ENGLISH

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr W Price

Pre-requisites

None

Co-requisites

None

Overview

“I can read you like a book” is a cliché for complete and easy understanding. But is the process of reading so self-evident? And do books give up their secrets quite so easily? 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 examines what it is we do when we read: how we process information from textual clues and respond imaginatively to the fictions presented on the page. We investigate how the form of a text shapes responses and structures expectations in the reader. We look at the interplay of oral and written traditions in poetic form, and how poets play upon convention in their work. We also engage with disruptive texts which ask us to reflect upon literature and ask what it is and what it is for.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures (Tues and Thurs) and 1 one-hour tutorial (to be arranged) per week.

4 one-hour voluntary sessions on library skills, essay writing, exam preparation and course review.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%); continuous assessment (40%) consisting of 2 essays (15% and 25% respectively); tutorial assessment mark (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

The first written exercise will constitute an unassessed plan (including a draft introduction of approximately 100 words) of the first assessed essay submission. This will increase both the coherence and utility of the assessment procedures whilst streamlining the workload of students on the course.

Feedback

Class tutors will provide both verbal feedback in class (and/or office hours where requested) and written feedback via the standard English Literature cover sheets.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Alcobia-Murphy

Pre-requisites

None

Overview

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. Included are texts such as: Vladimir Nabokov’s (i) Lolita, Art Spiegelman's Maus and Seamus Heaney's North.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures (Tue and Thur at 12) and 1 one-hour tutorial (to be arranged) per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment (50%): 1000 word essay (15%); 1500 word essay (25%); Tutorial Assessment Mark (10%). 1 two-hour written examination (50%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

(1) Written feedback is provided on a diagnostic exercise early on in the course prior to completion of required written assessments; (2) Oral feedback on students' progress is provided continuously by tutor.

Feedback

Written feedback is provided within two weeks of submission of essays; oral feedback available on request with regards to written examination.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr M Durham

Pre-requisites

None

Co-requisites

Overview

An understanding of the way language is structured is an invaluable tool to discuss and analyse English and other languages. This course provides students with an introduction to the main aspects of English linguistics. Students will learn how to identify and analyse the major "building blocks" of language through an introduction to phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as sociolinguistics. Examples for illustration and discussion will be drawn from varieties of English spoken in the British Isles and world-wide. Lectures and tutorials will be geared to providing students with an active vocabulary with which to discuss language and essential analytical tools with which to analyse its structure and function.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures, and 1 one-hour tutorial.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 3 on-line assessments (20% each); one 1,250 word paper (30%); Tutorial Assessment Mark (10%).

Resit: Examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Students will receive formative commentary from tutors in tutorials.

Feedback

Students will receive feedback on-line for their performance in on-line assessment; they will also be encouraged to discuss this performance with their tutors. All students will receive written feedback on essay performance; again, they will be encouraged to discuss their performance with their tutors.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr R M Millar

Pre-requisites

None.

Co-requisites

None.

Notes

This is a 15 credit, six week course.

Overview

Meaning is at the heart of our understanding of language, ourselves and the world; and yet it is notoriously difficult to ?tie down?. Why do I think a particular word means one thing while you think it means something ? subtly or significantly ? different? This course gives you the opportunity to explore these issues. You will learn how we construct hierarchies of meaning and how these may differ from language to language; you will also come to understand how what a word means can differ from place to place and at different times. The course also considers how dictionaries and thesauri are constructed.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures, one line workshop and one-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One 2,000 word essay (50%); homework exercise (30%), tutorial assessment (20%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Students will receive formative commentary from tutors in tutorials.

Feedback

Students will receive feedback on-line for their performance in on-line assessment; they will also be encouraged to discuss this performance with their tutors. All students will receive written feedback on essay performance; again, they will be encouraged to discuss their performance with their tutors.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above who have passed 30 credit points in Level 1 English courses OR from literature courses in a foreign language.

Overview

So you think you know Shakespeare? This course invites you to think again. Studying a range of plays we seek to 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. The playhouse was a new cultural venue in Shakespeare's time, and the language itself was a rapidly evolving medium to which drama gave voice. Building upon study of the language of Shakespeare and the conditions of the Elizabethan playhouse, this course examines the ways in which the theatre imagined and debated key issues of the period. What was the place of Shakespeare's theatre within the culture of his time? How did his plays engage with controversial questions of politics, religion and gender? And how did he bridge the demands of a form that was both popular entertainment and a leisure activity of the elite? Encounters with Shakespeare is your chance to find out.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures plus one-hour tutorial per week. Additional optional film screening on Wednesday afternoons.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%), in-course assessment: 500-600 work written exercise (5%), 1,000-1,200 word first essay (15%), 1,200-1,500 word second essay (20%) and tutorial work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Feedback

Assessed coursework will be returned to students within two weeks of submission with detailed comments and students will have the opportunity to discuss their work with tutors in specified office hourse. Generalised feedback on coursework highlighting issues needing attention, will be delivered in class as part of preparation for each successive assignment.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr M Durham

Pre-requisites

LN 1002 or EL 1514 or equivalent. This pre-requisite may be waived at the discretion of the Undergraduate Programme Convener.

Co-requisites

None

Notes

This is a six week course.

Overview

From the moment we become literate, we are taught that the word is the smallest unit of meaning. This is not entirely correct. Words themselves are often made up of smaller meaningful elements. Underlying men, for instance, are two units: man and a plural marker. This course will teach you how English and other languages construct their vocabularies through word-formation, giving you the analytical and conceptual tools necessary to do so. You will also consider how the sound-pattern of a language interacts with its morphology (so that, in English, the plural's in hands is pronounced differently from the same ending in hats) as well as the ways in which word-formation can change over time.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures, a weekly online workshop and 1 one-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One 2,000 word essay (50%); 1 homework exercise (30%), tutorial assessment mark (20%).

Resit: Examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Informal feedback will be given during the seminars.

Feedback

Students will receive feedback for their essay and homework exercise in the form of comments on the work itself, informal feedback will also be given during the seminars.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr T C Baker

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above who have passed 30 credit points in Level 1 English courses.

Overview

How do we know what we know? Are our lives shaped by our own efforts and learning, or are we subject to forces we cannot control? Does the acquisition of knowledge carry tragic consequences? Such questions have reverberated throughout literary history. Looking at a wide range of texts from ancient to modern, and including poems, plays, and novels, this course will introduce students to some of the central ethical and intellectual concerns found in literature, as well as providing a solid cross-period foundation for further study. Besides literary expressions of the Fall such as Milton's Paradise Lost, the course features reworkings of the Faust and Prometheus legends, including texts by authors such as Aeschylus, Marlowe, Mary Shelley and Angela Carter.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial per week

Assessment

1st attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%); in course assessment: first essay (1,500 words) 15%, second essay (1,800 words) (20%), one reflective exercise (5%); tutorial assessment mark (10%).

