English

The course sets out to achieve four main goals. 1) Give a historical overview of feminist film theory and queer film theory. 2) Engage with some of the key concepts crucial to the understanding of queer cinematic practices. 3) Survey some of the landmark titles in the history of queer cinema. 4) Introduce contemporary Chinese language cinemas with queer subject matters. Assessment: quizzes, group or individual presentation and its write up, final presentation, final paper.

This course provides a study of the principal aspects of language acquisition, particularly as it relates to the case of second languages, examining the main theories of language acquisition while focusing particularly on English as a first and second language. Topics covered include characteristics of English as a first language, linguistic development, input and interaction, child-directed speech; acquisition of English as a second language, contrastive analysis, sequences of development, pragmatics in second language; influence between languages, the concept of "language transfer," code switching, multilingual speakers.

This course explores literary representations of the Other in nineteenth century Britain. By “Other” we consider the intersecting categories of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, with our examples including specific locations such as Antigua, Barbados, China, etc. We begin with Jane Austen, consider Mary Shelley and George Eliot, and end with Charles Dickens, and primarily focus on canonical texts and/or writers and how they represent or reflect the changes in Britain’s relationship with the Other and with its Empire. From Austen’s Antiguan underpinnings of British society to Shelley’s racialized monstrosity and Eliot’s sojourner to the West Indies, as well as Dickens’s engagement with opium use, we investigate the way in which Empire informs and shapes the (early) nineteenth-century British novel. In the process, we attempt to take the lessons of post-colonial studies and use them to deconstruct Western literary conceptions of the Other.

The course considers the ways in which history is retold and reimagined through literature in Scotland. Exploring the past 250 years of Scottish literary history it focusses on poetry and prose, and feature historic battles, royal beheadings, corruption and conspiracy, family dramas, playground bullies, and tinpot dictators. It charts this territory by considering both landmark works and less-celebrated texts, though all are concerned one way or another with power and agency. This focus on the currency of stories means confronting the nation's histories and myths - their heroic and patriotic ideals, their accidents and arbitrariness, and their crimes and complicities.