English, _MA

Compulsory Courses

Getting Started at the University of Aberdeen (PD1002)

This course, which is prescribed for level 1 undergraduate students (and articulating students who are in their first year at the University), is studied entirely online, takes approximately 5-6 hours to complete and can be taken in one sitting, or spread across a number of weeks.

Topics include orientation overview, equality and diversity, health, safety and cyber security and how to make the most of your time at university in relation to careers and employability.

Successful completion of this course will be recorded on your Enhanced Transcript as ‘Achieved’.

Detailed course information

Acts of Reading (EL1009)

15 Credit Points

This 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. It covers a broad historical range (from Folk Tales and ballads to 21st century postmodernity) and offers a basic grounding in key elements of literary theory, literary history and the varieties of literary form.

Detailed course information

Controversial Classics (EL1513)

15 Credit Points

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.

Detailed course information

Rethinking Reading (EL1536)

15 Credit Points

'Rethinking Reading' complements the module ‘Acts of Reading’. Intended primarily for students with degree intentions in English, this course introduces key areas in critical theory that inform the current work of staff at Aberdeen. It asks students to consider the history of English studies and its relationship to colonialism, and how this impacts on conceptions of literature and authorship, alongside topics such as gender and sexuality, and genre. Through a series of modules, the course introduces each area of theory alongside a literary text used as a case study. The course supports students in learning to read and use critical theory in your work, incorporating reflective learning and a practical focus on the techniques involved in critical writing.

Detailed course information

Optional Courses

Select further courses of choice to make up 120 credit points.

Compulsory Courses

Encounters with Shakespeare (EL2011)

30 Credit Points

So you think you know Shakespeare? This course invites you to think again. Studying a range of plays we get behind the mythology of Shakespeare, and rediscover the dynamic inventiveness of the Elizabethan theatre. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were the principal players in a period of literary experimentation that reinvented the possibilities of literature. Encounters with Shakespeare is your chance to find out more.

Detailed course information

Optional Courses

Select ONE OR BOTH of the following courses listed below, plus further courses of choice to make up 120 credit points.

Power, Empire and Equality (EL2018)

30 Credit Points

This optional course in literature allows students at pre-Honours to learn about the impact of global colonialism through the writings of those who experienced it and its repercussions. It includes theorists of our time and texts like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen. The texts on this course are necessarily concerned with enslavement and freedom, with how one encounters difference, and what it means to possess or claim territory. In examining these issues students will engage with issues of power and equality over centuries of writing about colonialism and empire.

Detailed course information

The Tragedy of Knowledge (EL2512)

30 Credit Points

This course traces the use of key Western myths from antiquity to the present to examine the way knowledge is often presented as both dangerous and compelling. As well as introducing students to a range of historical, social, and formal variations on the theme of knowledge, the course also highlights the role of storytelling and adaptation in the formation of knowledge and understanding.

Detailed course information

Optional Courses

Select ONE course from EACH of the following categories:

Medieval/Renaissance Literature

• EL35EH: Classical Epic
• EL30CP: Page and Stage: Renaissance Writings 1500-1640
• EL35DQ: Knights, Virgins and Viragos: Chaucer and Medieval Writing

Romantic/Victorian Literature

• EL30XR: Romanticism
• EL30SB: Britain and the 19th Century World
• EL35QA: Sympathy for the Devil: Scottish Short Stories

Contemporary/Modern Literature

• EL35KN: Haunted Texts
• EL30FF: Modernism: Make it New
• EL30RD: American Voices: Self and Society,1850-1930
• EL30WC: Queer Times
• EL35UT: Art and Atrocity: Representations of Violence and Trauma

Plus ONE course from the following, or an outside subject, to make up 120 credit points in total:

• EL30YB: Creative Writing: Creativity and Craft
• EL35VC: Fallen Women and Self-Made Men
• EL30UT: Art and Atrocity: Representations of Violence and Trauma
• LN3524: Stylistics
• FS35ZB: Landscapes of Film and Literature

Page and Stage: Renaissance Writings 1500 - 1640 (EL30CP)

30 Credit Points

This course explores the poetry, drama and prose of a period often referred to as the golden age of English literature. A period which saw Shakespeare and his contemporaries produce innovative new literary works in which the language of desire took centre stage.

Detailed course information

Classical Epic (EL35EH)

30 Credit Points

This course is your opportunity to study four of the most influential and gripping texts of world literature. We begin in the oral culture of ancient Greece, with the Iliad's stark meditation on war and death, and the Odyssey's consolatory reflections on divine justice, poetry and love. In imperial Rome, we see the genre transformed into a monument to political power in Virgil's Aeneid, then thrown into disarray by Ovid's irreverent anti-epic, the Metamorphoses. We end by considering some of the ways these texts have been exploited and adapted across the intervening centuries, in poetry and prose, art and film.

