MA Sociocultural Linguistics

This module will focus on how language structure relates to meaning and communication. We will look at various aspects of language structure – sounds, words, sentences and short texts, and relate them to function and meaning. For example, we will discuss how speakers deploy different grammatical resources to give varied representations of events and their participants. We will also explore how different structural choices help speakers express their knowledge, and certainty or uncertainty of events, or how they impose obligations or grant permission to their conversational partners, what means they use to express attitudes and take a stance, and how they figure out what others mean even when they mean something different from what they say.

The module aims to make clear the wider aims of linguistic research, as well as enable students to apply theoretical notions to specific data sets and develop their own skills of linguistic analysis, especially as it relates to human interaction and communication. Language structure will be seen as contextualised and contingent, subject to variation at any one time and change across periods of time.

This course combines a sociolinguistic with a discourse analytic approach in order to explore the socio-cultural contextualisation of language and meaning from two angles: language use and language representation. This dual focus will be evident throughout the course; topics such as language and gender, language and ethnicity, languagte and social class or language and the media will be examined in relation to the socio-cultural (and situational) contexts in which speakers use language as well as in relation to different representations of specific socio-cultural groups in the media and other (written) texts. For example, we will investigate both how women speak and how women are spoken about (e.g. sexist language). Other topics that will be addressed in this course include the political correctness debate; attitudes to non-standard English; multicultural London English and the linguistic construction of identity. 

The course will introduce students to a wide range of empirical research and methodologies. Drawing on analytical tools and frameworks from semiotics, pragmatics, (critical) discourse analysis, conversation analysis, feminist linguistics, ethnography and variationist sociolinguistics, this course will investigate how language is used and meanings are created, interpreted and contested in a range of different texts, discourses and socio-cultural environments.

This module will introduce students to the analysis of discourse and identity in spoken interaction. The course will allow students to develop in-depth, critical understanding of approaches, concepts and debates in spoken discourse analysis. The second aim of the module is to provide students with the opportunity to apply their newly acquired methodological insight to the study of discourse and identity in many different conversational and institutional settings.

A range of methodological frameworks and analytic concepts will be explored, including ethnographic approaches to language analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, membership categorisation analysis, performativity and narrative analysis. Seminar discussions will seek to establish what each of these approaches has to offer to the analysis of discourse practices and identity constructions of speakers in naturally occurring talk. For example, we will consider the question if analysts should or can avoid to bring a priori assumptions about the relevance of macro identity categories such as gender and social class to their data.

The module will also encourage students to carry out their own projects by collecting, transcribing and analysing a sample of spoken language of their choice. Students will then get the opportunity to present and discuss their work with their colleagues in seminars.

The overall aim of this module is to explore the development of the English language, its variation and change, in relation to linguistic and social issues of language contact and multilingualism. Students will have the opportunity to study the spread of English and the rise to its current status as a global language, discuss the establishment of (English) language standards and (standard) varieties world-wide, the emergence of English as a Lingua Franca and other language contact phenomena. The focus will be on the challenges and opportunities open to multilingual societies and to consider the impact of English in multilingual settings. An understanding of Global Englishes and aspects of multilingualism gives students the necessary conceptual and theoretical tools to understand English practices in a multilingual world and to conduct their own research within an area they find of interest.

The module introduces students to a range of empirical studies and debates in a cross-disciplinary field that has become known as intercultural or cross-cultural communication. One of the questions researchers ask in this field is if speaking styles vary from culture to culture. For example, do some groups of speakers accept and encourage more overlap and simultaneous talk than others, or do understandings of directness and politeness vary culturally. Students will study inter/cross-cultural communication in everyday interaction but also in institutional settings, examining talk in business and educational settings such as the multilingual/multi-ethnic classroom. The module also explores the relevance of cultural stereotypes and cultural representations, for example, in media and tourism contexts.

