BA (Hons) English

This module will introduce you to a wide range of works from the literary canon, from ancient Greek texts in translation to the contemporary, covering the major genres, and embodying significant interventions or influences in literary history.

You'll focus on reading primary texts voraciously and discovering - or rediscovering - diverse writers and cultures so that you can make informed choices from more specialized modules later in your degree. Not being limited to a period, genre or single approach, this module cultivates difference and chronological sweep; it aims to challenge and surprise, as rewarding ‘exploration’ should.

Lectures and seminars sustain the thematic continuity of the module by encouraging you to consider contrasts and dialogues between texts. Cohesion is also supplied by the fact that many of the texts articulate literal and metaphorical ‘explorations’, quests and searches.

This module will introduce you to essential concepts in modern literary study, enabling you to become a more observant, perceptive and analytical reader and critic in your own right.  You'll explore the history and nature of literary studies, and contemporary critical debates.

You'll learn a vocabulary in which to discuss literary language, ideas of literary convention and genre, poetic rhythm and form, and the nature of narrative voice and narrative structures.  You'll be introduced to debates about the relation of texts on the page to texts in performance, and to wider questions about the interpretation of texts. A series of lectures and activity-based seminars, Practical Academic Skills and Strategies (PASS), will ask you to reflect on, and to put into practice a range of academic strategies to enable you to acquire a set of reading, writing and research skills that will support you throughout your studies.

This module will introduce you to the pleasures of poetry written in English and demystifies the language and concepts used in studying it. You'll consider the major poetic components and forms employed in a variety of periods and clarify and illustrate the terminology critics employ in discussing poetry.

The aim is not to provide a chronological survey nor to cover the work of most of the major poets between Chaucer and the present. You'll focus on the vocabulary and technical aspects of verse: diction, metre, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, stanza form, and other such features. Major forms will also be examined: the sonnet, ballad, free verse, dramatic monologue, etc. Lectures will usually address a small number of poems from more than one period, works that illustrate one of the primary poetic characteristics.

This module introduces short stories and tales from various literatures and historical periods. You will explore classical sub-genres such as the fairy tale, the tale of terror, and the detective short story, examine single-author studies of masters of the short story such as Edgar Allan Poe, and consider the uses of the short story in diverse areas of twentieth-century literature.

This module will introduce you to key themes in U.S. literature and culture by focusing on the ways that the identities of Americans and the identities of America have been imagined, negotiated and reimagined, from colonialism to the present day. We'll look at visions of the New World and concepts of the frontier; war, genocide, slavery, and their legacies; democracy and its exclusions; and American’s modernization and modern America’s casualties. Across visual culture and literature and a variety of genres, from the slave narrative to the horror film, these themes will be examined for the way they shape a sense of American-ness.    

This module will introduce you to the kinds of U.S. literature and culture they could study at Level 5 and 6 and to the Department’s approach to that material.

This module will introduce you to the study of language in its different contexts of use. We'll cover some of the main areas of linguistic knowledge, for example meaning, varieties of language and multilingualism, language change, history of English, and the characteristics of language across different genres and text types. We'll explore how spoken language is used to communicate in a number of different situations: everyday conversational contexts with your family and friends, or more formal interactions in various institutional contexts like schools or doctor’s surgeries. Our discussions will cover also how language is deployed in written texts, including literary and media texts.

We'll look at how language varies in these different contexts, but also in different locations, and at different points in time. We'll consider whether and how speech varies between people of different gender, age, or ethnicity. We'll think about how languages are learnt, both by children and adults, and how they are taught. We will explore how multilingual speakers use language, and how multilingualism is reflected in city landscapes or literary works. This module will equip you with the tools you need to discuss how language is structured and how it encodes meaning, at the level of individual sounds, words, sentences and in interaction. You'll think about how people experience languages as users, but also as learners, and will acquire skills in hands-on analysis of linguistic data. This module aims to provide you with new perspectives on language in any context of use, as well as new vocabulary to discuss it. 

This module introduces you to some of the ideas, approaches and methodologies of comparative literature. This interdisciplinary module introduces you to how comparative literature links engages with other disciplines. You'll encounter literary themes, genres and movements from across national literatures and explore the relationship between literature and other arts.

The module is divided into three parts:

1. The relationship between literature and the other arts, in this case Shakespeare and film
2. The study of the evolution of a literary theme/figure (Salome) re-interpreted across different media—prose, poetry, visual art, dramatic and musical performance
3. The study of an international movement (European modernism) and examination of the dynamic cultural exchanges about art, self and society in Britain, France and Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century. 