Resit:1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Students will keep a weekly course journal which will not be given a CAS mark, but will be taken into consideration as part of tutorial assessment.

Feedback

Summative assessments will be given CAS marks, and written or verbal feedback will be provided. Additional informal feedback on performance and tutorial participation is also given in tutorials.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr R M Millar

Pre-requisites

None.

Co-requisites

None.

Notes

This is a 15 credit, six-week course.

Overview

A chronological examination of the linguistic history of the British Isles, including discussion of the emergence, social and cultural development, and (in some cases) extinction of all languages known to have been used in the archipelago from earliest times. The presently living languages (English, Scots, Gaelic, Irish and Welsh) will be discussed in relation to their individual historical developments, their mutual relationships, and their relationships with extinct languages which influenced them in earlier periods. The main focus of the course will not be on internal linguistic history but on the socio-political aspects of language history. Examination of the external history of the languages will illuminate many issues in socio-historical linguistics: mutual influencing of languages, standardisation, diversification, style and register, status of dialects and sociolects.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures per week, one on-line workshop and one-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One 2,000 word essay (50%); homework exercise (30%); tutorial assessment (20%).

Resit: Two-hour examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Students will receive formative commentary from tutors in tutorials.

Feedback

Students will receive feedback from tutors on written work and on tutorial performance.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

TBA

Pre-requisites

EL 1514 or equivalent. This pre-requisite may be waived at the discretion of the Undergraduate Programme Convener.

Co-requisites

None.

Notes

This is a six week course.

Overview

The course covers key aspects of articulatory phonetics and will introduce elementary phonological theory as it relates to the description of English. The latter will include accounts of simple phonological processes and the notion of derivational rule. Students will also acquire skills in the production and perception of sounds of English through a combination of lectures and practical activities (ear training, transcription practice, etc).

Structure

2 one-hour lectures per week, 1 one-hour tutorial per week, 1 online workshop per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%), one assessed homework exercise (30%), and tutorial assessment mark (20%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

The formative assessment will take the form of feedback during seminars.

Feedback

Students will receive feedback for their essay and homework exercise in the form of comments on the work itself, informal feedback will also be given during the seminars.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr H Hutchison

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

This course covers American literature from colonial times to 1900, viewing the work of important writers against the backdrop of history. The focus of the course is the 19th century, a period of immense social and cultural upheaval in the United States which transformed a rural colony into a political and industrial giant. The course considers issues of gender, race and religion, and the search for and emergence of a distinctively American voice. Authors studied include Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, Douglass and James.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 essay (30%), 1 two-hour exam (50%), group project (10%) and seminar assessment mark (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

To be confirmed

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School. This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

The period of the Stewart monarchy saw full participation by the independent Scottish nation in European affairs, and arguably the greatest era in the history of Scottish literature. We will examine a varied selection of texts, including Barbour's heroic epic of Robert Bruce, the courtly poetry of the reigns of James IV and V, satirical and polemical Reformation writings, David Lyndsay's Satire of the Thrie Estaitis (the only mediaeval play still regularly performed), and the love poetry of the reigns of Mary and James VI. Attention will be paid to the development of Scots as a literary language, and to issues of politics, religion and national identity. This course will equip students with an understanding of literature and society in one of the richest periods of Scottish literary history.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%) and in-course assessment: exercise (30%), presentation (10%), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

120 credit points at Level 2, which should include EL2010/2302 or equivalent. This pre-requisite may be waived at the discretion of the Head of School.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School. The field work aspects of this course may pose difficulties to students with disabilities. For such students, alternative arrangements will be made available. Any student wishing to discuss this further should contact the School Disability Co-ordinator.

Overview

One of the universals of human life is that language is subject to change. Underlying much of this change is the fact that the form of all living languages varies from speaker to speaker. Sociolinguistics studies the way class, ethnic background and gender affect the way you speak and the way others perceive your speech. Historical Linguistics attempts to find significant patterns in the same variation and change found in the past.

This course introduces the basic principles of both Sociolinguistics and Historical Linguistics. In order to illustrate these principles, reference will be made to case studies, both historical and contemporary. You will also be encouraged to participate in small-scale research and fieldwork projects.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%) and in-course assessment: one 2,000-2,500 word essay (30%), seminar work (10%), group presentation (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

120 credit points at Level 2, which should include EL 2010 / EL 2302 This pre-requisite may be waived at the discretion of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, language in Europe has experienced two apparently contradictory traits. Because of the ideal of 'self determination of peoples', the number of standard languages has increased considerably; on the other hand, the creation of the European Union and growing English-language hegemony have been perceived as threatening to many languages on the continent. This course will discuss these issues, paying particular attention to the links between identity and nationality and language. The relationship between these factors in different parts of the continent - from Ireland to Spain, from France to Russia - will also be considered.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%) and in-course assessment: one 2,000-2,500 word essay (30%); group presentation (10%); seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr T Baker

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

This course examines a selection of the best and most exciting forms of literary modernism - from the novel, to poetry and drama, and from traditional, 'high-modernist' to experimental and avant-garde works. These literary works will be set against readings by representative thinkers of modernity, from Darwin, Freud and Nietzsche to Theodor Adorno. The rich intellectual and cultural background of the period will also be discussed with reference to modernist movements in visual art and music. A further aim of the course is to convey a sense of the historical experience of modernity, a period characterised by rapid, often violent change, by war and revolution, and by scientific and technological progress.

Authors studied will include: Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, TS Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay 1 (20%), Essay 2 (30%); Group presentation (10%); Seminar Assessment (10%); Examination (30%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

EL 2010, EL 2302

Overview

Students will be introduced to a range of conceptions of 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 several analytical methods for discourse analysis, including conversation analysis; critical discourse analysis and narrative 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

1 two-hour seminar and 1 one-hour lecture per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 2,500-word essay (50%); two hour examination (40%); and Seminar Assessment (10%).

Resit: Two-hour examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr D Duff

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

The Romantic period (1789-1830) was a turning point in literary history which transformed received modes of writing, redefined the role of literature, and gave new prominence to ideas of originality, imagination, creativity and self-expression. This course explores these fascinating developments, particularly in poetry. The first half concentrates on the work of Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and examines the emergence of the revolutionary aesthetic of Romanticism in the context of the social and political upheavals of the ‘Age of Revolution’. The second half focuses on the ‘second-generation’ Romantic poets Shelley, Byron and Keats, but also pays attention to outstanding prose writers of the period including the essayists De Quincey, Hazlitt and Lamb and the novelists Jane Austen and Mary Shelley.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (50%) and in-course assessment: essay (30%), seminar work (10%), group project (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr W Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 3 or by permission of the Head of School

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

The course offers students an opportunity to develop their understanding of, and their practical skills in, the writing of fictional and non-fictional prose. It thus contributes to their career potential as professional writers. Through a combination of analytical textual study and the practical application of compositional principles and techniques the course also provides students with a richer understanding of how effective prose works are constructed.

