ENGLISH

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor P Crotty

Pre-requisites

None

Overview

This combined literature and language course introduces students to the study of English by exploring the dynamic relationship between author, reader and text in a series of classic works of fiction and poetry. Highlighting the role of language as the medium of literature, we will focus on questions of definition of language, dialect and accent, and consider how the latter contribute to the difference between oral and written language. Students will be encouraged to become self-aware as readers and as users of language. The course will also examine the role played by form and tradition in literature and demonstrate how an understanding of these can enhance our enjoyment of texts.

Structure

3 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial (to be arranged) per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%), in-course assessment: two essays (15% and 25%) and tutorial assessment mark (10%).

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

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

To be confirmed

Pre-requisites

None

Notes

This course is compulsory for students intending to study Language and Linguistics at Honours level. It is one of a set of core course options for entry to the Language and Linguistics Joint Honours programme (along with EL 2009, Language and Linguistics Applications)(see Calendar entry for the complete list of course options).

Overview

The course provides students with an understanding of the essentials of language study through an introducion to various aspects of linguistic theory. Students will learn how to identify and analyse the major "building blocks" of language, concentrating on pronunciation, word and sentence formation, and meaning. Examples for illustration and discussion will be drawn from English and a wide range of other languages both living and extinct. 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.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial per week, with one-hour on-line workshop in alternate weeks.

Assessment

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

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

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor P Crotty

Pre-requisites

None

Overview

Literature can provoke, offend and disturb as well as entertain. This course considers some of the most powerful and controversial works of modern literature. It examines the circumstances of publication, the nature of the controversy, and the cultural and critical impact of each work. The course shows how poems, plays and novels can raise searching questions about national, racial and personal identity, and looks at the methods used by writers to challenge their readers, as well the responses of readers to such challenges. Included are texts such as: Ibsen's The Doll's House, D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Sylvia Plath's Ariel, Toni Morrison's Beloved and James Kelman's How Late It was, How Late.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures and one-hour tutorial (to be arranged) per week.

Assessment

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

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

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr T Rist

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

2 one-hour lectures, 1 one-hour tutorial per week and one film showing.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), in-course assessment: 500-600 word written exercise (5%), 1,000-1,200 word first essay (15%), 1,200-1,500 word second essay (20%) and 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 1509 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: in-course assessment: one 1,000-1,500 word essay (25%), one 1,000-1,250 word assessed homework exercise (15%), tutorial assessment mark (10%) and examination (50%).

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

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Professor D Hughes

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

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

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), in-course assessment: two essays (20% each) and 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 1509 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: In-course assessment: essay (60%), exercise (30%) and tutorial assessment mark (10%).

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

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

To be confirmed

Pre-requisites

Essentials of Language (EL 1509)

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The course covers key aspects of articulatory phonetics and will introduce elementary phonological theory as it relates to the description of English. The latter 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

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

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (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%) and in-course assessment: 2,000-2,500 word 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 period of the Stewart monarchy saw full participation by the independent Scottish nation in European affairs, and arguably the greatest era in the history of Scottish literature. We will examine a varied selection of texts, including Barbour's heroic epic of Robert Bruce, the courtly poetry of the reigns of James IV and V, satirical and polemical Reformation writings, David Lyndsay's Satire of the Thrie Estaitis (the only mediaeval play still regularly performed), and the love poetry of the reigns of Mary and James VI. Attention will be paid to the development of Scots as a literary language, and to issues of politics, religion and national identity. This 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%) and in-course assessment: exercise (30%), presentation (10%), seminar work (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 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%) and in-course 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 2009, Language and Linguistics: Applications. This pre-requisite may be waived at the discretion of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in 2007/08.

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%) and in-course assessment: one 2,000-2,500 word essay (30%); group presentation (10%); seminar work (10%).

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

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

To be confirmed

Pre-requisites

Available only to Junior Honours English or Language and Linguistics students who have passed EL 2802. This pre-requisite may be waived by the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in 2007/08.

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 functioning 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: In-course assessment: 2 laboratory reports (45%); 1 two-hour written examination (45%) and seminar assessment 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%) and in-course assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%), seminar work (10%).

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

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner / Dr B A Fennell

Pre-requisites

EL 2009: Language & Linguistics Applications

Overview

Students will be introduced to a range of conceptions of 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: conversation analysis; critical discourse analysis; text linguistics; narrative 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

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

Assessment

1st Attempt: 2,500-word essay (50%); two hour examination (40%); and SAM (10%).

Resit: Two-hour 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) was 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%) and in-course 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

The Renaissance has been widely considered the golden age of English literature, producing such towering literary figures as Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe, and presenting mingled views of the erotic, the political, the religious and the lyrical while even laying claim to England's first 'novels'. Taking in poetry, drama and prose, this course presents a wide and contrasting range of writings which illustrate its authors' diverse interests: the court, the country, the city and - above all - love; or should that be 'sex'?

