English

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Shane Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to registred postgraduate students

Overview

What is the role of the writer in a divided society? Must he or she engage with political events? Situated within a particular community, must the writer forego subjective response in favour of objectivity? With so many questions impinging on Northern Irish writers, the aesthetic and critical grounds have become narrower and narrower. This course considers how several writers — Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Brian Friel, Derek Mahon, Frank McGuinness, Eoin McNamee and Glenn Patterson— have framed these questions and how they have been framed by them.

Structure

One two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

3000-3500 word essay (80%); Seminar Assessment Mark (20%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor P Crotty

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

Both of Ireland’s greatest modern writers lived through a period that saw the difficult and sometimes violent emergence of a new Ireland from (to use Joyce’s teasing term) a ‘semi-colonial’ past. Both were concerned, in very different ways, with issues relating to constructions of national identity in volatile historical and social circumstances. This course will provide an exploratory in-depth introduction to major texts by Yeats and Joyce, making reference to topics such as Celticism and primitivism, coloniality and postcoloniality, tradition and modernity, language and nationality.

Structure

One two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Essay 3000-3500 words (80%); Seminar Assessment Mark (20%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr S Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

This course examines how the artist's sense of place can influence both his choice of subject matter as well as determine his approach to it, and also investigates the manner in which place is constructed in the work of art. Looking closely at selected literary and filmic texts from each decade of the twentieth century, the course isolates the prevailing Irish cultural stereotypes — the idealization of the West of Ireland, the figuration of Ireland as a woman — and examines both how they are mediated and to what ends they are mobilized. The course focuses particularly on a number of key themes: the rural-urban divide, emigration and the Irish diaspora, the intersection between gender and nationality, and the utopic possibilities of "elsewhere". In the end, what the course demonstrates is the importance of knowing one's place.

Structure

One two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Essay 80%; Seminar Assessment 20%

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Prof D Hewitt

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course will inculcate an understanding of the intellectual achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the many ways in which the intellectual analyses of Enlightenment writers are reflected, represented and discussed in the imaginative writings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The period 1750–1830 is the only time in which Scottish writings and writers had a decisive influence on the European imagination, and the only period in which Scottish letters might be considered as of greater significance than English. David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Lord Byron are the key figures, but they worked in an intellectual milieu which both challenged and supported them.

Structure

One two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Essay (80%), and two oral presentations (10% each) with written summaries.

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Alison Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

Walter Scott is beyond doubt Scotland’s most significant and best-known writer of fiction. His significance lies beyond this, however, for his roles of poet, editor and collector as well as his lasting literary influence make him one of the most culturally significant of nineteenth century figures both in Scotland and internationally. This course aims to explore the full cultural, critical and historical backgrounds to Scott’s work and to examine all aspects of his writing career. Supported by the work of the Walter Scott Research Centre it will suggest a range of intellectual avenues by which students might develop postgraduate interests in Scott.

Structure

Teaching is 1 two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Essay (80%); 2 x oral presentation (10% each)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Alison Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

Modern Scottish literature is rich in both fiction and poetry and is particularly innovative in two outstanding periods; the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ of the inter-war period and from 1970 onwards. This course, while necessarily selective, will try to capture something of the excitement of these periods and set the texts studied in the wider context of Scottish literary developments. In this course we will explore the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir and Edwin Morgan and the fiction of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Nan Shepherd, James Kennaway, Robin Jenkins, Muriel Spark, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Janice Galloway.

Structure

One 2-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Essay 80%; 2 x 15 minute oral presentation (10% each)

Credit Points

10

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 5

Overview

This course will look at key Latin texts, knowledge of which is vital for the study of Renaissance literature, using modern parallel-text translations alongside early modern translations and adaptations. It will also consider how early modern writers emulated and appropriated these Latin works. Authors to be covered include Virgil (Aeneid1, IV, VI, XII, Eclogues), Ovid (Metamorphoses, Ars Amatoria), Horace, Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, Tacitus and Livy. This course is strongly recommended to students undertaking research in the early modern period in particular and literature in general. Some knowledge of basic Latin would be useful, but is not essential.

