BA English and American Literature (QT37)

Course Code UNU1QT37301
Duration 3 Years
Attendance Full Time
Award Degree of Bachelor of Arts

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Overview

Toni Morrison The writers of Britain and America are of course deeply connected: often they employ the same language, address the same readers, share the same cultural reference points. But at the same time, the two traditions differ sharply in their typical values and tones of voice. This programme allows you to experience these continuities and distinctions. Students on this programme have access to the courses that make up the degrees in English Literature and American and English Literature. The combination also means that you encounter the teaching of two different Schools: the interdisciplinary work of the School of American Studies, and the more literary focus of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing.

Your degree course will be planned in conjunction with your adviser, but we give an outline here. The basic unit of teaching, the module, lasts for one semester and carries twenty credits in Years 1 and 2, thirty credits in Year 3. The academic year contains two semesters; in each semester you will normally take three units, making a total of six units a year (two and four respectively in the final Year). Over the three years of your course you will normally accumulate 360 credits: that is, eighteen modules. Free choice modules are available – either to extend your degree subjects, or to venture outside them. As we believe in encouraging interdisciplinarity, you will be required to take three units (sixty credits) outside English and American Literature. Within our own Faculty of Arts and Humanities, this could involve taking units in American Studies, Creative Writing, Drama, History or Film, for example. Alternatively, you may opt for units offered by the Faculty of Science or the Faculty of Social Sciences subject to entry requirements.

Course Structure:

Year 1

The first year requires you to take introductory courses in both traditions, though a slight emphasis is placed on the less familiar American literature and on its social and historical background. Courses such as Imagining America, and Literature in History provide you with the context within which future studies will unfold. You will have a list of optional modules to choose from, encouraging you to broaden your awareness of related subjects such as film, drama, philosophy, linguistics or history.

Year 2 and Year 3

The precise mixture of English and American modules in the second and third years is up to you, and you will discuss your choices with your faculty adviser to make sure that you end up with a balanced programme. You are required to take a number of modules outside the immediate English and American Literature programme. There is a wide range of modules to choose from in the Faculty of Humanities, including free-choice courses in drama, film and creative writing as well as offerings in other literatures and in history.

You can also (and subject to entry requirements) use your free choices to take modules offered by other faculties.

Modules of study are taught in a number of different forms – often lectures and smaller seminar groups – designed to encourage student participation. In every module your work is assessed; forms of assessment also vary, including essays, project work, presentation, examination or a combination of any of these methods. You may also write a dissertation during your final year.

This programme does not include a year in the USA.

Teaching and Assessment:

Key skills, issues and ideas are introduced in lectures given by all members of faculty, including literary critics, literary historians, and writers. More specialist study is undertaken in small group seminars. These are chosen from a range offered within the School and across the University. You will also spend time studying and researching in the library or carrying out practical work or projects. In most subject areas, you are assessed at the end of each year on the basis of coursework and, in some cases, project and examination results. In your final year, you will write a dissertation on a topic of your choice and with the advice of tutors. There is no final examination. Your final degree result is determined by the marks you receive in years two and three.

Course Organiser

Prof Peter Womack

Course Brochure

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Related Courses

Entry Requirements

We do not include General Studies in our offers. The combined English Language and Literature A-level is acceptable instead of English Literature. A second Arts or Humanities subject at A-Level is required. Students studying the IB programme must offer a second Arts or Humanities subject at Higher Level.

A Level AAB-ABB including English Literature grade A
International Baccalaureate 33-32 points overall with score of 6 in HL English
Scottish Advanced Highers AAB-ABB including English Literature grade A
Irish Leaving Certificate Please contact the university for further information
Access Course Please contact the university for further information
HND Please contact the university for further information
European Baccalaureate 80-75% overall, including 80% in English Literature

Students for whom English is a foreign language

If English is not your first language you must have a recognised English Language qualification: Minimum IELTS 6.5 with a 6 in each sub-section, or TOEFL 585 (238 CBT / 93 IBT). Please contact us for more information about other qualifications that we may consider.

Interviews

The majority of candidates will not be called for an interview. However, for some students an interview will be requested. These are normally quite informal and generally cover topics such as your current studies, reasons for choosing the course and your personal interests and extra-curricular activities.

Gap Year

We welcome applications from students who have already taken or intend to take a gap year, believing that a year between school and university can be of substantial benefit. You are advised to indicate your reason for wishing to defer entry and may wish to contact the appropriate Admissions Office directly to discuss this further.

Special Entry Requirements

English Literature A-Level grade A is required.

Intakes

The School's annual intake is in September of each year.

Alternative Qualifications

We encourage you to apply if you have alternative qualifications equivalent to our stated entry requirement. Please contact our Admissions team for details.

GCSE Offer

Students are required to have Mathematics and English at Grade C or above at GCSE Level.

Assessment

For the majority of candidates the most important factors in assessing the application will be past and future achievement in examinations, academic interest in the subject being applied for, personal interest and extra-curricular activities and the confidential reference. We consider applicants as individuals and accept students from a very wide range of educational backgrounds and spend time considering your application in order to reach an informed decision relating to your application. Typical offers are indicated above. Please note, there may be additional subject entry requirements specific to individual degree courses.

Year 1
Year 2
Year 3

Year 1

Compulsory Study (80 credits)

Students will select 80 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
Imagining America: Literature I Imagining America: Literature I is a level one module designed to introduce the major writers and themes of literature in the United States. For this module there will be a weekly lecture and a two-hour seminar. Lecture Slot: Monday, 1200-12.50. Further information on the timing of the seminar can be found in the published timetable. more...	AMSA1F07	20	Semester 1
Imagining America: Literature II Imagining America: Literature II is a level one module designed to expand upon an introduction to the major writers and themes of literature from the United States. For this module there will be a weekly lecture and seminar. Further information on the timing of the seminar can be found in the published timetable. more...	AMSA1F02	20	Semester 2
Literature in History 1 This is the main introductory module to the study of literature. It aims to help new students to read historically, by offering a range of models of the relationship between literature and history, explored through the study of selected historical and literary moments. The module is taught by a weekly lecture, with an accompanying seminar. more...	LDCE1F01	20	Semester 1
Literature in History II This module follows on from Literature in History I, taking in more recent history, and including discussion of how writers of the present make use of the past. The module is taught by lectures, with an accompanying seminar. Attendance at both lectures and seminars is compulsory. more...	LDCE1F10	20	Semester 2

Option A Study (20 credits)

Students will select 20 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
Analysing Film and Television The module is designed to provide students with core study skills and techniques and methods of textual analysis. The module will cover the analysis of a range of formal features and frameworks such as narrative, mise-en-scene, camera work, editing and sound used in the analysis of film and television. The study skills covered will include use of the library and internet for research, as well as note taking, essay planning and the conventions of academic writing. In the process the module will cover issues such as referencing and plagiarism. It will be taught by lecture, seminar and screening. more...	FTVF1F09	20	Semester 1
Classic Readings in Philosophy This introductory module for first year students is designed to invite you into philosophical enquiry by way of a detailed study of some of the most famous books by the founding fathers of Western Philosophy. The set texts typically include a classic work by Plato, from the birth of philosophy in Classical Greece, and a classic work by Descartes, the father of modern philosophy. One or two texts by Aristotle or later Greek and Mediaeval thinkers may also be included. The texts are studied in modern English. No prior knowledge of philosophy is required, and this module is suitable for students from other disciplines who are taking no other philosophy modules It is taught annually. more...	PHI-1A01	20	Semester 1
Containing Multitudes: American History I This module offers a survey of American history from the colonial period through the nineteenth century, taking such key events as, eg, the conquest of the continent, the development of American democracy and the traumatic years of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Students in American Studies four-year programmes also take the complementary module Containing Multitudes: American History II, which is taught in the Spring Semester. Students attend a weekly seminar and an associated lecture series. more...	AMSA1F09	20	Semester 1
Introduction to Cultural Studies This module will introduce students to the development of cultural studies in this country and the work undertaken in the field. While it is a core module for those in Literature and History, it is suited to all those interested in interdisciplinary study and the history of academic disciplines, and it will introduce students to a range of approaches in study. It is taught through seminars. more...	LDCE1F05	20	Semester 1
Introduction to Early Modern Studies This module introduces key themes in early modern history: witchcraft, gender, rebellion, religious conflict, the reformation, warfare, state formation and other key aspects of the period 1500-1750. more...	HIS-1A15	20	Semester 1
Introduction to Medieval History This module is designed to provide an introduction to medieval history both for first year historians and students from other schools. It surveys the history of medieval Europe, including England, from c.1000 to c1300, and also examines some archaeology, literature, art, and architecture from the period. The module also aims to introduce students to a range of primary sources, including some of the physical remains to be found in East Anglia. more...	HIS-1A13	20	Semester 1
Introduction to Modern History This module provides a wide-ranging introduction to the political, social and economic transformation of Britain and Europe from the early nineteenth century to the First World War. Among the themes it considers are industrialisation and its impact; revolution and reform; nationalism and imperialism; gender and society; great power relations; the impact of war and the collapse of the old Europe in 1917-18. more...	HIS-1A19	20	Semester 1
Reading Cultures I: American Icons This module provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary research methods and writing skills that are essential for students undertaking a degree programme in the School of American Studies. Students will be encouraged to look at reading American culture across disciplines and media, and to develop their own strategies for learning, from note taking and planning, through locating and engaging with critical opinions, to producing and evaluating academic writing. This module is intended as an introduction to interdisciplinary scholarship and its transferable skills. more...	AMSA1F17	20	Semester 1
Reading Texts: Tutorial Class This module provides the opportunity to work closely on selected texts within the contexts of a small group. It aims to develop and explore modes of textual analysis. By the end of the module the students will have highly developed reading skills, a sense of the implications of interpreting texts and the individual research skills essential for a university degree. Not available to Visiting Students. more...	LDCE1F03	20	Semester 1
Reading Translations: Tutorial Class This module provides the opportunity to work closely with texts in translation, looking at how we read and analyse them and how we consider their relationship to the originals. We aim to develop the skills necessary for working with foreign texts in English translation. A thorough reading knowledge of another language besides English is essential. more...	LDCE1F13	20	Semester 1

