English

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor C Fynsk

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

One two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

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

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Prof. Christopher Fynsk

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

One two-hour seminar meeting per week.

Assessment

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

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr Mark Garner

Pre-requisites

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

Overview

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

The student will gain knowledge and understanding of:

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

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per fortnight.

Assessment

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

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Prof Cairns Craig; Dr Michael Brown

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Notes

Overview

The course explores the meanings that the past has had at various stages in Western culture more generally and in Ireland and Scotland specifically. It compares the construction of the past as the product of divine intervention with notions of history as progressive enlightenment, as cyclic or as catastrophic; it explores how literary works construct a sense of a national past and compares that with the role of the historian as a writer. It then compares the ways in which key events in Scottish and Irish history, such as the 1745 Rising or the 1798 Rebellion have been rendered by different generations of historians and writers.

Structure

1x 2-hour seminar, weekly + 6 workshops.

Assessment

Essay 5,000 words (80%); presentation (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

M Garner, B Fennell

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate taught students

Overview

Theories of communication from transmission and reception to the co-construction of meaning. Basic relevant principles of pragmatics, semiotics, language use and social psychology. Techniques of communication analysis with particular reference to the language of their own professional context.

Structure

1 x 2 hour lectures per week

Assessment

1st attempt: Exam 40%; portfolio of communication analysis
Resit: Exam 100%

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Timothy Baker

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students on a relevant MLitt programme or by permission of programme co-ordinators.

Notes

Overview

The idea of place is central to many key twentieth-century Irish and Scottish novels. Looking at a selection of novels about rural, urban, and diasporic experience, and including both canonical and lesser-known works, this course will acquaint students with key debates in the study of regional and national fiction. Place in these novels is something to be praised and scorned, embraced and abandoned, but always remains central in any discussion or individual and communal identities. Major themes and issues to be discussed include: the idea of 'home'; the role of nostalgia and longing in Irish and Scottish fiction; the nature of community; the significance of emigration and displacement; and discussions of place in modernist and postmodernist fiction. Authors to be discussed may include James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Elizabeth Bowen, Nan Shepherd, and George Mackay Brown.

Structure

1 x 2-hour seminar per week, 6 additional 1-hour workshop.

Assessment

Essay of 3000-3500 words (70%); review article of 1000-1500 words (20%); oral presentation (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Alison Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Notes

Overview

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

Structure

Teaching is 1 x 2-hour seminar per week, plus 6 x 1-hour workshop.

Assessment

2 oral presentations (10% each); 1 x 3000-3500 word essay (65%); 1 x 1000 word exercise (15%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Wayne Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course engages students in a variety of activities designed to develop their creativity and originality, as well as in specific tasks to test and extend their skill in 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.

Candidates will be assessed on the basis of: a folio of 8 complete poems, each piece no longer than 40 lines, or a single poem (a self-contained extract from a longer work is also permissible) no shorter than 180 lines and no longer than 300 lines (80%) together with a fully scripted verbal presentation, delivered to the class, of key technical and expressive challenges met with during the creative evolution of the folio (20%).

Structure

1 x 2-hour seminar per week, plus 6 x 1-hour workshops.

Assessment

Folio of original poetry (80%); fully scripted self-reflexive presentation (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Catherine Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

This core course provides an advanced introduction to the theory of the novel and lays the foundation for the elective parts of the MLitt degree programme in the Novel. The course concentrates on twentieth-century theory, but also investigates earlier critical writings on the novel and relates theory to practice through textual examples from across the range of the novel’s historical development. The course is divided into three sections: narratology, genre theory, and the sociology of the novel. Topics to be explored include unreliable narrators, formal devices, the grammar of narrative, the competition of genres, borderlines of the novel, realism and its alternatives, the history of novel-reading, the literary cannon, novel and nation/transnationalism.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week, plus 6 x one-hour workshops.

Assessment

Exercise (15%); Essay (65%); 2 x oral presentation (10% each)

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Tarrin Wills

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students on related programmes.

Overview

Old Norse is the direct ancestor of modern Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese. It was the lingua franca of Viking-Age Scandinavia, and had a lasting impact on the development of the English language. It was also the primary literary language of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, notably the Icelandic sagas and skaldic and eddic poems. It is, hence, the gateway to a fuller understanding of medieval Scandinavia, the "Latin" of the North. This course will provide the basic linguistic tools needed to read Old Norse texts, and some background about the history of the language and its links with other languages. No prior knowledge of Old Norse is assumed.