Structure

1 one-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar/workshop per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: 1 two-hour exam (40%), 1 piece of original creative writing (50%), seminar assessment(10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

The Renaissance has been widely considered the golden age of English literature, producing such towering literary figures as Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe, and presenting mingled views of the erotic, the political, the religious and the lyrical while even laying claim to England's first 'novels'. Taking in poetry, drama and prose, this course presents a wide and contrasting range of writings which illustrate its authors' diverse interests: the court, the country, the city and - above all - love; or should that be 'sex'?

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%) and in-course assessment: two 2,000-2,500 word essays (25% each), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr J King

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

Since the rise of the women's movement in the 1960s, and the subsequent growth of feminist criticism, it has become almost impossible to talk about literature without paying some regard to gender issues. Looking at a range of texts by both male and female writers from different national cultures, this course will consider the role of literary texts in both constructing and deconstructing gender roles. It will also consider the concept of gendered writing. Since definitions of sexual identity are central to the course, texts which question the stability of that identity, such as lesbian and gay writing, will be used in addition to the canonical texts. A variety of critical approaches will be used, including Elaine Showalter's concept of the 'wild zone', Judith Butler's view of gender as 'performative' and the French feminist concept of écriture feminine. Authors studied will include: James Joyce, Jackie Kay and Jeanette Winterson.

Structure

1 lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%); essay (40%); group project (10%), Seminar assessment (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr S Alcobia-Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

The past two decades in Scotland and Ireland have witnessed a remarkable literary renaissance, not only resistant to metropolitan literary and linguistic norms, but also to inherited notions of Scottish and Irish identity. New modes of urban writing, working-class writing and women’s writing have altered the landscapes of Scottish and Irish literature. The course will examine a range of Scottish and Irish texts, adopting a comparative framework where appropriate, and focusing on such issues as: the role of writing in the construction of national identity; the relationship between nationality and gender; the literary use of non-standard language; regional identity and the urban/rural division; narrative voice; literature and politics.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour exam (40%), essay 1 (2-2,500 words)(15%), essay 2 (2-2,500 words)(25%), individual presentation (10%), seminar assessment mark (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 3 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

A pass in EL 2802.

Overview

This course focuses upon two areas of speech communication: speech acoustics – the study of the sound signals passing between speaker and hearer, and auditory phonetics – the processes by which these signals are perceived and understood by the hearer. Topics to be covered include speech production, basic acoustics, computerised methods for speech analysis, auditory system, and speech perception. Students will learn to use speech analysis software to analyze speech data, and will become familiar with theories of speech production and perception.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar and 1 one-hour laboratory practical per week

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment: 3 in-course exercises (20% each for the first two and 50% for the third) and seminar assessment work (10%)Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%)

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M Durham

Pre-requisites

Available to students in programme year 3 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

How children and adults learn language has been the topic of much debate within linguistics. This course will focus on some of the main theories of language learning and introduce students to research in first and second language acquisition. It will answer questions such as: when do children first start learning language? How do they go from babbling to one word sentences to the full complexity of adult grammar in a span of merely a few years? How do the brains of people who learn two languages simultaneously differ from those who learn a second language later on in life? What are some of the causes of the speech errors we find in second language learners? How can using a second language influence the way we use our native language?

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 one-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%), In-course assessment: 2,000-2,500 word essay (30%), group presentation (10%), and seminar assessment mark (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Notes

Admission subject to approval by the Head of School.

Overview

Many of our modern sensibilities were shaped in the nineteenth century, a period of rapid change that saw increasing urbanisation, an explosion in population, and major political reform. These changes brought anxiety and introspection, and the literature of the time expresses both excitement and doubt as Britain moved towards the secular, urban and democratic society we know today. The course will examine the complex inter-relationship between selected works and issues of the day, including Reform, “culture”, and the function of art in society. Authors studied will include Charlotte Brontë, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture, 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (40%) and in-course assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%), seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above who have passed 60 credit points in level 2 English courses.

Overview

In the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scotland experienced 'a social and economic transformation unparalleled among European societies of the time in its speed, scale and intensity' (Tom Devine). The course examines how this changing Scotland is imagined in some of the key literary texts of the period, and will relate these texts to their contexts: literary, linguistic, social, historical and intellectual. Writers to be studied may include: Robert Burns, John Galt, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

Structure

1 two-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (40%) and in-course assessment: essay (35%); exercise (15%); seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or by permission of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

EL 2010, EL 2302 This pre-requisite may be waived at the discretion of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

The course will examine the solution of linguistic and communication problems within a variety of real-world contexts and within a range of paradigms. It will do this in the context of both theory and practice. Approximately half of the course time will be devoted to the exploration of theoretical frameworks within which linguistic knowledge can be applied. Approximately half of the course will examine in some detail a range of actual applications, such as: language teaching; forensic investigation; terminological standardization; the construction of dictionaries; development of national language policies; and communication within professional contexts such as health care and law.

Structure

1 one-hour lecture and 1 two-hour seminar/workshop per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%) and in-course asseessment: one written assignment (2,500-3,000 words) (40%) seminar work (10%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

London in the early modern period was a centre of government, a thriving commercial hub and one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. It was also a centre for literary production across a range of genres, from plays to pageants, from poetry to pamphlets. This course will examine the various ways in which the city is represented in the literature of the period and will explore such topics as the place of the stage; sin and the city; ceremony and festivity; commerce and the community; and urban satire.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%) and in-course assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%) and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr T Rist

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

This course will explore the religio-political implications of representing the supernatural on the English Renaissance stage. In light of what Max Weber termed the Protestant ‘demystification’ of the physical universe, students will study the ‘reformation’ in English attitudes to the supernatural in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In line with current historicist practice, such social change will be viewed as a ‘context’ for a variety of dramatic texts that treat the supernatural in the period. Authors for study will include: Marlowe, Shakespeare.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%) and in-course assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%), and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr J King

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

For the nineteenth-century writer of realist fiction, there was an obvious vehicle at hand with which to tell fictional life stories: the Bildungsroman, or novel of development, tracing an individual’s growth from youth to maturity. Twentieth-century novelists, however, have found this traditional linear plot unsatisfactory as a means of conveying the nature of an individual life. This course aims to develop students’ understanding of the variety and significance of different narrative forms in twentieth-century English and North American women’s fiction, ranging from Woolf’s canonical Mrs Dalloway to contemporary work by Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: Essay (40%); examination (40%); group project (10%); seminar assessment mark (10%).

