| BIOGRAPHY | LDCE3X46 | 30 |
| 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. |
| BIOGRAPHY | LDCE3X48 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3X46: WRITING LIFE: BIOGRAPHY AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| CHAUCER | LDCE3Y05 | 30 |
| 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. |
| CHILDREN'S LITERATURE | LDCE3X67 | 30 |
| 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 fairy tales, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and their influence on the field, and examining other authors such as Charles Kingsley, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume and Lemony Snicket. By studying the development of children's literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society. |
| CHILDREN'S LITERATURE | LDCE3X69 | 20 |
| THIS IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LITE3X67 CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. 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 fairy tales, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and their influence on the field, and examining other authors such as Charles Kingsley, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume and Lemony Snicket. By studying the development of children's literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society. |
| DRAMA AND LITERATURE: THE QUESTION OF GENRE | LDCE3X06 | 30 |
| 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. |
| EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA | LDCE3Y81 | 30 |
| 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. |
| EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA | LDCE3Y83 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3Y81: EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| FIN DE SIECLE: FANTASIES OF DECADENCE AND DEGENERATION | LDCE3X50 | 30 |
| 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. |
| FIN DE SIECLE: FANTASIES OF DECADENCE AND DEGENERATION | LDCE3X52 | 20 |
| THIS IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LITE3X50 FIN DE SIECLE: FANTASIES OF DECADENCE AND DEGENERATION, AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. 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. |
| HENRY JAMES: QUESTIONS OF ART, LIFE AND THEORY | LDCE3Z32 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LITE3Z42 HENRY JAMES: QUESTIONS OF ART, LIFE AND THEORY AND IS AVAILABLE ONLY TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS. |
| HENRY JAMES: QUESTIONS OF ART, LIFE AND THEORY | LDCE3Z42 | 30 |
| 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. It can be taken by students who have studied modules in nineteenth-century writing or modernism. Reserved for students on course(s): Q300U1, Q300U2, Q200U1, Q201U1, Q3W8U1, QT37U1, QV31U1, W400U1, WQ43U1, VQ53U1, TQ73U1. |
| JOHN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST | LDCE3Y70 | 30 |
| 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. |
| LITERATURE AND DECONSTRUCTION | LDCE3X87 | 30 |
| 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. |
| LITERATURE AND DECONSTRUCTION | LDCE3X89 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3X87: LITERATURE AND DECONSTRUCTION AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| LITERATURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS | LDCE3X54 | 30 |
| 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. |
| LITERATURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS | LDCE3X56 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3X54: LITERATURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY | LDCE3X45 | 30 |
| 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. |
| LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY | LDCE3X61 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LITE3X45 LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. 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. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (AUT) | LDCE3X15 | 30 |
| 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 1830 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the unit organiser by the end of the previous semester. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (AUT) | LDCE3X31 | 20 |
| This module is a 20-credit version of LITE3X15 LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1830 (AUT) and is available ONLY to non-HUM and Visiting Students. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (SPR) | LDCE3X18 | 30 |
| 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 1830 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. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (SPR) | LDCE3X30 | 20 |
| This module is a 20-credit version of LITE3X18 LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1830 (SPR) and is available ONLY to non-HUM and Visiting Students. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (AUT) | LDCE3Y77 | 30 |
| 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. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (AUT) | LDCE3Y79 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3Y77: LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1830 (AUT) AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (SPR) | LDCE3Y78 | 30 |
| 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. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (SPR) | LDCE3Y80 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3Y78: LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1830 (SPR) AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| MADNESS, MEDICINE, SCIENCE AND WOMEN'S WRITING IN THE REGENCY | LDCE3X75 | 30 |
| 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. |
| MADNESS, MEDICINE, SCIENCE AND WOMEN'S WRITING IN THE REGENCY | LDCE3X77 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LITE3X75 MADNESS, MEDICINE, SCIENCE AND WOMEN'S WRITING IN THE REGENCY AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. 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. |
| MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN TRADITIONS | LDCE3Y82 | 30 |
| 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. |
| MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN TRADITIONS | LDCE3Y84 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3Y82: MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN TRADITIONS AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| MIND, BODY AND LITERATURE | LDCE3X09 | 30 |
| 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. |
| MIND, BODY AND LITERATURE | LDCE3X11 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3X09: MIND, BODY AND LITERATURE AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| NERVOUS NARRATIVES | LDCE3X83 | 30 |
| ‘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). |
| NERVOUS NARRATIVES | LDCE3X85 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3X83: NERVOUS NARRATIVES AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| POETRY AFTER MODERNISM | LDCE3Z60 | 30 |
| 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. |
| POETRY AFTER MODERNISM | LDCE3Z62 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3Z60: POETRY AFTER MODERNISM AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| POETRY OF THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY | LDCE3X71 | 30 |
| 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. |
| POETRY OF THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY | LDCE3X73 | 20 |
| THIS IS A 20 CREDIT VERSION OF LDCEX371: POETRY OF THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| QUEER LITERATURE AND THEORY | LDCE3X58 | 30 |
| 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. Authors studied will include Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Armistead Maupin, Charlotte Mendelson, and Sarah Waters, as well as young adult novels by David La Rochelle, Alex Sanchez, Nancy Garden, Julie Anne Peters, and David Levithan. Using queer theory will also allow us to analyse literature from the perspective of gender and sexuality, and authors looked at will include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, 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. |
| QUEER LITERATURE AND THEORY | LDCE3X60 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3X58: QUEER LITERATURE AND THEORY AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/ EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| REGENCY WOMEN WRITERS | LDCE3X80 | 30 |
| 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. |
| REGENCY WOMEN WRITERS | LDCE3X82 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSI0N OF LDCE3X80: REGENCY WOMEN WRITERS AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| REVENGE TRAGEDY: ANCIENT AND MODERN | LDCE3Y86 | 30 |
| 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. |
| REVENGE TRAGEDY: ANCIENT AND MODERN | LDCE3Y88 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3Y86: REVENGE TRAGEDY: ANCIENT AND MODERN AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| SATIRE | LDCE3X62 | 30 |
| ‘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. |
| SATIRE | LDCE3X64 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3X62: SATIRE AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| SHAKESPEARE: SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE | LDCE3Y36 | 30 |
| 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. |
| SHAKESPEARE: SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE | LDCE3Y40 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LITE3Y36, SHAKESPEARE: SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND NOVEL 1818-2000 | LDCE3Z03 | 20 |
| This module is a 20-credit version of LITE3Z09 THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND NOVEL: 1818-2000 and is available ONLY to non-HUM and Visiting Students. |
| THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND NOVEL 1818-2000 | LDCE3Z09 | 30 |
| 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)? |
| THE GOTHIC | LDCE3X41 | 30 |
| 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. |
| THE GOTHIC | LDCE3X51 | 20 |
| This module is a 20-credit version of LITE3X41 THE GOTHIC and is available ONLY to non-HUM and visiting students. |
| THE LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR ONE | LDCE3Z10 | 30 |
| The module will examine representations of World War One. As a Level 3 unit, 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. |
| THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: NONSENSE AND MODERN WRITING | LDCE3X01 | 30 |
| 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. |
| THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: NONSENSE AND MODERN WRITING | LDCE3X03 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3X01: THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: NONSENSE AND MODERN WRITING AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| TRAUMATURGIES: READING AND WRITING TRAUMA ACROSS CONTEXTS | LDCE3X91 | 30 |
| 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. |
| TRAUMATURGIES: READING AND WRITING TRAUMA ACROSS CONTEXTS | LDCE3X93 | 20 |
| THIS MODULE IS A 20-CREDIT VERSION OF LDCE3X91: TRAUMATURGIES: READING AND WRITING TRAUMA ACROSS CONTEXTS AND IS AVAILABLE TO VISITING/EXCHANGE STUDENTS ONLY. |
| ULYSSES | LDCE3Z50 | 30 |
| 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. |
| ULYSSES | LDCE3Z52 | 20 |
| This module is a 20-credit version of LITE3Z50 ULYSSES and is available to Visiting / Exchange students only. |
| VIRGIL'S CLASSIC EPIC | LDCE3Y18 | 30 |
| 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. |
| VIRGIL'S CLASSIC EPIC | LDCE3Y32 | 20 |
| This module is a 20-credit version of LITE3Y18 VIRGIL'S CLASSIC EPIC and is available ONLY to non-HUM and Visiting Students. |
Our teaching received a 96% satisfaction rate in both the 2012 National Student Survey and the 2013 Guardian University Guide league table.