Detailed course information

Knights, Virgins and Viragos: Chaucer and Medieval Writing (EL35DQ)

30 Credit Points

Knights, Virgins, and Viragos offers an introduction to the variety of medieval literature and culture. Turning a critical eye on the role misconceptions of the Middle Ages play in present day white supremacy, the course highlights genres from medieval drama to life writing, with attention to the medieval history of race making and modern responses to the work of Chaucer in the poetry of Patience Agbabi.

Detailed course information

Romanticism (EL30XR)

30 Credit Points

The Romantic movement swept Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and produced some of the most innovative and exciting literature that has ever been seen. This rule breaking art helped shape the way that we consider art today and underpins many of our ideas about imagination, originality, creativity and self-expression. This course will explore the ways in which the Romantic movement manifested itself across Britain and Ireland and will consider writers such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Austen and Byron.

Detailed course information

Sympathy for the Devil: Scottish Short Stories (EL35QA)

30 Credit Points

While the short story is often said to have developed in America, nineteenth-century Scottish writing is in fact instrumental in the emergence of the form. Often drawing on oral and folk traditions Scottish writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employ the supernatural, or our fear of it, to explore subjects such as guilt, fear, remorse and the extent to which we can control our own destinies. This course will explore the ways in which the short story in Scotland develops from the early nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. It will include writers such as Walter Scott, James Hogg, John Galt, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jane Findlater.

Detailed course information

Britain and the Nineteenth - Century World (EL30SB)

30 Credit Points

The Romantic (1782-1832) and Victorian (1832-1901) periods were ones of remarkable activity for British citizens abroad. Imperial expansion, increasing international trade, major conflicts and growing mass migration all drew more British citizens than ever into contact with the wider world. This course explores the footprints left by these interactions in nineteenth-century literature: critically examining how Britain saw the world and how the English-speaking world saw Britain during a century of unprecedented international activity. This course will combine canonical writers of empire and migration with less well-known accounts of the period. Writers covered may include Mary Shelley, Henry Derozio, Fergus Hume, Cornelia Sorabji, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle. The course will apply a range of critical lenses to this material offering students an introduction to key concepts and debates from nation theory, settler studies and postcolonial studies.

Detailed course information

Modernism: Make IT New (EL30FF)

30 Credit Points

The early twentieth century was a time of great literary experimentation as literary modernists rose to the challenge to make it new. We will explore modernism’s stylistic experimentation while also considering the social contexts and changes that shaped this literature. The course will examine a range of writers, genres, movements and locations which prompt us to consider what, when and where was modernism.

Detailed course information

American Voices: Self and Society, 1850 - 1930 (EL30RD)

30 Credit Points

This course examines an important and diverse period in the development of American literature, lasting from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s. During the course we will be analysing works by a variety of American writers from this period in their historical, social and political contexts as well as considering the ways in which they pioneered innovative literary forms and techniques.

Detailed course information

Haunted Texts (EL35KN)

30 Credit Points

This course offers an overview of a wide range of twentieth-century Scottish literature, focusing on themes of haunting, death, and place. Including novels, short stories, poetry, and drama, the course explores questions of the relationship between self and society, the legacy of the past, and the formation of gendered and regional identities. There are lots of ghosts.

Detailed course information

Queer Times (EL30WC)

30 Credit Points

This course adopts a cross-period approach, bringing contemporary and premodern texts into conversation in exploring representations of queer experiences and themes in diverse forms. Divided into three sections, queer presents, queer pasts, and queer futures, the course will introduce a selection of theoretical and critical readings in thinking about how representation is shaped by temporal and cultural context. We will consider the relationship between representation of queer experience and formal experimentation, and how queer forms impact on our sense of queer possibilities.

Detailed course information

Art and Atrocity: Representations of Violence and Trauma (EL30UT)

30 Credit Points

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 accusations of voyeuristic prurience or crass opportunism when he or she attempts to re-present events of public violence? This multi-disciplinary course examines work from a wide range of modes, including fiction, poetry, film and graphic art, and looks at the difficulties of inscribing trauma and the ethics and praxis of remembrance. Key events covered include the Holocaust, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, 9-11, the Gulf War and the conflict in the Balkans.