This module represents the full chronological sweep of the Victorian period as well as a range of its genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays and drama. The module engages with authors such as Tennyson, Dickens, Browning, the Brontës, Eliot, Stevenson, Kipling and Wilde. We will consider a variety of critical approaches to the literature of the period and examine how writers use form, content and language to represent and question power relations. We will study the ways in which texts set in Britain and overseas contribute to debates about class, gender, sexuality, politics, morals, religion, industrialisation, nationhood, race and empire.

Lots of students join Goldsmiths because they want to make a difference in society, to bring about positive change and develop skills and experiences which will allow them to access exciting careers. Goldsmiths’ Social Change module will allow you to do work on group projects with students from other departments to bring about change. You’ll be introduced to the UN’s Sustainable Development goals and core project management theories and practices allow you to work across a number of weeks towards a final Festival of Ideas where you’ll report work back to the academic and local community.

This module will introduce you to major texts, themes and movements of nineteenth-century American literature and then explore the ways that literary concerns of the nineteenth century have evolved or been adapted or interrogated in and by twentieth- and twenty-first century American authors.

You'll engage with the ways that nineteenth-century literature narrated national identity, the ways America was experienced, and so the tensions between the idea of nation and its realities. Studying twentieth- and twenty-first century counterparts to this literature, you'll examine how the nation has been rewritten. Of particular interest to this module will be the literary representation of migration, frontiers and indigeneity; the experience of modernity (of the city, technology, industrialisation, and economic transition); notions of independence, revolution and democracy; slavery and its legacies; the transatlantic and global dialogues of this nation's literature; the social and cultural position of women; the relationship between religion and power; and environmentalist sensibilities and ecological catastrophes.

You'll explore these topics and their evolution through a variety of genres and forms particular to American literature. 

This module focuses on the vibrant and innovative literature of the century following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The module begins with the unruly and exuberant satire of the Restoration and early eighteenth century and ends with the most important African autobiography of the eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative. In between, we explore later developments in satire, the rise of the novel and a variety of poetic kinds and themes. While offering a broad introduction to the literature of the period, the module gives particular emphasis to the following: the characteristics and informing assumptions of satire in prose and verse; developments and trends in prose fiction from Defoe to Burney; the distinctive contribution of the period's growing body of professional women writers; responses to colonialism and the slave trade.

This module introduces you to key concepts and texts in philosophical aesthetics and the historical and critical role it plays in political philosophy. The first half of the module focuses on the sustained and intensive reading of (primarily) the first part of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (pertaining to aesthetic judgment), key debates involved in the historical development of aesthetics as a science of sensation and judgments of taste, the ramifications for the theory of moral sentiments and the genesis of art criticism in early German Idealism, and contemporary interpretations of the significance of Kant's argument for human freedom and the autonomy of reason.

The second half of the module examines the aftermath of the revolution Kant introduced by focusing attention on various responses - and criticisms - that have arisen since the publication of the third Critique. Through close textual engagement, we will explore a variety of distinct views on the Kantian legacy, including the question of representation; civil imagination; technology and the aestheticization of politics; and race and the knowledge of freedom.

On this module we will read key literary texts which emerge from and address the history of Black people's presences in Britain and will engage with important debates which have occurred over the past 60 years around the role of Black cultures in Britain.  We shall explore how Black Britain has always been influenced by a range of cultural nationalisms, as well as being formative of a new and distinctively 'Black British' sensibility. The term begins with 2019 Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo's earlier novel in verse, The Emperor's Babe. To build the chronological and thematic arc we investigate how her act of writing African-Romano presences into ancient contexts matches the archaeological findings that prove the presence of African people during the Roman occupation and earlier - although published writing by people of African descent in Britain is only available from the eighteenth century onwards.

While enslavement and colonial forces become the dominant oppressive determiners of Black people's lives, we will explore the rich aesthetic offerings in representation that important contemporary literary voices including Andrea Levy and Yrsa Daley-Ward inherit, and respond to, in their work. This enables us to consider the ways in which Black British literature positions the experience of 'being contemporary'.

While the cultural and critical theory by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, Sara Ahmed and Kobena Mercer frames theoretical angles, the literary criticism by Black British scholars and a range of other scholars (who have been committed to recognising the importance of this field in literary studies) underpins the module's central focus: the discussion and analysis of the creative literature.

This module examines four of the most influential Greek and Roman epics - Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses - and their reception in the work of contemporary writers who have turned to the classics for inspiration.

While classical literature is a potent influence on writers in many literary periods, there has been an upsurge in creative interpretations and reworkings of classical epic from the 1990s to the present. You will develop a good working knowledge of four major epics and an understanding of their reception in the work of writers such as Michael Longley, Alice Oswald, Christopher Logue, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, Margaret Atwood, Madeline Miller, Eavan Boland, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney and Louise Glück.

