Introduction to American Studies

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

What is American studies? What makes what we do American studies as opposed to just plain historical or literary studies? This module examines the history and development of the discipline and explores key debates using an archive of seminal essays by leading figures that highlight the key problems and developments in the field.

Issues to be discussed may include:

• an American 'tradition'
• interdisciplinarity
• popular culture
• American ethnicity and race
• masculinity and gender
• media
• environment
• America as 'global village'.

Texts in Time 1

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

What is literature? How has it changed over time? What is the relationship between writing and the historical moment in which it was produced? How can we read texts to understand the ways in which they comment on and intervene in their particular cultural contexts? How do literary and other kinds of cultural artefacts enable us to reinterpret history and culture? How does the study of texts from other historical periods better enable us to understand our own? These are some of the questions which we will be exploring during the module.

Texts in Time 1 will introduce you to the study of many different kinds of texts - poetry, plays, letters, prose fiction, a novel, as well as visual texts - in their historical and cultural contexts. Following an introductory week, the module is divided into two blocks: the first focusing on the early modern period, and the second on the eighteenth century and Romantic period, from 1700-1820. Each week brings a new text or texts into consideration, but all are connected to the overarching theme of the module: 'Citizens and Strangers'.

Texts in Time 2

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

What is literature? How has it changed over time? What is the relationship between writing and the historical moment in which it was produced? How can we read texts to understand the ways in which they comment on and intervene in their particular cultural contexts? How do literary and other kinds of cultural artefacts enable us to reinterpret history and culture? How does the study of texts from other historical periods better enable us to understand our own? These are some of the questions which we will be exploring during the module.

Texts in Time 2 explores many different kinds of writing (poetry, autobiography, essays, novels) as well as visual texts (film, photography, the graphic novel) in their historical and cultural contexts. For those of you who have already taken Texts in Time 1, this module continues the chronological movement already begun on that module, but it can also be taken as a stand-alone module. Texts in Time 2 is divided into three blocks. The first block addresses texts from the nineteenth century, the second block focuses on 1922, a key moment in Modernism. The final block looks at contemporary writing and culture. Each week brings a new text or texts into consideration, but all are connected within each block to an overarching theme.

The Look of America

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module takes as its premise the notion that ever since the explosion of mass media and mass society in the industrial age, the United States has taken an increasingly dominant place in the global visual imagination. This process reached its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century, and since then America has generated for the world innumerable iconic and hegemonic visual representations of its own cultural narratives.

The task of this module will be to explore and deconstruct some of these visual representations, along with the ideologies and narratives that sustain and refract them. You will begin with an introduction to visual theory, especially as it applies to the American context, and acquire the critical tools necessary for the module. You will then locate the period under scrutiny within a broader visual and cultural 'prehistory', illuminating the roots of the modern world and its visual scene.

After this, you will concentrate on the culture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking a thematic approach, you will examine the issues that emerge over the module of the twentieth century, referring forwards and backwards in order to generate connections where appropriate. The intention here is to introduce you to aspects of visual culture and its criticism, as well as to defamiliarise and explore some of the more familiar American iconography surrounding us.

American Humour

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Humour is probably among the most approachable of ways to introduce first year students to core issues in American Studies, and one of the most telling. Jewish humour, for example, which clearly informs, say, the films of the Marx Brothers, Heller's Catch-22,or the TV comedy of Seinfeld, can teach us much about the history and culture of immigration and assimilation so integral to American identity. Likewise, African-American comedians from the 70s to the 90s exemplify a particular, 'signifying' tradition, in Henry Louis Gates' phrase, as well as providing comment on the politics of the day. Or we might view the relationship between American economy and culture - a grand narrative of the twentieth century - as dramatised in the Fordist dystopias of Chaplin, the Southern Gothic of Flannery O'Connor and the acceleration from post-war boom in Thomas Pynchon to the vision of Wall Street excess in Ellis' American Psycho. In all these cases, humour provides both spectator or readerly pleasure and a form in which a more covert critique takes place, making it an invaluable mode for you to experience and consider key cultural and historical questions.

