English

This creative writing course is intended for students with a strong interest in writing poetry and developing their artistic craft. In this course, students begin the work of critically assessing contemporary poetry as practicing poets. It explores some key concerns of contemporary poetry, including race, sexuality and the environment, and covers a range of poets working in both traditional and non-traditional forms. Using sample poems provided in class, alongside critical materials, students develop an informed critical idiom for the discussion and critique of contemporary poetry, and also work towards writing a small portfolio of their own poems. Students must be willing to produce new poems to deadline, and be prepared to have their work discussed in class. It is the responsibility of students to offer constructive and considered feedback to their peers during these weekly sessions. *Students are required to submit an application for this course. 

This course introduces students to five key Scottish ghost-fiction writers and their most memorable fantastic fictions: James Hogg, J.M. Barrie, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, and George MacDonald. It invites students to think about the role that the supernatural continues to play in Scottish writing through exploration of its representation in Romantic and Victorian fiction. Through closely analyzing excerpts from these writers and discussing the various wider cultural, social, and political anxieties and fears that can be expressed via the supernatural, students explore the historical context and literary impact of the Scottish Gothic.

This course involves studying the works of a number of poets, whose work reflects the variety of techniques used in modern and postmodern poetry. Students are asked to focus on, for example, the imagery, structure, prosody and diction used in these poems, and to experiment with these elements in their own poetry writing. Students undertake a series of writing exercises that allow them to explore these techniques and concerns.

This course explores accounts centering on the movement and displacement of people in the French, German, and Spanish-speaking worlds. Beginning with an introductory guide to studying culture(s) in a Modern Languages' context, it then focus on experiences resulting from movement or displacement, whether forced or voluntary, and engages with themes such as alienation, belonging, difference, borders, and otherness. Its case studies are taken from a variety of media (including literature and film) and are considered in terms of their specific local and national relevance as well as their transnational implications. The course offers diverse perspectives on the issues arising from cultural encounters occasioned by, for example, diaspora, exile, migration, urbanization and colonialism. 

This course introduces major works of ancient Near Eastern, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman literature to explore the cultural and historical foundations of Western civilization. Texts such as the Hebrew Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid, are read and analyzed with a focus on themes of heroism, divinity, and human experience. Emphasis is placed on close reading, literary analysis, and active participation through discussions, quizzes, written responses, and group presentations.

The course examines early modern narratives about creating artificial humans (the Golem, Frankenstein, Homunculus). Students discuss extracts from more recent literary texts that explore the relationship of humans and artificially created humanoids (Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me), and examine well-known science fiction films that depict humanoid robots and/ or androids (Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Alex MacGarland’s Ex Machina, and James Cameron’s The Terminator). Students analyze how fiction reflects real-world technological developments, human fears and desires, as well as gender roles and society’s relationship with technology more generally.

This seminar discusses how writers from different times and places have reacted to upheaval in different ways and examining the space where personal storytelling and political intent intertwine. It analyzes how the personal circumstances of those writers influence their respective writing, to gain clues as to how students' own individual conditions interact with their writing. Topics include how can fiction capture the turbulence of its times and can the world of fiction make sense of the complex causes of anger arising from sociopolitical change?

In this course students take a scientific approach to literature by applying ideas from linguistics and cognitive science to the analysis of literary texts. The course explores the textual and cognitive foundations for literary interpretations and aesthetic effects, and the underlying ideological and psychological implications of particular linguistic choices.

This lecture course begins with several recent historical and cultural assessments of Europe’s relationship to the orient in the early eighteenth century, together with an overview of the ways in which the popular taste for oriental tales was marginalized by the rise of the novel as the quintessential British literary form. Students examine the vogue of chinoiserie and the rise of sentimentalism and the man of feeling, before turning to an examination of works by British Romantic writers who variously imagine, engage with and negotiate cultures, lands and peoples from the East. Through an analysis of Coleridge’s Eastern fables, Percy Shelley’s evocations of the Indian muse, Byron’s oriental romances, Mary Shelley’s depictions of otherness and De Quincey’s encounter with the Malay, students interrogate the extent to which these tales, romances and musings are reflective of open engagement and productive influence, and to what extent they can be seen as attempts to control and subjugate an otherness.