English

From Wordsworth’s ‘gleams of half-extinguished thought’ to Freud’s excavation of the human psyche, writers and thinkers throughout the 19th century were preoccupied by the workings of memory and time. This course investigates connections between literature, the arts, philosophy and science, revealing the centrality of memory and memorialization to the 19th-century imagination. Students examine how developments in science and technology impacted upon the perception and representation of time, while also exploring how modernity was constructed through an active engagement with the past. Topics to be discussed include: time and modernity; technology and the standardization of time; history and historicism; afterlives and hauntings; evolution and extinction; architecture and material memory; nostalgia and trauma; imperial and colonial time.

The course examines a range of English prose and narrative forms. It examines issues including the rise of the novel and narrative history; distinctions between story and discourse; realism; narrators and narrative "frames"; free indirect style and other means of transcribing consciousness; irony and tone; temporality, structure and form; genre; fictionality and metafiction. The implications of such issues for primary critical analysis are demonstrated and explored.

In this course, students examine a selection of six notable North American novels: OF MICE AND MEN by John Steinbeck; ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST by Ken Kesey; IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote; Julie Otsuka's WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE, THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison; and Octavia E. Butler’s KINDRED. Students explore the relationship between social history and the aesthetic and generic development of North American writing with an emphasis on the way in which these novels reflect key cultural concerns including madness, murder, incarceration, isolation, The American Dream, identity, prejudice, and resilience.

This course explores poems of 17th-century England, concentrating on the works of John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. Based on these poems, the course covers Metaphysical Poets, Cavalier Poets and Religious Poets. 

This course explores genre fiction, often defined as formulaic popular fiction such as mystery, detective stories, horror, romance, Western, science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction. It examines the thematic and stylistic conventions of gothic fiction and those of detective fiction. The course looks at how genres are divided into subgenres and how they are combined into cross genres as well as the establishment of new genres. The primary goal of this course is to learn about gothic fiction—its history, its generic characteristics, and its significance in English literature—while also improving close reading skills and independent interpretation of literary texts seen in their socio-historical context. 

This course teaches the art of writing narrative. It allows students to explore their creative side and includes perspectives on narratological concepts such as point of view, characterization, conflict, and writing feeling. Readings include contemporary British and American writers with a specific eye to their craft and technique in the art of writing.

In this course, students study two classic Victorian novels alongside poetry, drama, essays, scientific writing, and paintings and visual material. The course demonstrates the extraordinary range of experimentation in Victorian literary writing and art in this period. For example, students read Dickens's DOMBEY AND SON to think about modernity and machines in the 1840s, but also to think about the sea and the maritime nature of the British empire. Other seminars are spent finding out what the Victorians thought and felt about nature, gardens, animals, science, sexual pleasure and pain, religion, the violence of British imperialism, environmental exploitation, a growing commodity culture, capitalism, and the changing status of women.