Structure

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (90%); presentation and seminar work (10%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Wayne Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 5

Overview

The course engages students in a variety of activities designed to develop their creativity and originality, as well as in specific tasks to test and extend their skill in the writing of poetry. Students will do imitations of a variety of different poetic styles, they will write on specific topics, they will develop and revise their poems in the context of submitting their work to discussion and analysis by the rest of the class and by their teacher(s).

Structure

1 x 2 hour seminar, weekly

Assessment

Candidates will be assessed on the basis of: a folio of 6 complete poems, each piece no longer than 40 lines, or a single poem (a self-contained extract from a longer work is also permissible) no shorter than 180 lines and no longer than 300 lines (80%) together with a fully scripted verbal presentation, delivered to the class, of the key technical and expressive challenges met with during the creative evolution of the folio (20%).

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Prof C Craig

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course will analyse Irish and Scottish texts, both philosophical and literary, in the context of theories of the Enlightenment and of resistance to it. Selections from the writings of Hutcheson, Hume, Reid, Ferguson, Smith and Stewart will be read alongside literary works by writers such as Swift, Sterne, and Galt.

Following Rick Sher's argument that MacPherson's Ossianic poetry was a collaborative project of the Scottish Enlightenment, it will focus in particular on the collection of poetry and the production of "folk" poetry as a means of constructing and maintaining national identity, and on the work of Burns, Owenson, Baillie, Scott and Moore. It will also explore the ways in which historical materials are incorporated into narrative poems by poets such as Scott, Campbell and Byron.

Structure

One two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Exercise 1500-words (20%); Essay 3-3,500 words (80%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr C Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

This core course provides an advanced introduction to the theory of the novel and lays the foundation for the elective parts of the MLitt degree programme. The course concentrates on leading twentieth-century theorists, but also investigates earlier critical writings on the novel and relates theory to practice through textual examples from across the range of the novel’s historical development. The course is divided into three sections: narratology, genre theory, and the sociology of the novel. Topics to be explored include story and discourse, narrative time, the competition of genres, borderlines of the novel, realism and its alternatives, the history of novel-reading, serialisation and censorship.

Structure

1 two hour seminar per week.

Assessment

essay (80%); exercise (10%); oral presentation (10%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr J King

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

Few literary terms are used as often or as casually as ‘realism’. This course offers a more rigorous consideration of the term as it was used in the Victorian period, when the term dominated ideas about fiction. Novels will be studied in relation both to the novelists’ views of their work, and to twentieth-century critiques of realism. The course will include novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. It will conclude with a novel by Virginia Woolf to show how early twentieth-century scientific and cultural developments gave rise to a radically different conception of ‘reality’ and of the literary forms which might best convey it.

Structure

One two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Essay, 3,000-3,500 words – 80%; 2 scripted presentations – each 10%

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr M Durham

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

This course is a compulsory element of the MLitt in English Sociolinguistics. The course runs in the first semester and constitutes an in-depth examination of major aspects of contemporary dialects of English. Social correlates are examined in relation to language variation and change. The theoretical implications of socio-psychological and socio-political factors are also discussed with exemplification from relevant studies.

Structure

1 x one hour seminar per week

Assessment

1 x 3500 word essay (80%), 1 x in-course exercise (20%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor C Fynsk

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course will convene each year whether or not students take it for credit because it is the core intellectual event in the Centre for Modern Thought. All postgraduates working in the CMT are expected to attend on a regular basis and attendance to date averages at least 12. (normally students and staff). The purpose of attaching credits to this course is to enable students from other MLitt programmes to take it.

Structure

One two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Continuous assessment: Essay proposal (20%): Essay 6,000 words (80%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Prof. Cairns Craig

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course explores the ways in which reading has developed since the invention of print and through those changes the different ways in which the past has been ‘read’ at various stages in Western culture, from the interpretation of the Bible to the establishment of the significance of ‘national’ history. It compares the construction of the past as the product of divine intervention with the notion of history as a progressive enlightenment; it explores how literary works construct a sense of a national past and compares that with the role of the historian as a writer. It then compares the ways in which key events in Scottish and Irish history have been rendered by older and more contemporary historians.