Resit: Examination (100%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Pugh

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

This module examines the encounter between Spenser, the greatest poet of the sixteenth century, and his Queen, the powerful and enigmatic Elizabeth Tudor. Author of the first epic in English, ostensibly praising Elizabeth as 'Gloriana', Spenser is often regarded as an apologist for ther regime, but he also wrote a biting satire which was recalled by the censor, and lived for most of his career in what he saw as exile in wartorn Ireland. We read selections from across his varied output, focussing on some of his many depictions of the Virgin Queen, ranging from the overt to the veiled, from the celebratory to the comic and harshly critical. Like many Renaissance poets, Spenser often creates meaning in his poems through allusion to classical literature and myth. Passages from the Augustan poets Virgil, Horace and Ovid, read in translation, will enrich our understanding of his complex and ambiguous relationship with political power.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One 3,000 word essay (80%); seminar assessment (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr R O'Connor

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or above or by permission of the Head of School

Overview

Predicting the future became something of a national obsession in Britain between the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War. This turbulent period saw the headlong acceleration of the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the British Empire; it also saw sweeping social changes, the rise of rival empires, and the birth of new ideologies such as Socialism and Marxism. What did the future hold for Britain, for Western civilization, and for the human race as a whole? British writers vied with each other in playing on their readers’ hopes and fears, presenting exotic and radically divergent visions of the future in fictional form, ranging from nightmares of enemy invasion or racial degeneration to distant prospects of a socialist paradise or a drug-induced utopia. This course examines the fictional futures produced in Britain between 1820 and 1935 in their cultural contexts, exploring the interplay between imaginative fantasy and the real-life concerns of the writers and readers.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week

Assessment

1st attempt: 2,500-3,000 word essay (80%); seminar assessment(20%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

The parameters of this course are the Irish Union and the catastrophic Great Famine. The Irish novel matured and flourished during this period of change and crisis with writers such as Edgeworth, Owenson, Maturin, the Banims and Carleton contributing to the tradition. This course explores how these novelists were instrumental in developing new genres such as the national tale and the historical novel in response to cultural and political developments. The course will also explore how Irish writers distinctively manipulated pre-existing forms such as the gothic tale and the melodrama.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: one 3,000 word essay (80%); seminar assessment (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr C Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

The course will examine a full range of Byron's work, from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which established his fame as a poet, to the oriental tales and verse dramas, and his epic Don Juan. It will tackle problems such as the relationship of autobiography and writing; poetic tradition and its violations; the Byronic hero; cross-dressing; Byron's heroines; the art of pleasure; political and social satire. The impact of Byron on his contemporaries was always shocking; even now he shocks, and the course will ultimately confront the how and the why.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: One 3,500 word essay (80%); seminar assessment (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr C Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

Challenging conventional boundaries between the humanities and the sciences, 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 first part of the course considers the use and abuse of literary concepts in medical practice and of medical ideas and history in literature. The second part examines literary representations of the physician and narratives of illness, focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The third part explores the representation of psychiatry and psychiatric theory in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and film.

Structure

2 two hour seminars per week

Assessment

1st attempt: Essay 1 (1500-2000 words) (20%); Essay 2 (3000-3500 words) (60%); in-class presentation (10%); seminar assessment (10%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. It will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

Some of the finest Scottish novels of the twentieth century are written deliberately as Glasgow novels, attempts to address an urban experience often marginalised in the Scottish literary tradition. Glasgow novelists have sought to come to terms with the city and with phenomena like industrialisation, commercial expansion, class division, socialist politics and personal alienation. The course will consider: the novel as an urban form; the position of the artist in industrial society; narrative technique and the treatment of vernacular language; realism and surrealism; stereotypes and the changing image of Glasgow.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: 2,500-3,000 word essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr T C Baker

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 and above or by permission of the Head of School

Overview

The past twenty years have seen an increased interest in the viability of the Gothic tradition in Scottish literature, with almost every major Scottish author incorporating Gothic elements into otherwise realistic form. The Gothic novel is often seen as a way of simultaneously re-examining the past and addressing the concerns of the present. Modern Scottish writers have used Gothic themes and techniques to address key cultural issues of politics, history, and sexuality. The course will examine a range of modern Gothic fiction, including novels and short stories, and will consider: realism and surrealism; the role of fantasy in contemporary Scottish fiction; and the representation of history. Authors to be discussed may include Iain Banks, Alasdair Gray, Alice Thompson, and Michel Faber.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: 2500-3000 word essay (80%); SAM (20%).

Resit: Not normally available.

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of Head of the School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course discusses the ways that society and individuals interact in terms of language. It pays particular attention to the nature of bilingualism within a society; how a nation can cope with (and benefit from) widespread bilingualism; how lesser-used languages can either survive or cease to be used when they are under pressure from larger-scale languages; and the manners in which ‘new’ languages can be ‘planned’ and standardised. Whilst the course pays attention to the Scottish linguistic situation, it discusses cases from all over the world.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr M Durham

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

EL 30LQ

Overview

Understanding the intricacies of language variation and change research is best achieved through hands-on practice. This course will give students the opportunity to do just that by enabling them to conduct their own small-scale research project. Over the six weeks of the course they will learn how to plan a research project, how to conduct sociolinguistic interviews, how to transcribe these interviews and how to extract and analyse their results.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: 1 essay (2500-3000 words) 80%, Seminar work 20%.

Resit: Essay (100%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or above or by permission of the Head of School

Overview

Walter Scott played a pivotal role in the development of the novel. His fiction enters into a dialogue with his eighteenth-century predecessors, engages with the concerns of Romanticism, and looks forward to developments in the novel in the twentieth-century. This course will examine the ways in which Scott explores the potentialities of the novel form through a selection of his fiction and in his comments on writers such as Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Richardson, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley. Some modern commentaries on Scott's role in the development of the form will also be considered. Texts studied may include Waverley, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Ivanhoe and Redgauntlet.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: 2,500 - 3,000 word essay (80%); seminar assessment (20%).