Working within the epic tradition allows these writers to demonstrate skill in the handling of inherited materials, to take a playful approach to the canon, to experiment with form, to address controversial issues or identities, and to introduce the voices of characters who were silent in the ancient epics.

You will examine the ways in which the formal and thematic characteristics of ancient epic are appropriated and adapted by contemporary writers who engage with classical epics to question constructions of gender, notions of heroism, exploration and returning home, the representation of conflict, and the role of the storyteller.

Examining contemporary indigenous writing from Canada, the United States, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Guatemala, this course will question literature’s ability to comment on matters such as indigenous sovereignty, cultural distinctiveness, colonial encounters, and geographical presences.

By exploring the work of eight authors and their engagement with identity, place and politics, the course offers an in-depth understanding of contemporary tribal literature and its contexts. Several literary genres will be discussed, including prose, poetry and autobiography, and we’ll consider how various modes of writing have been used to reflect and construct aboriginal and indigenous worldviews in the 20^th and 21^st century.

Seminars will also reflect on perceptions of tribal identity as well as cultural or personal trauma arising from genocide and removal. You’ll be asked to consider the attempt to mesh storytelling and traditional narrative with contemporary literary aesthetics.

This module invites creative-critical examination of the contemporary poetry scene emergent in London/SE London, considering poetry and poetics in relation to formal innovation (including hybridity), canon formation/reformation and social and cultural diversity.  Due attention will be given to the ways in which such poetry might be read as works of activism - and the place of prosocial close-reading -  as well as active consideration of how poetry and poetics intersects with diverse and under-represented identities such as those that relate to class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and disability.   In order to facilitate close, considered reading, the module will engage you in sustained `deep-reading' of selected poets' work through study of full collections, giving you the choice of devising a creative, critical or even hybrid response to material studied.  Poets studied will all have a connection to London/SE London, and, in the first instance, will include Raymond Antrobus, Jay Bernard, Caroline Bird and Caleb Femi, with the module updating the reading list according to the changing currents of the contemporary scene.

Through workshop sessions, this module focuses on approaches to form and structure in fiction, poetry, life writing, reflective essays, journalistic reviews, and travel features.

Practical experimentation in these forms plays an important part in the development of your writing skills. Once in each term, you’ll also meet your tutor for a one-to-one tutorial to discuss formative feedback and their general progress on the module.

The five genres we teach on this module are poetry, fiction, journalism (including review, travel writing), life writing, and creative non-fiction (lyrical essay). You should be aware that seminars take a workshop form - everyone is expected to participate and contribute. Participation is part of the learning process, and success in the module is unlikely without substantial attendance.

In this module, we will study and analyse language in use. We will learn about how people interact and the different elements of language that persuade, (dis)empower and contribute to the discourses that construct our social realities. Students will be introduced to a variety of different theoretical perspectives and approaches (e.g., Critical Discourse Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Stylistics) and a range of tools and methodological frameworks to enable them to effectively analyse both spontaneous spoken interaction and written media, advertisements and literary texts. 

The questions that will be addressed may include the following:

• How is spoken language organised and how can it be transcribed and analysed?
• How do language choices influence the representation of social groups in the media?
• What are the language strategies employed by politicians?
• How is language used by advertisers to make us buy things?

What language techniques make us admire our favourite fictional works?

'Modern American Fiction' provides you with an introduction to American fiction since 1945, encompassing the diverse forms, genres, histories and identities which have helped shape literature and culture in modern America. You'll examine both canonical and `marginal' texts of the period, reflecting the variety and complexity of American culture. You'll consider texts through the lenses of form (Realism, Postmodernism), genre, regional identity and racial/ethnic identity (Black writing, Jewish writing, Native American writing), as well as addressing issues of gender and sexuality.

In this module, you'll study modernist writing in Britain, Ireland and internationally from the 1920s, including such works as Eliot, 'The Waste Land'; Woolf, 'Mrs Dalloway'; Joyce, 'Ulysses'; Brecht, 'Mother Courage'; poems of Yeats, Auden, Stevens and others.

This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice. An introduction to the language and literature of the Anglo-Saxons, with consideration of a variety of themes and genres, including history, lyric, mythology, poetic elegy and romance. Some texts are read in translation. Major texts might typically include selections such as the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', 'Beowulf', works by King Alfred, Ælfric, and Bede.  

This module will focus on how the English Renaissance was shaped by encounters with different places, languages, cultures, religions, and races. As travellers and scientists re-drew the parameters of the known world writers also reimagined what had now become a fluid category, kick-starting an unprecedented period of literary innovation.

