ENGLISH

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr H Hutchison

Pre-requisites

None

Overview

This course offers an introduction to the three major genres of literature: fiction, poetry and drama. Using an attractive range of examples from different literary periods, the course explores the distinctive characteristics of each genre, and introduces key critical concepts for analysing works of literature.

Structure

3 one-hour lectures plus 1 one-hour tutorial.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%) and continuous assessment (50%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr L McIlvanney

Pre-requisites

None

Overview

In the past twenty-five years Scotland has witnessed a remarkable literary renaissance, encompassing fiction, poetry and drama. New modes of urban writing, working-class writing and women’s writing have altered the landscape of Scottish literature. The course will examine a range of contemporary Scottish texts, exploring their key technical and thematic features, and focusing on such issues as: the role of writing in their construction of national identity; the relationship between nationality and gender; the literary use of non-standard language; regional identity; literature and politics. The course will also feature appearances by prominent Scottish writers, who will talk about their own work and Scotland now.

Structure

3 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%), continuous assessment: one essay (30%), one exercise (20%), tutorial assessment mark (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Mr J D McClure

Pre-requisites

None

Notes

This course is compulsory for students intending to study English at Honours level. It is also one of a set of core course options for the Language and Linguistics minor programme (see Calendar entry for the complete list of course options).

Overview

This course provides students with an understanding of the essentials of language study. Students will learn how to identify and analyse the major "building blocks" of language, concentrating on pronunciation, word and sentence formation, meaning and style. Lectures and tutorials will be geared to providing students with an active vocabulary with which to discuss language and essential analytical tools with which to analyse its structure and function. Exercises and examples will draw on a range of literary and non-literary texts.

Structure

3 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), continuous assessment: 2 one-hour class tests (20% each), tutorial assessment mark (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr C Shrank

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above who have passed 40 credit points in Level 1 English courses OR from literature courses in a foreign language.

Overview

This course offers an opportunity to study a number of Shakespeare’s plays and plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries and to become familiar with different approaches to literature, from feminist criticism to New Historicism. Shakespeare’s plays will be introduced in the context of the dramatic conventions and innovations of the early-modern theatre and of other contemporary playwrights. The course will survey a range of critical and theoretical approaches to Shakespeare from the Romantics to the present day, and will also consider film adaptations of Shakespeare.

Structure

3 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), continuous assessment: written exercise (5%), first essay (15%), second essay (20%), tutorial work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above who have passed EL 1004 or equivalent language courses in other disciplines.

Overview

This course follows on from EL 1509, Essentials of Language, providing students with an introduction to a number of central branches of linguistics. Topics to be discussed include 'Why and how do languages change?'; 'Why do people speak differently in different contexts and in different locations?'; 'How does language differ in various literary and non-literary contexts?'; 'How do we define styles of language?'

Structure

2 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment: 1 essay (25%), one assessed homework exercise (15%), tutorial assessment mark (10%), examination (50%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above who have passed 40 credit points in Level 1 English courses.

Overview

This course introduces students to the exceptionally rich and diverse literature of the period 1640 to 1789, a period that witnessed great upheavals in the political, social and cultural life of Britain. Examining a wide range of authors and genres, the course raises questions about how literary texts relate to the historical circumstances in which they were written, and how the literary canon was formed. Topics to be explored include revolutionary poetics, satire, the cult of sensibility, travel writing and the early novel. Among the authors studied are Marvell, Milton, Aphra Behn, Pope, Swift, Sterne and Blake.

Structure

3 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), continuous assessment: two essays (20% each), tutorial assessment mark (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Mr J D McClure

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above who have passed EL 1004 or equivalent language courses in other disciplines.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

A chronological examination of the linguistic history of the British Isles, including discussion of the emergence, social and cultural development, and (in some cases) extinction of all languages known to have been used in the archipelago from earliest times. The presently living languages (English, Scots, Gaelic, Irish and Welsh) will be discussed in relation to their individual historical developments, their mutual relationships, and their relationships with extinct languages which influenced them in earlier periods. The main focus of the course will not be on internal linguistic history but on the socio-political aspects of language history. Examination of the external history of the languages will illuminate many issues in socio-historical linguistics: mutual influencing of languages, standardisation, diversification, style and register, status of dialects and sociolects.

Structure

3 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment: essay (60%), exercise (30%) and tutorial assessment mark (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr D Watt

Pre-requisites

Essentials of Language (EL 1004)

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The course will cover key aspects of articulatory phonetics and will introduce elementary phonological theory as it relates to the description of English. The later will include accounts of simple phonological processes and the notion of derivational rule. Students will also acquire skills in the production and perception of sounds of English through a combination of lectures and practical activities (ear training, transcription practice, etc).