Structure

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

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%) and in-course assessment: two 2,000-2,500 word 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, or Gender Studies courses

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School. This course will not be available in 2007/08.

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. 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%) and in-course 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, Dickinson, Whitman, Douglass and James.

Structure

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

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 essay (30%), 1 two-hour exam (50%), group project (10%) and 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 2009, Language and Linguistics: Applications, or equivalent. 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%) and in-course assessment: one 2,000-2,500 word essay (30%), seminar work (10%), group presentation (10%).

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

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Janus

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 examines a selection of the best and most exciting forms of literary modernism - from the novel, to poetry and drama, and from traditional, 'high-modernist' to experimental and avant-garde works. These literary works will be set against readings by representative thinkers of modernity, from Darwin, Freud and Nietzsche to Theodor Adorno. The rich intellectual and cultural background of the period will also be discussed with reference to modernist movements in visual art and music. A further aim of the course is to convey a sense of the historical experience of modernity, a period characterised by rapid, often violent change, by war and revolution, and by scientific and technological progress.

Authors studied will include: Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, TS Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett.

Structure

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

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay 1 (20%), Essay 2 (30%); Group presentation (10%); Seminar Assessment (10%); Examination (30%).

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

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden

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: John Galt, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, James Hogg, 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%) and in-course assessment: essay (35%); 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 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

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%) and in-course assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%) and 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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr H Hutchison

Pre-requisites

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

Notes

Also available to Cultural History and History students in Programme Year 4.

Overview

Science became a major force in society during the Nineteenth Century. This course offers an exciting interdisciplinary look at the impact of science on the literature and culture of the Victorian period. It also explores how scientific thought and practice was shaped by the mood of the age. Using literary texts and contemporary source material, it investigates how scientific breakthroughs in areas such as geology, physics and medicine fuelled the rise of an industrial, urban society, and challenged traditional ideas about religion, gender, class and the human mind. It will also explore how scientific thought was used in the central political and social debates of the period, and at how this cultural context altered the course of science. Writers and scientists studied will include figures such as Mary Shelley, Charles Darwin, Hugh Miller, Charles Dickens, Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Karl Pearson, H G Wells and Albert Einstein.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%), in-course assessment: 2,500-3,000 word essay (40%), group project (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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 will read the complete, dramatic works of Christopher Marlowe, one of Shakespeare's best-known theatrical contemporaries, paying particular attention to the author's sustained interest in social outsiders and the moral universes in which they exist and are judged. The course will also consider Marlowe's dramatic awareness of the religious controversies of his age and address New Historical questions as to the subversive or conservative power of the theatre in the sixteenth-century England of Renaissance and Reformation.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay (80%); SAM (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the course co-ordinator for further details.

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.

Notes

This course will not be available in 2007/08.

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

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%) and in-course assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%), and 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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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

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.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%), in-course assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%), and 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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Dornan

Pre-requisites

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

Overview

The parameters of this course are the Irish Union and the catastrophic Great Famine. The Irish novel matured and flourished during this period of change and crisis with writers such as Edgeworth, Owenson, Maturin, the Banims and Carleton contributing to the tradition. This course explores how these novelists were instrumental in developing new genres such as the national tale and the historical novel in response to cultural and political developments. The course will also explore how Irish writers distinctively manipulated pre-existing forms such as the gothic tale and the melodrama.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: one 3,000 word essay (80%); seminar assessment (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.

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 and John Keats.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (60%), exercise (20%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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 have 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.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: 2,500-3,000 word essay (80%) and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr P Schlicke

Pre-requisites

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

Notes

This is a six-week course.

Overview

Dicken's reputation as the greatest English novelist rests on works which transformed the nature of the novel and probed the heart of the Victorian society. Comic, tragedy, delicate, bold, topical, timeless - in their rich variety his works are landmarks of English literature. This course samples the range of his output.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: Essay (80%), and seminar assessment (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the course co-ordinator for further details.

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. As the texts studied in this course are long, students are advised to read ahead over the summer.

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 a selection of his novels. It will also consider more general theories of the relationship between literature and national cultural identities.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor P Crotty

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

Seamus Heaney has written some of the most popular accessible as well as some of the most intellectually challenging poetry in English in the last half century. The course traces the relationship between the apparently "reader friendly" poems of Death of a Naturalist (1966) and the more rebarbative and demanding writings of The Haw Lantern (1987) and other later collections. Heaney's work is placed in its historical context in relation both to the politics of Northern Ireland and the crisis of representation in late twentieth-century poetics.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: Essay (80%), and Seminar Assessment (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Alcobia-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. This course will not be available in 2007/08.