Option B Study (20 credits)

Students will select 20 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
Containing Multitudes: American History II This module continues where Containing Multitudes I leaves off and tracks the historical narrative through from the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, covering industrialisation and America's emergence as a world power, the Progressive era, the New Deal, the Cold War and its legacy, and the impact of the dramatic changes of the 1960s. Students attend a weekly seminar and an associated lecture series. more...	AMSA1F04	20	Semester 2
Reading Cultures Ii: Ideas and Ideologies The module develops and expands the research methods, writing skills, and oral skills acquired in Reading Cultures I: American Icons. By continuing the exploration of contemporary American culture and introducing cultural and critical theory as a means to engage with current ideas and ideologies circulating around American cultural icons, the module will encourage exploration of America's changing position in the world. The module is intended to further facilitate skills in reading, writing, analysis, synthesis, independent thinking, and confidence as self-supporting learners in order to provide a strong foundation for work at levels 2 and 3. more...	AMSA1F18	20	Semester 2
Reading Texts II This module seeks to build on and develop the work of the Autumn semester, in particular that of Reading Texts and Reading Translations. The focus will fall again on small-group discussion and on the reading of a small number of texts - one creative, and one critical - chosen by the tutor from a set list. With this close attention to reading at its core, the module will also look at a number of the terms and ideas central to the study of literature and to the practice of interpretation. Not available to Visiting Students. more...	LDCE1F08	20	Semester 2
Writing Texts This module explores the culture and anthropology of writing, and addresses issues such as the differences between writing and speaking, between literary and non-literary texts, and the writer's relationship with readers. In weekly lectures and seminar groups, we will look at the writing process itself - drafting, revising, editing, translating - and will explore how and why texts come into being, and how they work to position the reader or to generate readerly interaction. The module is taught by a lecture, with an accompanying seminar. more...	LDCE1F14	20	Semester 2

Year 2

Option A Study (40 credits)

Students will select 40 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
19th Century American Writing This module aims to build on and develop your knowledge of the range of American literature in the nineteenth century. We will consider the rise of a distinctly American literary tradition in modes like realism, the gothic, romanticism, naturalism and the detective story, looking to make new connections both among writers and between literature and such larger issues as slavery, economics and feminism. more...	AMSA2L59	20	Semester 1
20th Century American Poetry This module provides a broadly chronological view of American poetry from the start of the twentieth century to the present day. It wonders about what the consequences might be if we consider seriously Emerson's claim (made in 1844), that America might be seen as a poem. Through detailed examination each week of groups of three related poets, the module aims both to question what constitutes an American poetics, and to examine how this conception has changed over the course of the twentieth century. As well as tracing a trajectory in American poetry from modernist to postmodernist modes, one of its primary concerns is also to start exploring how ideas of what an American poetry might be are inflected differently in `mainstream' and in more avant-garde (or `experimental') poetries. Indeed, by explicitly thinking about these differences the module will pay particular attention to the ways in which ideas of nationhood, of political dissent and protest, of poetic `groupings' and canon-formation, are instrumental in determining what we choose to see as America's representative poetry. By the end of the module students should have a wide knowledge of a range of different twentieth-century American poetries, as well as a strong sense of how the political, cultural and literary `tastes' of America across the century have delivered it the sorts of poetry it deserves. more...	AMSA2L24	20	Semester 2
American Paris Between the Wars This module introduces some of the styles, ideas and ideologies of trans-Atlantic modernism as elements in the creation of a myth. It centres on the American expatriate colony in Paris and, from this, works to contextualise and re-imagine some of the century's most notorious literary and artistic moments. Initial studies of the little magazines, manifestos, publishers, painters and photographers provide a sense of the driving political and aesthetic energies of the period, while the module's middle weeks uses this context to re-read a group of expatriate novels. The final three weeks of the course shifts the emphasis to considerations of memory, memoir and the construction of myth. more...	AMSA2L65	20	Semester 1
American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century This module surveys the prose of some of the twentieth century's most important American women writers, writers who (or whose 'other' works) tend to disappear from reading lists that include books by women only out of duty. Along the way we will seek to interrogate the terms with which we begin: American, women and prose. Assuming that biology does not define literature, we will instead seek to understand the social pressures on these women writers, and their responses to them, in an effort to maintain the specificity, diversity and range of these women's literary pursuits. more...	AMSA2L63	20	Semester 1
Contemporary American Fiction The purpose of this module is to expose students to a range of prose works by important contemporary American writers. In particular, we will be concerned with some of the key concepts associated with contemporary American fiction, including the definition of the contemporary: postmodernism; metafiction; historiography; postcolonialism; and memory. more...	AMSA2L78	20	Semester 2
Living On the Hyphen: Cuban America Since the mid nineteenth century Cuban nationals have been exiled in the United States and created a body of literature alerting the reader to the specifically transnational nature of Cuban identity. Since the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the concomitant political, economic and cultural isolation of the island, the case of Cuba and Cuban exiles in the USA has been seen to be an exceptional and singular phenomenon with few commonalities with other ethnic groups in the United States. Moving beyond a nation-based model and utilising a transnational theoretical framework this course looks at contemporary Cuban and Cuban-American literature and film from both on and off the island in order to reconceptualise the relationship between the island and its exiles, analysing the evolution of the Cuban exile life and the ways in which questions of exile, return, family, belonging, identity, language and memory are explored and how they differ from previous generations for a variety of political, historical, sociological and ideological reasons (to be explored). more...	AMSA2L15	20	Semester 1
Radical Cousins Or Rival Siblings? U.s. and Australian Literatures. This module takes as its point of departure critic Joseph Jones' representation of America and Australia as 'radical cousins' and extends this formulation to ask whether they might equally be thought of as rival siblings. From its establishment as a penal colony in 1788'in large part as a result of the newly independent United States' refusal to harbour Britain's convicts any longer'Australia remained loyal to the Empire, even as it looked increasingly to the United States for guidance in matters of politics and popular culture. The module compares American and Australian literature from the past century or so in order to examine how both countries have engaged and explored shared questions about settler and post/ colonial identity; the staging of cultural independence from Great Britain; the size and scope of the natural environment; and gender performance, among others. more...	AMSA2L18	20	Semester 2
The Beats and the Limits of Writing This module covers the writers known as `The Beats' in terms of their antecedents, the literary and cultural traditions in which they worked, and the social and critical debates that raged during their heyday. Students will be asked to read widely, to compare and contrast different writers' styles, and to make informed judgements about the writers' relationships to the times in which they wrote. The module aims to foster an understanding of the Beat literary phenomenon in literary, political and social contexts. It will also examine the debts Beat writers owed to `American Renaissance' writers including Emerson and Whitman, to wider ideas of the `avant-garde' in the Twentieth Century generally, and to European Romantic traditions. It will investigate how a Beat poetics developed as a response to Cold War `consensus culture', and sought to establish a countercultural (though distinctly American) `tradition'. more...	AMSA2L84	20	Semester 2
The Holocaust in American Literature This module aims to explore representations of the Holocaust in American literature. Students will explore how the Holocaust is represented by American Jewish and non-Jewish authors. Students will consider whether, and how, the Holocaust is `Americanised' by American writers; they will consider some of the ethical and philosophical debates concerning representation of the Holocaust in art; they will examine how American Jewish writers engage with the Holocaust to negotiate questions of Jewish identity; and they will consider the problematic uses and definitions of the term `holocaust' in American culture. more...	AMSA2L82	20	Semester 2

Option B Study (40 credits)