Structure

1 two-hour lecture per week, 1 one-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 in-class exercise under test-conditions (50%), one assessed homework exercise (30%), one 5 minute oral examination (10%) and tutorial assessment mark (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr L McIlvanney

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

The past two decades in Scotland and Ireland have witnessed a remarkable literary renaissance, not only resistant to metropolitan literary and linguistic norms, but also to inherited notions of Scottish and Irish identity. New modes of urban writing, working-class writing and women’s writing have altered the landscapes of Scottish and Irish literature. The course will examine a range of Scottish and Irish texts, adopting a comparative framework where appropriate, and focusing on such issues as: the role of writing in the construction of national identity; the relationship between nationality and gender; the literary use of non-standard language (demotic and synthetic Scots, Hiberno-English); regional identity and the urban/rural division; narrative voice; literature and politics.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), continuous assessment: essay (30%), seminar work (10%), individual presentation (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Mr J D McClure

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

The Stewart monarchy saw full participation by the independent Scottish nation in Europe, and the greatest era in Scottish literature. Texts include the heroic epics of Bruce and Wallace, the courtly poetry of the reigns of James IV and V, the historical and polemical prose of the Reformation, David Lyndsay’s Satire of the Thrie Estaitis (the only medieval play still regularly performed), and the love poetry of the reigns of Mary and James VI. Issues of language, politics, religion and national identity will be addressed. The course will equip students with an understanding of literature and society in one of the richest periods of Scottish literary history.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), continuous assessment: essay (30%), presentation (10%), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

To be arranged

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

The fourteenth century is the greatest period in the early history of literature in English. Texts and authors studied range from the popular to the courtly and from the (very) profane to the sacred. The interaction of these, and of native with foreign influences, creates an unusually diverse and dynamic cultural scene. If lively narrative poetry is the single most important form - with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Ploughman - it is also the period in which lyric begins to mature as a form. The great civic Mystery play cycles represent the beginnings of a vigorous, earthy vernacular dramatic tradition which points forward to the achievements of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The course will also consider some of the strongly individual devotional writing by women in the period.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), continuous assessment: essay (30%), presentation (10%), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

120 credit points at Level 2, which should include EL 2509, Language and Linguistics: Applications. This pre-requisite may be waived at the discretion of the Head of School.

Overview

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, language in Europe has experienced two apparently contradictory traits. Because of the ideal of 'self determination of peoples', the number of standard languages has increased considerably; on the other hand, the creation of the European Union and growing English-language hegemony have been perceived as threatening to many languages on the continent. This course will discuss these issues, paying particular attention to the links between identity and nationality and language. The relationship between these factors in different parts of the continent - from Ireland to Spain, from France to Russia - will also be considered.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%); continuous assessment: essay (30%); group presentation (10%); seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr D Watt

Pre-requisites

Available only to Junior Honours English or Language and Linguistics students who have passed EL 2301. This pre-requisite may be waived by the Head of School.

Overview

This course focuses upon two areas of speech communication: speech acoustics – the study of the sound signals passing between speaker and hearer, and auditory phonetics – the processes by which these signals are perceived and understood by the hearer. The course aims to give a detailed and balanced picture of the principal medium humans use to communicate with one another. Students will learn to use sound spectrography software for speech analysis, and will become familiar with the structure and functions of the human ear.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture per fortnight; 1 two-hour seminar per fortnight (alternating with lectures); 1 one-hour laboratory practical per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment: 2 laboratory reports (45%); essay (45%); seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P Schlicke

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

Many of our modern sensibilities were shaped in the nineteenth century, a period of rapid change that saw increasing urbanisation, an explosion in population, and major political reform. These changes brought anxiety and introspection, and the literature of the time expresses both excitement and doubt as Britain moved towards the secular, urban and democratic society we know today. The course will examine the complex inter-relationship between selected works and issues of the day, including Reform, “culture”, and the function of art in society. Authors studied will include George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture, 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (40%); continuous assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr D Duff

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

The Romantic period (1789-1830) is a turning point in literary history which transformed received modes of writing, redefined the role of literature, and gave new prominence to ideas of originality, imagination, creativity and self-expression. This course explores these fascinating developments, particularly in poetry. The first half concentrates on the work of Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and examines the emergence of the revolutionary aesthetic of Romanticism in the context of the social and political upheavals of the ‘Age of Revolution’. The second half focuses on the ‘second-generation’ Romantic poets Shelley, Byron and Keats, but also pays attention to outstanding prose writers of the period including the essayists De Quincey, Hazlitt and Lamb and the novelists Jane Austen and Mary Shelley.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), continuous assessment: essay (25%), exercise (15%), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

