. They consider the integration of images with text and discuss the semiotics of different forms of text.