Structure

1 x 2 hour seminar, weekly

Assessment

Presentation (20%)
Essay: 3,000 words (80%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

Students will be introduced to a range of conceptions and perspectives on discourse, drawn from disciplines such as linguistics, social psychology, sociology, and communication studies. They will examine what the study of discourse reveals about the nature of language, social interaction, power relations, and the construction of meaning. They will learn the basic principles of four analytical methods for discourse analysis:
• text linguistics
• narrative analysis
• conversation analysis
• critical discourse analysis

They will gain practical experience in applying these approaches to a variety of discourses, including conversations, interviews, the media, academic writing, literary texts, and advertisements.

Structure

Assessment

1. 2,000-word theoretical essay (30%)
2. 2,000-word analytical paper (30%)
3. 2-hour exam (40%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Prof. Christopher Fynsk

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course will be co-taught by Modern Thought core staff or other members of the Centre who will be invited to contribute by reason of the appropriateness of their research interests to the objectives of the course. Each staff member will meet with the students for three weeks to discuss their field and readings from that field and their own research. The four areas of concentration to be covered will normally include: literary thought, political and legal thought, science studies, history (in some semesters, the areas of visual culture or cultural studies will be substituted). The course will introduce students to the contemporary issues of work in the respective fields and give them a perspective of the advanced research undertaken by Modern Thought staff.

Structure

One two-hour seminar meeting per week.

Assessment

Students will produce papers (3000 words) relating to readings from two section of the course.

Credit Points

Course Coordinator

Prof. Alan Spence / Dr Wayne Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course engages students in a variety of activities designed to develop their creativity and originality, as well as in specific tasks to test and extend their skill in imaginative writing. Students will write on specific topics, be guided in the exploration of literary technique and expressive strategies, gain practical experience in mastering fundamental elements of literary style and receive constructive feedback from both staff and peers on their creative efforts.

Structure

1 x 2 hour seminar, weekly

Assessment

A 1,500 word piece analysing, in practical terms, the expressive, stylistic and formal effectiveness of a chosen poem or short story (40%) together with an original creative work of poetry, drama or prose, not longer than 3,500 words in prose (including drama) or 40 lines in poetry (50%). The piece must be introduced by a fully scripted short verbal presentation of the key artistic challenges addressed in its composition (10%).

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Thomas Rist

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students or by permission of Head of School

Co-requisites

Candidates must normally hold an undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline

Overview

This course will consider the social construction of death as well as the myriad ways that ideas of death have shaped literary, historical, philosophical, anthropological, sociological and theological production.
Key questions for the course would include the social construction of death, how death came to be seen as 'natural', and the positive uses of such things as grief in personal as well as cultural life.
Students will study thinking about death from the points of view of a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds: literary, philosophy, anthropology and sociology, divinity and history.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week for 12 weeks.

Assessment

End of course essay: 3,500 words (100%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Alison Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available to postgraduate students registered on the MLitts in English Literary Studies, the Novel, and on the literature strand of the MLitt in Early Modern Studies

Overview

This course aims to provide students with the practical skills and conceptual grounding necessary to undertake literary studies at postgraduate level. It will explore the key debates involved in modern literary study, consider the issues involved in the research process, and facilitate an understanding of the skills required for the dissemination of research outcomes. It will also provide a forum that will facilitate students in acquiring a range of transferable skills such as reflective thinking and effective presentation.

Structure

1 2-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

Title and 300-word abstract (25%); oral presentation (15 minutes) (25%); 2000 word paper (50%).

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Co-requisites

x

Notes

Overview

Since the eighteenth century the plays of Shakespeare have been celebrated as the high-water mark of English Literature; the gold in the golden age of English Renaissance culture. But what impact did Shakespeare’s drama have on the audiences of the seventeenth century? Hamlet spoke of actors as the “brief chronicles of the time”, underlining the central importance of theatre to the culture and debates of the period. And within theatrical culture, Shakespeare’s success was beyond question, his contemporary and fellow playwright Ben Jonson, labelled him “the soul of our age”.
In this course, taught by a team of specialists in renaissance literature, we respond to the plays as literature brimming with the energies and enthusiasms of its time. Close study of a broad range of Shakespeare texts forms a central part of the course within a detailed investigation of their relationship with contemporary culture, informed by recent research in the field.
Areas of study will be selected from the following:
Shakespeare and the Reformation; Shakespeare and Popular Culture; Shakespeare and the Text; Shakespeare and the Uses of History; Shakespeare, Gender and Class, and Shakespeare and the Restoration Stage.