This course explores a selection of literature from the Tudor and Stuart period, examining poetic forms such as the sonnet, erotic verse and devotional poetry, as well as developments in drama from the courtly Masque to revenge tragedy and city comedy. Works are studied in their literary, social and political contexts, with particular reference to generic transformations and authorial interventions in political controversies or literary debates. The course will also pay close attention to audiences and to modes of literary production and consumption. Writers studied include Marlowe, Sidney, Donne and Jonson.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%), continuous assessment: 2 essays (25% each), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr J King

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

This course asks how far gender plays a part in the writing, reading and evaluation of literary texts. Most of the course will focus on gender as a social construct, looking at the construction of gender in texts by both male and female authors, and at ways in which texts encourage a gendered reading position. A variety of critical approaches will be used. Since definitions of sexual identity are central to the course, texts which question the stability of that identity, such as lesbian and gay writing, will be used in addition to canonical texts. Authors studied will include: Jackie Kay, Ernest Hemingway and Jeanette Winterson.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), continuous assessment: essay (30%), group presentation (10%), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr C A Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

This course covers American literature from colonial times to 1900, viewing the work of important writers against the backdrop of history. The focus of the course is the 19th century, a period of immense social and cultural upheaval in the United States which transformed a rural colony into a political and industrial giant. The course considers issues of gender, race and religion, and the search for and emergence of a distinctively American voice. Authors studied include Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Dickson, Whitman, Douglass and James.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 2 essays (20% each), 1 two-hour exam (50%), seminar assessment mark (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

120 credit points at Level 2, which should include EL 2509, Language and Linguistics: Applications. This pre-requisite may be waived at the discretion of the Head of School.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School. The field work aspects of this course may pose difficulties to students with disabilities. For such students, alternative arrangements will be made available. Any student wishing to discuss this further should contact the School Disability Co-ordinator.

Overview

One of the universals of human life is that language is subject to change. Underlying much of this change is the fact that the form of all living languages varies from speaker to speaker. Sociolinguistics studies the way class, ethnic background and gender affect the way you speak and the way others perceive your speech. Historical Linguistics attempts to find significant patterns in the same variation and change found in the past.

This course introduces the basic principles of both Sociolinguistics and Historical Linguistics. In order to illustrate these principles, reference will be made to case studies, both historical and contemporary. You will also be encouraged to participate in small-scale research and fieldwork projects.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%), continuous assessment: essay (30%), seminar work (10%), group presentation (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M Ray

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

This course in Modernist literature examines a selection of the best literature from the early years of the twentieth century. Seven major authors are represented by works which illustrate the characteristics of Modernism, and a further aim of the course is to convey a sense of the period and of the social and intellectual context in which the texts were written.

Authors studied will include: Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, D H Lawrence, T S Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and W B Yeats.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%), continuous assessment: essay (30%), group presentation (10%), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden and Dr L McIlvanney

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Overview

In the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scotland experienced 'a social and economic transformation unparalleled among European societies of the time in its speed, scale and intensity' (Tom Devine). The course examines how this changing Scotland is imagined in some of the key literary texts of the period, and will relate these texts to their contexts: literary, linguistic, social, historical and intellectual. Writers to be studied will include: Walter Scott, James Hogg, Elizabeth Grant, Robert Louis Stevenson, J M Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Nan Shepherd, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (40%), continuous assessment: essay (35%); exercise (15%); seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr D Duff

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by Head of School.

Overview

What makes literature ‘literary’? What is the relationship between literature and history? What is the role of the unconscious in literary creation? How does gender affect the way we read and write? Is literary criticism an art or a science? In recent years the exploration of these questions has transformed the nature of English as an intellectual discipline and led to radically new readings of literary texts. This course offers an introduction to modern literary theory, sampling the work of some of the most influential theorists of the twentieth century, and applying their ideas to the analysis of literary texts.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), continuous assessment: 2 essays (20% each), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

London in the early modern period was a centre of government, a thriving commercial hub and one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. It was also a centre for literary production across a range of genres, from plays to pageants, from poetry to pamphlets. This course will examine the various ways in which the city is represented in the literature of the period and will explore such topics as the place of the stage; sin and the city; ceremony and festivity; commerce and the community; and urban satire.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1 two-hour examination (40%), continuous assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%) and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr H Hutchison

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. Course may be taken separately from EL 43BN.