We will explore the resulting proliferation of literary worlds, foregrounding how the movement of people, as well as the movement of texts, literary styles, and ideas influenced Renaissance writers but also how this kinetic impulse resulted in new reflections on home and nation. Emphasising the importance of travel, translation, conquest, discovery, colonialism, national identity, world building, race and religious difference, we will read political utopias, chivalric romance and science fiction, and investigate English writers' engagement with the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and the New World.

Authors and genres covered include: Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, William Shakespeare, Amelia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, Isabella Whitney, Edmund Spenser, Hester Pulter, Katherine Philips, Philip Sidney, John Milton and Margaret Cavendish, travel narratives, the sonnet, epic, lyric poetry and drama. We will ask how the English literary Renaissance engaged with an everexpanding world outside England's shores and how it went about building worlds at home.

This module addresses the literature of one of the most exciting and traumatic periods of British history. Not only was Britain electrified by political revolutions in America and France, but it was also destabilised by the social and economic upheavals of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and by the significant imperial expansion that ensued after victory in the Seven Years War against France in 1763. In parallel with these phenomena, there evolved a discourse of science and a philosophical scepticism about the claims of religion.

The literature of this whole period is correspondingly energised and fraught, and it is marked by numerous radical departures: the rise of the novel, the prominent appearance of women writers, the terrifying apparition of the Gothic, the development of a revolutionary new poetry and the beginnings of what we might recognise as the kind of literary criticism that we ourselves write.

The module encompasses a broad sweep of Shakespeare's drama in a rough chronological order. We will read Shakespeare's plays with an eye to their historical context and as part of a radically innovative period in English literary culture when the parameters of English verse and performance were in flux. We will consider the explosive potential of the theatre as a space where ideas of social class and gender could be disrupted and transgressed, and explore links between power and spectacle, and the performance of subjugation, punishment, and violence. Emphasis will be placed on reading the plays closely and we will consider how Shakespeare epitomises the era's fascination with rhetoric (the art of persuasion). The expectation is that you will bring yourself to the classroom and I hope that you will share your thoughts about the plays and what they mean to you as an individual reader.

This module explores how and why language is used differently in a range of contexts. We will examine the variation of spoken language in relation to region, gender, ethnicity, age and social class; we will see that individuals are able to shift their style of speaking from one situation to the next and we will explore the attitudes that people have towards different varieties of English. We will also examine a range of tools and frameworks used by sociolinguistics to examine these topics.

The questions that will be addressed may include the following:

• Do women and men speak differently?
• What is slang?
• How and why do adolescents speak differently from adults?
• What are the public stereotypes about speakers with "non-standard" accents?
• How are varieties of English represented in literature?
• What is Standard English?

How do language choices influence the representation of social groups (e.g. women, asylum seekers)?

This module investigates the relationship between modern women dramatists, poets and prose writers (writing in English) in the contexts of Britain, the United States and Australia and the ways in which their work intersects with the tenets of feminist thinking. We'll examine a broad and selective historical sweep to create a problematised continuum, to explore initiatory ideas, featured in two periods that heralded the concepts and practices of limited emancipation for women, notably, the ages of revolution and the Enlightenment, and the late-nineteenth-century suffrage movement. From these Eurocentric pillars, we begin to consider the trajectory of modern woman's dramatic, poetic, prose and life-writing heritages via their affinity with experimental writing. The investigations will loosely subscribe to Marianne DeKoven's approach in her analysis of Gertrude Stein's work (1983):

1. To make a case for the importance of experimental writing (and subject-matter) as an alternative anti-patriarchal language
2. To analyse this writing as an end in itself as well as located within traditions that have primarily side-lined or devalued women's contributions, social and cultural,
3. To chart these experimental styles in relation to the multiplicity of feminist theory (and vectors of race, class, gender-fluid distinctions), and
4. To consider the strategies of the inaccessible and unreadable as aesthetic impetuses that gesture to that which lies beyond normative frameworks of experience and its rendering in language.

This approach will be underpinned by a decolonial and imperial consequentialist ethics that enables reflection upon African-descent, Indigenous, LGBTQI+, and disabled perspectives as represented in the creative works and critical theoretical texts authored by womxn and the unsettling of `woman' as a category in contemporary cultural representation. Each week two polemical pieces: one on social history or feminist theory, the other a manifesto will be analysed in tandem with the creative text under discussion. We will aim to interweave ideas about women's status both in society and cultural legitimation processes, their positioning in relation to the canon as revisionists and rewriters of it.

