Postgraduate English 2015-2016

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 attempt imitations of a variety of different poetic styles, will be provided with a number of specific 'stimulus' exercises and will develop and revise their poems both independently and in regular workshop sessions.

Novel Ideas: Reading Prose Fiction explores the many different voices of the novel from the eighteenth century to the present day, and considers how these voices are assimilated by readers and reading communities. It looks at how this literary form, sometimes regarded as trivial entertainment, has developed into a powerful and highly theorised literary genre, capable of handling complex cultural and psychological material, and of effecting profound social impact. 

This course examines some of the main critical approaches and theories that have shaped modern literary inquiry. An organising theme of the course is different notions of ‘text’, ranging from historicist definitions of the ‘material text’ to poststructuralist theories of intertextuality and the practice of modern textual editing. The relevance to literature of different types of context is also explored, as are the interpretative possibilities of various forms of ideological critique, including feminism and post-colonialism. Throughout the course students are exposed to a wide variety of primary and secondary texts from a range of historical periods and geographical locations. 

This course is devoted to the development of non-fiction creative prose. Among the themes and genres engaged with will be: travel writing, psychogeography, non-academic critical writing, prose poetry, diary, memoir, and the fragment. Students will study examples across the genre and build up a portfolio of work, discussion of which will form the basis of weekly workshops.  

During the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’, artists often attempted to forego a subjective response in favour of either cold objectivity or maddening obliquity in order to avoid bias and partisanship; however, with so many pressures on Northern Irish writers, photographers and film-makers to respond to the violence, this was not always possible. This course considers how some of the artists framed these dilemmas and how they have been framed by them. It also examines the different approaches taken to remembrance since the end of the ‘Troubles’ and explores the ways in which memory and trauma are framed within Northern Irish culture.

This course explores the intimate and enduring relationship between Scotland and Ireland, its impact on cultural life, and on the ways in which nation and national identity are experienced and imagined. Embracing the historical range of Scottish and Irish literary tradition, it asks students to consider the conceptualisation of national cultures in the context of contemporary critical theory; the social agency of language and its literary representation; and the merits of national/translational approaches.

This course will look at a wide range of recent women’s writing to consider interconnected questions of national, individual, and gendered identity.  It will examine how contemporary authors renegotiate ideas of self and nation, and even challenge any concept of stable identity.  Authors to be studied may include A.L. Kennedy, Emma Donoghue, Ali Smith, Deirdre Madden, and Eimear McBride.

Interactions between literature and science, medicine and technology take place on many different levels. Poets allude to scientific theories; scientists use narrative to explain the natural world or the human body and mind; novelists experiment on their readers’ nerves; science writers present natural history as a poetic pursuit or earth history as a drama. Different scholarly approaches, both literary and historical, are required to understand these diverse forms of engagement. This course will introduce students to a wide range of scholarly approaches to these interactions, within literary studies, medical humanities and the history of science.

This course examines the ramifications of Scottish medicine for literary culture within Scotland, throughout Britain, and across the transatlantic world. It will take an historicist approach in examining the cultural, geographical, political and other circumstances enabling the dissemination of distinctively Scottish medico-literary discourses, focusing on the period from the founding of the Edinburgh Medical School in 1726 to the end of World War One.

This course option is designed to allow the creation of a programme of individual study where other appropriate course options at masters level are not available. It will run at the discretion of the programme co-ordinator. In discussion with a designated supervisor students will be able to identify and design a programme of research and study, which may include the completion of an undergraduate course, with assessments appropriate to masters-level work, or which may be consist of a short programme of research conducted over one semester.

This course option is designed to allow the creation of a programme of individual study where other appropriate course options at masters level are not available. It will run at the discretion of the programme co-ordinator. In discussion with a designated supervisor students will be able to identify and design a programme of research and study, which may include the completion of an undergraduate course, with assessments appropriate to masters-level work, or which may be consist of a short programme of research conducted over one semester.

Disability studies and medical humanities are relatively new fields of interdisciplinary research in the humanities. Central to this course, which will explore representations of illness and disability in a selection of modern French and English literary and philosophical texts, will be the question of how to define the key terms ‘illness’ and ‘disability’. Exploring work by modern writers gives us insights into the way they think about their bodies and the conditions of illness or disability in their particular social and cultural context.