Medieval Scandinavia's most enduring contribution to world literature is represented by the Icelandic prose sagas and eddic poems. Terse, dramatic and brilliantly imaginative, the sagas tell stirring stories of legendary warriors, the kings of Norway, and events of the Viking Age including the settlement of Iceland and other migrations. The eddic poems, some of which may have been composed in the pre-Christian period, hark back to an earlier age of mythological and legendary history, recounting the Norse creation-myth and heroic exploits. Focusing on key texts in English translation, this course will introduce these various genres; no prior knowledge is assumed. It will also introduce the third major Old Norse literary form, skaldic verse, whose intricate patterns of mythological imagery conceal information about key events in the Viking Age.

Structure

10 x 1.5 hour seminars.

Assessment

3 in-class tests: 2 x 5%, 1 x 10%; 1 x 3000-word essay 80%.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Thomas Rist

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

12 x 2 hour seminar per week, plus 6 x 1-hour workshops.

Assessment

Essay (60%); Presentation (20%); SAM (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Shane Alcobia-Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students.

Overview

This course looks at the changing political and cultural contexts of the so-called 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland and examines the artistic responses to some of the key events during that period (specifically Bloody Sunday, the Hunger Strikes, the Shankill Butchers, and the Good Friday Agreement). Studying the works of influential writers (Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Deans, Eoin McNamee, Frank McGuinness), visual artists (Willie Doherty, Paul Seawright, Victor Sloan, Eoghan McTigue) and film-makers (Paul Greengrass, Steve McQueen, Maeve Musphy), the course explores the role of the artist in a time of violence, the relationship between narrative and trauma, and the role of memory in a divided society.

Structure

12 x 2-hour seminars per week = 24 hours; 3 x 2-hour film screenings = 6 hours; 6 x 1-hour workshop = 6 hours.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: review portfolio (4 x 500 word reviews) [20%)]; 3500 word essay [60%]; 2 individual presentations [10% each].

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Prof Derek Hughes

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students.

Overview

This course will study the interaction between the myth of Dionysus and the representation of the demonic in the Romantic and early twentieth-century literature, culminating in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in which the myths of Dionysus and Faust are synthesized. The first works to be studied will be Euripides' Bacchae and Part 1 of Goethe's Faust. Material covered in subsequent weeks will include works by Hoffmann, Polidari, Mary Shelley, Wagner, and Thomas Mann.

Structure

1 two hour tutorial per week + 12 hours of screenings + 3 hours of core skills session.

Assessment

Continuous assessment: 2 x 15 minute presentation (2 x 500 word synopsis to be submitted for external examiner) (10% each); 1500 word mid-course assessment (15%); 3500 word essay (65%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr T Rist/Dr T Baker

Pre-requisites

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

Co-requisites

Candidates must normally hold an undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline

Overview

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

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week for 12 weeks and 6 one-hour workshops.

Assessment

Essay 3,500 words (60%); essay 1500 words (20%); oral presentation and 500 word summary (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Professor Jeannette King

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

One two-hour seminar per week for 12 weeks; 6 one-hour workshops.

Assessment

Essay (65%); 2 oral presentations 10% each); Exercise (15%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Professor Cairns Craig

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

This course explores the development in Ireland and Scotland of kinds of literature which came to be typical of the movement now classed as 'Romanticism'. Beginning from James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry, it traces the changing relationship of art to nature and the emergence of an identification of the nation with the qualities of its natural environment. The development of specific modes of literature - pastoral, georgic, 'national tale', the Gothic and the historical novel - are traced in relation to developing constructions of national identity - British, Irish, Scottish, Celtic, Teutonic - to which they contribute. The course will plot the mutual influence of writers and texts from the two countries - Macpherson's Ossian on Charlotte Brooke's Reliques, Maria Edgeworth (Castle Rackrent) on Walter Scott (the Waverley novels) and Scott on Charles Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer) - and the ways in which they stimulate each other to distinctive representations of the nation.

Structure

1 x 2-hour seminar, weekly, plus 6 x 1-hour training sessions.

