Literary Studies has prided itself on constantly being in flux in the postmodern era as a sign that it responds to ideological and social changes. The most pressing contemporary issue that affects all of humanity is the global environmental crisis. In keeping with its revisionist energies, one important field of literary study that has opened up over the past two decades is ecocriticism, which explores the connections between literature and the environment. Ecocriticism critiques anthropocentrism and offers a radical revaluation of human relationship with the non-human ‘other’.

This advanced course will focus on representative texts of late 20th and early 21st century Anglophone literature. Topics will include memory, history, and the representation of trauma; the writing of transnational and trans-lingual experience; the ethics of narration and reading; the formation and dynamics of the non-nuclear family. We will study formal practices and innovations; allegory and intertextuality; the poetics of perspective and unreliable narration; the impact of translation on Anglophone literature.

This module will introduce a selection of texts across genres from South Asia along with a complementary set of Critical Readings that students will need to apply to the reading of primary texts. The texts will be approached as reflecting conflicts of neo/colonialisms and the complications of modernities, as grappling with issues of gendered and racialized identities; as explorations of issues relating to the underside of globalisation. Students should gain a fairly in-depth knowledge of leading literary works from South Asia. They will also need to produce a final term paper that will potentially be expandable to an Honours thesis.

This course will focus on close reading of passages from a selection of prose and poetry authored by women. As we read these texts, we will explore a few of the key issues that have concerned women writers. We will examine questions of the difference of the female point of view, the suppression of female subjectivity and autonomy as well as the renderings of an alternative worldview and culture.

This course explores a number of radical twentieth-century literary texts in various genres, written in or translated into English, each of which is an attempt to challenge and re-invent more traditional forms and modes of writing. These modernist texts, and their inter-relationship, will be considered under the rubric of “world literature”. The course will also look at some of the themes -such as empire and nation, the nature of the artist, the bourgeois experience, the city, and changing understandings of gender, race, sexuality and the foreign - that shaped modernity in the modernist century.

In the late 20th century, developments in critical thought had a major impact on literature and criticism. Relations between literary production and language, politics and history were radically re-examined by and through what has become known as ‘theory’. As a body of thought, theory includes such diverse and conflicting schools and movements as Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism and gender theory, new historicism, postcolonialism and postmodernism. As well as exploring the institution of theory in the academy, students will put theory into practice in readings of selected literary texts.

In this course we will examine the gothic as an important genre in American literature and trace its tradition over two hundred years of literary history. As a response to dominant ideas and conventions that shaped American literature, the gothic offers us a challenging perspective on the mainstream as well as on what it excludes. Beginning with some classic examples of the genre, we will seek to identify the elements and the rhetoric of the gothic text in order to appreciate the specific use that later writers have made of the gothic form.

This module examines selected texts of 19th century American writing through Reconstruction; it examines typical aspects of American character/imagination, and it trains students to read literary texts closely and to express their understanding of texts both in class discussion and in writing. The module is aimed at undergraduate English majors, but cross-faculty students who enjoy literature are welcome.

This course offers you an introduction to the study of literature by looking at the development of literature as a subject of teaching and learning. We will begin by tracing the formation of related concepts in Western history leading up to the establishment of literature as an academic discipline. The course will then survey influential theoretical approaches to literature in the 20th century and will examine their accounts of what literature is and what its place and role are (or should be) in culture and society. Mapping important debates carried on in these accounts, we will ask how they define and explain basic activities, roles and effects that form part of literature, such as the activities of reading and writing, the roles of writers and readers, the network of publication, and the products of writing (work, text, script) and their meaning. A range of selected literary texts will allow us to critically explore the insights and interests of different approaches. At the end of the course, students will be able to orient themselves within the field of literature with the help of a basic vocabulary of critical terminology and to situate their own interests in relation to relevant theoretical concerns.

This course introduces students to the world of the bustling and controversial theatres of the AngloAtlantic Eighteenth Century. Taking a dramaturgical approach to a number of dramatic texts produced in this important period in the history of popular entertainment, this course will examine key developments in literary innovation such as character development and the rise of interiority from within the context of new theatrical technology, the rise of new forms of media, the growing power of government censorship, an emerging imperial identity, nationalism, and increased social mobility. We will also focus on the rise of celebrity culture in the period and examine the development of popular obsession with “stars” within the broader social contexts of shifting gender norms, new regimes of sexual expression, and the rise of consumer culture. We will also examine plays alongside other forms of texts such as published gossip, celebrity memoirs, newspaper advertisements, playbills, and acting manuals, making use of existing databases hosted at the Folger, Huntington, and the British Libraries. This course also aims to serve as a general introduction on how to read literary texts historically, and how the study of literature can benefit from an interdisciplinary approach that borrows insights from Language Studies; Cultural Studies; New Media Studies; and Gender/Sexuality studies. At the end of this course, students should have acquired a critical familiarity with the dramatic culture of the Eighteenth Century, as well as a set of analytical skills that will prepare them for the future study in literary criticism. Texts to be studied might include popular versions of Sentimental Comedy; Operas/Oratorios; Bourgeois Tragedy; Gothic Fantasy; Pantomime and Travel Drama. Authors to be studied might include Jonathan Steele; George Frideric Handel; Henry Fielding; Oliver Goldsmith; Susanna Centlivre; Hannah Cowley; and Elizabeth Inchbald.