Overview

The late nineteenth century brought industrialisation and a new sophistication into American culture. This course focuses on American writing at this time of astonishing social and intellectual change. Issues such as wealth and society, innocence and decadence, the urban environment, the growth of New York, the conscious mind and the role of women emerge in the novels and poetry of the period. Designed as a sister course to EL 43BN 'An American in Paris' (although the courses may be taken separately), this course aims to examine the response of writers to these issues, and the new forms of writing which they explore as they open the door to Modernism. Authors to be studied include James, Wharton, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Frost and Cummings.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr T Rist

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

This course will explore the religio-political implications of representing the supernatural on the English Renaissance stage. In light of what Max Weber termed the Protestant ‘demystification’ of the physical universe, students will study the ‘reformation’ in English attitudes to the supernatural in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In line with current historicist practice, such social change will be viewed as a ‘context’ for a variety of dramatic texts that treat the supernatural in the period. Authors for study will include: Marlowe, Shakespeare.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1 two-hour examination (40%), continuous assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%), and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr J King

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

In 1966 Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, provided a feminist ‘response’ to Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, published in 1847. Since then, such revisions of Victorian fiction and history have become increasingly popular, particularly among women novelists, reaching a peak in the 1990s. Much of this writing deals with aspects of women’s experience rarely present in Victorian fiction, but in the process it also explores the ways in which gender itself – what it means to be a man or a woman – was constructed by nineteenth-century religion, science and literature. This course examines some of the most important of these novels in the context of these influential Victorian discourses.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1 two-hour examination (40%), continuous assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%), seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr L McIlvanney

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

Some of the finest Scottish novels of the twentieth century are written deliberately as Glasgow novels, attempts to address an urban experience often marginalised in the Scottish literary tradition. Glasgow novelists sought to come to terms with the city and with phenomena like industrialisation, commercial expansion, class division, socialist politics and personal alienation. The course will consider: the novel as an urban form; the position of the artist in industrial society; narrative technique and the treatment of vernacular language; realism and surrealism; stereotypes and the changing image of Glasgow.

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Mr J D McClure

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not run in 2004/05.

Overview

Arguably Scotland’s greatest poet, and certainly one of her most profound, Robert Henryson presents a vivid and critical picture of the surface and the underside of Stewart Scotland. Lively storyteller, comic statirist and austere moralist, champion of the oppressed, critic of social and political abuses, celebrant of the pleasures of life, and above all, a man with a deep understanding of the human condition, Henryson employs humour (sometimes earthy), irony, and dramatic boldness to call in question the ways of God and man. This course will place him in the cultural climate of Stewart Scotland, and examine his later influence.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of the School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will be available in 2004/05 and in alternate sessions thereafter.

Overview

In general, historical linguistics has been primarily concerned with the study of languages before the mid-18th century. Language in the modern era has often been considered identical to contemporary language. Yet this is not the case. In the recent past of many languages, there have been changes documented by the then-emerging science of linguistics which might have been impossible before an era of mass literacy and relatively easy communication. With some emphasis on the histories of English and Scots, students will examine and analyse different developments during the period in order to ascertain whether any patterns can be found.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M Ray

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

May not be taken along with EL 45ML.

Overview

The course will examine the development of the short story during the last two hundred years in Britain and America, from Washington Irving and Herman Melville to contemporary writers such as John Fowles and Malcolm Bradbury.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1 two-hour examination (40%), continuous assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%), seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr C Llamas

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 who have 30 credit points from EL 30LQ/EL 35LQ. This pre-requisite may be waived, by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

Sociolinguistics is a fieldwork-based discipline. This course aims to provide a foundation in some of the primary methods used in sociolinguistic research. The focus of the course will be on how to design and conduct studies of language variation, including methods of sampling populations of speakers, problems and techniques associated with the elicitation of speech styles, and the analysis, interpretation and presentation of results.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr P Schlicke

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

Dickens burst onto the nineteenth-century literary scene ‘like a skyrocket’. Although his reputation as the foremost English novelist now rests primarily on the achievement of his later works, it was the comic zest of his early fiction which his contemporaries admired most. These novels and sketches provide revealing insight into the first years of the Victorian era, even as their youthful high spirits and crusading appeal gave them enduring popularity.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

Where does our concept of nationhood come from? What is its connection to our national literature? How is it related to representations of the past? These are questions which vex post-devolution Scotland as it seeks to establish its cultural identity. They are also issues interrogated in the work of one of Scotland’s greatest writers, Walter Scott. This course will explore the relationship between Scott’s fiction and Scotland via texts such as Waverley, The Tale of Old Mortality, Rob Roy and The Heart of Mid-Lothian. It will also consider more general theories of the relationship between literature and national cultural identities.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School. (EL 30IF is highly recommended).