Structure

1 x 2 hour seminar per week

Assessment

3-3,500 word essay (80%) scripted presentations (20%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Mark Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

This Course will train postgraduate students in the methods involved in Linguistic research. The course introduces the student to bibliographic research and the use of electronic resources and corpora. This course also provides an introduction to hypothesis generation and testing, data elicitation, qualitative and quantitative data analysis.

The student will gain knowledge and understanding of:

- Bibliographic research techniques
- The formulation and testing of a research hypothesis
- Basic statistical analysis
- Basic qualitative analyitical methods
- The planning and timetabling of their own research project

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per fortnight.

Assessment

Detailed research proposal (60%), annotatted bibliography (40%).

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

This course will involve detailed exposition and analysis of descriptive rules of morphology and syntax. Discussion of learner difficulties and fossilization will be included as will detailed discussion of the gap between competence and performance in morpho-syntax. Focus will be on: tense, aspect, modality, agreement, negation, general complementation and relativization.

Structure

Assessment

Four exercises - 25% each

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr R Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The present dialectal diversity of the English-speaking world is rooted in both the historical development of the English language and the social and cultural frameworks in which it was used. Seminars will discuss the development of English both as a linear movement from past to present, and also in terms of its diversity from place to place. Wherever possible, texts representing earlier stages of the language will be examined and analysed. Throughout the course, students will encounter elements of linguistic theory and methodology which will aid their understanding both of this course and of the MLitt programme as a whole.

Structure

12 x 1 hour seminars (1 per week)

Assessment

1 two hour written examination (80%), 1 in-course textual analysis (20%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor David Hewitt

Pre-requisites

Acceptance for entry to an MLitt in English Literary Studies; others by permission of the Head of School

Overview

The course will explore the social, intellectual, philosophical and aesthetic contexts of, and issues arising from, Modernist literature. It is based on a selection of works by major authors, including Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, T S Eliot, D H Lawrence and Hugh MacDiarmid

Structure

Teaching is 1 two-hour seminar (12 weeks)

Assessment

Essay (80%; 2 oral presentations 20%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Hazel Hutchison

Pre-requisites

Acceptance for entry to an MLitt in English Literary Studies; others by permission of the Head of School

Overview

This course is an examination of the poetry of the Victorian age, focusing on major representative poets and their critics. The course will also explore elements of Victorian thought and culture, including issues of gender, faith and doubt, social change, war and visual art. The course will be delivered in three sections: the first tracing the evolution of Victorian poetry out of the work of the Romantics, and exploring Victorian theories of poetics through the work of Tennyson; the second examining the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites in the context of their ideas of art and aestheticism; the third focussing on many of the themes of the age in the work of Thomas Hardy

Structure

Teaching is 1 two-hour tutorial per week

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (80%), 2 oral presentations (20%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr David Duff

Pre-requisites

Acceptance for entry to an MLitt in English Literary Studies; others by permission of the Head of School

Overview

This course explores the place of genre in English Romantic literature analysing a variety of literary genres and a wide range of authors from the period 1760-1830. The critical reception of literary genres will be addressed, as will the larger cultural contexts of Romantic literature. Three overarching themes structure the course: Genres in Time; Poetry versus Prose; Genre- Mixing. In each section, carefully highlight the transforming attitudes to genre that characterise the period, as well as the formal inventiveness of Romantic writing

Structure

Teaching is 1 two hour seminar per week plus 3 one hour lectures spaced across the course (to introduce each section)

Assessment

Essay 80%; 2 oral presentations 20%

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor Janet Todd

Pre-requisites

Available only or registered postgraduate students or by permission of the Head of School