Detailed course information

Creative Writing: Creativity and Craft (EL30YB)

30 Credit Points

This course offers students the opportunity, through lectures and interactive workshops, to develop their understanding of, and practical skills in, the writing of prose fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. Taught by widely published, award-winning writers, it provides a thorough, practice-based understanding of creative process and of the technical challenges involved in developing an original idea into a completed literary artefact, presented to a professional standard. It also contributes to students' future career potential, whether as ‘creative’ or other kinds of professional writers/communicators.

Detailed course information

Stylistics (LN3524)

30 Credit Points

This course enables students to apply skills of close linguistic analysis to a range of literary texts and genres. Students will explore the ways that different aspects of linguistic structure shape and contribute to readers' interpretations. The core structural elements of phonology, morphology and syntax will be covered; each week, students will discuss a particular text, putting into practice skills of stylistic analysis. We will cover both canonical ‘Literary’ texts and other forms of writing.

Detailed course information

Landscapes of Film and Literature (FS35ZB)

30 Credit Points

This course will invite students to explore the ways film and literature can engage with and represent a variety of landscapes, and how, in turn, landscape can influence both the production of the work and the creation of meaning. We will study selected works of film and literature from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including mainstream and independent cinema, poetry, and fiction and non-fiction literary texts that have been adapted for film. We will look at ways in which various landscapes may have been appropriated for their emotive qualities: to connote feelings of desolation, oppression or plenitude; loneliness, fear or joy. We will also look at landscapes as sites of specific cultural history. As the course progresses, drawing on contemporary research in cultural and human geographies, and elsewhere, we will explore the ways that studying landscapes of film and literature can assist in our ability to conceive landscape not only as a static or symbolic entity, but as a highly mobile, interactive site in which history, experience and materiality converge in the ongoing production of space and meaning. In this way, we will consider how the works studied articulate John Wylie’s provocative claim that ‘landscape is tension’.

This interdisciplinary course will draw on writings from literary, film and cultural theorists, philosophers, artists and social scientists.

Detailed course information

Compulsory Courses

English Dissertation (EL4502)

30 Credit Points

Students will have the opportunity to write a dissertation on a topic of their choosing within English literature.

Detailed course information

Optional Courses

Select a further 90 credit points from the following courses:

• EL40WH - All For One: The Politics of Love and Friendship in Literature (30 credit points)

Not the Queen's English (EL40SC)

30 Credit Points

This course will focus on the ways in which non-standard English is used within anglophone literary texts from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. Classes will cover a wide range of geographical spaces and publishing contexts: different weeks will focus on ballad collecting and linguistic antiquarianism, the use of language in American abolitionist texts, working-class voices in nineteenth-century English novels, postcolonial approaches to English, Scottish post-industrial writing and contemporary African-American literature. Authors covered may include: Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Charles Dickens, Edwin Pugh, Zora Neale Hurston, Chinua Achebe, Jamaica Kincaid, Tom Leonard and Percival Everett.

Detailed course information

Controversy and Drama: Marlowe to Revenge Tragedy (EL40CT)

30 Credit Points

This course begins by considering the theatre that gave us Marlowe and Shakespeare, among other major dramatists, as an institution actively engaged in the controversies of politics and religion of the age. Part 1 of the course focuses on the plays of Christopher Marlowe, whose controversial life is unusually well documented and whose plays starkly anticipate later tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama . Part 2 considers how those tensions in politics and religion developed in later drama, giving particular attention to the genre of revenge tragedy.

Detailed course information

Amnesty, Amnesia, Archive (EL40UU)

30 Credit Points

From 1968-1994, Northern Irish writers and visual artists found themselves addressing key questions: what is the role of the artist in a divided society, and must s/he engage with political events? This course considers how the artists framed these dilemmas and how they have been framed by them. Following the outbreak of peace in the province, the role of artists changed: their work now focused on the victims of violence and to demand justice. This course examines the different approaches taken to remembrance by writers/artists and explores the ways in which memory and trauma are framed in their work.

Detailed course information

Literature and Medicine (EL40HQ)

30 Credit Points

This course explores the relationship between literature and medicine, and asks what kind of ground the two disciplines might share and how they might enrich one another. The use and abuse of literary concepts in medical practice and of medical ideas and history in literature will be considered along with the literary representations of the physician and narratives of illness, focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The final part of the course explores the representation of psychiatry and psychiatric theory in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature.

Detailed course information

Screenwriting: the Narrative Within the Frame (EL40TM)

30 Credit Points

This course will investigate different forms of scriptwriting by writers from a range of historical periods. We will be considering narrative form and content as shaped by subject selection and storytelling devices and structures. The filmic themes will be considered from aesthetic, historical and theoretical perspectives. Through a series of seminars, workshops and screenings, students will develop approaches to visualising film narratives, culminating in a scriptwriting folio of work.