Notes

This is a 6-week course. Course will not run in 2004/05.

Overview

Does Northern Ireland's history interweave with or overwhelm the poetic imagination? When it comes to the Province's "chronic sovereignty neurosis", the cultural spin-doctors are always ready with their diagnoses - but what about the writers? The dilemma involves not only the writer's perception of how poetry intersects with politics, but also his or her relation to tradition(s), literary or otherwise: does he or she embrace the community with all its intimate biases or become a solitary figure, seeking an "objective" viewpoint on the Troubles? The title of this course indicates the main thematic concerns to be explored: what is the role of the poet in a time of violence? Must the writer engage with political events, or is it imperative that he or she abstain from social commentary?

Poets studied include: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (70%), presentation (10%), formal debate (10%) and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

To be advised

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course will examine a number of Anglo-Irish novels from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These novels - written at a time of significant political developments, such as the land war, the emergence of cultural nationalism, the insurrection of 1916, and partition - reflect a picture of turbulence and transgression. Written by some of Ireland's best-known Anglo-Irish writers, these texts deal with the great themes of the Irish Gothic and Big House tradition. Texts to be studied include Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), and Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray (1891).

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous Assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr D Duff

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

From Gawain and the Green Knight to Goldfinger, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, romance is a genre which embraces some of the greatest works of English literature as well as being the vehicle for some of its most seductive fictions. In recent years, romance has also been the focus for theoretical debates about the nature of genre, attracting the attention of major twentieth-century theorists. The course explores this rich literary and critical tradition, analysing works in verse, prose and drama (and film) from six centuries whilst also investigating modern theories of genre. Among the authors studied are Marie de France, Spenser, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, T S Eliot and David Lodge.

Structure

1 one-hour seminar (followed by one-hour’s self directed study) and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1 two-hour examination (40%), continuous assessment: essay (40%), oral presentation (10%) seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor P Davidson

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course will examine W H Auden’s work of the 1930s: poems, plays and films. Auden returned from Berlin at the beginning of the 1930s convinced that another European war was inevitable, yet, paradoxically, his poetic output in the decade is obsessed with violence, thrillers, blood-feuds and spies. Paradoxically, the socialist Auden is himself obsessed with violent, upper-class men. Against these obsessions is set a haunted involvement with the desolate landscapes of the north of England. The course will also look at the documentary films on which Auden worked in the later ‘30s.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr H Hutchison

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. Course may be taken separately from EL 40BJ.

Overview

Many of the best-known American writers of the early twentieth century did much of their writing in Europe. This course looks at those American writers who left the rapidly changing and expanding New World of the United States to re-discover the Old World. Designed as a sister-course to the Gilded Age, this course juxtaposes American commercialism and idealism with European culture and sophistication, and explores the contrasts and ironies exposed by writers who moved between the two worlds. It focuses on the magnetic pull of Paris on the Amercian imagination, and looks at the difficulties and dislocations faced by writers in exile. It also explores the links between American and European society and uncovers the interdependence of the two cultures.

Writers studied include Henry James, Edith Wharton, T S Eliot, Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor D Hewitt

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours students, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. Course will not run in 2004/05.

Overview

The course will study the reconfigurations of male and female sexuality and sexual roles as reflected in the novel between the 1740s and 1840s inclusive. It aims to consider the ways in which such matters are represented and discussed in fiction, and the ways in which the novel form adapted itself to such concerns, as well as the ways in which changing forms led to new insights. Authors studied are likely to include Richardson, Laclos, Austen, Scott and Charlotte Brontë.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (60%); seminar paper, presented orally but submitted on paper (20%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr L McIlvanney

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course will examine the full range of Burns’s work, from the early satires and verse epistles to ‘Tam o’Shanter’ and the later songs. Topics will include Burns’s deployment of a radically mixed Scots-English idiom, his interest in the cult of sentiment, and his involvement with political radicalism. The relationship of Burns to his literary predecessors, both vernacular and Augustan, will be examined, along with Burns’s influence on the subsequent generation of English Romantic poets.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Mr J D McClure