Assessment

Essay (80%); presentation (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Barbara Fennell

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Notes

Overview

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

Structure

One 2-hour seminar and one 1-hour workshop per week

Assessment

Four exercises - 25% each

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M Durham

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

One 2-hour seminar and one 1-hour workshop per week

Assessment

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

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Mark Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

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

Structure

One 2-hour seminar and one 1-hour workshop per week

Assessment

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

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

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

Notes

Overview

The course covers vocal tract anatomy; basic principles of sound production and propagation; descriptive taxonomy of English sounds; segmental features of connected speech such as assimilation, weak forms, elision, linking, epenthesis, etc; suprasegmental aspects of speech such as stress, rhythm and intonation; and approaches to teaching pronunciation. Practical exercises and practice teaching will be arranged.

Structure

One 2-hour seminar and one 1-hour workshop per week

Assessment

Continuous assessment: 2 in-course exercises (35%); presentation (15%); annotation (15%); 2,000 word written project (35%).

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Professor C Fynsk

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week

Assessment

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

Credit Points

20

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

1 x 1 hour tutorial per fortnight

Assessment

Research proposal 75%; annotated bibliography 25%

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr David Duff

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students.

Overview

This course explores the role of genre and genre theory in Romantic literature. Studying a wide range of texts from 1760 to 1830, the course examines the formal innovations and experiments that propel the Romantic 'revolution in literature', but also the fascination with archaic forms such as sonnet, ballad, epic and romance, whose revival and transformation make Romanticism a 'retro' movement as well as a revolutionary one. The tension between the drive to 'make it old' and 'make it new' generates one of the most dynamic phases in the history of literature, whose complications are played out in the theoretical writing of the period as well as in its rich creative literature. Among the topics addressed are transformations of lyric; novelization; autobiography; gothic and anti-gothic; the poetics of the fragment and sketch; the relationship between poetry and prose; and the theory and practice of genre-mixing. Besides canonical poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, the course will also study a selection of female poets, Romantic essayists like Hazlitt and Lamb, the satirist Thomas Love Peacock, and Continental theorists including Schiller, De Stael and the Schlegels.

Structure

12 two-hour seminars per week, plus 6 x one-hour workshops.

Assessment

Exercise (15%); Essay (65%); 2 x oral presentation (10% each).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Wayne Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students.

Overview

This core course is compulsory for students enrolled on the M.Litt in Creative Writing. It 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 staff. The course will also offer workshops on preparing for professional publication and preparing for the folio dissertation.

Structure

12 x two-hour seminars per week, plus 6 x one-hour workshops.

Assessment

Folio of original prose fiction, including introductory essay (80%); 1 x body of work comprising creative exercises set over the duration of the course (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Andrew Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students.

Overview

Few writers made so significant a contribution to the dramatic culture of the early modern period as Thomas Middleton but Middleton's hand in the Jacobean theatre has been difficult to assess until recently. Best known today as the author of a number of city comedies, the full extent of his output was much broader. Unlike Shakespeare and Jonson, however, no collection of Middleton's plays was published during the period so that masterpieces like A Revenger's Tragedy and The Maiden's Tragedy have only recently been acknowledged as his work. He was author of A Game At Chess, a scandalous satire on the religious politics of Europe that enjoyed the longest run of any play of the English Renaissance theatre. But the play was shut down by the censors and never appeared in print. This course takes advantage of recent scholarship that has at last helped to establish the canon and chronology of Middleton's works.

Middleton's working practices are illustrative of the full range of dramatic output in the period. As well as writing alone, Middleton also worked closely in collaboration with other leading dramatists including Shakespeare with whom he co-authored Timon of Athens, as well as revising Measure for Measure and Macbeth to give us the texts we have today. He wrote for public and private playhouses, for boy's companies and for adult actors. He was a key innovator in the drama of contemporary London life, responsible for a range of plays that investigate the religion and morality of urban society. For the City he produced a number of pageants and masques becoming London's de facto poet laureate by the end of his life.

The career and works of Thomas Middleton thus offer many opportunities for researching the theatrical culture of the Jacobean period. The course opens by exploring Middleton's relationship to dramatic culture through an investigation of textuality, collaboration, and the stage. From here we move to a detailed consideration of how Middleton's work engages with cultural politics of its moment. The course culminates in an extended case study of A Game At Chess.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week, plus 6 x one-hour workshops

Assessment

Exercise (20%); Essay (70%); 1 x oral presentation (10%)

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Catherine Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week, plus 6 x one-hour workshops.

Assessment

Exercise (15%); Essay (65%); 2 x oral presentation (10% each).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Alison Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students on a relevant MLitt programme.

Overview

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

Structure

9x 2-hour group taught seminars, 3x 1-2 hour one-to-one dissertation preparation sessions with supervisors.