Detailed course information

Brief Encounters (EL40TL)

30 Credit Points

Writing has not always been viewed as self-expression but for long periods of history was perceived as a branch of rhetoric or ‘persuasive speech’. ‘Brief Encounters’ examines some of the implications of this, combining textual analysis from a writerly perspective with creative writing practice in a workshop format.

Detailed course information

Vulnerable Bodies, Precarious Lives (EL40KF)

30 Credit Points

What does it mean to inhabit a vulnerable body, or to embrace and celebrate ideas of vulnerability more generally? How can literature help us understand the precarity and uncertainty that seem like an inherent part of contemporary life? This course offers an overview of twenty-first-century women’s fiction from a variety of traditions, and centres on themes of embodiment, community, fragmentation, and environment. Examined together, these texts highlight the generic and thematic diversity of contemporary women’s writing, and the way the self must always be reconstructed through literature in new ways.

Detailed course information

British Poetry of the 20th Century (EL40YN)

30 Credit Points

This course will explore the work of some of the most influential and innovative voices in 20th century British poetry. Beginning with the Modernist revolution in technique, theory and taste, it will trace some of the main continuities and reactions that stemmed from the first decades of the century and which culminated in a richly diverse and fascinating late 20th century/early 21st century poetic landscape.

Detailed course information

Staging the City: Renaissance Urban Drama (EL45AD)

30 Credit Points

Drama was the entertainment phenomenon of the early modern period: a popular art form that developed swiftly and attracted mass audiences. London was both the city that played host to this new cultural form, and the subject of much of its output. The course will examine the relation between life in the early modern city and the great flowering of drama by celebrated authors of the period. Using works by well-known writers such as Middleton, Jonson and Shakespeare, as well as lesser known authors, we will explore how the plays of the period engage with key concerns of urban living.

Detailed course information

Wandering Women: Literature, Place and Environment (EL45JA)

30 Credit Points

This course explores the work of women writers with particular emphasis on the role of place (focused mostly, but not exclusively, on modernist women writers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). We will look at a number of different environments including urban, rural, domestic and trans-national spaces. We will analyse place in relation to a number of other themes such as gender, sexuality, race, spirituality and creativity. We will read a number of canonical and lesser known women writers, working across various genres, including fiction, poetry and life-writing. Authors may include: Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, Andrea Levy, Bernadine Evaristo, Elizabeth Bishop. Previous study of modernism is not required.

Detailed course information

Horrible Histories: Violence and Trauma in the Scottish Novel (EL45QV)

30 Credit Points

Scotland's history is one of violence, bloodshed and trauma. This is reflected in its literature, above all in the fiction of the nineteenth century. Focusing on pivotal moments of upheaval in Scotland's past such as the Covenanting Wars and the Jacobite Risings this course will explore the ways in which these violent events are reflected in the works of writers such as Walter Scott, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and those in the modern period who have inherited their legacy. Exploring key concepts such as how the novel might approach and engage with the past, the extent to which it may operate as a form of commemoration and the limits which traumatic events place upon forms of narration, the course will examine the ways in which we can comprehend and remember a nation's violent history through the form of the novel.

Detailed course information

The Art of Screenwriting (EL45PG)

30 Credit Points

This course will focus on the theory and the practical techniques of writing screenplays for cinema and for television. It will encourage students to put together the tool kit of skills which they will require to write effective screenplays based on both adapted source material and on original material. The course will survey the established skills of creating effective narrative screenplays across genres, but with an emphasis on contemporary dramatic cinema.

Detailed course information

Sex and Death: Exploring the Forbidden in Gothic Fiction (EL45VA)

30 Credit Points

This course looks at how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic Fiction confronts themes and concepts which are considered taboo, unpleasant or strictly. Sexuality and mortality are key themes here, as well as the crossing of class, racial and gender boundaries. We explore how the Gothic can be simultaneously deeply conservative and shockingly radical, and speaks to private fears and desires whilst bringing to public light social injustices and inequalities. This course focuses mainly on the Gothic novel, but may also include poetry and short stories.

Detailed course information

The Shock of The Now: Contemporary Poetry (EL45FJ)

30 Credit Points

This course introduces students to contemporary poetry across its many forms and styles. We will investigate the place for poetry in contemporary culture, whether in poetry anthologies, slim volumes of verse, in performance, or on social media. Looking at a wide range of authors active from the turn of the millennium on, we will trace a genealogy for contemporary poetry, as informed by the legacies of modernism, and subsequent waves of poetic schools and movements. The course is strongly recommended for students with an interest in poetry, literary form, contemporary British and Irish writing, and creative writing.

Detailed course information