Throughout the module students will need to consider the term ‘culture’ critically, comparing popular definitions of ‘culture’ as homogenous and static with postmodern models that highlight the heterogeneity and fluidity of ‘culture’. Students will become familiar with a range of methodological approaches to the study of language, culture and interaction. These tend to include the ethnography of speaking, interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics and politeness theory. The module will not only ask students to study language/discourse and culture in a range of different English-speaking countries and settings, but it will also invite students to consider a variety of ‘other’ linguistic and cultural contexts.

This module aims to introduce students to contemporary approaches and frameworks of analysis of written texts. The module explores the analytic techniques and principles of written discourse analysis and gives students space to apply these techniques to a wide selection of texts (texts from the contemporary media, advertisements, textbooks, political and administrative texts, texts in translation, etc.). The module leads students to a discussion of how linguistic analysis can illuminate wider social issues, for example issues of power and ideology, issues of representation and identity. Students acquire knowledge of different levels of linguistic analysis, and learn to examine written texts at the micro-level, and to link the micro to the macro. The use of a variety of texts is intended to lead students to debates about language use and social issues in different areas of human activity: media representation, translation, education, etc.

What is English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)? What are ELF implications for language teaching? How can teachers address the plurality of English in their teaching?

English as a lingua franca, and research into the plurality of English, is a vibrant field of investigation and this module aims to bridge the gap between the socio-cultural research on ELF and language teaching/teacher education.

You will start with exploring the dynamic, co-constructed and intercultural nature of ELF, focusing on pragmatic and multilingual aspects, before concentrating on pedagogic implications. Throughout the module, the emphasis is on the plurality of English, the fluidity and intercultural nature of ELF communication. These raise questions for pedagogical applications for the language classroom, which are addressed in relation to various aspects, such as multilingual resources, materials, assessment, a reconceptualization of the notion of communicative competence and ultimately a change of mindset for an ELF-informed pedagogy. The module intends to relate research on ELF (and theoretical questions ELF raises) to the practical concerns of teachers and teacher educators, and relate existing ELF findings to pedagogical practices within a critical pedagogy perspective.

This module is open to students interested in ELF and its applications for the classroom and to language teachers who would like to address ELF and the plurality of English in their pedagogy.

This course is the core course for the MA Critical & Creative Analysis programme. It aims to provide a detailed, intensive introduction to some of the key thinkers who have been influential on the development of cultural theory and analysis. It is necessarily selective, with an emphasis on 20th century European thought, but has its focus on the different cultural critiques and critical cultures that have emerged through different perspectives. Through lectures and group discussions, we will explore the interventions of Simmel, Benjamin, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Alexander, Stengers, Haraway and Serres, among others. The course will appeal to students who wish to spend time deepening their appreciation of theoretical interventions, and who enjoy discussing the implications of theoretical analysis for both sociological research and political critique.

The term ‘social media’ has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Social media is now a crucial aspect of how we form and maintain friendship networks, but it is also increasingly central to commercial exchanges (to branding, PR, advertising), and to news production and consumption (by both professional and citizen journalists).  In this course we consider the historical formation of social media and the lines that can be drawn to contemporary consequences, particularly the blurring of public and private lives, shifts in power relations and the spread of rumors and urban myths that we see today.   Some of the core questions for the course will be how to think about how types of social media content are (re)produced, how data is diffused with and across networks, how social media may reinforce social inequalities, and why social media is an integral part of ‘performed’ social life – not just a fad driven by Facebook and Twitter.  This course will be based around a selection of case studies that will vary from year to year.  In each case we will be asking how we can critically assess what difference (if any) social media has made to everyday life and social structures.

Module Convener: Dhiraj Murthy 

This option module examines the relations between gender, sexuality and media. It aims to explore the ways in which gender and sexuality are constituted through a broad range of media, and how they may be resisted, intervened in and created differently. The module considers media in an open sense, understanding it to include practices of mediation, technological processes and modes of production and consumption, as well as particular cultural forms including television, film, music, digital and social media, art and design. It attends to how gender and sexuality are not stable identities or classifications but are instead processes involving relations with media and technologies, and with ‘race’, ethnicity, class and dis/ability.