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The figure of the hero is central in literature from antiquity to recent times. The concept has varied: heroes may be associated with a national cause, they may be of outstanding strength or valour; or they may exhibit other morally admirable qualities. The course starts with an examination of the war hero of antiquity, and the re-emergence of the figure, greatly altered, in Virgil’s Aeneas. The main focus of the course is on Beowulf, Hary’s Wallace and Malory’s Sir Lancelot, examined against their historical and cultural backgrounds to determine what constant qualities are essential to the hero-figure. Finally, more recent literary presentations of the heroic ideal will be discussed.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (50%), exercise (30%), seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, who have 30 credit points from either EL 30VP or EL 35LQ. This pre-requisite may be waived by the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course discusses the ways that society and individuals interact in terms of language. It pays particular attention to the nature of bilingualism within a society; how a nation can cope with (and benefit from) widespread bilingualism; how lesser-used languages can either survive or cease to be used when they are under pressure from larger-scale languages; and the manners in which ‘new’ languages can be ‘planned’ and standardised. Whilst the course pays attention to the Scottish linguistic situation, it discusses cases from all over the world.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr D Watt

Pre-requisites

Available only to senior honours students who have passed EL 30NW, Visible Speech: Instrumental Phonetics, or by approval of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course will provide students with training in the key aspects of theory and method involved in the study of phonological variation and change. A broad overview of the field will be provided. Students will be given the opportunity to carry out in-depth computer-based analyses of existing and specially-collected speech recordings. By the end of the course, students will be able to contextualise the results of narrowly focussed studies of contemporary and historical phonological phenomena within the broad theoretical framework provided by sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, theoretical phonology, and laboratory phonetics/phonology.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture per fortnight; 1 two-hour seminar per fortnight (alternating with lectures); 1 one-hour laboratory practical per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: 2 word reports (40%), written assignment (50%); oral presentation (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr P Schlicke

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

Widely dismissed uncritically as a mode of bombast and false sentiment, melodrama is an important artistic mode which not only dominated theatrical art of the nineteenth century, but also profoundly influenced the age’s fiction and poetry. Recent reappraisal has found its methods artistically legitimate, historically conditioned and culturally significant – and productive of rollicking entertainment. Starting with gothic drama which dominated the early nineteenth century stage, the course will sample the variety of forms taken by plays as the century proceeded – romantic drama, domestic drama, nautical drama, and society drama.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. Travel is a central motif of his work shaping its subject matter and themes and contributing to a theory of writing which bridges the Victorian age and modernity, often anticipating modern critical theory. This course will explore the metaphor of travel in Stevenson’s work and consider the ways in which it begins to articulate some of the questions which now inform post-colonial debates. Texts to be studied will include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, and a selection of South Seas stories and Stevenson’s essays.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School. (EL 30IF is highly recommended).

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The predominant genre in contemporary Northern Irish fiction is that of the thriller, one that puts the sex back into semtex. Such a genre, known as "Troubles Trash", often perpetuates the myth of Belfast as a knowable city, a "hellish stasis left behind by world history". The novels studied on this course offer an implicit critique of this genre. Themes studied on this course include: the ability to represent violence in literature; the use (and abuse) of history as a representational strategy; identity politics; the impact of the Troubles (and the current ceasefire) on Northern Irish literature.

Authors to be studied include: Seamus Deane, Deirdre Madden, Eoin McNamee, Bernard MacLaverty and Robert McLiam Wilson.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (70%); presentation (20%) and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor P Davidson

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. Course will not run in 2004/05.

Overview

This course will explore the poetry composed in response to the wars and revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century. While each class will focus on a careful reading in historical and social context of one or two poems, there will also be consideration of wider issues of literature and history. Canonical poems by Marvell and Milton will be read alongside newly-discovered poems by unknown writers. There will be particular focus in this course on poetry written in Scotland and Ireland.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P Schlicke

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours English or Joint Honours English students.

Overview

This course will provide students with guidance on writing a dissertation on a topic approved by the Head of School.

Structure

3 one-hour tutorials.

Assessment

Dissertation (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours Language and Linguistic students.

Overview

This course will provide students with guidance on writing a dissertation on a topic approved by the Head of School.

Structure

3 one-hour tutorials.

Assessment

Dissertation (100%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course is not available in session 2004/05.

Overview

Why does history matter? For the sixteenth century the past was suddenly a critical subject. The period witnessed an explosion in historical writing. The radical break with tradition brought about by religious reformation combined with the impact of newly disseminated classical historians led to the emergence of new forms of history writing and new ways of thinking about the past. Central to these developments were innovations in the writing of life histories. This course will examine approaches to life writing across generic boundaries from popular forms to ‘politic’ histories and the history play. Authors to be studied will include Thomas More, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and others.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr T Rist

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course looks at the works of a number of devotional poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the relationship of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century devotional poetry to the courtly traditions of Petrarchan poetry as well as to the writings and philosophy of the imitatio Christi tradition of affective meditation on the Passion. In addition, it stresses the role of devotional poetry in the English Reformations of the period. Authors for study will include Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr C Shrank

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. Course will not run in 2004/05.

