English

This course looks at how poets use sonnets to express profound emotions and desires, such as Shakespeare's contemporary Richard Barnfield, politically charged Milton and Shelley, and contemporary poets, including Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney. The course considers origins of the sonnet in Sicilian and troubadour poetry and song, into the English sonnet boom of the 1500s, up to its most contemporary manifestations.

This course introduces students to key concerns in Irish writing from the early years of the Literary Revival to the end of the Second World War. The course covers literature in a variety of forms (poetry, drama, novels, and short fiction), and engages with a range of concerns, including nationalism, the politics of representation, and class, religious, and gender identification. Writers on the course include W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Sean O'Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kate O'Brien. This course is taught through a mixture of a weekly lecture and tutorials.

This is an online course focusing on advanced rhetorical reasoning and the theory, construction, and delivery of sound arguments, which are critical to success in the university and the workplace. Designed to improve writing and critical thinking abilities, this course teaches students to craft persuasive, ethical, and engaging arguments. It examines the production and reception of arguments across a range of genres, including digital environments.

This course explores American literature of the 19th century with special attention to major works and writers. Topics include gothic, race, indigenous populations, transcendentalism, and national identity through a range of literary forms, including poetry, short stories, novels, and the essay.

Writers of the English Renaissance are renowned for their virtuosic use of language. Critics and readers often describe the particular brilliance of Early Modern English texts, their elaborate puns and metaphors, crystalline images, striking diction, formal inventiveness, and hidden layers of meaning. This course explores wordplay, in its many senses, in the English Renaissance, and helps students to build a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of writing. Focusing largely on 17th-century texts, students explore the literary contexts for some of the greatest poetry and prose written in English, from Donne to Milton. Building upon the first-year Introduction to Renaissance Literature, these lectures and seminars approach the literature of Early Modern England from the point of view of its language, focusing on the most fundamental level: that of the word itself.

In the early 21st century, popular left-wing political movements have gained new energy and visibility as activists have forged new connections across the globe. Forms of transnational activism as diverse as the alter-globalization movement, environmental activism, anti-austerity activism, and refugee advocacy networks all rely on a notion of solidarity between people from different national, cultural, and economic backgrounds, and especially between people from the global north and the global south. But what does it mean to be in solidarity with another person, or with a movement? Are you in solidarity with someone only when you share political beliefs with them, or is it possible to be in solidarity on the basis of shared human feeling and a commitment to universal human rights? Using E. M. Forster's plea to "only connect" as a point of reference and departure, this course examines expressions of transnational solidarity in literature and film circulated in English from the 1970s to the present day. It examines the shift in the late and post-Cold War period from third-worldist to humanitarian ideas of solidarity, and on the persistent use of documentary realism and the construction of a sympathetic protagonist as means of both ideological and emotional persuasion. It explores the reasons for the cultural prominence of some solidarity movements rather than others, and discusses the possibilities and pitfalls of imaginative empathy as a basis for political activism. The course examines examples of the recent backlash against human rights-based notions of solidarity, and the return of utopian political ideas. Contexts studied include Biafra, the Chilean and Nicaraguan solidarity movements, the anti-apartheid movement, the Palestine solidarity movement, and the global uprisings of 2011 and beyond.

How does one travel far from home, and write about it in way that doesn't reinforce retrograde notions of difference? This course considers questions of travel and migration through travel writing, historical accounts of migration, and film. Students explore how in an increasingly globalized world, where economic inequality is only growing, the projection of the Other continues.

This course explores key aspects of 20th- and 21st-century literature and critical debate in Irish. The course covers the following aspects of the transmission and wider context of Early Irish documents: periods of Early Irish up to the beginning of Modern Irish (c. 1200 AD); development of the Irish script; Irish manuscripts and their dating; Irish glosses explaining Latin texts; other (more personal) Irish notes in manuscripts; Irish as a Celtic language and a brief comparison with Gaulish; Ogam inscriptions; and early Irish metrics and poetry.

This course focuses on oral and writing proficiencies. Students write both short and long composition pieces on simple topics, and they learn to employ vocabulary to enhance their creativity.