The module is taught in a combination of lectures, seminars, screenings and workshops. As well as exploring media through different theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches, practice-research is embedded in the module, meaning that you will try out different practices of making and analysing media. As examples, these practices might include experimenting with creative writing, blogging, collaging, photography, video, drawing. This work will go towards a portfolio that you will build up over the term.

Course convenor: Rebecca Coleman

This course aims to investigate discourses of equality and social justice in the context of the changing manifestations of race, religion, class, gender and sexuality in advanced capitalist and neoliberal times. Taking an interdisciplinary case study approach the course examines international research on pertinent issues such as educational inequalities, migration, religious difference and gendered violence.

The course takes an intersectional approach drawing on feminist perspectives and critical race theory to understand the ‘border crossings’ of transnational peoples as they ‘live out’ new and affective religious, ethnic, class, sexual and gendered identities in rapidly changing global contexts.

The course will focus on three broad areas of inquiry: First, discourses on multiculturalism and concern about ‘the migrant’ frames our focus on social justice. Here we look at race, gender, citizenship and belonging in the context of Islamophobia, securitization and the nation state. Second, mapping differences among raced, gendered, classed and faith based groups in education, health and employment enables a critical analysis of social justice discourses such as ‘diversity‘ in the context of the ubiquitous nature of whiteness, patriarchy and elitism in our institutions. Third, we contextualise the courses’ concern with social justice and inequality by looking at agency and ‘voice’ and the struggle for civil, political and social rights. In particular we examine transnational feminist, ethnic and indigenous social movements and the emergence of postcolonial pedagogies of difference and dissent.

Course convenor: Nirmal Puwar

Interrogate the work that stories do in shaping social life. As such, its focus lies less on the literary or representational dimension of stories and more on the way that stories and 'storying' operate as one of a number of cultural processes through which the possibilities of and for social life and identity are shaped and delimited. It is for this reason that the concept of stories that will be explored in this course has significant social, cultural, political and ethical implications, and also raises provocative methodological questions in the context of social research. In this course students will come to understand the different ways that stories have been analysed in both classic and contemporary social theory and in research. Stories will be understood as descriptive (representational), constitutive (ontological) and relational (ethical). Although stories are strongly associated – for example in sociology, literature and history - with verbal narrative and narrative representation, this course will stimulate thinking and analysis of stories more broadly

in terms of what Mary Louise Pratt has called a 'contact zone' (Pratt 1992) between historically and geographically separate subjects and between different levels, scales and kinds of experience. Course topics such as ‘Stories and the social’, ‘Fiction as method’ and ‘Case stories’ will demonstrate ideas and discussions about how stories move across, divide, puncture and assemble diverse perspectives, spaces and temporalities of experience. Students will be introduced not only to the cultural and discursive dimensions of stories, but also to stories and storying as social, political, affective, visual, and material.

By discussing and investigating these different approaches to stories, students will be introduced to a range of theorists, debates and methods, inviting and supporting trans- and inter-disciplinary thinking. In this course, students will learn to identify and recognise the different implications of working with stories, and stories and doing an analysis of stories. Thus, as well as addressing issues of representation, ontology, epistemology and ethics, the course will consider some of the methodological issues that are raised, appeased or aggravated by the use of stories in social research. These issues may include the problems of interpretation, power, reflexivity, ‘truth’ and inter-subjectivity as they apply to textual data and to qualitative research. The course will provide opportunities for students to develop theoretical and methodological skills and knowledge that can be used to support their own research.