Overview

This course will consider how sixteenth-century English identities were constructed in opposition, or relation to, other nations. It will examine the iconic nature of England’s so-called ‘island’ status; the development of the English vernacular; writing – and rewriting – national history; and English fears of the ‘polluting’ or ‘effeminising’ effects of foreign travel, foreign diets and foreign literature. Texts studied will include poetry, prose romance, travel writing and drama by authors such as Spenser, Nashe and Shakespeare.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr C A Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course is not available in session 2004/05.

Overview

This course will examine a full range of Byron's work, from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which established his fame as a poet, to the oriental tales and verse dramas, and his epic Don Juan. Topics to be discussed will include: autobiography and writing; poetic tradition and experimentation; the Byronic hero; cross-dressing; Byron's heroines; the art of pleasure; political and social satire. Attention will also be given to Byron's relation to his contemporaries, and the critical debates about his life and work.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr C A Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to student in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course examines the emergence of a distinctive New England literary culture from the colonial era to the American civil war, focusing on the so-called New England Renaissance of about 1830-60. This period saw a concentration in New England of a group of authors, who declared America's literary independence from Old England, redefined the notion of regionalism and nationhood, and transformed received modes of writing to create a new aesthetic and a new tradition. This course explores these developments through a range of texts, including Emerson's essays, Hawthorne's tales and sketches, Emily Dickinson's poems, and Thoreau's Walden. The course also pays attention to the place of 'literary transcendentalism' in American culture.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%), oral presentation (10%) and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Mr J D McClure

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. Course will not run in 2004/05.

Overview

Modernist poetry arose from a belief that familiar uses of language were no longer adequate, or appropriate, for what needed to be said. The practices of Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and Thomas resulted from this fundamental change in the attitude towards language and style. The course will examine reasons for this change, and ways in which each of them rose to the challenge which is presented. Their departure from traditional poetic language, and even from the normal rules of grammar, will be seen as creative responses to a whole new set of ideas regarding the expressive function of language.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of the School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

Contact between languages is inevitable. Language contact is also one of the central spurs of linguistic change. Often this contact is brief, and the influence of one language over another is ephemeral; sometimes the contact has long-lasting and profound effects upon at least one of the languages concerned.

This course will discuss different types of language contact, their various effects, and the social and linguistic contexts from which they spring. It will pay particular attention to the ‘transition period’ between Old and Middle English, assessing the types and levels of contact between English and both Norse and French.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr M Ray

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. May not be taken along with EL 40ME.

Overview

The course will examine the development of the short story in English literature from 1900 to the present day. We will begin with an intensive study of James Joyce to establish the defining features of the modern short story and we will then examine later authors ranging from D H Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett to contemporary writers such as John Fowles and Malcolm Bradbury. Special attention will be given to the formal analysis of features of narrative and discourse and to the development of close reading skills.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The North-east is a region which offers particular resonances to themes of Scottish literary identity, defining its own space at the margins of both central Scotland and the wider parameters of the UK. This course considers fictions set in the North-east examining the ways in which they both interrogate the marginal status of the region and offer wider reflections on identity as it is constructed via gender, language, and social, geographical and cultural contexts. Texts will include Grassic Gibbon’s Grey Granite, Shepherd’s A Pass in the Grampians, Muir’s Imagined Corners, Aboulela’s The Translator and Shannon’s The Tin Man.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor A Spence

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. May not be taken along with EL 48TG.

Overview

This course is taught by award-winning Scottish writer Alan Spence. Students will produce a series of original works aided by Professor Spence’s considerable experience in numerous genres of writing.

The course will be assessed by continuous assessment: (i) seminar work: 25% and (ii) submission of a portfolio of original writing, involving three pieces of work eg poems, short stories, dramatic dialogues (exercises: 75%).

The three pieces of written work will be marked on a qualitative as well as a quantitative basis.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: three exercises (25% each) and seminar work (25%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr B Fennell

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours English or Language and Linguistics students who have 30 credit points from either EL 30VP or EL 30LQ or EL 35LQ. This pre-requisite may be waived by the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not run in 2004/05.

Overview

This course examines the effects of colonialism on language contact, change and spread. It focuses on the spread of English within the British Isles, the British Empire and beyond, and on post-colonial models of language contact in a variety of countries. Effects of contact on other national standard languages will be discussed, as well as on the development of pidgins, creoles and other interim, immigrant and minority varieties. The notions of linguicism, linguistic imperialism and linguistic prejudice will be explored in depth, and studies from sociolinguistics will feature alongside readings from politics and international relations, cultural and literary studies.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor Derek Hughes

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours students have at least 15 Credit Points from the Level 3 English group 3 courses, or by permission of Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The years after 1660 saw an intellectual and moral revolution. Some thinkers began to view human life and thought as purely material processes, and to regard the soul as a meaningless concept. Increased global exploration brought awareness that there were no universal ideas of sexual morality. For a relatively short period, dramatists explored the nature of humen sexuality with a freedom and open-mindedness that were not to be equalled until the twentieth century. This course will cover the rise and fall of sex comedy. It will include three plays by Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn her living as a creative writer, and works by Wycherley, Etherege, Otway, Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Farquhar.

