English

The course introduces and develops an understanding of American modernism, both in terms of the particularities of American culture in the early 20th century, and in relation to its complex relationship with Europe. Particular attention is paid to concepts of race/ethnicity, gender, politics, and social activism as ways of emphasizing the plurality of American modernism, as well as the diverse aesthetic forms which give it expression. In its geographical reach, the course encompasses writing from the American West, rural Wisconsin, New York (from Harlem to the Jewish American community of the Lower East Side), and expatriate experience in post-war Britain. At the core of the course is an exploration of the complex, shifting and dynamic nature of American Modernism, both in terms of the creative output of its writers, and in relation to the critics and theorists who attempt to define it.

The course outlines media history with an accent on the 17th, 18th, and the first half of the 19th century. The broad themes are the formation of a mediated public sphere and the emergence of media markets in relation to the growing industrial capitalism. The course takes a closer look at oral and written news media, the freedom of speech and censorship, the postal system, and the popular culture of chapbooks.

This course looks at popular fiction in the late 19th, 20th, and earlier 21st centuries to see how suspense narratives are encoded in society. Students examine detective stories, espionage fiction, ghost stories, horror fiction, and thrillers to see how ideologies are both reinforced and challenged by popular fiction. The course considers the emergence and development of the genres, explores the allure of fear, and examines ideas about class and gender in relation to the practices of reading and the circulation of texts. Though primarily focused on literature, the course is supplemented by optional film screenings and discussions. The course introduces students to the study of popular fiction as it both contributes to and is produced by ideology. The comparison of generically-linked texts from either end of the 20th century encourages discussion of the changes in social history of the period. The chosen texts guide students into a basic understanding of important theoretical ideas: the unconscious, post-Marxist concepts of ideology, Foucauldian ideas about surveillance and power. The course encourages discussion of a wider range of film and general reading and an understanding of students' own cultural environment.

This course traces both the development of English literature and the development of Medieval English society, through the transition from a shame culture to a guilt culture. Students read a selection of outstanding literary works of the early and late medieval period. Beginning with some Old English literature in translation, students consider the heroic ethos and its consequences for personal relationships and societal structures. The course then looks at a variety of key Middle English texts, including some works by Marie de France, Chaucer, and the Pearl-poet, tracing first the transition to feudalism and later the medieval rise of the middle class.

This course develops students' understanding of, and ability to analyze, poetic and poetic-dramatic texts. Covering a substantial range of poets and texts from different literary periods, it fosters wide and varied reading, introduces students to theories of and about poetry ("poetics") and helps students to understand, appreciate, and employ the expressive resources of language.

The course offers an introduction to the ideological debates of Romanticism, from both a social and aesthetic point of view, considering literary studies compared to other artistic forms and aspects such as the Gesamptkunstwerk (the complete work of art). 

This course explores how memoir has developed as a literary form in Ireland. The claustrophobic relationship between the stories of the nation and the individual has been a commonplace since at least the 1920s, when the Blasket Island autobiographies were at once held up as a model for the new Free State while also recording a way of life that was to quickly vanish. Beginning with an introductory session which establishes how this relationship has developed since then, this course examines the form of the memoir as a way of negotiating the relationship between the individual and society in Ireland, north and south. It asks students to critically examine the forms and themes by which we are called to remember the past century, and to investigate the contexts in which Irish memoir has been written and received.

Human Rights has been an object of literary studies since the 1980s-2000s. Tapping into the knowledge produced in this new field, this course reframes the history of modern literature as part of a broader development: the invention and history of human rights. This course explores several 'classics' in the history of Human Rights literature as well as a broad range of literary texts that discuss human rights from various perspectives but are not considered part of the literary canon. This course studies these forms as they have evolved since the late eighteenth century and across the globe in oral and written modes (songs, poems, novels, (auto-)biographies, graphic novels/comics, and so forth). There will be two seminar-style classes per week with assigned reading in advance of each session. There is a particular focus on partner/small-group work and interactive discussions, presentations, and discussions on the literature for an assigned session. An introduction to literature course is required for entry. 

This course concentrates on literary culture and its production in Ireland and Scotland in the transitional period of c.1100-1600. Students review the literary corpus that existed in Ireland before the arrival of the Normans, looking at the structure, genres, and typical content of this literature. The 12th century in Ireland witnessed the changeover from monastic to secular schools, a new professionalization of poetry-making, and the perfecting of syllabic metres which had been in use for some 500 years. Students assess the function of the poet and the nature of his relationship with his patron. Irish-Scottish literary connections at this period are often over-looked and forgotten, but the same standard literary language stretched across the straits of Moyle from north east Ulster to Gaelic-speaking Scotland. 

This course examines the grotesque style, a recurrent feature of American literature, by focusing on fiction works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It begins by covering the definition of the “grotesque” from several scholars, each of whom present the concept differently. The grotesque, therefore, requires special deciphering that is examined in the seminar. An analysis of a selection of grotesque American fiction also allows a study of the reasons for the use of the grotesque and the role it plays.