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Undergraduate English 2014-2015

EL1008: READING WRITING

15 credits

Level 1

First Term

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.
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EL1513: CONTROVERSIAL CLASSICS

15 credits

Level 1

Second Term

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.
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EL2011: ENCOUNTERS WITH SHAKESPEARE

30 credits

Level 2

First Term

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.
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EL2512: THE TRAGEDY OF KNOWLEDGE

30 credits

Level 2

Second Term

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.
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EL3009: AMERICAN INNOVATION

30 credits

Level 3

First Term

This level-three course offers an introduction to American literature and culture between 1850 and 1950, a century in which the United States was transformed from a rural economy to an industrialised super-power. You will learn about the key writers of this period, the issues that sparked their imaginations, and the literary strategies which they adopted, or at times invented, to express their response to the changing world around them. This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars.
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EL30DP: KNIGHTS, VIRGINS AND VIRAGOS: CHAUCER AND MEDIEVAL WRITING

30 credits

Level 3

First Term

An introduction to late medieval-literature, challenging modern assumptions about the medieval and exploring the diverse range of medieval literary culture, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to the autobiographical narrative of Margery Kempe and surprising profanity of medieval lyric.
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EL30IH: STATES OF MIND: CONTEMPORARY IRISH AND SCOTTISH WRITING

30 credits

Level 3

First Term

This course explores a range of contemporary Scottish and Irish texts and looks at the key developments in the literatures of the two nations; indeed, new modes of urban writing, working-class writing and women's writing have altered the landscapes of Scottish and Irish literature. The course looks at 'states of mind' in a dual sense: imaginative projections of the 'nation' and psychological explorations of the mind.
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EL30XR: ROMANTICISM

30 credits

Level 3

First Term

The Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th century transformed received modes of writing, redefined the role of literature, and gave new prominence to ideas of originality, creativity and self-expression. This course traces the development of the Romantic aesthetic in the context of the social and political upheavals of the Age of Revolution. Analysing the work of major poets – Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats – as well as political writers, novelists and essayists such as Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Austen, and De Quincey, the course examines the literature and thought of Romanticism across a range of genres.

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EL3506: READING THE VICTORIANS

30 credits

Level 3

Second Term

Reading the Victorians reveals some surprising things about the nineteenth century, and about many elements of modern-day society. Queen Victoria's reign (1837-1901) brought industrialisation, urbanisation, scientific innovation, the growth of the British Empire and major political reform. This was also an age of artistic creativity, optimism and humour. Literature in many different forms was at the heart of these developments. This course explores how Victorian literature was both product of its age and agent of change, and examines the work of such writers as Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell and Kipling.
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EL3507: UNION, ENLIGHTENMENT AND MODERNITY: SCOTTISH LITERATURE 1750-1850

30 credits

Level 3

Second Term

The period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century was a time of rapid social and political transformation and high cultural achievement in Scotland. The 1707 Union of Parliaments had made the country part of the new polity of Great Britain and the century and a half that followed witnessed a steady growth in Britain's global power. Scotland played a leading role in these developments and Scottish writers responded in diverse ways to the challenges of modernity.  The course examines how these challenges are imagined in key poetic, fictional and philosophical texts.

 

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EL35CT: PAGE AND STAGE: RENAISSANCE WRITINGS 1500-1640

30 credits

Level 3

Second Term

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.
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EL35YB: CREATIVE WRITING: CREATIVITY AND CRAFT

30 credits

Level 3

Second Term

This course offers students the opportunity, through lectures and interractive 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.

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EL4002: ENGLISH DISSERTATION

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

Students will have the opportunity to write a dissertation on a topic of their choosing within English literature.
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EL4010: DISSERTATION IN SCOTTISH LITERATURE

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

Students will have the opportunity to write a dissertation on a topic of their choosing within Scottish literature.
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EL40AB: WRITING THE CITY

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

What is the relationship between writing and place? This course uses the example of London in the Renaissance to consider this question. Examing the literary output of the city at the time when new ways of writing and new literary forms were emerging, such as the popular playhouse and the printed pamphlet.
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EL40BP: THE GILDED AGE: AMERICAN LITERATURE 1865-1929

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

The Gilded Age was a time of glamour, hardship, renewal and corruption in American society. This fourth-year course looks at the literature of this formative period in the history of the United States, between the Civil War in the 1860s and the Great Depression in the 1920s. It explores how the writers of this period helped to shape, but also at times resisted the formation of a modern American identity.
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EL40GT: NEO-VICTORIANISM

