English

This course provides students with insight into the origins of modern celebrity within the literary and theatrical marketplaces of the long 18th century. The course also provides a grounding in the burgeoning field of celebrity studies and encourages reflection on continuities between the 18th century’s public spheres and our own. It traces the rise of different kinds of celebrity within 18th-century Britain’s literary and theatrical marketplaces. Students examine the fame of authors, performers, criminals, politicians, and numerous, notorious others. 

The course carries a three-fold purpose: to raise our readerly patience and sensitivity, to showcase aspects of western culture, and to help enhance our English language skills. A mixture of lecture and discussion will form the main classroom activity.

In this course, we shall read five to six European novels from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, by such writers as Dostoevsky, Proust, Woolf, Kafka, and Camus. We shall consider the following questions, among others: What have these authors discovered about the self, for example, about the richness and opacity of the inner life, about self-knowledge and self-deception, about possibilities of redemption through love, art or memory? In what ways do the novels we read reflect upon—or even intimate beforehand—the unfolding of European socio-political life over the course of a crisis-laden century? How do these authors ponder questions of individual responsibility, guilt and conscience, and do they, in their largely post-Christian era, propound any alternative possibilities of transcendence? How does each writer’s art of narrative extend or transform our consciousness of time and space and help us reinterpret personal experience and collective history?

The course analyses various depictions of "heroic women" in different cultural contexts and historical times. It explores the notion of female heroism in contrast to male heroism, indicating major differences and similarities. It also deals with women writers’ responses to male writers’ depictions of female protagonists. This course introduces students to certain major representative works of literature/topics from different cultural milieux and thereby develops their literary awareness and sensitivity, with a particular emphasis on the theme of heroic women in literature across a range of cultures and periods; engages students imaginatively in the process of reading and analyzing selected culturally different texts; develops an awareness of intercultural issues by presenting set texts not only individually, but also in relation to each other.

This course examines a broad range of both poetic genres and poetic styles. It covers poetry by a diverse variety of historic literati (from the 1800s to the 2010s), with emphasis on modern trends in current poetics.

Psychoanalysis is a highly influential and contested form of 20th century discourse. This course introduces students to key Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and perspectives. By bringing these into dialogue with a wide range of literary texts, it encourages students to consider how issues of unconscious motivation, sexuality, and madness operate in and around different forms of writing. It serves as a starting point for students to engage with existing psychoanalytic literary theory but emphasizes the close reading of foundational texts alongside literary works with the hope of generating new, mutually informed readings of both psychoanalysis and literature.

This is an introductory course to literature in Ireland in the English language. It gives students a general overview of literature in Ireland in the English language and a detailed knowledge of a limited number of specific texts. Students read a range of Irish literary texts with a particular focus on literature written since the Revival period that began in the late 19th century. It is divided into the following sections: contexts, poetry, drama, and fiction. Key texts include ones by W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Marina Carr. The course ends with a survey of Irish literature across a range of genres in the early part of the 21st century.

There are so many topics to explore: generic status; thematic inclusiveness; the incorporation of contemporary epistemology—and the ongoing ethical and environmental concerns that Melville raises. Students discuss the content of the "novel" and its shifting tones from the comic to the tragic, but there’s no end to the sense of things that the book raises. Students reflect on topics such as political dictatorship, obsession, absolutism, oil, modernity, etymology, capitalism, Christianity, slavery, and the roots of belief systems. 

This course gives students a broad grounding in the antebellum literature and culture of the United States, from colonial settlement to Civil War. Focusing on the self-conscious acts of speech and declaration which characterized early attempts to bring the new nation into being, the course introduces students to a range of texts designed to be spoken, including jeremiads, lyceum lectures, and orations. Students are encouraged to think about the powers and limitations of these early American voicings, and they draw on a range of literary media - from travelogues and letters to political pamphlets and legal documents - as well as elements of rhetoric and style, to explore literary experiments set on establishing a distinct, "American" voice. The course's wide historical range offers students the opportunity to develop an understanding of the relationship between literary production and the major social and political issues that shaped the early Republic.

This course explores how the Middles Ages has been rejected, reiterated, and reimagined in modernity. Beginning with the Gothic literature of the 18th century, the course tracks medieval revivals and reworkings across period, nation, and medium to explore how the medieval past is refashioned according to contemporary ideologies. What does it mean to describe an element of contemporary culture as "medieval"? Why and how have people turned towards the Middle Ages to understand the present and imagine the future? In addition to popular medieval literature and major critical and political movements, medievalisms in art, architecture, film, photography, music, and video games are potential subjects of study. Key topics include temporality, authenticity, gender, performance, nationalism, fantasy, racism, and cultural memory.