Resit: Essay 100%

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor P Crotty

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. It will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

Hugh MacDiarmid was the best known of the many pseudonyms of Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), the postman's son from the Borders who launched the Scottish Literary Renaissance on his return from service in the Great War. Grieve/MacDiarmid is remembered almost as much for his intemperate propaganda as for his astonishingly varied poetry in Scots and English. The course will examine the historical and ideational contexts of his cultural campaigning but will devote the greater part of its attention to a study of the poetry, paying particular attention to four separable areas of MacDiarmid's output - the "early lyrics" in Scots, the tragicomic rhapsody A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), the Marxist autobiographical poetry of 1931-2, and the elegiac verse written on the Shetland island of Whalsay in the period leading up to the mental breakdown of 1935 that finally silenced the lyrist (if not the propagandist) in him. The course will also consider a selection of MacDiarmid's short fiction in Scots and English.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course Assessment: essay (80%), and seminar assessment (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr B Fennell

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours English or Language and Linguistics students who have 30 credit points from either EL 35RC or EL 30LQ. This pre-requisite may be waived by the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

This course examines the effects of colonialism on language contact, change and spread. It focuses on the spread of English within the British Isles, the British Empire and beyond, and on post-colonial models of language contact in a variety of countries. Effects of contact on other national standard languages will be discussed, as well as on the development of pidgins, creoles and other interim, immigrant and minority varieties. The notions of linguicism, linguistic imperialism and linguistic prejudice will be explored in depth, and studies from sociolinguistics will feature alongside readings from politics and international relations, cultural and literary studies.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr D Duff

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

From Gawain and the Green Knight to Goldfinger, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, romance is a genre which embraces some of the greatest works of English literature as well as being the vehicle for some of its most seductive fictions. In recent years, romance has also been the focus for theoretical debates about the nature of genre, attracting the attention of major twentieth-century theorists. The course explores this rich literary and critical tradition, analysing works in verse, prose and drama (and film) from six centuries whilst also investigating modern theories of genre. Among the authors studied are Marie de France, Spenser, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, T S Eliot and David Lodge.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%) and in-course assessment: essay (40%), oral presentation (10%) seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Janus

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or above, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The comic modernism of such writers as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and John Banville draws on earlier Irish tradition (Swiftian satire, the 'comical incoherencies and uncommon indecencies' of Sterne, the macabre laughter of Maturin, Wildean word-play). This course aims to trace a genealogy of Irish prose fiction by reference to the role of laughter and comedy in driving formal literary innovation. In addition to gaining knowledge of the historical development of Irish prose fiction, students will have the opportunity to develop an understanding of the different literary modalities of comedy (wit and word-play, grotesque and macabre humour, parody and satire) and of the various theories of laughter as a psycho-social and aesthetic event.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars weekly.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay (80%), and seminar assessment mark (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will examine W H Auden’s work of the 1930s, focussing closely on his poetry. Auden returned from Berlin at the beginning of the 1930s convinced that another European war was inevitable, yet, paradoxically, his poetic output in the decade is obsessed with violence, thrillers, blood-feuds and spies. Paradoxically, the socialist Auden is himself obsessed with violent, upper-class men. Against these obsessions is set a haunted involvement with the desolate landscapes of the north of England.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or above.

Overview

While friendship might seem like a universal facet of human existence, its meaning is culturally contingent and changes over time. The English renaissance witnessed a shift in the nature of friendship from a social bond based on alliance to one grounded in affection and common interest. This course will examine how a range of early modern writings, including drama, poetry and prose, respond to changing ideals of friendship in the period, addressing issues such as the gendering of contemporary forms of amity and the relationship between homosocial and homosexual love. It will also explore how “less literary” writings, including letters, intervened in textual transactions between friends. Authors to be studied will typically include Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood and Roger Ascham.

Structure

2 x 2 hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: 3,000 word essay (80%) Seminar Assessment (20%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or above.

Overview

Best-known for her descriptions of London during the Blitz, Elizabeth Bowen has been described as a cross between Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf. This course looks at a range of Bowen’s novels and short stories, from her early modernist fiction about young women’s rebellion against fixed gender roles, through the thriller mode of her war writing and her use of the ghost story, to the postmodernism of her final novels that anticipate much about our global, consumerist society.

Structure

2 x 2 hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: 3,000 word essay (80%) Seminar Assessment (20%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Gordon

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

Why does history matter? For the sixteenth century the past was suddenly a critical subject. The period witnessed an explosion in historical writing. The radical break with tradition brought about by religious reformation combined with the impact of newly disseminated classical historians led to the emergence of new forms of history writing and new ways of thinking about the past. Central to these developments were innovations in the writing of life histories. This course will examine approaches to life writing across generic boundaries from popular forms to ‘politic’ histories and the history play. Authors to be studied will include Thomas More, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and others.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr T Rist

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course is devoted to the critical reading of the foremost epic in English, Milton's Paradise Lost, which will be considered in its entirety. Seminars will address key, critical issues for the poem as they arise in the weekly, prescribed reading. Topics for consideration will include the role and use of epic conventions in the poem, the nature of Milton's seventeenth-century Christian thinking, the conception of 'heroism', and the success (or failure) of the poem's almost hubristic ambition: 'to justify the ways of God to men'.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 essay (80%); seminar assessment(20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Pugh

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or above, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

From More's Utopia, a traveller's tale of a land called 'No-Place', through the Arcadias of Elizabeth pastoral, to the Hesperidean fantasies of Civil-War royalists and Milton's evocation of a lost Paradise, Renaissance literature is full of mythical or imaginary lands. For Sidney, this independence from reality, this ability to create new worlds, is what elevates literature above all other pursuits. But these fictional settings are not escapist: rather they offer oblique, often radical perspectives on contemporary England. In doing so they pose fundamental questions about literature's relation to its readers and role in society, and suggest some startling answers.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars weekly.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar assessment mark (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr C Jones

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

Psychology in the eighteenth century is the philosophy of the human mind. This course will explore through a range of texts how eighteenth-century literary writers engaged with the psychological theories of the period, and defined and interrogated competing ideas about the human mind. Particular attention will be given to the theory and representation of consciousness, melancholy and hypochondria, problems of language and communication, and states of dreaming and madness. Comparisons will be made between eighteenth-century theories of mind and Freudian and post-Freudian psychology. Among the authors studied are Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: In course assessment: essay (80%); seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr D Wall

Pre-requisites

Overview

One of the great insights of Romantic-period literature is that the life of the mind is not limited to consciousness. Dreams and visions, sometimes drug-induced, became a major preoccupation as poets explored subliminal and unconscious mental states, and the desires and anxieties which find their only expression in dream experience. The course will typically feature selected texts by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Thomas De Quincey, and their presentation of dream experiences. By analysing the language used by these writers, the course ultimately aims to explore the underlying impulses and motivations which surface in the texts studied on the course.