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

What is the Neo-Victorian novel? How can modern forms of fiction complicate our understanding of nineteenth-century literature and culture? And to what extent does historical fiction deepen present-day debates about representations of class, race, gender, sexuality, science and selfhood? We will consider a range of literary engagements with the Victorian novel from the 1960s to the present, including feminist, queer, postmodern and postcolonial approaches and their theoretical contexts. With attentiveness to intertextuality, appropriation and adaptation we will work towards an understanding of the continued influence of Victorian developments of the novel genre in modern literature.
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EL40GU: LITERATURE AND PSYCHOLOGY AT THE FIN DE SIECLE

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

Psychology, neurology and criminology came to the forefront of late-nineteenth-century thought about pressing issues and anxieties: post-Darwinian fears of decline and degeneration; decadence and neurasthenia; the strains upon and secrets within city spaces; New (and fallen) Women, and imperialist expansion and its attendant masculinities. Examining interdisciplinary exchange between literature and sciences of mind, we will engage in close reading of several texts to understand the role and scope of the novel genre at this time of social, cultural and aesthetic upheaval. Authors studied may include Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Joseph Conrad, R.L. Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and H.G. Wells.
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EL40KD: IMAGINED SPACES: SELF AND PLACE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY SCOTTISH FICTION

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

This course charts an idiosyncratic path through twentieth-century Scottish fiction, looking both at canonical novels and works relegated to 'genre fiction' in order to examine the interrelation between place, text, and narrative voice. The course focuses on questions of narrative reliability, depictions of region and nation, and self-reflexivity.
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EL40QT: HISTORICAL NATION: WRITING SCOTLAND'S PAST

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

This course will consider the ways in which Walter Scott and other Scottish writers record key moments in Scotland's past. Concentrating on pivotal events in Scotland's history it  will explore how Scott and those who have developed the form of the historical novel approach these events. The course will end by by examining how the legacy of Scott's fiction remains in the ways in which we engage with Scotland's history today. Writers to be discussed will include Walter Scott, James Hogg, John Galt, Robert Louis Stevenson and a selection of modern Scottish writers
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EL40UW: CONTEMPORARY NORTHERN IRISH CULTURE: VIOLENCE, MEMORY, AND TRAUMA

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

This course considers how several writers and visual artists have framed questions to do with the representation of violence, and how they have been framed by them. The course also aims to counteract the myth perpetuated by 'Troubles Trash Thrillers' that Northern Ireland is a knowable state, a hellish stasis left behind by world history. Themes studied on this course include: the ability to represent violence and trauma in both literature and the visual arts; identity politics; the impact of the Troubles (and the current ceasefire) on Northern Irish literature and visual culture.
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EL40XR: TRANSFORMATIONS OF ROMANCE

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

From Gawain and the Green Knight to Skyfall, Spenser’s Faerie Queene to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, romance is a genre which embraces some of the greatest works of literature as well as being a vehicle for some of its most seductive fictions. The course explores this rich cultural tradition, analysing works in verse and prose (and film) from six centuries while also investigating the efforts of literary theorists to explain the remarkable persistence and reinvention of the genre. Among the authors studied are Marie de France, Spenser, Milton, Austen, Keats, Browning, T.S. Eliot and David Lodge.

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EL40YC: KINGDOM OF THE MAD: SELF AND PLACE IN 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

Spanning a selection of influential modern American poets ranging from Frost and William Carlos Williams through to Plath, Stevens and Ginsberg, this course will explore some of the most important and influential poetry written in the 20th century. Focussing on the complexities of identity, alienation and the determination of each poet studied to 'make it new', students 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.
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EL40YK: CREATIVE WRITING: VOICE AND PLACE

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

The course will focus first on the role of voice in fiction and poetry, secondly on the equally fundamental role that a sense of place plays in the creation of compelling literary works. Taught by experienced, award-winning writers of poetry and prose, it offers students the opportunity to develop their confidence and literary skills in a supportive, constructive workshop environment. At the same time it will greatly enhance students' understanding and appreciation of how literary works in general produce their remarkable effects, and how they are constructed.
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EL40ZB: PERVERSE MEDIA: BECKETT AND THE ART OF FAILURE

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

Whether composing works for the stage or the page, for radio, television or film, Beckett took perverse pleasure in revealing the failures of the artistic media he was working in:  actors on the stage reduced to talking heads or voiceless bodies, first-person novels narrated by voices unable to say ‘I’, radio dramas filled with silence, television plays where the main action is listening, and film featuring characters terrified of being seen.  This course explores and interrogates the fascinating process of reading, listening, and watching the art of failure exemplified byBeckett’s later works of short prose, theatre, radio, film and television. 

