English

Old English was the language spoken and preserved in written texts up to the mid-eleventh century CE in the regions of the British Isles. It developed from the languages spoken by Germanic peoples coming to Britain from the continental mainland and presents the earliest precursor of Modern English. In this course, we will focus on Old English texts written in verse, exploring their themes, styles, meanings, and the challenges of dealing with a language surviving only in a small number of often unique and damaged manuscripts. Texts we will be reading include heroic poetry, such as Beowulf, elegies, as well as Old English versions of Biblical texts. The focus of our readings will be on the question of how such texts portray concepts of gender, how they construct but also deconstruct gender roles, and how they relate to gender theory in the 21st century. Students will be introduced to the grammar and pronunciation of Old English and will use their knowledge to work with the original texts alongside Modern English translations.

In this course students explore a variety of representations of modern urban United States, focusing specifically on New York and Los Angeles. Students are looking at a number of different genres of writing - fiction, poetry, travel narrative, and screenplay to consider the ways in which the city has been depicted in American literary culture. The relationship between aesthetics and urban geography is also examined through reading a number of key theorists alongside the primary texts. The course encourages both close critical engagement and conceptual thinking about the ways in which city spaces function as part of modern culture.

One of the primary functions literature serves is as a vehicle for memory. From the portrayal of national histories, to the embodiment of collective myths, to the expression of individual identities, literature has both lent authority to and constructed contentious arguments for our image of our past. The literature of central and eastern Europe is particularly rich in explorations of history and memory. While in earlier times literature was called upon to lend social and historical legitimacy to communities without nation-states, more recent literature of the region has played a major role in attempts to come to terms with the catastrophes of the 20th century.

This is an intermediate English Historical Linguistics course which should be taken after studying the basics of linguistics offered in CO201 Introduction to Language Studies and/or CO202 Introduction to English Linguistics at this school or anything equivalent to these anywhere.  

Building on the knowledge from these introductory courses, this course investigates the internal linguistic development of the English language from a synthetic to an analytic language, i.e. loss of inflections, depending on a more fixed word order, and emerging periphrases and function words such as auxiliaries and prepositions in constructing sentences. It also delves into the external influences on the English language throughout its history, namely, lexical borrowings from Greek, Latin (Classical and Medieval), Old Norse, and (Norman-)French words. 

The course first studies selected features of pronunciation, spelling, and grammar of English from its earliest stage of development. It also considers the cultural, social, and political aspects of the external history of English, especially in terms of vocabulary.  

By the end of the course one will have understood why the English language has become the lingua franca of the world but, for many speakers of it, whether native or non-native, ‘”English is among the easiest languages to speak badly, but the most difficult to use well’ (C. L. Wrenn, The English Language, 1977, p.9). 

This course introduces students to a varied range of 14th- and 15th-century English and Scottish literary texts: allegory, romance, dream vision, meditation, lyric, and drama. Through these texts students explore the medieval imaginative models of the physical and metaphysical world, considering issues such as society, the body, gender, God, love, and death. Visual images and other kinds of writing and commentary are considered alongside the literary texts, to develop an understanding of the imaginative world which the literature both emerged from and helped to shape.

This course focuses on the critical reading of narrative texts in English. 

While this course is based around primary Victorian comic texts, it allows students to understand and apply key concepts in the wider study of comedy: these include forms such as irony, satire, farce, comedy of manners, parody, and black comedy; and theoretical concepts in comedy, such as superiority, incongruity, and relief theories. Students also have the opportunity to study the work of key comedy theorists such as Freud, Bakhtin, and Bergson.
 

From boy bands to Valentines, our ways of expressing sexual love were first formulated in the Middle Ages. This course traces the early history of the language of love, through poetry and songs composed between the 12th and 15th centuries. With the help of English translations, students explore different types of poetry in various languages: Spanish, French, Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and the Occitan language of southern France. They learn to analyze complex poems, and to understand and respect cultural differences, through a range of activities including creative rewriting of translations.

This course examines current issues in the theory and practice of English Language Teaching (ELT). It provides a comprehensive introduction to the specific approaches, methods, procedures, and techniques used in the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language/English as a Second Language (EFL/ESL) and addresses newer trends such as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), or gamification.