Students will select 40 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
17th-Century Writing: Renaissance, Revolution, Restoration This module explores 17th-Century writing in diverse forms, familiar and unfamiliar: the masque, poetry, prose fiction, political prose and the antecedents of what we now call 'journalism'. We will consider the place of these works in society and in their intellectual and cultural contexts, and examine the traffic between literary writing and broader (popular?) print culture. more...	LDCE2Y13	20	Semester 1
Critical Theory and Practice Through a combination of lectures and seminars, this module will explore changing responses to the central questions of poetics, from Plato and Aristotle in the classical period to contemporary theory. What kinds of truth, if any, do poetry and fictional writing tell? What is the nature of the imagination or the role of invention? How does fictional writing relate to philosophy, religion, rhetoric or science? This module will approach these questions through a combination of historical, theoretical and practical approaches. This module enables students to identify, assess and employ a range of critical methods in their study of literature. more...	LDCE2X15	20	Semester 1
Eighteenth-Century Writing This module reads major British fiction and some poetry of the eighteenth century in terms of its relation to the development of society which is recognisably modern. We will examine such writers as Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, and exploring the `rise of the novel', the coming dominance of prose representation in journalism and fiction, the rise of the middle class, the move to an urban cash-nexus society governed by reason and contractual economic exchange, and the construction of new kinds of subjectivities for men and women according to the needs of middle-class patriarchy. In many ways, this module studies the development of the `modern mind'. more...	LDCE2Y11	20	Semester 1
European Literature: Encounters With 'Otherness' This module explores critical and aesthetic issues raised by general and comparative literature, issues of 'influence', reception, intertextuality, translation, formal and generic comparabilities, national identity and cultural borrowing. Theoretical questions will be examined through specific examples and case studies, ranging across different periods and geographies; however the focus is likely to be on the twentieth-century. Works studies may include texts by e.g. Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Sebald, Calvino, Celan. more...	LDCE2X24	20	Semester 2
Medieval Writing This module is designed to provide an introduction to the study of medieval English language and literature. In a series of lectures and seminars students will work through a small but representative selection of medieval texts, including lyrics, romance, and poetry, in order to develop a working knowledge of the language - Middle English - and an appreciation of different forms and genres found in medieval writing. Medieval texts and contexts will be used as a means of familiarising students with medieval language, and form the basis for further modules in medieval writing that may be taken within the School. more...	LDCE2Y15	20	Semester 1
Modernism The purpose of this module is to study the literature of the early decades of the twentieth century - very roughly 1900-1930 - in particular the work of those authors who attempted to break with received norms of literary style and content. The module is organised as a series of thematic explorations - poetic experiment, memory and desire, myth and innovation, and so on - and thus does not follow a chronological structure. The sequence of guiding lectures focuses its deliberations on a set of specific texts, with their contexts, and these are taken up for discussion in the accompanying seminars. 'Modernism' is this constructed gradually over the semester as a mosaic of closely related issues, each one reflecting on the others. As well as providing an overview of defining textual features, in prose and poetry, the module is concerned also with the interrelation of text and context, offering a range of ways of conceiving of modernist literature as both of, and self-consciously ahead of, its historical moment. more...	LDCE2Z15	20	Semester 1
Nineteenth-Century Writing This module introduces students to classics of nineteenth-century fiction, primarily British but also including two famous French novels to provide comparative foil. The lectures will direct attention to such formal and ideological matters as the free indirect style, literary realism, authorial omniscience and moral didacticism, the representation of history, comic and gothic elements, and the shift towards aestheticism and impressionism in the second half of the century. These features will be related to larger patterns of social change, notably changing relations between social classes, the role of the novel in bourgeois ideology, moral urgency and complacency, the repression of women, the retreat from progressive models of history and the development of a commodifying cultural sphere. more...	LDCE2Z30	20	Semester 2
Romanticism 1780-1840 Romantic Literature is often thought of as poetry, primarily work by Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Bryon. But the signs and forms of Romantic sensibility can also be found in a much broader constituency of writing practice: the novel, letter writing, the essay, political and aesthetic theory, and writing of all kinds taken as social commentary. This module is taught through a combination of lectures and seminars. more...	LDCE2X26	20	Semester 2
Shakespeare The aim of this lecture-seminar module is to help you become a better reader of Shakespearean drama. He was writing between about 1590 and about 1610; obviously his plays speak to us over a great cultural distance, and we can find fresh ways of reading them by exploring the theatrical, generic and historical frameworks in which they were written and staged. The lectures, then, will introduce a range of contexts, and the seminars will seek to turn them to account in the reading of the dramatic texts themselves. more...	LDCE2Y04	20	Semester 2

Free Choice Study (40 credits)

Students can select modules worth 40 credits from the course catalogue with the approval of their School.

Year 3

Option A Study (30 credits)

Students will select 30 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
American Autobiography This module examines the fascination of American literature with questions of selfhood, identity and autobiography. Opening sessions of the module will look at ways in which the very idea of America and its literature emerges from early-national attempts to 'write the self' and discuss changing theories of selfhood, identity and individuality as they are played out in America's historical development from colony, to nation, to postmodern superpower. Subsequent sessions will focus on specific texts of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries which engage questions of selfhood in order to define, maintain and develop an idea of what being an American might mean. more...	AMSA3L07	30	Semester 1
American Drama 1970-Present This module will be concerned with exploring the work of American dramatists in the context of the social, political and cultural life of the country. In particular, it will give attention to the work of new women and African-American writers as well as to that of established dramatists. more...	AMSA3L19	30	Semester 1
American Gothic American fiction began in the period of the European Gothic novel, which thus marked the American tradition from the first. In this seminar module we will establish the meaning of gothic conventions and consider their persisting effects in American fiction. more...	AMSA3L62	30	Semester 2
Mark Twain and the Gilded Age According to William Faulkner, Mark Twain was 'the first truly American writer ['] the father of American literature.' This module will test such paternity claims and examine their wider ramifications. We will explore Twain's writing, his relationship to the Gilded Age, his contemporaries, and his influence on later American writers. As both author and man, Twain contained multitudes. Few writers have straddled so many genres and styles, and few Americans have embodied so many of the nation's animating forces and tensions. He was, as his friend William Dean Howells felt, 'incomparable', and this module is an opportunity for significant reading and research into his life, work and beyond. more...	AMSA3L20	30	Semester 2
Multi-Ethnic American Writing America has long been interpreted as the location of social possibility founded upon a desire to assimilate and negate ethnic 'others'. This module traces the literary responses of four distinct 'American' cultures: Native American; African American; Asian American; and Mexican American. Each group of texts engage with the specific historical, cultural and political relationships between the US and each author's country of origin or national/cultural history, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics will include race and racism, colonisation, imperialism, slavery, segregation, immigration, and illegality/invisibility, with an emphasis upon contemporary experiences. more...	AMSA3L12	30	Semester 2
Tales of the Jazz Age This module examines American prose of the 1920s in the context of the Jazz Age. American literature of the 20s is often conflated with modernism, or the expatriate experience, or the Harlem Renaissance; this module will consider 1920s writing in the context of the market and the rise of professional authorship, anxieties about imitation and the middlebrow and conformism, and the pressures of commercial success on fiction. It will draw on reception studies and the influence of publication formats (mass-market magazines, serial publication, the burgeoning market for film adaptations). Texts will be drawn from a mix of 'high' and 'low.' After considering the pressures of commercialism on the publication of The Waste Land, texts could include the short stories of Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Babbitt, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Winesburg, Ohio, Glimpses of the Moon, and Manhattan Transfer. Students will also be expected to research journalism of the day, such as The New Yorker and the New York Times, which have accessible online archives. more...	AMSA3L31	30	Semester 1
The Literary 1960s When thinking of the sixties, literature, in general, is not what immediately springs to mind - pushed, as it is, to the background of music and the counterculture. Yet the decade brought about many profound changes in the paradigms of literature. Amongst such changes was the proliferation of metafiction as a narrative response to both the 'exhaustion' of literature in the light of the period's dramatic events, and to the new literary and philosophical developments in critical theory (poststructuralism). There was also the emergence of two 'new' genres: new journalism, and the non-fiction novel. This module is an examination of literary responses to the many changes and challenges brought about in this decade. It will discuss whether literature simply recoiled into solipsistic abstraction or whether it was a motivating force in the general struggle to conceptualize a `new' or countercultural American consciousness. more...	AMSA3L23	30	Semester 1
The Poetics of Place: Post 1945 American Poetry and Environment The American poet Charles Olson famously declared: `I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.' This module explores how a range of linguistically innovative American poets, from 1945 to the present, have engaged this question of space and environment in their writings. There will be a particular focus on how scientific literature, natural history writing, field guides, and eco-criticism have contributed to poets' theories of poetry and poetics as well as an emphasis on the role environmental notions of place and space play in forming and critiquing ideas of American identity. more...	AMSA3L24	30	Semester 2
The Rising Tide of the Transpacific This module considers the ways in which American literature has engaged with the opening up of Pacific space from the early nineteenth century to the present. From Melville's adventures on whaling vessels throughout the Pacific, to Pearl Harbour and anxieties about Japanese presence in and beyond the borders of the United States, to writing by contemporary Asian-American authors whose work evinces influences from China, Korea and India, the texts on this course chart the ways in which the Pacific Ocean and its peoples have contributed to, created, and contested American national narratives. The module will develop students' insights into issues of U.S. national history and cultural geography, and deepen their engagement with current theories of nationalism and transnationalism either in preparation for, or as a frame for reflection on, their studies abroad. more...	AMSA3L35		Semester 1
Writing and New Media in Early America Contemporary life is dominated by emergent media forms and new means of apprehending reality. But how unprecedented is this? American culture from the Colonial period through the nineteenth-century also witnessed the escalating influence of various forms of `media': an explosion of magazines and newspapers; newly instantaneous telegraph communication; daguerreotypes and photography; mass circuits for public speaking; early sound recording. This was not only a technological and social process but also a literary phenomenon. Just as with today's 'new media,' these changes transformed American writing and are responsible for much of what is striking about classic American literature. This module focuses on the relationship of literary art to this media landscape during 1750-1900, from the age of Franklin to that of Brady, Edison and Pulitzer. Throughout the semester, we will be defining what we mean by `media', considering the interaction between genre and medium, channels of information, data storage and transmission. Subjects the module will cover include: the emergence of literary journalism; the rise of the foreign correspondent; the symbolic figure of the photographer and journalist in American fiction; the effect of early sound recording on literary aesthetics. Questions it poses include: what effect did fresh modes of writing, listening and seeing have on fiction or poetry?; have `journalism' and `literature' always been mutually-exclusive? How have ethnic groups used such media as distinct modes of expression? These issues will be approached thematically by media type, with two sessions each on: 1) Colonial newsprint; 2) literary magazines; 3) the mass penny press and telegraph; 4) the lyceum; 5) the phonograph. Authors to be considered along the way include Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Nellie Bly and Upton Sinclair. more...	AMSA3L28	30	Semester 2

Option B Study (30 credits)