Students who select this module are required to source a placement and undertake 10 days of unpaid work at a host institution. Guidance and support in sourcing the placement is provided by the Careers Service. The work is normally carried out over 1 day per week, although there is the possibility of working more than 1 day per week, depending on the student's and the host institution's availability. The type of work students would be expected to do should have some relevance to their academic studies. Although students should not expect any sort of extensive or designated training such as that which might be offered to a professional working on a long-term basis at the institution, general guidance and support will be available. The type of work which students might undertake on their placement may include (but is not be limited to), for example, cataloguing, archive work, helping organise publicity for events or educational programmes, or shadowing a specialist in his/her work in a mostly observatory way. Students gain transferable professional skills through their active engagement with the campus careers service.

• The central objective is to enable you to take up a workplace learning experience which will benefit your studies, your skillset and your CV.
• The work placement will take place on one day per week over 10 weeks.
• Assistance will be given in sourcing a suitable placement.
• You will gain an understanding of key issues within the organisation and have access to data which you can use to develop your research report.
• You will be supported in preparing the assignments through workshops and individual discussions.
• You will have the opportunity to relate your degree subject to real-life situations, develop a range of transferable skills and gain sector-specific experience, thereby enhancing your employment prospects

What are the hallmarks of Gothic literature? These might include a confrontation with the ghostly, the monstrous, the inhuman, and the supernatural; the experience of nightmarish terror, the manifestation of unconscious desires and fears, and the sensation of the uncanny; unstable and doubled identities and imperilled existence; haunted landscapes and environments (the wilderness, ruins, castles, houses) in which it is all too easy to get lost and that are full of secrets.

In European Gothic, such tropes often symbolise social fears and disruptions brought about by modernity in its various stages and the consequent transformation of society. What, though, happens when the Gothic migrates to America? While early literary-critical opinion tended to find in American Gothic expressions of troubled moral landscapes – of psychological dramas, religious crises, or individual desires thwarted by the needs of the community – the critical consensus has since matured to understand the genre as just as driven by historical contexts as its European origins. Fundamentally, the genre expresses the contradictions between a mythologised national identity and the historical realities of the nation’s emergence and evolution.

In this module, we’ll attend to those contradictions in exploring American Gothic’s navigation of the following themes:

• the colonial dread of what lies beyond the frontier; the traumatic transition from colony to nation
• the uncanny nature of pre-Civil War Southern literature as it struggles to shroud the realities of slavery in the fantastical and the mysterious
• the way that slave narratives exceed realism to convey the horrors of enslavement
• post-Civil War and post-1945 Southern fiction haunted by the South’s past and its violent legacies
• contemporary historical fiction that returns to the nineteenth century to confront the unquiet ghosts of the slave dead
• the explosion of the social consensus in the 1960s and ‘70s and the more-than-coincidental realisation that something dreadful stalks the suburbs, slashing the fabric of mainstream society and draining it of life
• the experience of nature as strange, uncontrollable and deadly – animated by its contamination by humans; and Native American life amongst the spectres of past traumas and monstrous manifestations of ongoing existential danger

The aim of this module is to present a range of linguistic frameworks that can enable you to analyse different text types found in advertisements, magazine and newspaper articles, and television. The module covers social semiotic approaches to texts, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, and other linguistic and interdisciplinary approaches.

In the analyses undertaken, the linguistic features of a text will be broadly understood to include the participants (e.g. narrators, audience, observers, hearers). It will also include the audio-visual components, the cultural and ideological conditions within which these features occur.

We’ll address questions such as:

• How do particular texts encode dominant ideologies and relations of power?
• What cultural models and assumptions are visible in texts?
• How can the analysis of certain texts help us understand social and political issues like immigration, the climate crisis, gender roles, and others?
• How are certain groups of people represented in the media (g. people of certain ethnicity, religion, or gender)?

The module focuses on contemporary literature (primarily short stories, poetry and novels), which reflects the ethnic diversity of the region and its major thematic concerns. The historical context of the Caribbean and its relation to various traditions within Caribbean literature are explored. In addition, a range of critical approaches to texts will be examined alongside consideration of issues of literary production. Topics to be studied include issues of gender and genre, oral culture, slavery, the construction of black womanhood, the Creole voice and migratory subjectivities.

Examining contemporary indigenous writing from Canada, the United States, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Guatemala, this course will question literature’s ability to comment on matters such as indigenous sovereignty, cultural distinctiveness, colonial encounters, and geographical presences.

By exploring the work of eight authors and their engagement with identity, place and politics, the course offers an in-depth understanding of contemporary tribal literature and its contexts. Several literary genres will be discussed, including prose, poetry and autobiography, and we’ll consider how various modes of writing have been used to reflect and construct aboriginal and indigenous worldviews in the 20^th and 21^st century.

