English

Living and studying in a foreign country can be an exciting time in your personal and intellectual development. One productive way of dealing with the onslaught of impressions is to write about it. This course is designed to help you transform your ideas into a well-considered piece of literary writing. The resulting text may be fictional or non-fictional. It could take the form of a short story set in Berlin, a literary reportage, a creative essay, a series of poems or even the beginning chapter of a novel. Program: This course will be conducted workshop-style. You will work on your own text throughout the semester, and share and discuss it with your fellow students and the instructor. In addition, we will conduct short writing exercises and discuss assigned texts about the process of writing.

What has become known as the "spatial turn" in the humanities has alerted us to the ways in which the spaces we inhabit are produced by culture. These seminars take as their starting point the premise that Irish writing since the end of the 18th century (the massive exception of Joyce notwithstanding) has traditionally defined itself in terms of versions of the pastoral, and this in turn has had implications for the ways in which it has been possible to write the city as an Irish space. The central avenue in this course runs through the question of how literature produces space, and how this occurs differently across literary forms (fiction, poetry, drama).  However, there are diversions down alleys to encounter ghosts, crime, history, the flaneur, psychogeography, modernity, and the mediations of culture. There are glances in the shop windows of visual culture, as well as excursions into history, architecture, and philosophy, all with a view to sketching an outline map of Dublin in literature.

The course provides a broad overview of this diverse critical discourse over the past generation, while also paying close attention to some of the most pressing debates currently animating the field. Topics include identities, sexualities, temporalities, homophobia, activism, deviance, performance and transgression. 

The course explores key works from the Irish Literary Renaissance, otherwise known as the Irish Cultural Revival, or the Celtic Revival: an extraordinary period of literary endeavor during a time of intense cultural and political transformation. The texts on the course are key works of Irish literature, of literary modernism, and would also come to be hugely influential on post-colonial writing through the rest of the 20th century. Students explore how the texts shaped and contested ideas of identity and history; how Ireland's push for freedom from English rule coincided with the context of modernity; and students close-read our primary texts, discussing how they challenge conventional notions of style, form and genre, asking how their formal innovations related to historical and political change.

Originating in romance and comedy, the marriage plot became a major element in the novel. In its classic versions the marriage plot permits the satisfaction of desire: of characters and readers alike. It may also be involved in the negotiation of complex moral choice and in the resolution of difficult social issues.  This course examines how the marriage plot functions across the history of the English novel. The first half of the course examines important 18th and 19th century examples of the marriage plot. The second half of the course asks how, in the social circumstances of the 21st century— including the availability of divorce and changed concepts of gender—novelists deploy or adapt the marriage plot.

This course provides an overview of science fiction criticism and its history. It considers what form "scientific’" endeavors took on in the Middle Ages and how these might have informed the "fiction" of the time; it will place modern and pre-modern texts in critical conversation in order to rethink the history and future history of the genre and of the book. Most of all, this course develops new insights into a diverse selection of medieval texts and illuminations, and, through these, allows students to explore critical and theoretical topics such as periodization, otherness, space and place, and the possibilities and problems of genre fiction. 

Using an “ecocritical” approach, this course examines how literary texts have represented the relation of humans to “nature” and to environmental change from early mythological writings to present-day fiction. Among the texts to be studied are the Epic of Gilgamesh, Greek and Roman pastoral poems, Romantic landscape poetry, American environmental writing, Irish nature poetry, and contemporary ecological dystopic fiction.

The course examines a range of Yeats’s poetry, drama, and prose. Structured loosely around different phases of the poet’s career, seminars will emphasize key historical and cultural contexts, ranging from Yeats’s use of Irish myth and folklore through to his engagements with eugenic theory and global politics. They also attend to key question of poetics and ideology, including Yeats’s revisionary compositional practices, his use of poetic form, his attitude towards literary tradition, and how his work intersects with issues of race, religion, gender, and nation. 

This intensive three-week course explores, experiments, and discovers students' creative writing abilities and tastes and embraces creative writing as an ongoing process, an entrepreneurial "fail better" and "succeed together" via constructive feedback experience. Fortune helps those who dare, and sharing one’s own writing can be, albeit a means to self-expression and experimentation, scary, vulnerable, and quite uncertain. In this course, however, students can grow together in a practice-based environment exploring boundaries, challenging stereotypes and developing skills in a fun, intense, and stimulating way. Get inspired by poetry, prose, drama. Get a peek into the publishing world and the life of a writer. Experiment, play, and create with writing styles, language, and online media. More importantly, do what all writers have to do in the end of the day, write! Not a course for the faint of heart, but definitely one for those who want to be more creative, perceptive, develop a writer’s toolbox, and see London with literary-colored glasses. 

This course provides the necessary building blocks for conducting research and writing results in the form of a scholarly paper. Students are guided through the process of refining a research idea, writing a literature review, defending the methodology, and interpreting the results. The course pays special attention to necessary conventions of academic writing in English and introduces the basic concepts and methods of digital humanities. The course begins with a focus on the basic theoretical and technological issues involved in digital humanities research and explores the strengths and weaknesses of the new methodologies.