Structure

2 x 2 hour seminars per week

Assessment

1st attempt: 3,000 word essay (80%) Seminar Assessment (20%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor P Crotty

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will examine the full range of Burns’s work, from the early satires and verse epistles to ‘Tam o’Shanter’ and the later songs. Topics will include Burns’s deployment of a radically mixed Scots-English idiom, his interest in the cult of sentiment, and his involvement with political radicalism. The relationship of Burns to his literary predecessors, both vernacular and Augustan, will be examined, along with Burns’s influence on the subsequent generation of English Romantic poets.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

To be confirmed

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

The figure of the hero is central in literature from antiquity to recent times. The concept has varied: heroes may be associated with a national cause, they may be of outstanding strength or valour, or they may exhibit other morally admirable qualities. The course starts with an examination of the war hero of antiquity, and the re-emergence of the figure, greatly altered, in Virgil’s Aeneas. The main focus of the course is on Beowulf, Hary’s Wallace and Malory’s Sir Lancelot, examined against their historical and cultural backgrounds to determine what constant qualities are essential to the hero-figure. Finally, more recent literary presentations of the heroic ideal will be discussed.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (50%), exercise (30%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr T C Baker

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

Themes of religion and morality have long held a central place in the Scottish literary imagination, and have frequently been used as a means of addressing broad cultural issues. This course will introduce students to a wide range of novels concerned with the question of sin and the place of morality in contemporary society. Including texts from a wide variety of genres, ranging from thrillers to social realism, the course will focus on such issues as: the concept of ‘good’; the relationship between individuals and communities; the relationship between regional and religious identity; and the legacy of Calvinism in a secular context. Authors to be discussed may include John Buchan, Neil M Gunn, Muriel Spark, and A L Kennedy.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: 2,500-3,000 word essay (80%); SAM (20%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of the School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

In general, historical linguistics has been primarily concerned with the study of languages before the mid-18th century. Language in the modern era has often been considered identical to contemporary language. Yet this is not the case. In the recent past of many languages, there have been changes documented by the then-emerging science of linguistics which might have been impossible before an era of mass literacy and relatively easy communication. With some emphasis on the histories of English and Scots, students will examine and analyse different developments during the period in order to ascertain whether any patterns can be found.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of the School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

Contact between languages is inevitable. Language contact is also one of the central spurs of linguistic change. Often this contact is brief, and the influence of one language over another is ephemeral; sometimes the contact has long-lasting and profound effects upon at least one of the languages concerned.

This course will discuss different types of language contact, their various effects, and the social and linguistic contexts from which they spring. It will pay particular attention to the ‘transition period’ between Old and Middle English, assessing the types and levels of contact between English and both Norse and French.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr M Durham

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or above, or by permission of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

EL 30LQ

Overview

This course will provide students with an overview of the main American and Canadian dialects of English and discuss the processes through which they have become different from British English. Students will also learn about African American Vernacular English, both in terms of the divergence hypothesis and the origins debate. The course will also introduce students to the languages spoken in the United States and Canada both before and after the arrival of English and French colonists and the languages other than English spoken in North America today.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment: 1 essay (2,500-3,000 words) (80%); seminar assessment (20%).

Resit: Essay (100%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. Travel is a central motif of his work shaping its subject matter and themes and contributing to a theory of writing which bridges the Victorian age and modernity, often anticipating modern critical theory. This course will explore the metaphor of travel in Stevenson’s work and consider the ways in which it begins to articulate some of the questions which now inform post-colonial debates. Texts to be studied will include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, and a selection of South Seas stories and Stevenson’s essays.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr B Fennell

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in level 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

This course focuses on the role of multilingualism in society. It will examine in depth fundamental concepts such as monolingualism, bilingualism and multilingualism and discuss the role of multilingualism in primarily multilingual and primarily monolingual societies, dispelling the myth of monolingualism. It will especially examine the various roles of majority and minority languages and the importance of language in the home and in the wider community (eg in education, the economy, the media, the arts, diplomacy and defence).

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%); and seminar assessment mark (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr W Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

Many of the most innovative and influential modern American texts have voiced culturally dissident or marginal perspectives. Examining works by writers such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Ralph Ellison, William Burroughs and Raymond Carver, this course will consider a selection of texts representing Black American, Southern Gothic, Beat and post-modern American fiction. A core consideration will be the ways in which such 'rebel' voices represent both a continuity with the innovation of 19th century American fiction and yet also a subversive challenge to canonical assumptions of taste, region, gender, race and class.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar assessment (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Janus

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

‘To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.’ From his first successful piece of anti-theatre, ‘Waiting for Godot’, a drama in two acts where ‘nothing happens…twice’, Samuel Beckett applied his artistic credo to every genre and aesthetic form he worked in, turning the medium against itself and reducing it to the limits of its possibility. From his 1957 radio play ‘All That Fall,’ to the tape-recorded monologue of ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ (1958) to his ‘Film’ of 1965 starring Buster Keaton, to his 1976 prose piece ‘Fizzles’ illustrated by Jasper Johns, Beckett never ceased to interrogate the limits of aesthetic form and to challenge the audience to look, listen and read in new and difficult ways.

Setting a representative selection from Beckett’s later theatre and short prose texts against his work for radio, television, and film, this course will evaluate the techniques behind Beckett’s self-declared “art of failure”, analyzing the impact of new technology (radio, tape-recorder, television, cinema) on old media (print, stage), and exploring the range and mode of aesthetic perception associated with each medium.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week

Assessment

1st attempt: Course preparation and participation (20%); One 3,000-3,500 word essay (80%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr S Alcobia-Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours English or Joint Honours English students.

Overview

This course will provide students with guidance on writing a dissertation on a topic approved by the Head of School.

Structure

3 one-hour tutorials.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Dissertation (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr R McColl Millar

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours Language and Linguistic students.

Overview

This course will provide students with guidance on writing a dissertation on a topic approved by the Head of School.

Structure

3 one-hour tutorials.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Dissertation (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or by permission of Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

Scottish Literature has been particularly rich in two periods of the twentieth-century; the 1920s and 30s and from 1970 onwards. This course will explore works from these and the immediately contemporary period, examining key issues such as language, cultural negotiation, national identity and the relationship of Scottish writing to literary culture in the world at large. Authors to be discussed may include Barrie, Carswell, Jenkins, Morgan, Spark and Jamie.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 2,500 - 3,000 word essay (40%); SAM (10%); Group Project (10%); 2 hour examination (40%).

Resit: To be confirmed.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr H Hutchison

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

This course explores interactions between literary production and material culture in and around the Victorian period. Technological developments in the early nineteenth century made possible the mass-production of goods, including books, for the first time. But alongside new technologies came a growing fascination with the past and the rise of a thriving museum culture. Using the rich resources of the University collections, this course allows students to explore print material alongside collected objects and art to gain a fuller understanding of the diversity of the culture of the period, and to appreciate the role that texts and objects played in shaping nineteenth-century attitudes. The course also involves working to curate an exhibition for the public using material from the university’s collection. The theme of this exhibition will vary from year to year and literary texts will be chosen to intersect with the content of the exhibition.

Exhibition themes might include Empire, Nature, the Pre-Raphaelites, Travel, Time or the Victorian body.

