English

This course examines the fundamentals of creativity, writing and storytelling for communication professionals and media producers.

This course examines key literary texts and genres of postmodern literature in terms of their formal qualities and/or in their representation of the culture of late capitalism. It covers topics such as "From the modern to the postmodern", "Postmodern culture and the commodity form", "Gender, writing and the postmodern", "High and mass culture", "history and the postmodern", and "the simulacrum".

Students look at a wide range of authors and texts from across the span of Cambridge’s literary and intellectual life, including Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Helen Oyeyemi, and Zadie Smith – among others. Texts sampled will include poems, a play, novels, short stories, and prose non-fiction.

This course seeks to take a closer look at PRIDE AND PREJUDICE in order to analyze the novel's complexities, its narrative art, its negotiations of ideological problems, and the contextual issues it addresses either directly or indirectly. The course’s attention then shifts to another novel by Jane Austen, MANSFIELD PARK, a book that appears to form the starkest possible contrast to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE but is just as sophisticated, or possibly even more so. The seminar is designed not simply to teach Jane Austen but also to provide a practical guide to literary criticism. There is a strong focus on the nitty-gritty of the business of interpretation. The course therefore digresses frequently from the novels themselves in order to discuss the fundamental problems involved in understanding literary texts.

This course examines processes, techniques, and modes of expression used by contemporary theater-makers to create a variety of forms. The course examines how the performance-making processes of significant practitioners function analytically, creatively, and practically. Students consider how practitioners strategically deploy methodologies, conventions, and techniques to produce particular outcomes, and how process is informed by content, genre, mode of representation, theatrical convention, and ideological and cultural context. Students learn methods of workshopping and performing that can create stimulating and engaging theater. Theater-makers examined may include DV8 Physical Theater, the Wooster Group, Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Robert Lepage's Ex Machina, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Complicite, Grid Iron, and Station House Opera.

The course introduces students to the origins and the history of science fiction through of classic works in the genre. Students read classic works in science fiction, engage with critical writing on the genre from its inception to the 21st century, and identify themes and concerns of the genre in contemporary films and texts.