Students will select 30 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
Writing Life: Biography and Creative Non-Fiction How do writers attempt to capture 'life' in all its various forms? What, if any, are the different requirements in writing the life of a famous (or not so famous) person and that of a city or landscape? What about the 'life' of travel or food and how do you approach writing about the natural world? These are just some of the questions that this module sets out to address. We will be reading a wide variety of texts, from the 'traditional' biography to some of the more experimental examples of creative non-fiction. From Samuel Johnson to essays in The New Yorker, all human (and non-human) life will be there! Students may choose between writing their own piece of Biography or creative Non-Fiction as their final project or submitting a critical essay. more...	LDCE3X46	30	Semester 2
Chaucer This module explores Chaucer's major writings in their historical, cultural and literary contexts. The module will introduce Chaucer's writing in a range of genres and will examine his works' representation and exploration of society, identity, chivalry, politics, religion and gender, and will also consider the medieval reception of Chaucer's writing. Previous experience of medieval literature will be useful but is not required. more...	LDCE3Y05	30	Semester 1
Children's Literature This module offers students the chance to learn about children's literature and its development and also to try to write a piece of children's literature themselves. It starts with the history of children's literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through Aesop's fables, fairy tales, Mother Goose, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and examining other authors such as A.A. Milne, Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, Sherman Alexie and Nancy Garden, amongst others. The course looks at issues of genre and content as well as historical context. By studying the development of children's literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society. more...	LDCE3X67	30	Semester 1
Drama and Literature: the Question of Genre This seminar will explore the boundaries between drama and other genres (kinds, art-forms, media) in an attempt to investigate a number of interrelated theoretical questions. We shall explore these issues via various types of activity - practical criticism, critiques of literary theory, performance analysis, dramatising prose narrative. The set texts are works of literature which do not quite fit generically - particularly plays that seem to be in some sense 'epic', or novels in some sense 'theatrical', ranging from Shakespeare in the 17th century through to Gay and Fielding in the 18th and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov in the 19th. more...	LDCE3X06	30	Semester 2
Early English Drama This module focuses on the medieval and early sixteenth century period, exploring conceptions and deployments of drama. Comparative work of different forms of drama, the drama and other artistic media, and the drama and social attitudes will be encouraged. You will explore whether drama successfully produces civic unity; how audiences are addressed and constructed; the theatricality of how the Biblical past is imagined, the significance of staging, place, and gesture; the social and political functions of drama, the representation of women; and protests against the drama from various quarters. Our period ends just as the suburban professional theatre was establishing itself in London in a form that was fundamentally influenced by these much earlier dramatic activities. We shall explore how spectacle and ceremony enabled pre-Reformation communities to celebrate their existence and assert an often contested or otherwise problematic sense of their cultural identity. more...	LDCE3Y81	30	Semester 1
Fin De Siecle: Fantasies of Decadence and Degeneration Max Nordau's 1892 Degeneration, attacking fin de siecle decadence, draws together fears of cultural decline and corrupting artistic practice through pseudo-Darwinian thinking about devolution. Yet Nordau's urgent and apocalyptic claims about 'diseased' art draw an ambivalent response from contemporary writers, such as those associated with the aestheticism and decadence of The Yellow Book. It is within the fantastic, however, that Nordau is most directly confronted and social norms most explicitly deformed by art. Wilde's swift move from pedestal to pederast may remove a key figure, but texts such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; The Novel of the White Powder; Dracula; Wells' science fiction dystopias and, more recently, Moore and Campbell's From Hell, rehearse, react to, or reflect upon such concerns. These writings share a central tension: are the effects of decadence and degeneration offering pessimistic prophesy or optimistic alternatives? This module would complement nineteenth-century options and offer a perspective on the Modernist module. For students also taking the Gothic it would be related, although usefully focusing on the closing years of the nineteenth century with a different emphasis. more...	LDCE3X50	30	Semester 2
Henry James: Questions of Art, Life and Theory In this module students engage with the range of Henry James's writing and also the reproduction of his life and work in contemporary culture. This module aims not simply to add to understanding of James but also to explore the issues that his work raises in relation to the art and history of fiction, philosophy and cultural reproduction. It is suitable not only for literature students who want to study this writer who spans realism and modernism, and short stories, literary criticism and fiction, but also for creative writing students and literature and philosophy students. The final assignment will have a creative writing option that comprises a piece of creative writing with a critical reflection. It can be taken by students who have studied modules in nineteenth-century writing or modernism. more...	LDCE3Z42	30	Semester 2
John Milton's Paradise Lost Paradise Lost is perhaps the finest poem in the language. Its ambition is breathtaking: it begins before time, ends with time, spans the whole of the created universe, and yet focuses on a single, human relationship, on betrayal, recrimination and reconciliation. It is an attempt to explain the co-existence of evil and an omnipotent good God, a response to defeated political aspirations, and an attempt to create a republican poetics. In the module we will read the poem intensively, and seek to understand it in its historical context. Was there a republican aesthetic? How did writers respond to the collapse of radical political ideals and (comparative) religious toleration when 1660 brought the restoration of Charles II? How have literary historians participated in the occlusion of Britain's republican traditions? While there are no pre- or co-requisites, some knowledge of seventeenth-century literature or history, especially through LITE2Y13 Seventeenth-Century Writing, would be an advantage. more...	LDCE3Y70	30	Semester 2
Literature and Deconstruction In an interview with Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida describes literature as `this strange institution which allows one to say everything'. This module explores the writings of Derrida and related thinkers alongside a range of literary texts, including works by Keats, Shakespeare and Joyce. Through a combination of lectures and seminars, we will think about the strangenesses of literature, look at the ways in which it is an `institution' and consider the kinds of freedom ' of speech, writing and thinking ' it permits. Our aim throughout will be to establish the possibilities for literary criticism opened up by deconstruction. The module is open to everyone, but may be of particular interest to those who studied critical theory in the second year. more...	LDCE3X87	30	Semester 1
Literature and Human Rights Reading key philosophical, political, legal and literary texts, this module will track the emergence of human rights as a cultural idea from their conception in the eighteenth century, through to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and beyond in the period after World War Two. The module will address the following questions: What type of human being was presupposed by the declarations of rights? How did the novel help form perceptions about rights and human sympathy? In what ways did the UDHR re-imagine concepts of human rights after the Holocaust? How were these changes reflected in new forms of post-war writing, such as post-colonial and late modernist writing? How can we think about the relation between rights and literature today? This module will suit students who have enjoyed the challenges of philosophy and literary theory. It should also appeal to those who are interested in thinking seriously about the relationship between literature and its `real world' applications and significance. more...	LDCE3X54	30	Semester 2
Literature and Philosophy This module explores the relations between literature and philosophy and differing understandings of the self, love and ethics through close reading of philosophical and literary texts. It is organised chronologically and moves from the classical writing of Plato to modern literature. The module designed for final year students who are studying Literature and Philosophy. It is also open only to students in Literature who have taken modules in Philosophy in years one and two; or by special concession at the discretion of the module organiser to other students who have substantial experience in both Honours level Literature and Honours level Philosophy. more...	LDCE3X45	30	Semester 1
Literature Dissertation: Post-1789 (Aut) This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1789 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3X15	30	Semester 1
Literature Dissertation: Post-1789 (Spr) This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1789 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3X18	30	Semester 2
Literature Dissertation: Pre-1789 (Aut) This module is an advanced-level unit, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3Y77	30	Semester 1
Literature Dissertation: Pre-1789 (Spr) This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3Y78	30	Semester 2
Madness, Medicine, Science and Women's Writing in the Regency This module will study late 18th-century and early 19th-century writings in the context of scientific and medical innovation. We consider whether it may be appropriate to view the work of novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley as a response to, and even a protest against these newly (or, more correctly, nearly) professionalised, male-dominated worlds. These women writers often concern themselves with the 'consumers' as well as the providers of the services offered by these professions; this module considers why that might be and how this kind of contextualisation might impact upon our readings of their work. more...	LDCE3X75	30	Semester 1
Medieval Arthurian Traditions From Welsh folklore to Monty Python, the tales of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have excited and intrigued generations. Why? To answer this question we explore the development of the legend from its twelfth-century Celtic roots through to a number of twentieth-century film adaptations. How the legend has been translated across form, genres, cultures and ages will be studied, including examples from Middle English Arthurian Texts, translations of the Welsh Mabinogion, of Monmouth's Latin chronicle and French romance texts. This module will enable students familiar with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to enhance their awareness of the wider Arthurian traditions within which this text belongs, but is also suitable for students who are encountering medieval literature for the first time. more...	LDCE3Y82	30	Semester 2
Mind, Body and Literature The sense of loss in a Hardy poem, the parallel universe of a science fiction story, the sombre world of a Scandinavian crime novel: all have in common that they make the reader think, feel and possibly act. Drawing on an understanding of literature as writing which both engages and affects us, we look at a variety of literary texts (e.g, by Blake, Hardy, Lawrence, Hughes) and consider what they have in common with the everyday (clocks, teddy-bears, congregation ceremonies) and the bizarre (zombies, unicorns, ghosts). We consider how we understand text worlds, how metaphor relates to the body, whether real emotions can arise from fictional texts. Participants should have an open mind, a desire to understand literary theories, and a readiness to think outside the box. more...	LDCE3X09	30	Semester 1
