English

In this course, students explore a broad range of texts in the Irish literary tradition. It encompasses material from the 18th century (Jonathan Swift) to the present (Emma Donoghue and Kevin Barry), and, in the process, engages with some of the most innovative and exciting literature to be produced over the last 300 years. The course is generically diverse, and includes work by a variety of poets, novelists, playwrights, and short-story writers. It is not organized chronologically, rather, material is clustered around a number of concepts or ideas (satire, history, violence, and place), with several lectures given over to a discussion of each of these issues.

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.