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EL4502: ENGLISH DISSERTATION

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

Students will have the opportunity to write a dissertation on a topic of their choosing within English literature.
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EL4508: CREATIVE WRITING FOLIO DISSERTATION

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

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.
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EL4510: DISSERTATION IN SCOTTISH LITERATURE

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

Students will have the opportunity to write a dissertation on a topic of their choosing within Scottish literature.
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EL45BR: FRANKENSTEIN TO EINSTEIN: LITERATURE AND SCIENCE IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

This course explores the intersection of science and literature during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. It is taught by staff from both the English and History programmes, and is designed to challenge many preconceptions about the role of science in nineteenth and early twentieth century society. No scientific knowledge is required. However, students will read a mix of fictional and poetic writings alongside non-fiction and scientific texts. This course will show how literature reflected the changing status of science in society and accommodated new ideas. It will also show how science itself was shaped by literary production and cultural expectation.
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EL45CT: CONTROVERSY AND DRAMA: MARLOWE TO REVENGE TRAGEDY

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

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. 
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EL45ET: CLASSICAL EPIC

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

We will read (in English translation) what are arguably the most influential texts of world literature, and among the most exciting tales ever told. We begin in ancient Greece with Homer’s two contrasting epics—the Iliad’s dark vision of human mortality, and the Odyssey’s meditation on the enchantment of story-telling. Moving to classical Rome, we shall see how Virgil transformed the genre into a monument to imperial power, and how it is thrown into disarray by Ovid’s fantastical and irreverent epic of endless change. We end with Lucan’s magnificent lament for lost freedom in a tyrannical age.

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EL45HQ: LITERATURE AND MEDICINE

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

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.
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EL45KP: ALL TOO HUMAN: ANIMAL AND POSTHUMAN RELATIONS

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

The question of the human is at the forefront of contemporary philosophical and cultural enquiry. Looking at a range of popular and literary texts, as well as recent theoretical writings, this course investigates the relation between the human and animal and the representation of human transformation and adaptation in order to study contemporary approaches to the body, language, and suffering.
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EL45TL: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: WRITING FROM EXPERIENCE, WRITING IN SHORT FORMS

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

The course will be taught in two parts, focusing on personal experience as material for fiction and poetry, and exploring historical and contemporary varieties of short written forms as catalysts for your own work. Initially, the course will enable you to use your own experience to create fictional worlds, stressing the importance of close observation, character, dialogue and attention to detail. The second part will encourage you to explore less familiar short forms from other historical periods, as well as to look afresh at virtual forms from our own time such as Facebook profiles, texts, tweets and blogs.

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EL45UR: REPRESENTATIONS OF VIOLENCE: PUTTING THE ART BACK IN ATROCITY

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

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? Is it justifiable to make art out of atrocity? This multi-disciplinary course examines work from a wide range of genres, including fiction, poetry, film, photography and graphic art, and looks at the difficulties of inscribing trauma in texts and at the ethics and praxis of remembrance.
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EL45WF: LOVE, SEX AND THE SACRED IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

This course explores the representation of love, sex, and desire in a range of medieval texts, from the explicit satire of the fabliaux to devotional writing. It will address the relationship between gender and desire, the historical development of conceptions of sex, and the interplay between sacred and secular forms of desire. 
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EL45XT: GUILLOTINES, GHOSTS AND LAUGHING GAS

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

The 1790s was a turbulent decade in which literature, politics and science interacted in unprecedented ways, producing far-reaching changes in all areas of intellectual life. The rise of Romantic poetry coincided with a cult of Gothic horror, new forms of fiction and drama, and an explosive pamphlet war unleashed by the French Revolution. This course explores the distinctive culture of the revolutionary decade, studying poems, novels and plays by Coleridge, Blake, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, 'Monk' Lewis and other writers, alongside Jacobin and anti-Jacobin polemics, courtroom speeches, political cartoons, and experiments with 'laughing gas' in the laboratories of the poet-chemist Humphry Davy. ​

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