This is a course about the political and economic organisation (‘political economy’) of the media with particular reference to western industrial democracies. It addresses the issues raised by commentators who explain media processes and the relationship of mass communications to society in terms of political economy. However, it steps outside the confines of this tradition of thought to consider other explanations of the functioning of the mass media. This opens up a broad based discussion of the role of the media in society, what shapes the media, how it should be organised and what influence it has, viewed from a variety of viewpoints. As you will see, there are liberal and radical political economy answers to all these questions. But there are also other answers as well. You will have to make up your mind about which positions you think are most convincing and best supported by the evidence. This course is designed to help you make your way through the literature, guide you through the relevant debates and assist you to reach your own conclusions.

This module looks at the rise of promotional culture (public relations, advertising, marketing and branding), promotional intermediaries and their impact on society.

The first part of the module will look at the history of promotional culture and will offer some conflicting theoretical approaches with which to view its development. These include professional/industrial and economic, political economy and other critiques, post-Fordist and postmodern perspectives, audience and consumer society accounts, semiotics and textual analysis.

The second part will look at specific case areas, investigating the ways promotion intervenes, interacts and mediates social relations and organisations. These sector studies include fashion and taste, hi-tech commodities and innovation, popular culture and creativity (film, TV, music), celebrities and public figures, political parties and promotional politics, and markets and values.

In each of these areas, questions will be asked about the influence of promotional practices on the production, communication and consumption of ideas and products as well as larger discourses, fashions/genres and socio-economic trends.

This module will examine how histories of Western imperialism have shaped the landscapes of the present. Our task is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to longer histories of empire. In addition to introducing key concepts from critical race and postcolonial studies, lectures will also offer phenomenological interpretations of how race structures the present often by receding into the background, as well as drawing on theories of affect and emotion to explore how security regimes become racial regimes. Our concern is with how histories of empire ‘get under the skin,’ and set reading include works that reflect on the experience of being or becoming strangers, or ‘bodies out of place.’ We attend to the intersection between race, gender and sexuality throughout.

The module provides an exploration of recent themes in feminist and cultural theory. It also allows you to explore a series of case study topics within the broad fields of gender cultural studies. You will become aware of the range of theoretical resources mobilised by feminist writers to account for, or make sense of, how bodies take shape over time. You will become familiar with the feminist approaches to questions of affect and emotion.

The module explores the consequences of social and mobile media in a comparative context. What does it mean to live entangled with social and mobile media? What are the consequences of the culture of ‘always on’ connectivity for our identities, relationships and communities? What are the implications for inequality? Are there any opportunities for protest movements or for coping during emergencies? These questions have never been as urgent as they are today. During the pandemic, we have collectively experienced a huge dependency on social and mobile media as our professional and social lives migrated online. The module offers an opportunity to critically unpack some of the assumptions made about media technologies, starting by unravelling the very notion of social media.

 The module pivots on the double logic of social media: while social media enable socialities and intimacies at a distance, they are also key instruments of extraction and surveillance. This tension between agency and corporate or state control through datafication is a theme that runs across all lectures. The module takes a distinctly non-western approach focusing on the experience of social media in the context of everyday life. The key texts informing our seminar discussions are ethnographies from the global south. Through this comparative approach, we aim to question widely held assumptions about social media as well notions of intimacy, care, labour, protest and inequalities.

While both academic and industry research has long established how racial and ethnic minorities are portrayed negatively in the media, in recent times there has been an increase in the level of campaigning around issues of representation – from the trending of #oscarssowhite, to the activism of the website Media Diversified, and recent parliamentary interventions made by actors Lenny Henry and Idris Elba demanding more diversity on and off screen. The aim of this module is to develop a rigorous, theoretically and empirically grounded approach to the topic of diversity in the media in order to help students develop an in-depth and nuanced understanding of how cultural industries work to produce discourses around race.