Seminars will also reflect on perceptions of tribal identity as well as cultural or personal trauma arising from genocide and removal. You’ll be asked to consider the attempt to mesh storytelling and traditional narrative with contemporary literary aesthetics.

Through workshop sessions, this module focuses on approaches to form and structure in fiction, poetry, life writing, reflective essays, journalistic reviews, and travel features.

Practical experimentation in these forms plays an important part in the development of your writing skills. Once in each term, you’ll also meet your tutor for a one-to-one tutorial to discuss formative feedback and their general progress on the module.

The five genres we teach on this module are poetry, fiction, journalism (including review, travel writing), life writing, and creative non-fiction (lyrical essay). You should be aware that seminars take a workshop form - everyone is expected to participate and contribute. Participation is part of the learning process, and success in the module is unlikely without substantial attendance.

This comparative and interdisciplinary, you'll explore literary and visual decadence in France and England in the nineteenth century. Beginning with definitions of the term `decadence' and its antecedents in antiquity, you'll consider the emergence of decadence as a literary tradition in France as a challenge to the orthodoxies of Romanticism and its subsequent treatment by English decadents and European Symbolists at the fin de siècle.

The module is structured chronologically and the focus each week is on one or more set texts. The principal themes of decadence - degeneration, disease, sexuality, artifice, death- are traced in the work of nineteenth-century writers and artists and understood against the backdrop of contemporary cultural anxieties and controversies.

This is module aims to give a comprehensive introduction to the study of language and gender. We’ll examine how gender is reflected and constituted in language, focusing both on the way we speak (style) and the (gender) ideologies/discourses which shape our language use and identity.

You’ll become familiar with research investigating a wide range of authentic language use, including classroom interaction, couples talk, gossip among friends, frat talk, and parliamentary debate. The module encourages a critical engagement with past and present approaches to the study of language and gender. It draws on a range of different theoretical and methodological frameworks to show how gender and identity can be analysed in language.

Whereas some feminist approaches foreground issues such as (male) dominance and (female) collaboration, more recent studies describe how language constitutes a resource to construct a wide range of gender identities. This includes tough hegemonic masculinities in Sottish schools, uncool nerd femininities in the US high school, Hindi ‘boy’ identities in a New Delhi NGO, and onstage performances of African American drag queens.

'Modern American Fiction' provides you with an introduction to American fiction since 1945, encompassing the diverse forms, genres, histories and identities which have helped shape literature and culture in modern America. You'll examine both canonical and `marginal' texts of the period, reflecting the variety and complexity of American culture. You'll consider texts through the lenses of form (Realism, Postmodernism), genre, regional identity and racial/ethnic identity (Black writing, Jewish writing, Native American writing), as well as addressing issues of gender and sexuality.

Whilst modernist drama on the European continent is characterised by a variety of pronouncedly anti-realist tendencies, modern English drama continues the tradition of Realism. In this module, you'll explore the main contrasts and affinities between these modernist and realist trends, focussing on major innovative approaches to Realism (term 1) and on precursors and varieties of modernist drama from 1880-1930 (term 2).

Through a close reading of representative texts, you will be introduced to a range of dramatic forms and techniques of the period in question. Examples from expressionist film will acquaint you with questions related to performance, stage set, and lighting. - Thematically, the plays chiefly focus on questions of gender and sexuality; class, economic power, and social justice; and religion in social, political and aesthetic contexts.

In this module, you'll study modernist writing in Britain, Ireland and internationally from the 1920s, including such works as Eliot, 'The Waste Land'; Woolf, 'Mrs Dalloway'; Joyce, 'Ulysses'; Brecht, 'Mother Courage'; poems of Yeats, Auden, Stevens and others.

This module examines a selection of representative poems, schools, and trends of English-language poetry, chiefly in Britain, Ireland, and the USA, from 1945 to the present day.  We’ll pay close attention to the linguistic, stylistic, and formal resources of modern poets and how their work might be situated within the broader contexts of historical, political and socio-cultural change.

We’ll trace patterns of influence and reaction within and across national traditions, diverse identities and among schools and evolving lineages including the American ‘confessionals’, the New York poets, the Northern Irish ‘renaissance’, feminist and LGBTQI+ poetics.

Authors for study include Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Frank O’ Hara, Audre Lorde, Sharon Olds, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and a range of poets emerging in the 21^st century such as Terrance Hayes, Daljit Nagra and Danez Smith.