Overview

The course will consist of detailed study of the 6 novels, juvenilia and unfinished work of Jane Austen, one of the pre-eminent writers of fiction in English Literature. It will also include less detailed study of several other novels relating to Austen’s work, for example Ann Radcliff’s Romance of the Forest and Frances Burney’s Camilla

Structure

Teaching is one 2-hour seminar per week

Assessment

1 essay of 3000-3500 words (80%); two scripted presentations of 1000 words each (10%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor Derek Hughes

Pre-requisites

This course is available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The principal writer on the course will be Aphre Behn (1640-89), the first British woman to earn her living as a creative writer and the greatest British woman writer before Jane Austen. The course will look at her outstanding contribution to the Restoration theatre, and her innovative work in the novel and short fiction. It will also look at works by woman writers of the generation after her death, such as Delarivier Manley and Susanna Centlivre

Structure

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay 3000-3500 words (90%) and oral presentation (10%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor Patrick Crotty

Pre-requisites

N/A

Overview

This level 5 module serves as a critical introduction to the history of poetry in Ireland and Scotland and it maintains a comparative focus throughout, with Irish and Scottish writers being dealt with in pairs or paired clusters from the middle ages to the present. The module examines the key developments in Irish and Scottish poetry, including (1) the flowering of poetry in Scots during the period between the C14th wars of independence and the Union of the Crowns (1603), (2) the tension between 'the English of Scotland' and the English of England as marked in Scottish poetry from the seventeeth century onwards, (3) the emergence of English poetry in Ireland in the C18th, and (4) the Irish Literary Revival and the Scottish Literary Renaissance in the early years of the C20th.

Structure

1 two hour seminar per week

Assessment

1 x 3000-3500 word essay (80%), 1 x oral presentation (10%), and SAM (10%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Wayne Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 5

Overview

The course engages students in a variety of activities designed to develop their creativity and originality, as well as in specific tasks to test and extend their skill in the writing of prose fiction. Students will do imitations of a variety of different narrative styles, they will write on specific topics, they will develop and revise their work in the context of submitting their fiction to discussion and analysis by the rest of the class and by their teacher(s).

Structure

1 x 2 hour seminar, weekly

Assessment

A prose fiction of no more than 5,000 words together with a self-reflexive essay of 3,000 words analysing the origin, development and completion of the work and of its success in fulfilling the task set.

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor C Craig

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course consists of 12 meetings at which Irish and Scottish writing of the past ten years, together with critical responses to it, are analysed and compared. The course will include work by poets, short story writers, novelists and dramatists and attention will also be given to film and television adaptations of the work of Irish and Scottish writers.

Structure

1 x 2 hour seminar, weekly

Assessment

1500-word exercise (20%); essay 3,000-3500 words 80%

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Prof. Craig

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course consists of 12 meetings in which Irish and Scottish texts in the period after modernism – thus both ‘post-modern’ and, arguably, ‘postmodern’ – will be analysed in the context of theories of the postmodern, together with critical responses to them. The work of theorists such Lyotard, Deleuze, McHale, Nairn, McCrone, Kearney will be used to set the framework for a discussion of the relationship between modernism, post-modernity, and the postmodern. Major literary works to be studied will include James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’. The work of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, W.S. Graham, Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray and Paul Muldoon will be examined in the context of postmodernisms.

Structure

1 x 2 hour seminar, weekly

Assessment

1500-word exercise (20%); essay 3,000-3500 words 80%.

Credit Points

10

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

Participants will be asked to identify their own area of investigation in their dissertation, and then will be introduced to the various procedures for identifying what is already known. They will receive instruction on what a good research proposal consists of and will prepare a research proposal suitable for use in AHRC applications or as the basis of their dissertation.

Structure

3 two-hour group sessions, and three one-hour individual coaching sessions.

Assessment

Research proposal, 100%

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Availalbe only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course introduces students to the major works of two key writers, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, in the development of the novel in the late 19th and early 20th century. The course will include study of the following novels:

Thomas Hardy: Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Two group presentations (10% each) : Essay, 3,000-3,500 (80%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr M Durham

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course follows on from EL5039: Sociolinguistics I and constitutes an in-depth examination of major aspects of contemporary variation and change in accents and dialects of English. Relevant studies will be presented in order to exemplify theoretical issues and to provide students with a good knowledge of current and seminal work in English Sociolinguistics.