Assessment

Essay 80% Seminar Assessment 20%.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr C Shrank

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

Chaucer’s Criseyde (Cressida) is one of the most compelling female characters in medieval and Renaissance literature. Her story is that of a single woman surviving in a world of war, betrayal and sexual censure. This course will explore representations of Criseyde from Chaucer to the Restoration, and the connection between ‘fame’ and sexual reputation. It will also examine the difficulties experienced by (male) writers when portraying women in a way which avoids the dichotomies of virgin/whore, victim/scold.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (65%), class exercise (15%), seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor D Hewitt

Pre-requisites

Available to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

One of the great insights of literary Romanticism was that the life of the mind is not limited to consciousness. Dreams, sometimes drug-induced, became a poetic subject as poets explored subliminal and unconscious mental states, and the desires and anxieties which find their only expression in dream experience.

Selected poems by S T Coleridge, P B Shelley, and John Keats.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (60%), exercise (20%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr C Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course will involve the close study of five major women novelists of the Victorian period: Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. It will give particular attention to narrative structure and generic innovation, the representation of women in fictional and psychological texts of the period, the relationship between gender and writing, and political discourse in the novel.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr C Llamas

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 who have 60 credit points from Level 2 English courses, including EL 2507 or EL 2508 and EL 30LQ/EL 35LQ. This pre-requisite may be waived, by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The construction of identity is intricately connected with the use of language. This course explores the role of language in the construction of identity and the significance of identity construction to language variation. The concept of identity is investigated on various levels beginning with individual identity and developing through to national identity. The focus of the course is on how these multi-levelled identities are realised through the use of language. A variety of quantitative and ethnographic language variation studies will be surveyed in order to illustrate the issues under investigation.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr P Schlicke

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

Dickens’s reputation as the greatest English novelist rests on masterpieces which transformed the nature of the novel and probed the heart of Victorian society. Comic, tragic, delicate, bold, topical, timeless: in their rich variety Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend are landmarks of English fiction.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

EL 35LQ Language: Variation and Change. This requirement may be waived with permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The course will examine the nature of discourse, and consider a variety of views from within and outside the discipline of linguistics. It will consider how the understanding of discourse is determined by theoretical perspectives, how this in turn ilfluences the mode of analysis. The basic principles and methods of application of several analytical approaches will be presented, including conversation analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. Each will be considered in the light of the information it provides about different aspects of society and social interaction within its cultural context.

Assessment

Continuous assessment (100%); one 2,500-3,000 word essay; SAM (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor A Spence

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. May not be taken along with EL 45TG.

Overview

This course is taught by award-winning Scottish writer Alan Spence. Students will produce a series of original works aided by Professor Spence’s considerable experience in numerous genres of writing.

The course will be assessed by continuous assessment: (i) seminar work: 25% and (ii) submission of a portfolio of original writing, involving three pieces of work eg poems, short stories, dramatic dialogues (exercises: 75%).

The three pieces of written work will be marked on a qualitative as well as a quantitative basis.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: three exercises (25% each) and seminar work (25%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The poets studied here keep their Englishness tightly wrapped in inverted commas; the sun has set on the Empire. Although anglocentric, many of them are uneasy with contemporary society and offer alternative visions. They explore issues of identity (class, gender, nationality) while pondering their own diminishing status as purveyors of cultural truths. This course looks closely at selected works from Roy Fisher, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Craig Raine, Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage, spanning three decades (1961-1991). With so many accents, one wonders if that “small v” really unites us, or is telling us what to do with national identity.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (70%), 2 presentations (5% each), seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr D Duff

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 (EL 30XR is highly recommended), or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. Course will not run in 2004/05.

Overview

Poet, idealist, rebel, Percy Bysshe Shelley embodied the aspirations and tensions of the Romantic age, and wrote some of its most compelling literature. This course explores the full range of his writing, from his youthful gothic novel Zastrozzi to his lyrical masterpiece Prometheus Unbound and the late fragment The Triumph of Life. Attention will also be given to prose works including A Defence of Poetry and the essay On Love, his relation to other writers, and the critical debates about his controversial life and work.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).