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Undergraduate English 2016-2017

EL1009: ACTS OF READING

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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EL30CP: PAGE AND STAGE: RENAISSANCE WRITINGS 1500-1640

30 credits

Level 3

First 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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EL30HK: AMERICAN INSURRECTIONS: WRITING, SELF AND NATION, 1776-1865

30 credits

Level 3

First Term

This course follows the development of American literature in English from the printing of the Declaration of Independence, the defining document of the American Revolution, in 1776, to the end of the Civil War, in 1865. It focusing on the idea of America, both as the subject of American writing, and as the context in which that writing was produced. Among the authors studied in the course are: Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
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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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EL30UT: ART AND ATROCITY: REPRESENTATIONS OF VIOLENCE AND TRAUMA

30 credits

Level 3

First 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? 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.
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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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EL35DQ: KNIGHTS, VIRGINS AND VIRAGOS: CHAUCER AND MEDIEVAL WRITING

30 credits

Level 3

Second 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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EL35EH: CLASSICAL EPIC

30 credits

Level 3

Second Term

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.
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EL35GK: MIND AND MONSTROSITY: REALISM AND THE GOTHIC IN THE LONG 19TH CENTURY

30 credits

Level 3

Second Term

Exploring connections between Gothic monstrosity and psychological realism, this course investigates an exciting range of texts and contexts from the long nineteenth century. Focusing on novels from 1789-1914, with some attention to other genres and adaptations, we ask what it means to be human, and how cultural anxieties and scientific/technological developments have affected literature (and vice versa). From doubling to degeneration, madness to the metropolis, villain to vampire, empire to the threat of extinction, we examine the work of writers such as Mary Shelley, Dickens, Poe, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Bram Stoker and H.G. Wells.​
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EL35KM: PERVERSION OF THE INTERIOR: WOMEN'S FICTION 1925-1975

30 credits

Level 3

Second Term

Gothic, Romance, Autobiography: these are the central topics of mid-twentieth-century fiction by and for women, and yet have often been critically neglected. Looking at a range of women's fiction in this period, including popular and middlebrow titles as well as literary classics, this course looks at what women wrote, what women read, and who deemed these works important. This course especially focuses on the relation between physical space (the home, the village) and psychological space (including representations of mental illness) in order to discuss the space of women's writing.
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EL35XR: ROMANTICISM

30 credits

Level 3

Second 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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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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EL40BT: 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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EL40CT: CONTROVERSY AND DRAMA: MARLOWE TO REVENGE TRAGEDY

30 credits

Level 4

First 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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EL40GT: NEO VICTORIAN TRANSFORMATIONS

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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EL40HQ: LITERATURE AND MEDICINE

30 credits

Level 4

First 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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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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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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EL40YL: CREATIVE WRITING: THE WRITER'S VOICE

30 credits

Level 4

First Term

Creative Writing: The Writer's Voice will focus on the crucial and often complex role of voice in fiction and poetry, considering both theoretical and practical aspects. It offers students the opportunity to develop their creative processes and practical literary skills in a supportive, constructive learning environment. Teaching consists of carefully targeted critical advice and guidance from the class tutor and peer evaluation from class members in a workshop environment. Examples of writing by recognised authors and class members will be used to enhance students' awareness of the key role of voice in imaginative writing, leading to practical application in their own creative work.
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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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EL45FI: WRITING IN A FREE STATE

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

This course addresses Irish writing produced, in or out of the country, between the revolutionary period (1916-1922) and the establishment of the Irish Republic in 1949. Political ferment was matched by a remarkable surge in literary production, in drama, fiction and poetry. We will examine the ways in which writers responded to (and helped shape) political change, while also staging literary revolutions of their own in the bold experiments of Ulysses and other landmark texts.

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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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EL45QV: HORRIBLE HISTORIES: VIOLENCE AND TRAUMA IN THE SCOTTISH NOVEL

30 credits

Level 4

Second Term

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.
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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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