This  course will consider examples from different eras in the Scottish Gaelic poetry canon. As an overarching theme and within the broader context of the MLitt in Scottish and Irish Literature it will consider how the poets of different eras have explored the concepts of both Scottish and Gaelic identity. 

 

Taught by experienced, award-winning writers, this course will engage students in a variety of activities designed to develop their creativity and originality, as well as in specific tasks to test and extend their technical skill in the writing of prose fiction. Students will be encouraged to develop an awareness of the centrality of narrative voice, to experiment with a variety of different narrative styles and to develop and revise their work in the context of workshop discussion and individually targeted feedback from course tutors.

This course will look at a wide range of  science fiction writing, beginning from the ‘fantasy science’ of Tait and Balfour’s The Unseen Universe, through early science fiction in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle to the science fiction of major modern Scottish writers such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Naomi Mitchison. On the Irish side, the course will explore how the fantasy science of the Celtic Twilight (W.B.Yeats’s ‘experiments’ in occultism) lead on the modernist science fantasies of Flann O’Brien and Francis Stuart.

This course studies Samuel Beckett’s work in the full range of its engagement with poetry, short fiction, novels, plays, radio and television drama, film and criticism. Beckett’s output is among the great achievements of twentieth-century modernism. We will explore his oeuvre across the full span of his career, encountering Beckett¹s work in the context of the Irish Literary Revival, European Modernism, theatre and performance art, and post-war postmodernism. Among the topics for discussion will be: Ireland and Irishness, representations of gender, language and translation, pessimism and the comic tradition, modernism and experiment, theatre and performance studies, Beckett as self-director, literature and film/visual culture, and writing and critical theory.

This course option is designed to allow the creation of a programme of individual study where other appropriate course options at masters level are not available. It will run at the discretion of the programme co-ordinator. In discussion with a designated supervisor students will be able to identify and design a programme of research and study, which may include the completion of an undergraduate course, with assessments appropriate to masters-level work, or which may be consist of a short programme of research conducted over one semester.

This course option is designed to allow the creation of a programme of individual study where other appropriate course options at masters level are not available. It will run at the discretion of the programme co-ordinator. In discussion with a designated supervisor students will be able to identify and design a programme of research and study, which may include the completion of an undergraduate course, with assessments appropriate to masters-level work, or which may be consist of a short programme of research conducted over one semester.

This course offers students the opportunity to develop their understanding of, and practical skills in, the writing of prose fiction. This skills-based course is structured around six wide-ranging and overlapping discussion areas: character; setting and the senses; point of view (voice, perspective and degrees of knowing); showing/telling; plot and structure; fact and fiction (life-writing, memory, and the use of scientific/medical/psychological detail).

This course focusses on the part Middle Scots poets play in constructing ideas of a national literary tradition. It will consider the ways in which these texts articulate changing conceptions of vernaculars and vernacular writing, and their reception in the work of the seventeenth-century poet and collector Allan Ramsay. It will also explore the role of the publishing society founded by Sir Walter Scott, the Bannatyne Club (1823-61) and examine the role of medieval texts and medievalism in shaping influential narratives of Scottish literary history, and their on-going impact upon perceptions of Scottish and British identity.

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

This course will provide students with the opportunity to write an extended folio of creative work in either poetry or prose. It will provide students with the opportunity to explore and extend their creative ambitions in writing and, through the reflective commentary element, enable them to contextualise their own creative achievements in relation to works by established writers. Throughout the evolution of the folio, the student will develop a thorough practical awareness of some of the key stylistic, formal and expressive possibilities available to the skilled creative writer.

Independent research with the support of individual supervision, in an area of literary studies chosen in consultation with staff. Students will further develop skills acquired over the programme, formulating a distinctive research question and producing a sustained piece of scholarly argument (15,000 words).

Under individual supervision, students will write a 15,000-word dissertation on a topic relating to the relationship between literature and science/medicine/technology, as agreed with the Dissertation Coordinator and an appropriate supervisor.

Under individual supervision, students will write a 15,000-word dissertation on a migration/postcolonial studies-related topic to be agreed with their supervisor.

Under individual supervision, students will write a 15,000-word dissertation on a novel-related topic to be agreed with their supervisor.