The unique intervention of the Race and the Cultural Industries module is in drawing attention to the context of production. It explores the experience of people of colour working in the cultural industries to help explain why representations of race take the form that they do. In order to address the varied contextual factors that shape representations of race, there is a strong stress on interdisciplinarity, combining critical media studies (including political economy and cultural studies perspectives) with race critical scholarship (postcolonial theory, poststructuralist and post-Marxist approaches). By focusing on cultural production the overall aim of the module is to demonstrate how racialized minorities who work in the media are constrained (or enabled) by the conditions of the cultural industries. Moreover, the module is designed to help future practitioners conceptualise their own forms of antiracist media practice.

This module is concerned with social and cultural constructions and understandings of gender, sexuality and the body as discussed in anthropology and beyond. The main aim of the module is to develop a critical understanding of some of the major theoretical approaches to gender, sex and the body, as they have been and are relevant to anthropology. In European intellectual history ideas about the body have often revolved around the biological binary categories male and female. In this module, however, using a range of ethnographic examples we look at ways in which the idea of male and female is perceived, embodied and challenged, cross-culturally, in different contexts, and at different historical moments. The topics addressed range from work, performance and narrations of the self, to queer communities and families, and from biopolitics, and new technologies of the body/reproduction, the body, gender, and nation, and gender and globalisation. By the end of the module, you will be expected to be familiar with the main theoretical perspectives in anthropology on gender, sexuality and the related politics. You should also be aware of the historical changes which have marked the analysis of these concepts and be able to use ethnographic material as evidence for theoretical points.

This is the core module for the interdisciplinary MA programme in Anthropology & Cultural Politics.
In this module, we will draw on a number of questions that are common to Anthropology, cultural studies, visual cultures, science and technology studies, and the social sciences and humanities in general: culture, power, the public, everyday life, property, things…. In these terms, the reading list is widely interdisciplinary. The objective of the module is to assess the particular contribution that Anthropology can make to these discussions.

The module material is intended to take anthropology’s engagement with culture into areas of public and political concern. Since these areas are potentially limitless, the topics included have been selected for their ability to equip students with knowledge of key theorists and issues that will help illuminate contemporary society as well as students’ specific areas of interest. You are encouraged to draw upon your own practice and other experience in seminar discussions as appropriate.

Anthropology has for a long time had a troubled relation with history. The scientific racism of the 19th century was replaced in the beginning of the 20th century with ahistorical, site-specific studies. But with time, history became an issue again – the growing interpenetration forced by colonialism, and capitalism and the world wars questioned the assumptions of radical cultural difference on which synchronic studies were based. Inevitably, history and historical change has become the heart of anthropological theory. A number of questions and dichotomies on historical continuities and changes have emerged, both at a theoretical and an empirical level: the relation of structure and agency; the place of consciousness and historicity in relation to historical events; the formation of a global culture versus the persistence of local cultures; the meaning of terms such as ‘modernity’, ‘capitalism’ and the ‘West’.

This module provides a general introduction to issues of culture, language and identity and their importance for the study of educational theory and practice. The module will investigate the social and cultural basis of teaching and learning and how teacher and learner identities are formed. It will explore a broad range of material from British and other national contexts, enabling students to become familiar with some of the main ways in which ‘culture’, ‘language’ and ‘identity’ have been conceptualised. As a core module it will also serve as a point of introduction to many of the ideas and discourse that are explored on other modules on the programme.

This module focuses on issues of race, ethnicity and cultural diversity in education. We will begin by considering what these terms mean, before discussing how and why ethnic and racial boundaries have been constructed through history, and to what extent people accept or contest these boundaries. We will pay particular attention to the history of the concept of racism, and to some of its contemporary manifestations around the world.

From these starting points we will move on to consider how these concepts impact on education. Issues such as what is or should constitute a 'good pupil', the nature of the teacher’s role in the classroom, what knowledge is valued, and who decides, will be investigated. We will also consider how other aspects of identity, notably social class and gender, intersect with ethnicity and race to affect learning and learner identities in different ways.