This module will focus on how the English Renaissance was shaped by encounters with different places, languages, cultures, religions, and races. As travellers and scientists re-drew the parameters of the known world writers also reimagined what had now become a fluid category, kick-starting an unprecedented period of literary innovation.

We will explore the resulting proliferation of literary worlds, foregrounding how the movement of people, as well as the movement of texts, literary styles, and ideas influenced Renaissance writers but also how this kinetic impulse resulted in new reflections on home and nation. Emphasising the importance of travel, translation, conquest, discovery, colonialism, national identity, world building, race and religious difference, we will read political utopias, chivalric romance and science fiction, and investigate English writers' engagement with the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and the New World.

Authors and genres covered include: Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, William Shakespeare, Amelia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, Isabella Whitney, Edmund Spenser, Hester Pulter, Katherine Philips, Philip Sidney, John Milton and Margaret Cavendish, travel narratives, the sonnet, epic, lyric poetry and drama. We will ask how the English literary Renaissance engaged with an everexpanding world outside England's shores and how it went about building worlds at home.

This module addresses the literature of one of the most exciting and traumatic periods of British history. Not only was Britain electrified by political revolutions in America and France, but it was also destabilised by the social and economic upheavals of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and by the significant imperial expansion that ensued after victory in the Seven Years War against France in 1763. In parallel with these phenomena, there evolved a discourse of science and a philosophical scepticism about the claims of religion.

The literature of this whole period is correspondingly energised and fraught, and it is marked by numerous radical departures: the rise of the novel, the prominent appearance of women writers, the terrifying apparition of the Gothic, the development of a revolutionary new poetry and the beginnings of what we might recognise as the kind of literary criticism that we ourselves write.

Proceeding chronologically from the mid-20th century and the flourishing of second wave feminism to the #metoo movement of the twenty-first century, this module offers an overview of different forms of women’s writing (short story, documentary chronicle, the experimental novel, parody) which are examined in corresponding cultural and historical contexts ranging from South Africa, Belarus, Haiti, the U.S., France, to the UK. and Northern Ireland. 

In addition to providing a detailed knowledge of the intellectual and cultural history of second and third wave feminisms and contemporary gender theory, this module examines the aesthetic and intellectual diversity of women’s writing across several interconnected thematic headings including class, art, sexual violence, the queer child, ethics, memory, shame, and intimacy.

The module will help you develop an understanding of how social, political and cultural contexts have shaped (and constrained) women’s lives and have had different effects on their literary creation and production. The module encourages careful attention to the distinct aesthetic and intellectual concerns of the writing as well as to the ideological content of literary texts. We’ll also debate the political efficacy and continuing desirability of the term ‘women’s writing’ in the twenty-first century by considering questions of essentialism, marginalisation and the marketing of contemporary literature.

In this module, we’ll explore the relationship between literature and film in the 20^th and 21^st century. We’ll look at texts and films from various national literatures and cinemas to examine the particular characteristics of literature and film as they respond to one another, and to establish the precise nature of the cross-connections between them.

We’ll explore how a range of modern and contemporary writers have responded to the challenges of film. You’ll study connections between literary modernism and early cinema, to work out what film and cinema meant for the modernists from Gorky and Eisenstein to Nabokov, Woolf, Schwartz, the Surrealists and Brecht. You’ll explore how film and cinema shaped their artistic and political views.

As well as introducing you to a number of films from the early era, this part of the module is focused on short writings and drama. To complete our survey of literary genres under the influence of film and cinema, we’ll also study examples of the Hollywood novel and their film adaptations, and explore how poets (e.g. W.H. Auden) and filmmakers (e.g. Jim Jarmusch) have attempted to fuse film and poetry.

This module explores key developments and trends in the novel form from the early seventeenth century to the present day. Beginning with Cervantes' seminal Don Quixote, the course goes on to look at representative landmarks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century `realism' and of later modernist and postmodernist fiction.

We'll end with three weeks dedicated to the contemporary novel. As well as attending to the distinctive features of the individual novels, we will investigate critical and theoretical accounts of the genre, paying particular attention to debates about realism, character, plot and narrative voice.

This module covers the period from the closing of the frontier in America to the Second World War, a period of mass immigration, rapid growth of urban centers, the Stock Market crash of 1929, and the privations of the Great Depression.

Through a selection of poetry, drama, and fiction, you'll trace some of the major themes of the period:

• the literary and cultural move from Naturalism to Modernism
• the Harlem Renaissance
• muck-raking and reform
• post-World War I writing
• the emergence of an American poetic vernacular

The module will be lecture and seminar based, and the lectures--as well as addressing the texts for each week-will also examine the relation of the visual arts, music, and cinema to the literature of this period. 

