Undergraduate Catalogue of Courses 2013/2014
ENGLISH
PLEASE NOTE: Resit: (for Honours students only): Candidates achieving a CAS mark of 6-8 may be awarded compensatory level 1 credit. Candidates achieving a CAS mark of less than 6 will be required to submit themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.
Course Co-ordinator: Dr J King
Pre-requisite(s): Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.
This course examines some of the most important contemporary women's fiction set in the Victorian period. Much of this writing deals with aspects of women's experience rarely openly discussed 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 science and literature. The course begins by looking at Charlotte Bronte's novel, Jane Eyre, and Jean Rhys's novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which in 1966 provided a feminist 'response' to Bronte's novel. Such revisions of Victorian fiction and history became increasingly popular in the final decades of the twentieth-century, and it is this body of writing which will form the main focus of the course.
2 two-hour seminars per week.
1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%), in-course assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%), and seminar work (10%).
Course Co-ordinator: Dr A Lumsden
Pre-requisite(s): Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.
Note(s): This is a 6-week course. As the texts studied in this course are long, students are advised to read ahead over the summer.
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 a selection of his novels. It will also consider more general theories of the relationship between literature and national cultural identities.
2 two-hour seminars per week.
1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).
Course Co-ordinator: Professor D Hughes
Pre-requisite(s): Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of Head of School.
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 human 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 plays by Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn her living as a creative writer, and works by Wycherley, Etherege, Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Farquhar.
1 two-hour seminar per week.
1st Attempt: In-course assessment: Essay (80%), and seminar assessment (20%).
Course Co-ordinator: Dr C A Jones
Pre-requisite(s): Available only to student in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.
Note(s): This is a 6-week course.
This course examines the emergence of a distinctive New England literary culture in the nineteenth-century, focusing on the 'Renaissance' of 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 Hawthorne's short stories and 'international novel' The Marble Faun, Emerson's Essays, Poe's gothic tales, and Emily Dickinson's poems. The course also pays attention to the possibilities of tansatlantic comparative analysis.
2 two-hour seminars per week.
1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), oral presentation (10%), and seminar work (10%).
Course Co-ordinator: Dr T. Baker
Pre-requisite(s): Available only to students in Programme Year 4 of the English Programme.
Themes of religion and morality have long held a central place in the Scottish literary imagination, and have frequently been used as a means of addressing broad cultural issues. This course will introduce students to a wide range of novels concerned with the question of sin and the place of morality in contemporary society. Including texts from a wide variety of genres, ranging from thrillers to social realism, the course will focus on such issues as: the concept of 'good'; the relationship between individuals and communities; the relationship between regional and religious identity; and the legacy of Calvinism in a secular context. Authors to be discussed may include Neil M. Gunn, Muriel Spark, and A.L. Kennedy, and Christopher Brookmyre.
1 two-hour seminar per week
1st Attempt: continuous assessment: 3000 word essay (80%); oral presentation (10%); seminar work (10%)
Resit: For honours students only: candidates achieving a CAS mark of 6-8 may be awarded compensatory level 1 credit. Candidates achieving a CAS mark of less than 6 will be required to submit a new essay.
Formative Assessment and Feedback Information
Students will be asked to keep an informal course journal throughout the duration of the course.
Detailed written comments on essay; detailed oral feedback on presentation content and delivery.
Course Co-ordinator: Dr C. Jones
Pre-requisite(s): Available only to students in Programme Year 4 of the English Programme.
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.
1 two-hour seminar per week
1st Attempt: Essay (2500-3000 words) 80%; Presentation 10%, Seminar Assessment 10%
Resit: For honours students only: candidates achieving a CAS mark of 6-8 may be awarded compensatory level 1 credit. Candidates achieving a CAS mark of less than 6 will be required to submit a new essay.
Formative Assessment and Feedback Information
plenary, group and individual discussion
written feedback on essay
written feedback on presentation/
written feedback on seminar performance
Course Co-ordinator: Dr A Janus
Pre-requisite(s): Available only to students in Programme Year 4 of the English Programme.
The comic modernism of such writers as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and John Banville draws on earlier Irish tradition (Swiftian satire, the comical incoherencies and uncommon indecencies of Sterne, the macabre laughter of Maturin, Wildean word-play). This course aims to trace a genealogy of Irish prose fiction by reference to the role of laughter and comedy in driving formal literary innovation. In addition to gaining knowledge of the historical development of Irish prose fiction, and of its impact upon and interaction with other literary traditions, students will have the opportunity to develop an understanding of the different literary modalities of comedy (wit and word-play, grotesque and macabre humour, parody and satire) and of the various theories of laughter as a psycho-social and aesthetic event.
1 two-hour seminar per week
1st Attempt: essay 3000-3500 words (80%); presentation (students submit written draft) (20%)
Resit: For honours students only: candidates achieving a CAS mark of 6-8 may be awarded compensatory level 1 credit. Candidates achieving a CAS mark of less than 6 will be required to submit a new essay.
Formative Assessment and Feedback Information
Detailed written feedback on their essays; detailed oral feedback for their presentations.
Course Co-ordinator: Dr M Garner
Pre-requisite(s): EL 35LQ Language: Variation and Change. This requirement may be waived with permission of the Head of School.
Note(s): This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in 2008/09.
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 influences 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.
2 two-hour seminars per week.
1st Attempt: In-course assessment: one essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).