The module aims to challenge stereotypes, and notions of ethnic identities as fixed and unchanging. It invites participants to reflect on their own ethnic and cultural background, and to explore how this influences their own understandings of racialisation and identity. It also expects participants to draw directly on their own personal experiences as learners and, where appropriate, as teachers. Throughout the module we will seek to consider strategies and discourse which lead to a more inclusive socio-cultural approach to teaching and learning, and to experience the excitement and complexity of being part of an inclusive multicultural classroom ourselves.

This core module for the ‘Comparative Literature & Criticism’ pathway of the MA in Comparative Literary Studies will introduce you to the main concepts of comparative literary theory and practice and its principal debates, complementing these with textual analyses and the opportunity to engage in comparative readings. We will examine key aspects of the development of the discipline of “comparative literature”, and study the theoretical frameworks elaborated to describe the ways texts relate to, derive from, or influence other texts (such as influence, imitation and intertextuality, translation, and reception). Historical relationships and how these are constructed will be examined, focussing on the idea of tradition, the concept of the canon and its revisions, as well as the importance of literary history in our understanding of literature.

The literary texts and films studied will enable you to study “in action” central concepts of comparative critical practice, focussing for instance on genre; topoi; thematic approaches; textual rewritings; “translations” of texts to different genres (e.g. poetry to prose) or media (e.g. written text to film).

The module will ask questions such as: what happens to a text and its meaning when it is adapted to or referenced in a new geographical, historical, or social context? What does this mean for the concept of meaning itself? What is the relationship between genre, theme and story? Between a historically situated national identity and the crossing of linguistic, cultural and historical boundaries?

Teaching Mode: 3-hour seminar, including lecture-type input from the tutor.

This core module for the pathway in ‘Modern Literary Theory’ surveys key currents in literary and cultural theory from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Beginning with the examination of shifting ideas and theories of the ‘literary’ in the module of the discipline’s development, it goes on to explore ten key thinkers and tendencies, starting with Nietzsche. These will include Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin and Adorno, Structuralism, Blanchot, Derrida, Gender and Postcolonial Theory. Although the question of the relationship of theory to literary and cultural criticism is a central one, the module will enable you to focus on theoretical concepts in their own right. You will also be asked to consider the theoretical implications of the particular formal and stylistic choices made by the thinkers covered.

The module surveys the most internationally significant trends, influences, and movements in European and American literature of the twentieth century (and beyond). Covering modernism to postmodernism (and beyond) it examines the impacts of the philosophical thought of Bergson, Benjamin, and Nietzsche; the modernist disruption of literary conventions and challenges to Realism; women and modernism; post-Expressionism; Imagism in modern poetry; the novel and Existentialism; the ethics of writing Holocaust and post-Holocaust writing; the emergence of poststructuralism and the metafictional practices of OULIPO. These developments are studied through the analysis of major representative texts either in English (e.g. Joyce’s Ulysses and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury ) or in English translation (e.g. Camus’ The Plague) within their relevant cultural and intellectual contexts. Writers studied include James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, André Gide, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Mann, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, Bertolt Brecht, Mina Loy, H. D., W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Walter Benjamin, William Faulkner, Primo Levi, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Teaching Mode: Weekly lecture followed by 2-hour seminar.

This core module for the pathway in Literature of the Caribbean & its Diasporas intensively surveys Caribbean and diaspora literatures to highlight significant movements relative to the social, political and historical contexts impacting upon these new literatures. We are interested to trace the developments within the forms of literary and artistic expression examined, to show how literary texts, forms and genres veered between consolidation and experimentation from beginnings marked by the slave narrative, a preoccupation with history and memory and a close affinity with the aural/ oral, and to further explore some of the determining forces which underpinned the transformations of the literatures. We seek to trace the influence, and textual embodiment of intellectual and cultural developments in the region’s literature and that of its diaspora including the impacts of Colonialism, post-Colonialism, Negritude, and Globalisation. These developments are studied through the analysis of representative texts either in English (e.g. Walcott’s Omeros) or in English translation (e.g. Condé’s Windward Heights)

Teaching Mode: 3-hour seminar, including lecture-type input from the tutor.

