English

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. 

The persistence and exacerbation of social and economic inequality in the so-called post-colonial, globalized, or post-racial era has renewed scholarly and popular interest in the relationship between racism and capitalism. This course will examine key works of history, criticism, literature, and pop culture to understand this historical and structural relationship in the context of the United States. 
 
Because this is a graduate course, students enrolled in this course should be prepared to spend several hours outside class time each week reading and watching the course material -- on average per week, 50-75 pages of historical/critical work + 150 pages of fiction. 
 

This course focuses on twenty-first century U.S. fiction. It includes reading works from five to six authors for each section of the course. One half of the course focuses on twenty-first century transnational American fiction: texts that situate the United States at global scales (hemispheric, transatlantic, and transpacific), often with an emphasis on migration. The other half of the course focuses on twenty-first century U.S. fiction that raises and explores questions of selfhood, identity, and gender. Both parts of the course examine how the themes and forms of twenty-first century U.S. fiction relate to the changing identity of the nation, the state, and the self in today’s globalized world. 

The course focuses on the most important 19th century Russian writers with the view to introduce students to their works and ideas. It examines the main socio-political and cultural trends in Russia and in Europe that influenced such writers as Pushkin, Gogol', Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. This course is idea-led: it examines in depth several key themes clearly outlined at the beginning of the course. The list of main themes includes: the legacy of the Enlightenment and the representation of madness in Russian literature; the inter-relationship between the author and the government; the representation of St Petersburg in literature and the construction of Russian national identity; the criticism of Russian imperial policies; the emergence of nihilism and positivism in Russia; and the ongoing dialogue between Russia and the West. The course develops students' literary analytical skills, and enables them to gain deeper insights into the major themes explored by Russian most influential 19th-c. writers as well as into the techniques employed in their works.

Shakespeare occupies an iconic position in English literature and acquaintance with his plays is expected of the informed reader. This course offers an introduction to a representative range of Shakespeare's works. It approaches them through genre and the informing background of English Renaissance history, culture, and politics. By the end of the course, students have a good understanding of the major themes of Shakespeare’s plays and the milieu within which he wrote and performed.

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. In this course, we will focus 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 we will be reading include heroic poetry, such as Beowulf, elegies, as well as Old English versions of Biblical texts. The focus of our readings will be 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 will be introduced to the grammar and pronunciation of Old English and will use their knowledge to work with the original texts alongside Modern English translations.

In this course students explore a variety of representations of modern urban United States, focusing specifically on New York and Los Angeles. Students are looking at a number of different genres of writing - fiction, poetry, travel narrative, and screenplay to consider the ways in which the city has been depicted in American literary culture. The relationship between aesthetics and urban geography is also examined through reading a number of key theorists alongside the primary texts. The course encourages both close critical engagement and conceptual thinking about the ways in which city spaces function as part of modern culture.