Overview

How is the artist to respond when the virtual becomes the real and when words cannot carry the weight of trauma? How can an author avoid the acccusations of voyeuristic prurience or crass opportunism when he or she attempts to re-present events of public violence? This multi-disciplinary course examines works from a wide range of genres, including fiction, poetry, film and graphic art, and looks at the difficulties of inscribing trauma and the ethics and praxis of remembrance. The key events covered on this course are the Holocaust, 9-11, the Gulf War and Bloody Sunday.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment (100%): one 2,500-3,000 word essay (80%); 1 group project (10%); Seminar Assessment Mark (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the course co-ordinator for further details.

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 30RC or EL 35LQ. This pre-requisite may be waived by the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%) and in-course assessment: essay (40%), 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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr W Price

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

A troubled preoccupation with the complexities of self-hood and cultural belonging has been a dominant characteristic of American poetry since Whitman and Dickinson. In Modernism, Beat experimentation and confessional poetry we see both the formal and thematic radicalism of 19th Century American poetry extended and interrogated by 20th Century voices. Spanning a selection of influential modern American poets ranging from Frost and William Carlos Williams through to Plath, Ginsberg and Creeley, this course will consider both the distinctively American qualities of the works in question and their significance in the context of literary and cultural modernity in general.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay (80%) and seminar assessment mark (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr T Rist

Pre-requisites

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

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course is devoted to the critical reading of the foremost epic in English, Milton's Paradise Lost, which will be considered in its entirety. Seminars will address key, critical issues for the poem as they arise in the weekly, prescribed reading. Topics for consideration will include the role and use of epic conventions in the poem, the nature of Milton's seventeenth-century Christian thinking, the conception of 'heroism', and the success (or failure) of the poem's almost hubristic ambition: 'to justify the ways of God to men'.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 essay (80%); SAM (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the course co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor D Hewitt

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 course will examine a selection of writings by Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Lord Byron, written between 1790 and 1824. In the period 1790 to 1824 ideas of 'woman' were changing quickly in a period of unprecedented change. There were conflicts between the ways in which men and women understood 'woman'; there were ideological conflicts; there were social conflicts. The literature of the period both mirrors the changes and the conflicts, and adds to the debates. In addition there was increasing prudishness about sexuality, and the selection of novels will illustrate the strategies adopted by writers to enable them to discuss female desire.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 exercise (20%), one essay (60%), and seminar assessment (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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.

Overview

A privileged institution in American life and culture, the family has also been one of the great subjects of modern American literature. Challenging the idea that 'domestic fiction' is the exclusive preserve of women writers, this course examines the pre-occupation with family in a range of fictions by male American writers: John Cheever, John Updike, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen. The course will examine such topics as the literary presentation of suburbia, the treatment of fatherhood and masculinity, the tension between public and private life, and the nature of inheritance. The course will explore the key literary and linguistic features of the set texts to determine how these writers have engaged with what Don DeLillo calls 'the miscellaneous swarming air of families'.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: One 3,000-word essay (80%); seminar assessment (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.

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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (50%), exercise (30%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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 not be available in 2007/08.

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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor P Crotty

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

Hugh MacDiarmid was the best known of the many pseudonyms of Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), the postman's son from the Borders who launched the Scottish Literary Renaissance on his return from service in the Great War. Grieve/MacDiarmid is remembered almost as much for his intemperate propaganda as for his astonishingly varied poetry in Scots and English. The course will examine the historical and ideational contexts of his cultural campaigning but will devote the greater part of its attention to a study of the poetry, paying particular attention to four separable areas of MacDiarmid's output - the "early lyrics" in Scots, the tragicomic rhapsody A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), the Marxist autobiographical poetry of 1931-2, and the elegiac verse written on the Shetland island of Whalsay in the period leading up to the mental breakdown of 1935 that finally silenced the lyrist (if not the propagandist) in him. The course will also consider a selection of MacDiarmid's short fiction in Scots and English.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course Assessment: essay (80%), and seminar assessment (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr B Fennell

Pre-requisites

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

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course focuses on the role of multilingualism in society. It will examine in depth fundamental concepts such as monolingualism, bilingualism and multilingualism and discuss the role of multilingualism in primarily multilingual and primarily monolingual societies, dispelling the myth of monolingualism. It will especially examine the various roles of majority and minority languages and the importance of language in the home and in the wider community (eg in education, the economy, the media, the arts, diplomacy and defence).