In the era in which human activity, particularly fossil-fuel use and its effects, has become the main determinant in shaping the environment – an era which has been labelled the ‘Anthropocene’ – a growing body of literary work has emerged that seeks to explore the inextricability of social and natural damage and devastation.

This module considers the engagement of contemporary American fiction with a range of environmental crises, from climate change to pollution to ecological collapse. Generally speaking, the module asks what cognitive, interpretive and aesthetic resources are offered by the contemporary American novel in understanding such crises and catastrophes and in what ways has fiction evolved and adapted to capture this subject matter.

More particularly, the module asks how fiction might generate affective and politically transformative forms of public knowledge in the face of widespread dissociation of the consequences of a fossil-fuelled modernity, and, relatedly, how fiction might understand the social causes of natural disasters; how literature can chart or remember the geopolitical histories of energy supply and resource capitalism – histories that might include war, terrorism and pollution – that are normally forgotten at the point of Western consumption; how literature can encompass both the global scale and local impact of climate change and environmental degradation, as well as forge a sense of (eco)cosmopolitan solidarity between variously affected societies; how narrative can adapt to the subject matter of the ‘slow violence’ of pollution, contamination and man-made ‘natural’ disasters, and to the precarious and at-risk subjectivities produced by such violence; what kind of politics and ethics arise from such representations and how might literature engage with questions of environmental justice; and, in terms of worse-case scenarios, how literature imagines apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios of a world of spent resources and barely sustainable life.

‘Interculturality, Text, Poetics’ explores interpretative theories of interculturality including creolisation, poetics of relation, postcolonialism and carnivalisation in relation to Black British and Caribbean poetics, performativity and discourses such as humanism and globalisation.

We interrogate questions concerning what is literature and what meanings might be revealed by the ‘emergence’ of Black British and Caribbean literature mainly in the twentieth century. We consider the challenges of writing across histories and cultures in order to articulate a profoundly interconnected world and possibilities other than the nation. We examine how oral and literary texts, forms and genres within this body of writing through consolidation and experimentation, illustrate distinctive features of interculturality and syncretism. We investigate some of the determining forces underpinning the aesthetics of the texts.

As one of two core compulsory modules within the MA Black British Writing programme, the module intensively surveys Black British Writing since the late eighteen century to highlight the nature of its ‘relation’ to the social, political and intellectual contexts in which it was written. We consider the emergent literature primarily as a body of relational texts communicating across and between cultures and diversities. This writing, sometimes defined by its transnational location, problematizes questions of nation, the political, identity, critical theories and literature itself.

‘Interculturality Text Poetics’ applies to the texts a range of critical and theoretical perspectives including diasporic criticism and Glissant’s poetics of relation in order to undertake readings of the selected texts alongside other texts for the purposes of rigorous critical enquiry that complements in its emphases the ‘Historicising’ core module. For example, Equiano’s ‘Interesting Narrative’ may be read alongside Eze’s Race and the Enlightenment. Similarly, Sunmonu’s Cherish may be read in tandem with ‘Queen Victoria’s Black Daughter’ in Gerzina’s Black Victorians, Black Victoriana.

This module introduces students to key academic debates within the field of Translation Studies and addresses a range of topical issues relating to the professional practice of translation through the illuminating framework of twentieth and twenty-first-century translation theory. 

Touching on a range of currents of contemporary concern within the field, and placing these within their respective historical contexts, this module introduces students to broad theoretical questions that influence and impact upon the practice of the translator, including issues of loyalty, duty and faithfulness to the text-for-translation and to the audience of translation, translator ethics and the political positionality of the translator as an intercultural communicator and mediator.  

This module will prepare you for working as a freelance or in-house translator in the global translation and language service industry.