Structure

Two 2-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: Group presentation (10)%; essay (50%); reflective report on creation of exhibition (30%); participation mark based on class discussion and contribution to exhibition (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr R O'Connor

Pre-requisites

Available to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

Also available to Cultural History and History students in Programme Year 4.

Overview

Science became a major force in society during the nineteenth century. This course offers an exciting interdisciplinary look at the impact of science on the literature and culture of the Victorian period. It also explores how scientific thought and practice was shaped by the mood of the age. Using literary texts and contemporary source material, it investigates how scientific breakthroughs in areas such as geology, physics and medicine fuelled the rise of an industrial, urban society, and challenged traditional ideas about religion, gender, class and the human mind. It will also explore how scientific thought was used in the central political and social debates of the period, and at how this cultural context altered the course of science. Writers and scientists studied will include figures such as Mary Shelley, Charles Darwin, Hugh Miller, Charles Dickens, Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Karl Pearson, H G Wells and Albert Einstein.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%), in-course assessment: 2,500-3,000 word essay (40%), group project (10%), seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr T Rist

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

This course will read the complete, dramatic works of Christopher Marlowe, one of Shakespeare's best-known theatrical contemporaries, paying particular attention to the author's sustained interest in social outsiders and the moral universes in which they exist and are judged. The course will also consider Marlowe's dramatic awareness of the religious controversies of his age and address New Historical questions as to the subversive or conservative power of the theatre in the sixteenth-century England of Renaissance and Reformation.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay (80%); SAM (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lewis

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

Psychology, neurology and criminology came to the forefront of late-nineteenth-century thought about a number of 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 in the period 1880-1901, we will engage in close reading of several key texts to generate an understanding of 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, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and H.G. Wells.

Structure

2 x 2 hour seminars per week

Assessment

1st attempt: 3,000 word essay (80%) Seminar Assessment (20%) 10% Tutorial Mark (based on attendance, participation and quality of participation) and 10% group project.

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr T Wills

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

This course introduces students to a large and important body of medieval vernacular literature: the sagas of the Icelanders. The sagas are a fascinating and entertaining literature concerning the settlement period of Iceland, with themes centred around family and honour relationships and the problems of living in a remote and hostile environment, without centralised government or law enforcement. The sagas of the Icelanders influenced English and Scottish authors such as Coleridge, Blake and Scott, but they are also significant as a body of colonial and post-colonial literature from the Middle Ages.

This course will introduce some major works from the sagas of the Icelanders. It will cover the saga form, both textual and narrative features, as well as providing the historical, social and legal background to the works. In addition, the course will examine the sagas as colonial and settlement literature, using a comparative approach with modern literary forms.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One 3,000-word essay (80%); seminar assessment (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of Head of School.

Notes

This is a six-week course. This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

Dicken's reputation as the greatest English novelist rests on works which transformed the nature of the novel and probed the heart of the Victorian society. Comic, tragic, delicate, bold, topical, timeless - in their rich variety his works are landmarks of English literature. This course samples the range of his output.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: Essay (80%), and seminar assessment (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

TBA

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme year 4 or by permission of Head of school.

Notes

This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

The 1920s were one of the most creative periods in American literary history. American literature emerged at an international, cosmopolitan level, contributing significantly to the development and achievement of 20th–century literature. The media and machinery which direct and inform our everyday lives were developed in America in the 1920s; the key elements of essential texture of modern life originated in that decade. Authors who will figure in set reading will include T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: essay (40%), group project (10%), seminar participation (10%), exam (40%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lumsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in 2010/11.

Overview

The North-east is a region which offers particular resonances to themes of Scottish literary identity, defining its own space at the margins of both central Scotland and the wider parameters of the UK. This course considers fictions set in the North-east examining the ways in which they both interrogate the marginal status of the region and offer wider reflections on identity as it is constructed via gender, language, and social, geographical and cultural contexts. Writers studied will include Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Nan Shepherd and Jessie Kesson.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor P Crotty

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

Seamus Heaney has written some of the most popular accessible as well as some of the most intellectually challenging poetry in English in the last half century. The course traces the relationship between the apparently "reader friendly" poems of Death of a Naturalist (1966) and the more rebarbative and demanding writings of The Haw Lantern (1987) and other later collections. Heaney's work is placed in its historical context in relation both to the politics of Northern Ireland and the crisis of representation in late twentieth-century poetics.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: Essay (80%), and Seminar Assessment (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Programme Coordinator.

Notes

This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

This course examines the development of the short story during the last two hundred years, from Washington Irving, Hawthorne and Melville, through Hemingway, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf and Mansfield, to Raymond Carver and a selection of contemporary writers. This course will consider the distinctiveness of the short story as an art form, its many techniques and applications, and the factors that have influenced its evolution.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour examination (40%), in-course assessment: essay (40%), group project (10%); and seminar work (10%).

Resit: Examination (100%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr W Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. May not be taken along with EL 48TG.

Overview

This course will be assessed by in-course assessment (i) seminar work leading to the completion of three original literary pieces of any kind and (ii) submission of a portfolio of original writing consisting of either a single complete work of prose of between 1,000-3,500 words, or a single dramatic scene, or between 50-75 lines of poetry. The portfolio piece should be the strongest of the three coursework pieces (chosen in consultation with the course tutor) and will be marked on a qualitative basis.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: seminar work (25%): one complete exercise in creative writing (75%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Alcobia-Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The predominant genre in contemporary Northern Irish fiction is that of the thriller, one that puts the sex back into semtex. Such a genre, known as "Troubles Trash", often perpetuates the myth of Belfast as a knowable city, a "hellish stasis left behind by world history". The novels studied on this course offer an implicit critique of this genre. Themes studied on this course include: the ability to represent violence in literature; the use (and abuse) of history as a representational strategy; identity politics; the impact of the Troubles (and the current ceasefire) on Northern Irish literature.

Authors to be studied include: Seamus Deane, Eoin McNamee, Bernard MacLaverty and Robert McLiam Wilson.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (70%), presentations (20%) and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or above or by permission of the Head of School.

Co-requisites

Normally EL 35RC.

Overview

The course explores a variety of professional communities of practice from the point of view of language use. Topics discussed include:

Language and Law
Language and Law Enforcement
Language and Health Care
Dcotor-Patient Interaction
Talking Therapies
Organisational Communication
Talk and Organisational Interaction
Structure of Organisational Communications
Persuasive Discourse (Advertising, etc).

Students will apply a variety of linguistic methods to reveal the relationship between language, communicative practice and professional activities, in order to increase their understanding of language and enhancing professional practice. Where possible instructions from Law, Medical Science and other areas will discuss language in their field.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week, 1 one-hour text discussions and/or student presentations per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 2 linguistic analyses (40% each), seminar assessment (20%).

Resit: 1 two-hour examination.

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

The content will include works by Shakespeare, Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Thomas Southerne, containing representations of Black African characters, and of Carib, Aztec, and Pamunkey Native Americans.