Incorporating literature, film, TV, live performance and visual art, the module will thus address the social, political and philosophical issues each topic raises and the context from which it has sprung, from the 19th century 'Connecticut wits' to more recent 'gross-out' comedy. By way of materials, an on-line module reader will be made available to YOU composed of a number of readable essays on the theory of humour as well as selected essays more directly relating to each specific topic and/or work. Interdisciplinary in nature, the module will hence encourage you to investigate how ideas about humour can work with other texts to become forms of critical thinking: Bergson's notion of comedic automatism, for example, read alongside accounts of the factory system can illuminate Keaton or Chaplin's cinematic commentary on the fate of the American industrial worker. Through such connections, you will be introduced to influential writers like Bergson and Freud in an accesible fashion and find ways to apply and adapt their ideas in the wider cultural field.

American Identities

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

American Literature to 1890: Part I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module will introduce you to the major trends and texts of colonial America from the Iroquois Indians and Christopher Columbus through to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. These are not simply 'authors,' in the modern sense, writing 'great books' but diverse voices whose class, gender, race, nationality and religious persuasion influence the sense they make of America, and of themselves, in their writing. For example, some texts articulate ancient native traditions and myths without the benefit of a written tradition, while others are trying to come to terms in literary ways with experiences of migration to an unknown and wild place, captivity by the Indians, conflict, and slavery. Questions of national identity and the role that literature plays in constructing and communicating an 'American experience' are therefore central to the module.

We will look at the writing of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, beginning with Native American accounts of creation, the travel journals of Columbus, and an account of the conquest of the Aztec empire. American literature in this early period does not come in the usual forms of fiction, poetry, and drama that we are used to studying in European literature, nor is all of it written in English. We will be reading a variety of forms, such as Native American stories, accounts of conquest in South America and settlement in the English colonies, Puritan sermons, autobiography, political tracts, captivity narratives, poetry, and letterssome in translation, others in their original English. While these texts are not all recognisably what you might think of as 'literature,' they are the founding documents and genres of the Americas and their influence is felt in American culture to the present day.

American Literature to 1890: Part II

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

American Literature to 1890 II introduces you to the major trends and texts of a multi-ethnic America from Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper to Emily Dickinson and Henry James. These are not simply 'authors', in the modern sense, writing 'great books', but diverse voices constructed by class, gender, race, nationality and religious persuasion. Some texts articulate ancient native traditions and myths, others come to terms in writing with experiences of migration, captivity, conflict, and slavery. Central to the module are questions of national identity, and the role that literature plays in both constructing and communicating an 'American experience'.

Historical Controversy

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to the study of history through the critical reading of a key historical text. In this way you will gain an understanding of the complexity of the historical record and an appreciation for a range of problems associated with the interpretation of evidence. You will also be encouraged to think about the discipline of history and the nature of historical enquiry. Through a study of how historians have formulated and deployed their arguments, you will begin to learn to deploy ideas and to shape your own historical arguments.

Modern America

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The early years of the twenty-first century have witnessed the United States achieve unsurpassed global economic and cultural power. This module assesses the dramatic developments that have shaped the U.S. during the twentieth century, often described as the 'American century'. We will explore the transformations in American political and social life as the U.S. achieved economic supremacy, and extended this power on the world stage. As the nation increased its influence abroad, of course, it underwent a parallel series of turbulent changes at home. Hence we will also consider an America seen through the critical (and sometimes not-so-critical) lenses of writers, artists, commentators and filmmakers as they articulate the tensions and anxieties of modern U.S. life. The module addresses many social contradictions. The `Roaring Twenties, for example, was a period of consumerism and cultural experimentation that also gave rise to religious fundamentalism and Prohibition. Similarly, while the United States government in the 1950s was trying to `keep the world safe for democracy' in the face of communist expansion, it abused the constitutional liberties of its own citizens during the McCarthy witch-hunts. Although the country as a whole attained unprecedented levels of affluence in these years, poverty remained a persistent problem, and Americans continued to struggle with the repression of women, political dissidents and racial minorities. A crisis in American liberalism accompanied this proliferation of social and political protest, primarily due to American involvement in the Vietnam War. We will seek to understand how this war shaped protest politics, altered the relationship between Americans and the liberal state, and led to the Conservative resurgence in the 1980s. These events shattered the consensus belief in a modern America. We will evaluate what it then meant to live in a post-modern America, and how people adapted the conditions of post-modernity to cope with new and recurrent crises of difference, inequality, and insecurity. Through lectures that focus on the historical, literary and more broadly cultural aspects of the modern United States, you will learn to recognise the importance of cross- and interdisciplinary work as they pursue the dynamic relationship between cultural forms and social, political and economic realities.