Nervous Narratives `We all say it's nerves, and none of us knows what it means', says a character in Wilkie Collins' 1860 novel, The Woman in White. Our aim is to think about how a discourse of the `nerves' ' the `nervous temperament' and nervous illness ' can be both so pervasive culturally and so slippery in its meaning. This interdisciplinary module takes you from the late 17th century, when the concept of `neurologie' first emerged, to the 21st century, linking literary, medical and philosophical writing to explore the representation of the `nerves'. The historical range of the module is not meant to imply a transhistorical understanding of nervous illness or temperament, but rather will enable us to analyse the historically specific nature of the nervous body and what it is made to mean, culturally, within different contexts. In this way, we will be working with issues as diverse as religious `enthusiasm', hysteria and hypochondria, sensibility, sensation, fear of modernity, manliness and effeminacy, shell-shock, PTSD and the concepts of the healthy or fragile body of the nation. Spanning time and genre, the literary texts studied will take us from the earliest, Jonathan Swift's satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704) up to the contemporary: Siri Hustvedt's novel, What I Loved (2003) and her analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010). more...	LDCE3X83	30	Semester 1
Poetry After Modernism This module will survey a wide range of post-war British poetry actively engaged with the Modernist tradition of Eliot, Pound and others. Reading critical texts alongside poems, it will introduce students to lesser-known writers, such as the Welsh poet Lynette Roberts and the Scottish poet W.S. Graham, as well as considering well-known English poets such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes from a Modernist perspective. Recognising the influence of contemporary American verse on experimental poets such as J.H. Prynne and Paul Muldoon will also be an important theme. A chronological syllabus will take students from 1945 up to the present day, and there will be a chance to write creatively as well as critically as part of the assessment. Students wishing to take this module must have taken LDCE2Z15 Modernism. more...	LDCE3Z60	30	Semester 2
Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century The poetry of the nineteenth century is often thought of as being caught between the two stools of Romanticism and Modernism. This module examines the development of poetry from Romanticism to Modernism, and asks in particular whether the poetry of the nineteenth century can claim our attention in its own right, rather than as a late avatar of Romanticism or as a foretaste of the excitements of Modernism. The focus of the module, then, is on close critical engagement with a large range of nineteenth century poetry and poetics, including the work of poet-critic Matthew Arnold, poet-priest Gerard M. Hopkins, and of other writers from Christina Rossetti to Algernon Charles Swinburne. Due notice will also be taken of nineteenth-century continental and American poetry. more...	LDCE3X71	30	Semester 1
Queer Literature and Theory This module offers students the chance to learn about LGBTQ literature and its development in English-speaking countries, as well as approaches to queer theory. This means analysing sexuality and gender and the representation of such identities in literature. Authors studied may include Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Gore Vidal, and Sarah Waters, as well as children's books and young adult novels by Alex Sanchez, Nancy Garden, Ellen Wittlinger, and Marcus Ewert. Authors of theoretical texts looked at may include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, and Teresa de Lauretis. Understanding how LGBTQ characters are featured in literature also helps us to see how queer people are understood in a given society in general. This course also aims to look at a variety of genres in order to see how these different text types work and how they approach similar material in different ways. more...	LDCE3X58	30	Semester 2
Regency Women Writers This module situates the work of various women writers of the Regency period in literary and historical contexts. The main texts under discussion are by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Maria Edgeworth. The unit considers themes which - although not exclusive to women's writing at this time - occur strikingly frequently in the work of Regency women. These themes include sanity, madness and ideas about the mind, and literary devices such as the love-mad woman. Health, ill-health and the development of medicine are central to these fictions and the course, and we also discuss the figure of the doctor, the quack and the 'psychiatrist' in these texts. We look at writings by Regency women travellers whose destinations ranged from Italy to Bath, Sweden and Revolutionary France. more...	LDCE3X80	30	Semester 2
Revenge Tragedy: Ancient and Modern This seminar explores the different ways in which the concept of revenge has been conceived and represented in a range of dramatic texts. The module covers three distinct groups of primary materials: classical tragedy (in translation) including Aeschylus's Oresteia; early modern revenge tragedy including works by Shakespeare, Tourneur and Kyd; and modern cinematic explorations of the revenge formula including Get Carter, Old Boy and Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. Topics discussed include the relationship between classical and Christian attitudes to revenge, contemporary strictures upon private vengeance, the representation of justice through the ages, the limitations of the revenge tragedy formula. more...	LDCE3Y86	30	Semester 2
Satire `Satire is problematic, open ended, essayistic, ambiguous in relation to history, uncertain in its political effects, resistant to final closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, ambivalent about the pleasures it offers' (Dustin Griffin). The aim of this module is to investigate the problematic territory of satire. Using examples from modern and contemporary fiction and journalism alongside early modern and classical satire, we will formulate a critical and conceptual map, which will in turn allow us to discuss some of the problems of satire (those of genre, of gender, of politics, of morality, of history), and to explore some of the paradoxes of its strategies and functions (freedom versus limits; subversion versus conformity; transformation versus stasis). Writers under discussion will include Juvenal, Horace, Swift and Pope; John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague; Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, and Jonathan Coe. more...	LDCE3X62	30	Semester 2
Shakespeare: Shadow and Substance Platonist epistemology permeated Elizabethan culture: the aim of this module is to explore the relationship of Shakespeare's topic of the world as a stage to Neoplatonic conceptions of perception, politics, poetry and love. more...	LDCE3Y36	30	Semester 2
The Condition of England Novel 1818-2000 This module will examine the classic nineteenth-century 'Condition of 'England' novel alongside mid-to-late twentieth-century representations of England (and myths of national identity). Attention will be given to post-colonial writing as a significant part of the question: What is it to be English (or British)? more...	LDCE3Z09	30	Semester 1
The Gothic This module seeks to cover some 'canonical' texts of the Gothic Novel (1764-1820) in Walpole, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and to consider some later developments of the gothic mode in later 19th and 20th centuries: Poe, Le Fanu, Stevenson, MR James, Elizabeth Bowen, David Storey and Angela Carter. The course also seeks to introduce students to some of the theoretical and historical arguments around the contested nature of the term 'gothic', the Uncanny, the subversiveness or otherwise of this kind of writing, and its relation to the novel genre. more...	LDCE3X41	30	Semester 1
The Literature of World War One The module will examine representations of World War One. As a Level 3 module, the focus will be inter-disciplinary. Literary materials will be contextualised using historical and other sources. Use will also be made of memoirs, letters, diaries, and photographs. Students will be encouraged to conduct research using the internet and other facilities. more...	LDCE3Z10	30	Semester 2
Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense and Modern Writing It's widely recognised that modernist literature is characterised by a revolution of the word. Less widely recognised, and little explored, is the relationship between modernist linguistic experimentalism and literary nonsense, as practised by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and others. This course will begin with these well-known nonsense writers and explore their roots in earlier nonsense, including Shakespeare's, before going on to examine some of the adventures in language of major modernist and postmodernist writers. Authors studied are likely to include late Joyce, early Auden, Stein, Stevens, Cummings, Crane, Nabokov, Koch, Muldoon, Ashbery. The course will also set these avant-garde writers in the unfamiliar context of the mainstream fantasy writers who also come out of Carroll and the nonsense tradition, most likely Tolkien and Peake, whose imaginary worlds are based on their own invented languages. This is not a course on children's literature, but on some very challenging modern literature, though it should appeal to those who take a childish pleasure in wordplay and fantasy, and equally to those intrigued by philosophical issues around language. It would follow on very well from the second-year Modernism module. more...	LDCE3X01	30	Semester 1
Traumaturgies: Reading and Writing Trauma Across Contexts Trauma haunts the writing of the twentieth century. Slavery, war, patriarchy, terrorism, genocide, colonialism, modernity, technology and post-modernity: these legacies demand to be written and read, and engender a writing singular to their traumas. Yet the writing of these wounds, and the critical work that reads it, raises fundamental questions about whether trauma can ever be represented or understood. Spreading beyond their contexts, these questions effect their own traumas, cracking open our assumptions about what it is possible to read, to write, and indeed to think. Working roughly from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, this module reads a selection of theoretical, literary and critical texts that aim to write and read trauma across cultural, historical, personal and public contexts. more...	LDCE3X91	30	Semester 1
Ulysses This module will provide students with the opportunity to read one of the most famous, yet notoriously unread, novels of the twentieth century. The module has a number of aims. First, it will give students the time and opportunity to try to read and understand James Joyce's Ulysses. Secondly, the module will introduce students to some of the formal innovations typical of modernist writing through the close analysis of techniques such as interior monologue and mythic analogy. Thirdly, it will allow students to read a wide range of responses to Ulysses, both among Joyce's contemporaries, and in the history of twentieth century criticism. Fourthly, the module will situate the text historically, with a particular focus on the way that the text's obscenity affected its reception and circulation in the 1920s and 1930s. more...	LDCE3Z50	30	Semester 2
Virgil's Classic Epic This module will explore the centrality of Virgil's Aeneid to Medieval and Renaissance culture. It will examine developing attitudes to the Classical literary legacy and accommodation and reinvention of Virgil's epic poem within new religious, political and literary contexts. The course will begin with exploration of Virgil's poem on its own terms before turning to reworkings of the 'Aeneid' by Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Douglas and Marlowe, the Renaissance invention of a 13th Book to 'complete' Virgil's poem, and the recasting of classical epic within the very different conventions of medieval and Renaissance romance. Previous experience of classical or medieval literature is not required. more...	LDCE3Y18	30	Semester 2
You may also pick any of the modules that begin with: LDCE3X37 LDCE3Z64 LDCE3X94