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%); and seminar assessment mark (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the course co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr W Price

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

Many of the most innovative and influential modern American texts have voiced culturally dissident or marginal perspectives. Examining works by writers such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Ralph Ellison, William Burroughs and Raymond Carver, this course will consider a selection of texts representing Black American, Southern Gothic, Beat and post-modern American fiction. A core consideration will be the ways in which such 'rebel' voices represent both a continuity with the innovation of 19th century American fiction and yet also a subversive challenge to canonical assumptions of taste, region, gender, race and class.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar assessment (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 wil be required to submit themselves for re-assessement and should contact the course co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

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

1st Attempt: Dissertation (100%).

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.

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

1st Attempt: Dissertation (100%).

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.

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 2007/08.

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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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.

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. 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 and Fitzgerald.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: 2,500-3,000 word essay (80%) and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Pugh

Pre-requisites

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

Overview

This module examines the encounter between Spenser, the greatest poet of the sixteenth century, and his Queen, the powerful and enigmatic Elizabeth Tudor. Author of the first epic in English, ostensibly praising Elizabeth as 'Gloriana', Spenser is often regarded as an apologist for ther regime, but he also wrote a biting satire which was recalled by the censor, and lived for most of his career in what he saw as exile in wartorn Ireland. We read selections from across his varied output, focussing on some of his many depictions of the Virgin Queen, ranging from the overt to the veiled, from the celebratory to the comic and harshly critical. Like many Renaissance poets, Spenser often creates meaning in his poems through allusion to classical literature and myth. Passages from the Augustan poets Virgil, Horace and Ovid, read in translation, will enrich our understanding of his complex and ambiguous relationship with political power.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One 3,000 word essay (80%); seminar assessment (20%).

Credit Points

0

Course Coordinator

Professor D Hewitt

Pre-requisites

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

Overview

The 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. It will tackle problems such as the relationship of autobiography and writing; poetic tradition and its violations; the Byronic hero; cross-dressing; Byron's heroines; the art of pleasure; political and social satire. The impact of Byron on his contemporaries was always shocking; even now he shocks, and the course will ultimately confront the how and the why.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: One 3,500 word essay (80%); seminar assessment (30%).

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.

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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

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

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in 2007/08.

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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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. Writers studied will include Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Nan Shepherd, Jessie Kesson and Leila Aboulela.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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 in-course 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 (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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: three exercises (25% each), and seminar work (25%).

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.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Alcobia-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 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, Eoin McNamee, Bernard MacLaverty and Robert McLiam Wilson.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (70%), presentation (20%) and 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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor D Hughes

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, 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 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.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assesement: Essay (80%), and seminar assessment (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

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. This course will not be available in 2007/08.

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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Pugh

Pre-requisites

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

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

From More's Utopia, a traveller's tale of a land called 'No-Place', through the Arcadias of Elizabeth pastoral, to the Hesperidean fantasies of Civil-War royalists and Milton's evocation of a lost Paradise, Renaissance literature is full of mythical or imaginary lands. For Sidney, this independence from reality, this ability to create new worlds, is what elevates literature above all other pursuits. But these fictional settings are not escapist: rather they offer oblique, often radical perspectives on contemporary England. In doing so they pose fundamental questions about literature's relation to its readers and role in society, and suggest some startling answers.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars weekly.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar assessment mark (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the course co-ordinator for further details.

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 Hawthorne's tales and sketches,James Femimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohikans, Edgar Allan Poe's Emerson's Essays Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, short stories and Thoreau's Walden and 'Slavery in Massachusetts', and Emily Dickinsons Poems.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), oral presentation (10%), and 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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 who have 60 credit points from Level 2 English courses, including EL 2009 and 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 national identity and developing through to individual 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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr T Wills

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 introduce students to a large and important body of medieval vernacular literature, the sagas of medieval Iceland. The sagas are a fascinating and entertaining literature concerning the settlement period of Iceland, with themes centred around family and honour relationships and the problems of living in a remote and hostile environment, without centralised government or law enforcement. The sagas of the Icelanders influenced English and Scottish authors such as Coleridge, Blake and Scott, but they are also significant as a body of colonial and post-colonial literature from the Middle Ages.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One 3,000-word essay (80%); seminar assessment (20%).

Resit: For honours students ony: 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.

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 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.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: one essay (80%), and seminar work (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

To be confirmed

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

The course will be assessed by in-course 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 (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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: three exercises (25% each), and seminar work (25%).

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.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Alcobia-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

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: 3,000 word essay (80%), presentation (10%), and 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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor D Hughes

Pre-requisites

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

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The content will include works by Shakespeare, Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Thomas Southerne, containing representations of Jewish and Black African characters, and of Carib, Aztec, and Pamunkey Native Americans.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay (80%) Seminar Assessment (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 wil be required to submit a new essay.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Janus

Pre-requisites

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

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

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, 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 sature) and of the various theories of laughter as a psycho-social and aesthetic event.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars weekly.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay (80%), and seminar assessment mark (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 themselves for re-assessment and should contact the course co-ordinator for further details.