Structure

1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay (80%) Seminar Assessment (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr H Hutchison

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

The late nineteenth century brought industrialisation and a new sophistication into American culture. This course focuses on American writing at this time of astonishing social and intellectual change. Issues such as wealth and society, innocence and decadence, the urban environment, the growth of New York, the conscious mind and the role of women emerge in the novels and poetry of the period. This course aims to examine the response of writers to these issues, and the new forms of writing which they explore as they open the door to Modernism. Authors to be studied include James, Wharton, Dreiser and Fitzgerald.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: 2,500-3,000 word essay (80%) and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr T Rist

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. It will not be available in session 2011/12.

Overview

This course looks at the works of a number of devotional poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the relationship of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century devotional poetry to the courtly traditions of Petrarchan poetry as well as to the writings and philosophy of the imitatio Christi tradition of affective meditation on the Passion. In addition, it stresses the role of devotional poetry in the English Reformations of the period. Authors for study will include Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr A Lewis

Pre-requisites

Overview

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. Whether rewriting Victorian themes; reinterpreting well-known characters and authors; rediscovering Victorian narrative structures or recovering ‘lost’ nineteenth-century perspectives, the problems of proximity and remoteness can be seen to inform imaginative recuperation of the Victorians’ own array of competing histories.
This course will proceed from familiarity with key nineteenth-century texts and contexts to enable close analysis of prequels, sequels, offshoots and alternatives by authors such as Jean Rhys, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters, Peter Carey, Matthew Kneale, Lloyd Jones, James Wilson and Valerie Martin. 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.

Structure

2 x 2 hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: 3,000 word essay (80%) Seminar Assessment (20%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr M Wickman

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Level 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2011/2012.

Overview

Scottish crime fiction entered a new phase in the 1970s with the emergence of so-called Tartan Noir. Exhibiting a keen awareness of American hard-boiled crime fiction, Scottish writers have also manipulated the genre in provocative ways to comment on many of the crises of modern being—gendered, racial, ecological, national, and more. This course extends the range of this commentary by bringing Scottish crime fiction into conversation with the work of Martin Heidegger, the twentieth century’s most famous philosopher of being.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay (2,500-3,000 words), (80%); seminar assessment (20%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr M Garner

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 who have 60 credit points from Level 2 English courses, including EL EL 2010/2302 and EL30LQ This pre-requisite may be waived, by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in Session 2011/12.

Overview

The construction of identity is intricately connected with the use of language. This course explores the role of language in the construction of identity and the significance of identity construction to language variation. The concept of identity is investigated on various levels, from national identity to individual identity. The focus of the course is on how these multi-levelled identities are realised through the use of language. A variety of quantitative and ethnographic language variation studies will be surveyed in order to illustrate the issues under investigation.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr T Wills

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Overview

The Old English poem Beowulf has been the subject of an enormous amount of scholarly attention. Its value comes from the portrayal of legendary and historical events of the Dark Ages in Scandinavia, but is also one of the most subtle and complex works of early medieval vernacular literature. This course introduces the poem in translation, with seminars on the text itself, the social and historical background and other issues such as dating and the Beowulf manuscript. In addition, this course will introduce students to Old English language as an aid to understanding the poem.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: One 3,000 word essay (80%); seminar assessment (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

TBC

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

Widely dismissed uncritically as a mode of bombast and false sentiment, melodrama is an important artistic mode which not only dominated theatrical art of the nineteenth century, but also profoundly influenced the age’s fiction and poetry. Recent reappraisal has found its methods artistically legitimate, historically conditioned and culturally significant – and productive of rollicking entertainment. Starting with gothic drama which dominated the early nineteenth century stage, the course will sample the variety of forms taken by plays as the century proceeded – romantic drama, domestic drama, nautical drama, and society drama.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: essay (80%), and seminar work (20%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Professor A Spence

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. May not be taken along with EL 45TG.

Overview

The course will be assessed by in-course assessment (i) seminar work leading to the completion of three original literary pieces of any kind and (ii) submission of a portfolio of original writing consisting of either a single complete work of prose of between 1,000-3,500 words, or a single dramatic scene, or between 50-75 lines of poetry. The portfolio piece should be the strongest of the three coursework pieces (chosen in consultation with the course tutor) and will be marked on a qualitative basis.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: (i)seminar work (25%): (ii) one complete exercise in creative writing (75%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Alcobia-Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course. This course will not be available in 2011/12.

Overview

The poets studied here keep their Englishness tightly wrapped in inverted commas; the sun has set on the Empire. Although anglocentric, many of them are uneasy with contemporary society and offer alternative visions. They explore issues of identity (class, gender, nationality) while pondering their own diminishing status as purveyors of cultural truths. This course looks closely at selected works from Roy Fisher, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Craig Raine, Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage, spanning three decades (1961-1991). With so many accents, one wonders if that “small v” really unites us, or is telling us what to do with national identity.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: 3,000 word essay (70%), presentations (20%), and seminar work (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr S Alcobia-Murphy

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4 or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

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 works from a wide range of genres, including fiction, poetry, film and graphic art, and looks at the difficulties of inscribing trauma and the ethics and praxis of remembrance. The key events covered on this course are the Holocaust, 9-11, the Gulf War and Bloody Sunday.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Continuous assessment (100%): one 2,500-3,000 word essay (80%); 1 group project (10%); Seminar Assessment Mark (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr W Price

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 4, or by permission of the Head of School.

Notes

This is a 6-week course.

Overview

A troubled preoccupation with the complexities of self-hood and cultural belonging has been a dominant characteristic of American poetry since Whitman and Dickinson. In Modernism, Beat experimentation and confessional poetry we see both the formal and thematic radicalism of 19th Century American poetry extended and interrogated by 20th Century voices. Spanning a selection of influential modern American poets ranging from Frost and William Carlos Williams through to Plath, Ginsberg and Creeley, this course 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.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Essay (80%) and seminar assessment mark (20%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr T Wills

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in programme year 3 or by permission of the Head of School

Overview

Scotland and England produced some of the great literary works of late medieval Europe. This course introduces some of the major works of Middle English and Scots from the 14th and 15th centuries. It focuses on Middle English and Scots as literary languages, and equips students with an understanding of literature and society in one of the richest periods of literary production in Britain. Texts to be covered include a selection from works by Barbour, Henryson and Dunbar; the Gawain Poet; Piers Plowman plus medieval lyrics and mystery plays.

Structure

One 1 hour lecture and one 2-hour tutorial per week.

Assessment

1st attempt: One 2 hour exam (50%), continuous assessment: essay (30%, presentation (10%), seminar work (10%)

Resit: 1 two hour written examination (100%).

Formative Assessment

Feedback