This course will introduce poems by such major 20th-century poets as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney as well as work by other English poets. The poems have been chosen not just for their intrinsic merits, but also to illustrate the patterns of sound, syntax, tone and figurative language poets use to achieve their effects. The classes will not be lectures on poetry but close readings and discussion of individual poems.

This course offers a study of narrative fiction, and of its development.

This course will explore the early 20th century as a site of modernity. We will look at a range of texts to explore what the modern might mean and how writers have addressed issues of modernity and its impact on society and human relations. Some of the topics to be covered will include representations of the city, the changing roles of men and women, the rise of modern transportation and the impact of the First World War.

Through studying a wide range of landscape descriptions in poetry, travel writing, drama and the novel, students will learn about landscape description from aesthetic, historical, geo-humanist and geopolitical perspectives. Students will learn to identify particular movements and styles, such as the picturesque, romanticism, modernism and environmentalism in selected descriptions of places. They will also learn how place description functions in literary texts to provide not only a realistic visual setting, but through metaphor, the thoughts and feelings of characters, and the cultural and ideological outlook of the writer. The course has a practical component in which students produce place descriptions of their own and discuss these within their groups.

In this course, students will be introduced to literary and cinematic technique by studying recent film adaptations of English literature alongside the original text. We will take one period text, such as Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House or Mrs. Dalloway, and one contemporary text, such as Atonement, Cloud Atlas or Never Let Me Go. Students will confront the problems and possibilities of adaptation, the demands of fidelity to the original text, and the need to find contemporary resonances. As well as developing an awareness of the practical issues of moving from a textual to a predominantly visual medium, students will learn to identity aesthetic, cultural and political influences in the adaptation of literature. This course also allows students to think creatively about storyboards and visual techniques, by sketching alternative scenarios.

This course will introduce students to methods of reading modern western literary texts in English. Its focus is on fiction and poetry. Students will learn to analyze the artistic and imaginative use of language and develop the ability to think critically. This course provides a “big picture” survey of revolution and modern literature. We focus on key revolutionary moments in the history of Western countries. Texts chosen will be those exploring the varied cultural connotations of revolution and the relationship between literature and politics. Since literature is a window on culture and humanity, the course aims to deepen students’ understanding of people from different cultures and the complexity of life.

This interdisciplinary course of critical medical humanities examines contemporary literary and filmic texts that shape ethical thought about health and wellbeing. We will read major texts that problematize and hypothesize the relation between self and community; immunity and toxicity; power and medical interventions; faith and healing; and knowledge and narrative. This course aims to widen the “medical” beyond the scene of clinical encounter through close engagements with critical theory about the body and the self as embodied subjectivity. In our readings, we will discuss and debate the meaning and practices of responsibility, endurance, and imagination that challenge assumptions about the illness experience, caregiving, and the production of medical knowledge.

In this course we will read great plays of the English Renaissance in tandem with their non-dramatic sources (history, romance, chapbook, story cycle). In a couple of instances, the plays themselves will be considered as sources for contemporary representations (Hamlet for Stoppard’s spinoff, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Macbeth for Kurosawa’s film, Throne of Blood). For Renaissance speakers the word ‘version’ principally meant a ‘translation’ from one language into another. We will observe and evaluate, therefore, what happens when a well-known or ‘true’ story gets ‘translated’ into the conventions and genres of the theater. We compare notable variations in the telling of the tales, with attention to the following questions: How does the alteration of a plot element change a story’s significance? How does the manner of presentation — the enactment of drama (mimesis) or the narration of prose (diegesis) — affect the way we understand characters?

This course reads representative late nineteenth-century texts, which may include novels, short stories, plays, poetry, or even musical hall songs and pantomime. The aim is to situate these texts in a society that is still very much embedded in Victorian ideas and ideals but that is at the same time looking towards the twentieth century and its changing views of life, the world and literature. Course themes alongside the regular issues of class, race and gender may include: social changes, the changing subject, 10 devolution, degeneration, the reading public and the publishing industry, genre and modality (romance, realism, aestheticism), ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ art, and others.

From Lewis Carroll's Alice books, which heralded a new "Golden Age" of children's literature, to Cold¬ War era fantasy, comic songs, and Japanese anime, we will consider a variety of different texts and the notions of childhood they reflect and generate. Using Philip Nel and Lissa Paul's seminal Keywords for Children's Literature (2011), students will develop the critical vocabulary necessary to discuss children's fiction, poetry, and film in its aesthetic, ideological, and intellectual contexts. Students will also cultivate a strong theoretical framework for the study of children's literature by engaging with field-defining scholarship by Jacqueline Rose, Perry Nodelman, and others.