Option C Study (60 credits)

Students will select 60 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
American Autobiography This module examines the fascination of American literature with questions of selfhood, identity and autobiography. Opening sessions of the module will look at ways in which the very idea of America and its literature emerges from early-national attempts to 'write the self' and discuss changing theories of selfhood, identity and individuality as they are played out in America's historical development from colony, to nation, to postmodern superpower. Subsequent sessions will focus on specific texts of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries which engage questions of selfhood in order to define, maintain and develop an idea of what being an American might mean. more...	AMSA3L07	30	Semester 1
American Drama 1970-Present This module will be concerned with exploring the work of American dramatists in the context of the social, political and cultural life of the country. In particular, it will give attention to the work of new women and African-American writers as well as to that of established dramatists. more...	AMSA3L19	30	Semester 1
American Gothic American fiction began in the period of the European Gothic novel, which thus marked the American tradition from the first. In this seminar module we will establish the meaning of gothic conventions and consider their persisting effects in American fiction. more...	AMSA3L62	30	Semester 2
Writing Life: Biography and Creative Non-Fiction How do writers attempt to capture 'life' in all its various forms? What, if any, are the different requirements in writing the life of a famous (or not so famous) person and that of a city or landscape? What about the 'life' of travel or food and how do you approach writing about the natural world? These are just some of the questions that this module sets out to address. We will be reading a wide variety of texts, from the 'traditional' biography to some of the more experimental examples of creative non-fiction. From Samuel Johnson to essays in The New Yorker, all human (and non-human) life will be there! Students may choose between writing their own piece of Biography or creative Non-Fiction as their final project or submitting a critical essay. more...	LDCE3X46	30	Semester 2
Chaucer This module explores Chaucer's major writings in their historical, cultural and literary contexts. The module will introduce Chaucer's writing in a range of genres and will examine his works' representation and exploration of society, identity, chivalry, politics, religion and gender, and will also consider the medieval reception of Chaucer's writing. Previous experience of medieval literature will be useful but is not required. more...	LDCE3Y05	30	Semester 1
Children's Literature This module offers students the chance to learn about children's literature and its development and also to try to write a piece of children's literature themselves. It starts with the history of children's literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through Aesop's fables, fairy tales, Mother Goose, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and examining other authors such as A.A. Milne, Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, Sherman Alexie and Nancy Garden, amongst others. The course looks at issues of genre and content as well as historical context. By studying the development of children's literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society. more...	LDCE3X67	30	Semester 1
Drama and Literature: the Question of Genre This seminar will explore the boundaries between drama and other genres (kinds, art-forms, media) in an attempt to investigate a number of interrelated theoretical questions. We shall explore these issues via various types of activity - practical criticism, critiques of literary theory, performance analysis, dramatising prose narrative. The set texts are works of literature which do not quite fit generically - particularly plays that seem to be in some sense 'epic', or novels in some sense 'theatrical', ranging from Shakespeare in the 17th century through to Gay and Fielding in the 18th and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov in the 19th. more...	LDCE3X06	30	Semester 2
Early English Drama This module focuses on the medieval and early sixteenth century period, exploring conceptions and deployments of drama. Comparative work of different forms of drama, the drama and other artistic media, and the drama and social attitudes will be encouraged. You will explore whether drama successfully produces civic unity; how audiences are addressed and constructed; the theatricality of how the Biblical past is imagined, the significance of staging, place, and gesture; the social and political functions of drama, the representation of women; and protests against the drama from various quarters. Our period ends just as the suburban professional theatre was establishing itself in London in a form that was fundamentally influenced by these much earlier dramatic activities. We shall explore how spectacle and ceremony enabled pre-Reformation communities to celebrate their existence and assert an often contested or otherwise problematic sense of their cultural identity. more...	LDCE3Y81	30	Semester 1
Fin De Siecle: Fantasies of Decadence and Degeneration Max Nordau's 1892 Degeneration, attacking fin de siecle decadence, draws together fears of cultural decline and corrupting artistic practice through pseudo-Darwinian thinking about devolution. Yet Nordau's urgent and apocalyptic claims about 'diseased' art draw an ambivalent response from contemporary writers, such as those associated with the aestheticism and decadence of The Yellow Book. It is within the fantastic, however, that Nordau is most directly confronted and social norms most explicitly deformed by art. Wilde's swift move from pedestal to pederast may remove a key figure, but texts such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; The Novel of the White Powder; Dracula; Wells' science fiction dystopias and, more recently, Moore and Campbell's From Hell, rehearse, react to, or reflect upon such concerns. These writings share a central tension: are the effects of decadence and degeneration offering pessimistic prophesy or optimistic alternatives? This module would complement nineteenth-century options and offer a perspective on the Modernist module. For students also taking the Gothic it would be related, although usefully focusing on the closing years of the nineteenth century with a different emphasis. more...	LDCE3X50	30	Semester 2
Gender in American Culture The aim of this module is to think about democracy in the United States through a gendered lens. The Declaration of Independence declared that "all men were created free and equal", but throughout the history of the United States certain social groups have been denied their rights to citizenship and democracy. Therefore this module will be focusing upon the ways in which gender has been central to the construction of citizenship and democracy in the US. These concepts are critical elements in the formation of a modern American identity, and this module will provide a broader understanding of this distinctive feature of American history and society. more...	AMSA3S22	30	Semester 2
Henry James: Questions of Art, Life and Theory In this module students engage with the range of Henry James's writing and also the reproduction of his life and work in contemporary culture. This module aims not simply to add to understanding of James but also to explore the issues that his work raises in relation to the art and history of fiction, philosophy and cultural reproduction. It is suitable not only for literature students who want to study this writer who spans realism and modernism, and short stories, literary criticism and fiction, but also for creative writing students and literature and philosophy students. The final assignment will have a creative writing option that comprises a piece of creative writing with a critical reflection. It can be taken by students who have studied modules in nineteenth-century writing or modernism. more...	LDCE3Z42	30	Semester 2
John Milton's Paradise Lost Paradise Lost is perhaps the finest poem in the language. Its ambition is breathtaking: it begins before time, ends with time, spans the whole of the created universe, and yet focuses on a single, human relationship, on betrayal, recrimination and reconciliation. It is an attempt to explain the co-existence of evil and an omnipotent good God, a response to defeated political aspirations, and an attempt to create a republican poetics. In the module we will read the poem intensively, and seek to understand it in its historical context. Was there a republican aesthetic? How did writers respond to the collapse of radical political ideals and (comparative) religious toleration when 1660 brought the restoration of Charles II? How have literary historians participated in the occlusion of Britain's republican traditions? While there are no pre- or co-requisites, some knowledge of seventeenth-century literature or history, especially through LITE2Y13 Seventeenth-Century Writing, would be an advantage. more...	LDCE3Y70	30	Semester 2
Literature and Deconstruction In an interview with Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida describes literature as `this strange institution which allows one to say everything'. This module explores the writings of Derrida and related thinkers alongside a range of literary texts, including works by Keats, Shakespeare and Joyce. Through a combination of lectures and seminars, we will think about the strangenesses of literature, look at the ways in which it is an `institution' and consider the kinds of freedom ' of speech, writing and thinking ' it permits. Our aim throughout will be to establish the possibilities for literary criticism opened up by deconstruction. The module is open to everyone, but may be of particular interest to those who studied critical theory in the second year. more...	LDCE3X87	30	Semester 1
Literature and Human Rights Reading key philosophical, political, legal and literary texts, this module will track the emergence of human rights as a cultural idea from their conception in the eighteenth century, through to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and beyond in the period after World War Two. The module will address the following questions: What type of human being was presupposed by the declarations of rights? How did the novel help form perceptions about rights and human sympathy? In what ways did the UDHR re-imagine concepts of human rights after the Holocaust? How were these changes reflected in new forms of post-war writing, such as post-colonial and late modernist writing? How can we think about the relation between rights and literature today? This module will suit students who have enjoyed the challenges of philosophy and literary theory. It should also appeal to those who are interested in thinking seriously about the relationship between literature and its `real world' applications and significance. more...	LDCE3X54	30	Semester 2
Literature and Philosophy This module explores the relations between literature and philosophy and differing understandings of the self, love and ethics through close reading of philosophical and literary texts. It is organised chronologically and moves from the classical writing of Plato to modern literature. The module designed for final year students who are studying Literature and Philosophy. It is also open only to students in Literature who have taken modules in Philosophy in years one and two; or by special concession at the discretion of the module organiser to other students who have substantial experience in both Honours level Literature and Honours level Philosophy. more...	LDCE3X45	30	Semester 1
Literature Dissertation: Post-1789 (Aut) This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1789 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3X15	30	Semester 1
Literature Dissertation: Post-1789 (Spr) This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1789 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3X18	30	Semester 2
Literature Dissertation: Pre-1789 (Aut) This module is an advanced-level unit, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3Y77	30	Semester 1
Literature Dissertation: Pre-1789 (Spr) This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3Y78	30	Semester 2
Madness, Medicine, Science and Women's Writing in the Regency This module will study late 18th-century and early 19th-century writings in the context of scientific and medical innovation. We consider whether it may be appropriate to view the work of novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley as a response to, and even a protest against these newly (or, more correctly, nearly) professionalised, male-dominated worlds. These women writers often concern themselves with the 'consumers' as well as the providers of the services offered by these professions; this module considers why that might be and how this kind of contextualisation might impact upon our readings of their work. more...	LDCE3X75	30	Semester 1
