English

Haunted castles, labyrinthine catacombs, wailing ghosts, horrifying revelations, mad scientists, and undead antagonists. These are all part of the constellation of signs associated with Gothic literature. Nowadays, echoes of the historical Gothic are part of pop culture and academic theory alike; in Mark Fisher’s words, “The ghosts are swarming at the moment. Hauntology has caught on. It’s a zeitgeist.” This seminar aims to take a step back and look at where it all started. To this end, we will read key texts from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries and examine Gothic aesthetics, temporality, and topology in context. We will try to answer questions such as: what are Gothic literature’s historical/cultural origins? What anxieties were embodied and explored through it? And how did it evolve into the 19th and 20th centuries?

This course explores the fluctuating significance of racial slavery for the development of American and African American literary tradition. It departs from investigation of the idea that particular approaches to selfhood, writing, and freedom arose from the institution of slavery and in particular grew with the slaves’ forced exclusion from literacy and their distinctive relationship with Christianity. Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a central point of reference, students look at the development of abolitionist reading publics and the role of imaginative literature in bringing about the demise of slavery. That controversial text also provides a means to consider the relationship of sentimentalism to suffering and identification as well as the problems arising from the simultaneous erasure and re-inscription of racial categories, as oppression and as emancipation. When formal slavery ended, new literary habits emerged in response to the memory of it and the need imaginatively to revisit the slave past as a means to grasp what the emergent world of civic and political freedoms might mean and involve. Other issues covered include the disputed place of imaginative writing in the educational bodies that were created for ex-slaves and their descendants, the issues of genre, gender, and polyvocality in abolitionist texts, the problems of representation that arose in the plantation’s litany of extremity and suffering, and the contemporary significance of slavery in the culture of African American particularity.

The course analyzes selected English literary works with the emphasis on the 19th-century novel and various modernist genres. The influence and reflection of social developments in literature are addressed, as are the perspectives of cultural and literary history. Basic concepts and methods of literary criticism are applied.

This course offers a timely reassessment of the practice of child acting in the early modern theatre. Exploring the output of companies such as the Children of the Chapel Royal alongside works by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Middleton, it questions the repeated use of child and adolescent actors to portray female and sexually marginalized characters on stage; and situates the strategies attendant on boy playing in relation to embryonic queer art-forms such as drag and punning cant.

This course introduces students to Wilkie Collins's THE WOMAN IN WHITE (1859‐60), widely considered to be the first and best Victorian sensation novel. Using online resources, the class reads Collins's novel in instalments, as Victorian readers would have done. Students read 40 instalments over 10 weeks, reading four instalments per week. This relatively small amount of primary text reading per week is guided by specific questions about theme and genre and supplemented with contextual reading from ALL THE YEAR ROUND magazine, other historical sources, and secondary reading on periodical theory. Students examine issues such as women's property and inheritance rights, the marriage market, emerging proto‐feminism, alongside themes of madness, criminality, class, and national identity.  This slow and detailed method of reading and studying the novel not only allows for deep examination of the novel's many plots and subplots, themes, motifs, and generic influences, but also allows students to experience the thrill of the novel's many twists and cliffhangers in the same way as contemporary Victorian readers would have done. 

This course examines important historical, cultural, and social influences on language in the United States. We begin with an historical introduction to the English language in the United States, and then turn to other language varieties, such as Native American languages and languages of major immigrant communities (e.g., Spanish, Asian languages). We will also survey major forms of language variation, including regional dialects (e.g., Southern American English), social dialects, and other forms of socially patterned variation (e.g., youth language and slang). Furthermore, we will examine important controversies such as bilingual education and African American Vernacular English, as well as discuss topics such as language policy, language rights, and recent efforts to restrict and revitalize minority languages. Throughout the course, we will try to not only study language in the United States, but will also explore what this particular setting can reveal about issues of language and society in other contexts around the world.

This course will require students to engage in critical thinking, synthesizing information from a wide range of sources (e.g., textbook, academic journals, videos) on a wide range of topics pertaining to the language situation in the United States and participate actively in class activities (e.g., discussions, debates). Students will also engage in an independent research project, the results of which they will present both orally and in written form.

"Global Writing" are influential texts that are read by people around the world, bridging different cultures and languages. The older term "World Literature" includes some of the writers that the course will cover, but "Global Writing" is a broader concept. This course examines the key role of writers, translators, editors, and readers, looking at many key issues involving language and cultural identity. It also critically examines the selection process for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Course goals

This course introduces key literary works of American literature written or set during the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century (1860s to 1960s). Study the aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, and/or political impact of literary works at their time of publication. Discussions in lectures and seminars consider the possible legacies of the texts: how they continue to shape intellectual debates, literary history, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century in America and in the broader field of literature in English. In-depth knowledge and understanding of the ways in which cultural, social, intellectual, and political issues of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century figure in a selection of American literary texts; ability to select and analyze relevant primary and secondary sources and to produce original scholarly work on the topic of the course; and the ability to identify and apply some of the relevant critical concepts and literary theory to the study of American literature are gained.

Weekly workshop-seminar sessions and tutorials engage students in identifying and exploring the specific genre of Creative Non Fiction, with the goal of using such literary works as foundations for an examination of advanced principles in producing successful communicative writing (with an emphasis on the “creative” element). The course is based around an exploration of sub-genres of the form, with class discussion time given to considering the personal essay and memoir; literary journalism (“new journalism”); observational/descriptive essays and travel writing, for example. A reading list of creative non-fiction texts is used as the basis for lectures and example technique texts and as the springboard for in-depth critical analyses. During workshop seminars, students engage in peer assessment, providing oral and written critiques of classmates’ creative nonfiction writing (submitted on a rotating weekly basis). 

This course is offered by the Faculty of Economics and is designed to help students improve their oral, presentational and academic writing skills in English. The topics to be considered in class will vary slightly depending on the students' interests and academic orientation. The actual work will consist of student presentations; reading and analyzing student essays and short academic papers, and class discussions. Specific advice will be given to each participant on how to approximate their writing and oral presentation to more natural patterns of speech.