Structure

One 1-hour seminar per week

Assessment

1 x 3,500 word essay 80% and 1 in-course exercise 20%

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor C Fynsk

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course will convene each year whether or not students take it for credit because it is the core intellectual event in the Centre for Modern Thought. All postgraduates woking in the CMT are expected to attend on a regular basis. The purpose of attaching credits to this course is to enable students from other MLitt programmes to take it.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Essay proposal 20%: Essay (6,000 words) 80%

Credit Points

10

Course Coordinator

Prof A Spence/Dr W Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

Workshop sessions will be used to introduce students to: strategies for effective preparation, presentation and submission of work; varieties of generic writing; the role of literary agents; approaching publishers; web-based publishing

Structure

One two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Research and prepare list of 20 outlets, in the form of current literary journals, prize competitions and anthologies, for the candidate's creative writing (60%)
Draft submission letter to literary journal (40%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

This course will provide one-to-one or-two tuition for students in preparation for the dissertation that is to be written over the summer.

Structure

1 x 1 hour tutorial per fortnight

Assessment

Research proposal 75%; annotated bibliography 25%

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr J King

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

While much contemporary women’s writing shares a common interest in exploring the diversity of women’s experience, it employs a wide variety of forms for that exploration. Often experimental, or innovative in their use of familiar genres, women novelists writing today resist simple categorisation. This course will explore work by some of the most important living Anglo-American novelists, including work by Nobel prize winners (Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison).

Structure

One two hour seminar per week

Assessment

Essay, 3,000-3,500 words – 80%; 2 oral presentations – each 10%

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Andrew Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students in English Literary Studies/ Early Modern Studies

Overview

The course explores the career and output of Thomas Middleton, one of the most popular and versatile dramatists of the period. Middleton's relationship to dramatic culture is examined through an investigation of textuality, collaboration, and the stage. His plays' engagement with cultural politics of their moment is given detailed coverage, with the course culminating in an extended case study of A Game At Chess. Plays studied will range from acriss Middleton's career. They will include examples of his tragedies, his city comedies, and of entertainments written for city patrons. We will also study works written in collaboration with Shakespeare, such as Timon of Athens, and with Thomas Dekker, such as The Honest Whore I. The final text on the course will look at Middleton's controversial political allegory, A Game At Chess.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (3,500 words) (90%); presentation (10%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor Derek Hughes

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students on the MLitts in English Literary Studies or Early Modern Studies

Overview

This course will examine the representation of politics and London in drama during the reign of Charles II. It will look at plays by authors such as Dryden, Wycherley, Otway, and Behn, either adapting pre-Restoration plays (e.g., Otway's rewriting of Romeo and Juliet as The History and Fall of Caius Marius) or working within genres used by Shakespeare and/or his contemporaries: the Englisgh History play, the Roman play, city comedy.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

Continuous assessment: essay (3,500 words) (90%); presentation (10%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Catherine Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students in the School of Language and Literarture

Overview

This course explores the development of the novel as aesthetic form and exemplary genre of modern life in the 'long' nineteenth century, focusing on the wok of major British and American authors. It aims to compare and contrast the ideas and contexts that shaped British and American fiction in this period; to address the question of transatlantic influence and exchange; to establish the rivalrous nature of literary reception; and to develop critical perspectives on methodologies of comparative literary study. Authors to be studied include Charles Brockden Brown, Walter Scott, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, George Eliot, and Edith Wharton.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1 essay: 3,500 words (80%); 2 oral presetations (10% each)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

TBA

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course covers vocal tract anatomy and physiology; basic principles of sound production and propagation; descriptive taxonomy of English sounds; syllable structure and phonotactic constraints; phonological processes such as assimilation, lenition, epenthesis, elision, sandhi, stress reversal, etc.; major principles of phonemic and feature theory; and segmental and suprasegmental differences between major regional and social varieties of English. There is a strong practical element to the course in the form of ear-training, transcription practice, exercises based on phonological data, and computing sessions based in the phonetics laboratory.