Mark Twain and the Gilded Age According to William Faulkner, Mark Twain was 'the first truly American writer ['] the father of American literature.' This module will test such paternity claims and examine their wider ramifications. We will explore Twain's writing, his relationship to the Gilded Age, his contemporaries, and his influence on later American writers. As both author and man, Twain contained multitudes. Few writers have straddled so many genres and styles, and few Americans have embodied so many of the nation's animating forces and tensions. He was, as his friend William Dean Howells felt, 'incomparable', and this module is an opportunity for significant reading and research into his life, work and beyond. more...	AMSA3L20	30	Semester 2
Medieval Arthurian Traditions From Welsh folklore to Monty Python, the tales of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have excited and intrigued generations. Why? To answer this question we explore the development of the legend from its twelfth-century Celtic roots through to a number of twentieth-century film adaptations. How the legend has been translated across form, genres, cultures and ages will be studied, including examples from Middle English Arthurian Texts, translations of the Welsh Mabinogion, of Monmouth's Latin chronicle and French romance texts. This module will enable students familiar with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to enhance their awareness of the wider Arthurian traditions within which this text belongs, but is also suitable for students who are encountering medieval literature for the first time. more...	LDCE3Y82	30	Semester 2
Mind, Body and Literature The sense of loss in a Hardy poem, the parallel universe of a science fiction story, the sombre world of a Scandinavian crime novel: all have in common that they make the reader think, feel and possibly act. Drawing on an understanding of literature as writing which both engages and affects us, we look at a variety of literary texts (e.g, by Blake, Hardy, Lawrence, Hughes) and consider what they have in common with the everyday (clocks, teddy-bears, congregation ceremonies) and the bizarre (zombies, unicorns, ghosts). We consider how we understand text worlds, how metaphor relates to the body, whether real emotions can arise from fictional texts. Participants should have an open mind, a desire to understand literary theories, and a readiness to think outside the box. more...	LDCE3X09	30	Semester 1
Multi-Ethnic American Writing America has long been interpreted as the location of social possibility founded upon a desire to assimilate and negate ethnic 'others'. This module traces the literary responses of four distinct 'American' cultures: Native American; African American; Asian American; and Mexican American. Each group of texts engage with the specific historical, cultural and political relationships between the US and each author's country of origin or national/cultural history, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics will include race and racism, colonisation, imperialism, slavery, segregation, immigration, and illegality/invisibility, with an emphasis upon contemporary experiences. more...	AMSA3L12	30	Semester 2
Native American Writing and Film This module considers Native American writing and film as sites of cultural and political resistance, analysing the ways in which a diverse range of Native authors, screenwriters and directors within the United States respond to contemporary tribal socio-economic and political conditions. Taking popular ideas of 'the Indian', this module considers the ways in which stereotypes and audience expectations are subverted and challenged. Topics include race and racism, indigeneity, identity, culture, gender, genre, land and notions of 'home', community, dialogue, postcolonial theory in its application to those who remain colonised, and political issues such as human rights and environmental racism. more...	AMSA3S02	30	Semester 2
Nervous Narratives `We all say it's nerves, and none of us knows what it means', says a character in Wilkie Collins' 1860 novel, The Woman in White. Our aim is to think about how a discourse of the `nerves' ' the `nervous temperament' and nervous illness ' can be both so pervasive culturally and so slippery in its meaning. This interdisciplinary module takes you from the late 17th century, when the concept of `neurologie' first emerged, to the 21st century, linking literary, medical and philosophical writing to explore the representation of the `nerves'. The historical range of the module is not meant to imply a transhistorical understanding of nervous illness or temperament, but rather will enable us to analyse the historically specific nature of the nervous body and what it is made to mean, culturally, within different contexts. In this way, we will be working with issues as diverse as religious `enthusiasm', hysteria and hypochondria, sensibility, sensation, fear of modernity, manliness and effeminacy, shell-shock, PTSD and the concepts of the healthy or fragile body of the nation. Spanning time and genre, the literary texts studied will take us from the earliest, Jonathan Swift's satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704) up to the contemporary: Siri Hustvedt's novel, What I Loved (2003) and her analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010). more...	LDCE3X83	30	Semester 1
New American Century: Culture and Crisis A two semester special subject American Studies module that reads contemporary American culture through the lens of crisis. On the eve of the twenty-first century it appeared that the United States of America was indeed entering into a new American Century with its role as global leader as strongly defined as it was a century earlier. However, the last decade has been witness to a nation in turmoil and crisis, from the conflict between a universalising (Americanising) globalisation and an introspective nationalism; the war on terror and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq; environmental crisis and disaster; the conflict surrounding immigration and national identity, to the present financial crisis. The renewed and vigorous return to rhetoric of national `unity' that characterised the campaign and election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2008 highlighted the historical divisions and crises of American society and underscored that contemporary America is in crisis geopolitically, economically, democratically, environmentally, and culturally. Indeed, Obama's presidency has witnessed further polarisation of American politics and culture with the birth of the Tea Party Movement and the very recent Occupy Wall Street (now global) movement. Through a variety of cultural texts, from literature, film and documentary, political speeches and letters, to historical texts and pop culture, this course examines the ways in which these crises have been culturally and politically constructed and given particular sets of meaning and the ways in which these `meanings' have been utilised and mobilised to further create `Fortress America' and its particular brand of nationalism at the expense of all `others', whether outside or inside the United States. The way culture has engaged with, coproduced, and resisted these sets of meanings will be the main focus of this module. more...	AMSA3S1Y	60	Year Period
Place, Race and Space: American Migration and Citizenship This module will examine the contradictions of place-making, spatial mobility, and citizenship in the Americas by looking at the movement and settlement of immigrants and migrants since the 1870s. Although the concepts of place-making and spatial mobility appear to be contradictory, immigrants and migrants in their quest to find a home, move across regions, borders, and continents. Their ability to settle in certain places, depends on the economic and cultural conditions that prevail in the host locality and on the political-economic structure of the host society. Citizenship becomes an important variable in this process, because non-citizens are more vulnerable to social, political, and economic changes. more...	AMSA3S11	30	Semester 1
Poetry After Modernism This module will survey a wide range of post-war British poetry actively engaged with the Modernist tradition of Eliot, Pound and others. Reading critical texts alongside poems, it will introduce students to lesser-known writers, such as the Welsh poet Lynette Roberts and the Scottish poet W.S. Graham, as well as considering well-known English poets such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes from a Modernist perspective. Recognising the influence of contemporary American verse on experimental poets such as J.H. Prynne and Paul Muldoon will also be an important theme. A chronological syllabus will take students from 1945 up to the present day, and there will be a chance to write creatively as well as critically as part of the assessment. Students wishing to take this module must have taken LDCE2Z15 Modernism. more...	LDCE3Z60	30	Semester 2
Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century The poetry of the nineteenth century is often thought of as being caught between the two stools of Romanticism and Modernism. This module examines the development of poetry from Romanticism to Modernism, and asks in particular whether the poetry of the nineteenth century can claim our attention in its own right, rather than as a late avatar of Romanticism or as a foretaste of the excitements of Modernism. The focus of the module, then, is on close critical engagement with a large range of nineteenth century poetry and poetics, including the work of poet-critic Matthew Arnold, poet-priest Gerard M. Hopkins, and of other writers from Christina Rossetti to Algernon Charles Swinburne. Due notice will also be taken of nineteenth-century continental and American poetry. more...	LDCE3X71	30	Semester 1
Queer Literature and Theory This module offers students the chance to learn about LGBTQ literature and its development in English-speaking countries, as well as approaches to queer theory. This means analysing sexuality and gender and the representation of such identities in literature. Authors studied may include Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Gore Vidal, and Sarah Waters, as well as children's books and young adult novels by Alex Sanchez, Nancy Garden, Ellen Wittlinger, and Marcus Ewert. Authors of theoretical texts looked at may include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, and Teresa de Lauretis. Understanding how LGBTQ characters are featured in literature also helps us to see how queer people are understood in a given society in general. This course also aims to look at a variety of genres in order to see how these different text types work and how they approach similar material in different ways. more...	LDCE3X58	30	Semester 2
Regency Women Writers This module situates the work of various women writers of the Regency period in literary and historical contexts. The main texts under discussion are by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Maria Edgeworth. The unit considers themes which - although not exclusive to women's writing at this time - occur strikingly frequently in the work of Regency women. These themes include sanity, madness and ideas about the mind, and literary devices such as the love-mad woman. Health, ill-health and the development of medicine are central to these fictions and the course, and we also discuss the figure of the doctor, the quack and the 'psychiatrist' in these texts. We look at writings by Regency women travellers whose destinations ranged from Italy to Bath, Sweden and Revolutionary France. more...	LDCE3X80	30	Semester 2
Revenge Tragedy: Ancient and Modern This seminar explores the different ways in which the concept of revenge has been conceived and represented in a range of dramatic texts. The module covers three distinct groups of primary materials: classical tragedy (in translation) including Aeschylus's Oresteia; early modern revenge tragedy including works by Shakespeare, Tourneur and Kyd; and modern cinematic explorations of the revenge formula including Get Carter, Old Boy and Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. Topics discussed include the relationship between classical and Christian attitudes to revenge, contemporary strictures upon private vengeance, the representation of justice through the ages, the limitations of the revenge tragedy formula. more...	LDCE3Y86	30	Semester 2
Satire `Satire is problematic, open ended, essayistic, ambiguous in relation to history, uncertain in its political effects, resistant to final closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, ambivalent about the pleasures it offers' (Dustin Griffin). The aim of this module is to investigate the problematic territory of satire. Using examples from modern and contemporary fiction and journalism alongside early modern and classical satire, we will formulate a critical and conceptual map, which will in turn allow us to discuss some of the problems of satire (those of genre, of gender, of politics, of morality, of history), and to explore some of the paradoxes of its strategies and functions (freedom versus limits; subversion versus conformity; transformation versus stasis). Writers under discussion will include Juvenal, Horace, Swift and Pope; John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague; Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, and Jonathan Coe. more...	LDCE3X62	30	Semester 2