Assessment

1x 2,000 word project outline (40%); work towards conference organisation plus 1x 20 minute conference style presentation (30%); annotated bibliography (20%); 1x 1,500 word reflective piece (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Prof Cairns Craig

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

The course explores the development in Ireland and Scotland of kinds of literature which came to be typical of the movement now classed as 'Modernism'. Starting from Robert Louis Stevenson in Scotland and W.B. Yeats in Ireland, it traces the changing nature of art and its relationship to nationality. The development of the new modes of writing related to the increasing specialisation of reading publics is explored and the ways in which writers attempt through their writings to construct alternative versions of the nation. The course will plot the mutual influence of writers from the two countries - the shared development of 'Celticism', the general influence of the Irish Revival movement on the emergence of the 'Scottish Renaissance', the influence of J.G. Frazer's the Golden Bough on writers in both countries - and the ways in which they stimulate each other to distinctive experiments in style and form.

Structure

1 x 2-hour seminar weekly + 6x 1-hour training sessions.

Assessment

Essay, 5000 words (80%); presentation (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students registered on relevant MLitt programmes.

Overview

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

Structure

3 - 4 x 2-hour group taught seminars, 3 x 1-2 hour one-to-one dissertation preparation sessions with supervisor.

Assessment

1 x 2000 word project outline (60%); annotated bibliography (20%); 1 x 1500 word reflective piece (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Professor Jeannette King

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week, plus 6X one-hour workshops.

Assessment

Exercise (15%); Essay (65%); 2 x oral presentations (10% each).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

B Fennell, M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered taught postgraduate students

Overview

The course will begin with an overview of organizational and institutional communication as reported in the literature. Students will then go on to consider communication within their own and selected other organizations and institutions considering the relationship between institutional roles and communicative behaviour and developing a sample communication plan in the context of the strategic plan of their organization or institution.

Structure

6 x 2 hour lectures (1 x 2 hour lecture per fortnight)
2 x .5 hour individual/small group tutorials per semester

Assessment

Continuous assessment: 1 x essay (50%) and 1 x Communication Plan (50%)

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

M Garner, B Fennell

Pre-requisites

Available only to students registered on the Taught Postgraduate Masters programme

Overview

An individualized programme of readings in the student's own practical professional domain. Individual and group discussions of communication in specific professional domains. Interactive seminars on communication in students' own professional context.

Structure

3 x 2 hour lectures (1 per month)
2 x .5 hour individual small group sessions per student

Assessment

Essay on guided reading 40%; description of communicative practices within students' specific professional domain (60%)

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M Durham

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

One 2-hour seminar and one 1-hour workshop per week

Assessment

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

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Barbara Fennell

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students enrolled on a relevant programme or by permission of Head of School.

Overview

- Varieties of English: accents and dialects
- Regional varieties of English
- How English spread - English as a global language
- Overview history of the English Language
- English in Scotland and Ireland
- English in the New World(s) - North America; New Zealand; Australia; South Africa
- New dialect formation
- "Circles" of English: Outer Circle varieties
- Teaching English - what models to use?
- English pidgins and creoles

Structure

1 2-hour seminar and 1 1-hour workshop per week

Assessment

2,500- 3,000 word essay (80%); 750 word book review (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr R Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

One 2-hour seminar and one 1-hour workshop per week

Assessment

2 essays between 3500-4000 words each (40% each); textual analysis of 750-1000 words (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr Mark Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students in Sociolinguistics and ELATE

Notes

Overview

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

Structure

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

Assessment

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

Credit Points

60

Course Coordinator

Dr Alison Lumsden

Pre-requisites

By permission of the Head of School and successful completion of the 120 credits constituting the diploma.

Overview

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

Structure

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

Assessment

Dissertation

Credit Points

60

Course Coordinator

Dr M. Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to registered postgraduate students

Overview

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

Structure

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

Assessment

12,000 word dissertation

Credit Points

60

Course Coordinator

Dr Wayne Price

Pre-requisites

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

Overview

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

Structure

Six hours (approx) of individual advising sessions

Assessment

15,000 word dissertation 100%

Credit Points

60

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to students registered on the Masters programme in Sociolinguistics

Overview

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

Structure

6 hours approx of individual advising sessions

Assessment

Dissertation of 12,000 words 100%

Credit Points

60

Course Coordinator

Prof C Fynsk

Pre-requisites

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

Overview

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

Structure

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

Assessment

Continuous assessment : 15,000-word dissertation 100%