Structure

1 x 1 hour seminar per week
1 x 1 practical per week

Assessment

40% written assignment; 40% written examination; 20% in-class examination

Credit Points

10

Course Coordinator

tba

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

Direction and advice in investigating the area of the student's research work.

Structure

4-6 hours of individual advising sessions

Assessment

2000 word outline of dissertation (50%); Full annotated bibliography (50%)

Credit Points

10

Course Coordinator

Dr W Price

Pre-requisites

available only to students registered on the Masters programme in Creative Writing

Overview

Direction and advice in developing the student's ability to produce, and comment self-reflectively on, their proposed folio of creative writing

Structure

6 hours approx of individual advising sessions

Assessment

Written presentation (1,000 words) 75%; Proof-reading exercise (25%)

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Mark Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students in Sociolinguistics and ELATE

Notes

Overview

Students will be introduced a range of conceptions of and perspectives on identity, drawn from disciplines such as linguistics, social psychology, sociology, and communication studies. They will examine what the study of identity reveals about the nature of language, social interaction, power relations, and the construction of meaning. They will explore the application of the foregoing to language pedagogy through reflection on their own and their colleagues’ experiences as teachers and learners of English.

Structure

1 2-hour lecture/seminar per week
1 1-hour workshop per week

Assessment

In-course assessment: 1 3,000 word theoretical essay (70%); one 1,200 word book review (30%)

Credit Points

60

Course Coordinator

Dr Alison Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Acceptance for entry to an MLitt in English Literary Studies; others by permission of the Head of School and successful completion of the 120 credits constituting the diploma

Overview

Each candidate will be required to research and write a 15,000 dissertation on a subject and in an area approved by the Head of School.

Structure

There will be no teaching, but a supervisory meeting will be held at approximately fortnightly intervals (allowing for holidays etc.) at a mutually convenient hour.

Assessment

Dissertation

Credit Points

60

Course Coordinator

TBA

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

During this course, students will develop and research their own research topic on English Linguistics for Advanced Teachers of English using the methods, knowledge and understanding developed in the rest of the course. Students will prepare a 12, 000 word dissertation under supervision from a member of the linguistics staff, and they will be encouraged to develop, analyse and discuss their own data sets.

Structure

3 x 1 hour meetings by arrangement with tutor over course of summer

Assessment

12,000 word dissertation

Credit Points

60

Course Coordinator

Dr Wayne Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to students registered on the Masters programme in Creative Writing

Overview

Students will be directed by their supervisor and will prepare a single work or a portfolio of works of around 15,000 words in length

Structure

Six hours (approx) of individual advising sessions

Assessment

A creative writing portfolio which can be part of a novel, a collection of short stories or a collection of poems; if prose this should be no more than 12,000 words, if poetry it should amount to approximately 30 pages. In addition, a self-reflexive essay of approximately 3,000 words must be submitted along with the creative folio outlining the nature of the project undertaken, the formal and stylistic challenges involved and the aesthetic choices made in arriving at the final draft of the work.

Credit Points

60

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to students registered on the Masters programme in Sociolinguistics

Overview

Students will develop and research their own research topic using methods, knowledge and understanding developed in the rest of the course. Students will prepare a 12,000 word dissertaion under supervision by a member of the linguistics staff and will be encouraged to develoop, analyse and discuss their own data sets.

Structure

6 hours approx of individual advising sessions

Assessment

Dissertation of 12,000 words 100%

Credit Points

60

Course Coordinator

Prof C Fynsk

Pre-requisites

Available only to postgraduate students registered on the MLitt programme in Modern Thought

Overview

Each student will be required to research and write a 15000-word dissertation on a topic and in an area approved by the Programme Coordinator, and under the guidance of their appointed supervisor.

Structure

Specific arrangements are a matter for negotiation between supervisor and supervisee. There should be regular meetings throughout the period of supervision; typically, these would be fortnightly meetings totalling an average of 12 contact hours.

Assessment

Continuous assessment : 15,000-word dissertation 100%