Through workshops and lectures, you will develop the following skills:

• an understanding of the nature of freelance work and self-employment
• how to meet the needs of translation agency and in-house translation employers
• how to identify, evaluate and implement business and marketing strategies for different translators and text types
• how to establish client relationships
• bidding and competing for work and navigating the commissioning process
• project and time management
• how to use computer-aided translation, machine translation and online tools for translators
• how to edit, revise and proof your work. 

This module focuses on preparing students to become freelance or in-house translators within the contexts of cultural tourism, cultural entrepreneurship and cultural heritage.

It addresses key challenges for professional translators within these specialist domains of the translation employment market, from understanding the nature of freelance work and in-house translation work in museums, galleries and other cultural organisations; interpretation for heritage destinations and museums; to matching sensitively the skills and expertise of the specialist tourism translator with the demands of translating diverse texts and text types, within the contexts of cultural tourism, cultural entrepreneurship and cultural heritage and in the context of changing needs and expectations on the part of museums, galleries and other cultural organisation clients.

Much of the most significant and powerful contemporary fiction in English is written by those who come, or whose families have come, from outside the metropolitan and erstwhile imperial centre. This fiction is often called ‘postcolonial’, though there are those who would debate that term, as many do all aspects of the body of theory about the relation of the West and the rest of the world that has come to be known as ‘postcolonial theory’. Some would prefer the term ‘world’ or ‘transnational’ literature, for reasons we will discuss. This option divides its attention between the analysis of postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory. Theorists to be studied will include Fanon, Said, Spivak, Ahmad and McClintock, along with a variety of writers such as Lessing, Achebe, Rhys, Rushdie and Coetzee.

‘Palestine’ has become one of the most potent cultural/political signifiers of our time. This module aims to unpack some of its complex histories and meanings, with a view to understanding why it plays such a central role in contemporary debates about ‘Islamic radicalism’, neo-colonialism/globalisation, the decline of the West, human rights and ‘terrorism’. In doing so, it seeks to remedy a signal oversight in mainstream postcolonial studies, which has historically evaded any serious engagement with ‘Palestine’. These issues will be approached in a multi-disciplinary fashion, drawing on literary and cultural studies, politics, religious studies, trauma studies, film studies, history and ethnography. Particular attention will be paid to how cultural representation mediates relationships of power and ideology; and the role and effects of different styles, genres and modes of representation (fiction, memoir, graphic novel, film, poetry etc) in such mediations.

Please note: this is an experimental module and some of the texts will be less readily available than on comparable options. Students must be prepared to use internet sites like Amazon and AbeBooks to source out-of-print material, although every effort will be made to provide some stocks of each text in the library.

You explore representative African-Caribbean and Indian-Caribbean women’s writing – prose and poetry – since the 1960s, with comparative study of black women’s writing in non-Caribbean contexts. Principal texts might typically include Gilroy, 'Boy Sandwich'; Collins, 'Angel'; Hodge, 'Crick Crack Monkey'; Riley, 'Waiting in the Twilight'; Senior, 'The Arrival of the Snake Woman'.

This option focuses on the analysis of key novels published between 1941 and 1991. Disparate in many ways, the texts are united by their frequent placement within the flexible category of international ‘postmodernism’. We will be reading the novels alongside both literary-critical constructions of postmodernism(s) and broader theoretical accounts of postmodernity. The aim of the module is not to isolate a definition of ‘postmodernist fiction’ through which the novels should be read, but rather to explore a range of sometimes contradictory theoretical paradigms and textual practices. Areas of inquiry will include: the relationships between ‘modernist’, ‘postmodernist’ and ‘realist’ poetics; the politics of form; postmodernism and historiography; postmodernism and postcolonialism; feminism and postmodernism.

Texts will typically include: Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts; Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (The Beckett Trilogy); Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller; Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Salman Rushdie, Shame; Angela Carter, Wise Children. The module reader will be Patricia Waugh (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1992). Other important essays will be made available as handouts.