There are many kinds of words: words for formal occasions and for informal conversations, words for naming things, words for the actions we take, words helping other words, words with attitude and words we should treat with the utmost care. Some words become our lifelong companions, we wear them as names, and they are part of our identity. Words have the power to woo, or to offend and cause hurt – some are so potent, we treat them as taboo. But even the more innocuous, more ordinary, everyday words, can convey feelings and attitudes. Words are central to our experience of language.

In this module we’ll delve into the richness and variety of the lexicon. We’ll explore what the study of language can tell us about how words mean, how they function, how they change over time and how language speakers make new ones. We’ll discuss the history of words and link it to the history of the people who use them. We’ll explore the link between words and culture. The study of words will give you a window into the working of language more generally, and provide a link between language and the worlds its users inhabit.

Students who select this module are required to source a placement and undertake 10 days of unpaid work at a host institution. Guidance and support in sourcing the placement is provided by the Careers Service. The work is normally carried out over 1 day per week, although there is the possibility of working more than 1 day per week, depending on the student's and the host institution's availability. The type of work students would be expected to do should have some relevance to their academic studies. Although students should not expect any sort of extensive or designated training such as that which might be offered to a professional working on a long-term basis at the institution, general guidance and support will be available. The type of work which students might undertake on their placement may include (but is not be limited to), for example, cataloguing, archive work, helping organise publicity for events or educational programmes, or shadowing a specialist in his/her work in a mostly observatory way. Students gain transferable professional skills through their active engagement with the campus careers service.

• The central objective is to enable you to take up a workplace learning experience which will benefit your studies, your skillset and your CV.
• The work placement will take place on one day per week over 10 weeks.
• Assistance will be given in sourcing a suitable placement.
• You will gain an understanding of key issues within the organisation and have access to data which you can use to develop your research report.
• You will be supported in preparing the assignments through workshops and individual discussions.
• You will have the opportunity to relate your degree subject to real-life situations, develop a range of transferable skills and gain sector-specific experience, thereby enhancing your employment prospects

This module explores life writing in time, inviting creative and critical responses to a broad historical range of autobiographies.

Reading works will include Augustine’s Confessions, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430), Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951), Jan Morris’s Conundrum (1974) and Carmen Maria Machedo's In the Dream House (2020).

You’ll study how the genre has evolved and changed. We’ll pay attention to historical and political context as well as the formal and stylistic properties used to record a life and create a distinct voice. We’ll consider the importance of race, gender, religion, trauma, and mental health when writing a life. We’ll use careful close readings to consider how literary form shapes an autobiography’s perspective and tone, its description of varied temporalities, its documentary function, and processes of identity formation.

We’ll also explore how life writing relates to the development of the novel and autofiction. You’ll be encouraged to explore these works through an intersection of creative and critical practice, and this is reflected in the mode of assessment.

This module examines the politics and aesthetics of American literary and visual practice through photography and Hollywood cinema in the context of the Roosevelt Era. Taking as its starting point some of the historical and economic reasons for the Depression, the course focuses on the artistic responses to these changes and in particular with the intersections between writing and visual culture as it reflects and critiques the status quo. Students will be introduced to different responses - starting with a seminal realist text The Grapes of Wrath - to more modernist as well as populist approaches. Themes such as alterations in the agrarian power structure, upheavals in the traditional family, the potentially propagandistic nature of fiction and cinema will be introduced as key issues. Through a comparative analysis, the course will also illustrate the emergence and popularisation of visual aesthetics in literature of the period and how Hollywood was instrumental in enabling this.

This module examines a range of literary texts that all, in different ways, address the some of the anxious cultural, political, and social contexts of the later 20^th and 21^st century.

Proceeding by decades, we begin in the 1950s/60s with The Bell Jar and end in the 21st century with The Vegetarian and The Embassy of Cambodia. Paying close attention to the historical contexts of novels from Britain, Italy, South Africa, South Korea and the U.S., the module teaches you how to read (and think) critically and to write about literature in theoretically informed ways. You’ll learn about literary text as a unique space in which social, cultural, and ideological change might be refracted (not reflected) in a variety of aesthetic forms.

We’ll consider changing and competing definitions and concepts of the following: gender and sexuality, eco-feminism, queer history, cosmopolitanism and race, precarity, ideas of ‘home’ and belonging. Writers and critics studied include Teju Cole, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Zadie Smith, Angela Carter, Han Kang, Marilynne Robinson, Alan Hollinghurst, J. M. Coetzee, and Don De Lillo. You’ll read selected literary theory and critical essays in conjunction with the novels to learn about the importance of narrative form and the changing intellectual contexts of the period covered.