Shakespeare: Shadow and Substance Platonist epistemology permeated Elizabethan culture: the aim of this module is to explore the relationship of Shakespeare's topic of the world as a stage to Neoplatonic conceptions of perception, politics, poetry and love. more...	LDCE3Y36	30	Semester 2
Tales of the Jazz Age This module examines American prose of the 1920s in the context of the Jazz Age. American literature of the 20s is often conflated with modernism, or the expatriate experience, or the Harlem Renaissance; this module will consider 1920s writing in the context of the market and the rise of professional authorship, anxieties about imitation and the middlebrow and conformism, and the pressures of commercial success on fiction. It will draw on reception studies and the influence of publication formats (mass-market magazines, serial publication, the burgeoning market for film adaptations). Texts will be drawn from a mix of 'high' and 'low.' After considering the pressures of commercialism on the publication of The Waste Land, texts could include the short stories of Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Babbitt, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Winesburg, Ohio, Glimpses of the Moon, and Manhattan Transfer. Students will also be expected to research journalism of the day, such as The New Yorker and the New York Times, which have accessible online archives. more...	AMSA3L31	30	Semester 1
The American Body This module reads the changing values, presentations and representations of the body that move through and construct American culture. This module will involve pairing theoretical perspectives with current and historical ideas of the body to allow us to interrogate intellectual and popular meanings assigned to and played out through the body, reading particular moments in American writing, art, photography and popular forms for the things they might tell us about corporality and self presentation, but also about the wider structures of the social and cultural environment. We will engage with canonical debates about race, gender, sexuality and ideas of `representation', but also with categories that cut across and through these modes of reading ' with the normal and the ideal, ideas of illness and wellness, ability and disability, of the organic and the machine, of the body under servitude, or under punishment, and with the whole idea of embodiment in itself. This module ' like all other modules at this level - requires a substantial, regular, reading commitment. more...	AMSA3S30	30	Semester 2
The Condition of England Novel 1818-2000 This module will examine the classic nineteenth-century 'Condition of 'England' novel alongside mid-to-late twentieth-century representations of England (and myths of national identity). Attention will be given to post-colonial writing as a significant part of the question: What is it to be English (or British)? more...	LDCE3Z09	30	Semester 1
The Gothic This module seeks to cover some 'canonical' texts of the Gothic Novel (1764-1820) in Walpole, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and to consider some later developments of the gothic mode in later 19th and 20th centuries: Poe, Le Fanu, Stevenson, MR James, Elizabeth Bowen, David Storey and Angela Carter. The course also seeks to introduce students to some of the theoretical and historical arguments around the contested nature of the term 'gothic', the Uncanny, the subversiveness or otherwise of this kind of writing, and its relation to the novel genre. more...	LDCE3X41	30	Semester 1
The Literary 1960s When thinking of the sixties, literature, in general, is not what immediately springs to mind - pushed, as it is, to the background of music and the counterculture. Yet the decade brought about many profound changes in the paradigms of literature. Amongst such changes was the proliferation of metafiction as a narrative response to both the 'exhaustion' of literature in the light of the period's dramatic events, and to the new literary and philosophical developments in critical theory (poststructuralism). There was also the emergence of two 'new' genres: new journalism, and the non-fiction novel. This module is an examination of literary responses to the many changes and challenges brought about in this decade. It will discuss whether literature simply recoiled into solipsistic abstraction or whether it was a motivating force in the general struggle to conceptualize a `new' or countercultural American consciousness. more...	AMSA3L23	30	Semester 1
The Literature of World War One The module will examine representations of World War One. As a Level 3 module, the focus will be inter-disciplinary. Literary materials will be contextualised using historical and other sources. Use will also be made of memoirs, letters, diaries, and photographs. Students will be encouraged to conduct research using the internet and other facilities. more...	LDCE3Z10	30	Semester 2
The Poetics of Place: Post 1945 American Poetry and Environment The American poet Charles Olson famously declared: `I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.' This module explores how a range of linguistically innovative American poets, from 1945 to the present, have engaged this question of space and environment in their writings. There will be a particular focus on how scientific literature, natural history writing, field guides, and eco-criticism have contributed to poets' theories of poetry and poetics as well as an emphasis on the role environmental notions of place and space play in forming and critiquing ideas of American identity. more...	AMSA3L24	30	Semester 2
The Rising Tide of the Transpacific This module considers the ways in which American literature has engaged with the opening up of Pacific space from the early nineteenth century to the present. From Melville's adventures on whaling vessels throughout the Pacific, to Pearl Harbour and anxieties about Japanese presence in and beyond the borders of the United States, to writing by contemporary Asian-American authors whose work evinces influences from China, Korea and India, the texts on this course chart the ways in which the Pacific Ocean and its peoples have contributed to, created, and contested American national narratives. The module will develop students' insights into issues of U.S. national history and cultural geography, and deepen their engagement with current theories of nationalism and transnationalism either in preparation for, or as a frame for reflection on, their studies abroad. more...	AMSA3L35		Semester 1
Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense and Modern Writing It's widely recognised that modernist literature is characterised by a revolution of the word. Less widely recognised, and little explored, is the relationship between modernist linguistic experimentalism and literary nonsense, as practised by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and others. This course will begin with these well-known nonsense writers and explore their roots in earlier nonsense, including Shakespeare's, before going on to examine some of the adventures in language of major modernist and postmodernist writers. Authors studied are likely to include late Joyce, early Auden, Stein, Stevens, Cummings, Crane, Nabokov, Koch, Muldoon, Ashbery. The course will also set these avant-garde writers in the unfamiliar context of the mainstream fantasy writers who also come out of Carroll and the nonsense tradition, most likely Tolkien and Peake, whose imaginary worlds are based on their own invented languages. This is not a course on children's literature, but on some very challenging modern literature, though it should appeal to those who take a childish pleasure in wordplay and fantasy, and equally to those intrigued by philosophical issues around language. It would follow on very well from the second-year Modernism module. more...	LDCE3X01	30	Semester 1
Traumaturgies: Reading and Writing Trauma Across Contexts Trauma haunts the writing of the twentieth century. Slavery, war, patriarchy, terrorism, genocide, colonialism, modernity, technology and post-modernity: these legacies demand to be written and read, and engender a writing singular to their traumas. Yet the writing of these wounds, and the critical work that reads it, raises fundamental questions about whether trauma can ever be represented or understood. Spreading beyond their contexts, these questions effect their own traumas, cracking open our assumptions about what it is possible to read, to write, and indeed to think. Working roughly from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, this module reads a selection of theoretical, literary and critical texts that aim to write and read trauma across cultural, historical, personal and public contexts. more...	LDCE3X91	30	Semester 1
Ulysses This module will provide students with the opportunity to read one of the most famous, yet notoriously unread, novels of the twentieth century. The module has a number of aims. First, it will give students the time and opportunity to try to read and understand James Joyce's Ulysses. Secondly, the module will introduce students to some of the formal innovations typical of modernist writing through the close analysis of techniques such as interior monologue and mythic analogy. Thirdly, it will allow students to read a wide range of responses to Ulysses, both among Joyce's contemporaries, and in the history of twentieth century criticism. Fourthly, the module will situate the text historically, with a particular focus on the way that the text's obscenity affected its reception and circulation in the 1920s and 1930s. more...	LDCE3Z50	30	Semester 2
Virgil's Classic Epic This module will explore the centrality of Virgil's Aeneid to Medieval and Renaissance culture. It will examine developing attitudes to the Classical literary legacy and accommodation and reinvention of Virgil's epic poem within new religious, political and literary contexts. The course will begin with exploration of Virgil's poem on its own terms before turning to reworkings of the 'Aeneid' by Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Douglas and Marlowe, the Renaissance invention of a 13th Book to 'complete' Virgil's poem, and the recasting of classical epic within the very different conventions of medieval and Renaissance romance. Previous experience of classical or medieval literature is not required. more...	LDCE3Y18	30	Semester 2
Writing and New Media in Early America Contemporary life is dominated by emergent media forms and new means of apprehending reality. But how unprecedented is this? American culture from the Colonial period through the nineteenth-century also witnessed the escalating influence of various forms of `media': an explosion of magazines and newspapers; newly instantaneous telegraph communication; daguerreotypes and photography; mass circuits for public speaking; early sound recording. This was not only a technological and social process but also a literary phenomenon. Just as with today's 'new media,' these changes transformed American writing and are responsible for much of what is striking about classic American literature. This module focuses on the relationship of literary art to this media landscape during 1750-1900, from the age of Franklin to that of Brady, Edison and Pulitzer. Throughout the semester, we will be defining what we mean by `media', considering the interaction between genre and medium, channels of information, data storage and transmission. Subjects the module will cover include: the emergence of literary journalism; the rise of the foreign correspondent; the symbolic figure of the photographer and journalist in American fiction; the effect of early sound recording on literary aesthetics. Questions it poses include: what effect did fresh modes of writing, listening and seeing have on fiction or poetry?; have `journalism' and `literature' always been mutually-exclusive? How have ethnic groups used such media as distinct modes of expression? These issues will be approached thematically by media type, with two sessions each on: 1) Colonial newsprint; 2) literary magazines; 3) the mass penny press and telegraph; 4) the lyceum; 5) the phonograph. Authors to be considered along the way include Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Nellie Bly and Upton Sinclair. more...	AMSA3L28	30	Semester 2
You may also pick any of the modules that begin with: LDCE3X37 LDCE3Z64 LDCE3X94

Disclaimer

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the modules listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the annual monitoring, review and update of modules and regular (five-yearly) review of course programmes. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes and their constituent modules, there will normally be prior consultation of students and others. It is also possible that the University may not be able to offer a module for reasons outside of its control, such as the illness of a member of staff or sabbatical leave. Where this is the case, the University will endeavour to inform students.

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Literature, Drama and Creative Writing Courses

Literature, Drama and Creative Writing

BA English and American Literature (QT37)

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