Roots of America

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module provides a foundational survey of the history, literature, and culture of the United States (and the colonies which preceded it) to 1900. It begins with the Columbian encounter in 1492, when two worlds were brought into sharp conflict with each other and continues through English settlement and colonisation in the seventeenth century to growth, expansion and the articulation of a specific American identity by the middle of the eighteenth century. It assesses the creation of the American nation through war with Britain and through the imaginative construction of a new political relationship between people and government.

We will then proceeed to political and cultural formations in the nineteenth-century republic. You will focus on why the newly formed nation should ultimately falter on the issue of slavery and why the concept of the United States and the 'Union' became such contested terms. We will examine how contested visions of America's future and its 'manifest destiny' cohered and divided the citizenry, and ultimately ask, as Abraham Lincoln so aptly put it in 1855, 'can we, as a nation, continue together permanently--forever-half slave, and half free' Our attention subsequently turns to the mammoth transformations to American life unleashed by the Civil War and Reconstruction; events, historian James McPherson calls the 'Second American Revolution.' Among the many topics, we will examine the emergence of a modern activist central government committed, albeit temporarily, to constitutional protected civil rights; we will address how Americans, in both North and South, understood the meaning of Union and nation after the carnage of Civil War; and how industrialists, immigrants, and union activists attempted to shape and influence the rapid growth of American urban life in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Finally, we will consider the plight of black Americans as the promises of emancipation gave way to racial segregation in the South and the rise of the urban ghetto in the North.

You will be required to approach these topics from both a historical and a literary perspective, paying particular attention to formative texts - the writings of John Smith, John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton (among others) will be examined as a distinct American literary culture evolves in the nineteenth century. That culture--like all social values in the years preceding Civil War--would split in the North-South divide of the 1850s, but in the final lectures of the module, students will examine how literary works would ultimately bolster resurgent American nationalism in the decades following the War. You will also be encouraged to think about the imaginative formulation of American identity and American character through representations of such matters in film.

American Cinema B

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

An awareness of how Hollywood cinema was shaped, how it acquired its position of dominance, and the forms and aesthetic conventions that characterise it, is essential to an understanding of cinema more generally. Accordingly, this module will focus on the formation of Hollywood in the 1910s through to the post-World War 2 era, with particular emphasis placed on the development of the 'studio system' and Hollywood's 'golden age' of the 1920s to 1950. You will view a range of representative Hollywood films made during the period and analyse them in relation to the industry and its practices. You will also situate Hollywood cinema within the political and social life of the United States in the period.

American Cities: New Orleans

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

American Cities: New York

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

From New Amsterdam to 9/11 and beyond, New York has always been iconic. We experience the Big Apple through the sounds and sights that came before us: the movies, the music, the literature, the songs. But what goes on behind these images of ceaseless activity and glamour? Now the hub of global finace, New York was also a haven for immigrants, with Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty sitting right there in its harbour. Because of its diversity of population and ever-changing urban development, we will in this module be looking at the city from many perspectives, and find that to study its history and culture is to discover that the city that never sleeps never ceases to pose questions either.

American Literature Since 1890: Part I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module will introduce significant and canonical texts by American writers produced since 1890 and throughout the first part of the twentieth century. By analysing the working of class, gender and race in these texts we will explore many of the social and cultural issues associated with the evolution of American modernity and American modernist aesthetics. We will observe the different ways in which writers tackle or avoid important economic and social questions of the period. We will examine how important socio-economic developments such as the rise of industrialisation and urbanisation, war, consumer culture, the question of women's rights and ideas of national identity shape the stylistic and thematic fabric of these works.

American Literature Since 1890: Part II

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module will introduce significant and canonical texts by American writers produced since 1945. By analysing the working of class, gender and race in these texts we will explore many of the social and cultural issues associated with the American modernity and American post-modernist aesthetics. We will observe the different ways in which writers tackle or avoid important economic and social questions of the period.

Creative Writing in the Renaissance

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module introduces you to education and writing in early modern England. Not only will you explore the ways in which students were taught at school and university in this period, but we will attempt to recreate life in the early modern classroom, with its emphasis on oral and written argument and the need for students to be able to learn the principles of imitation so that they could then reproduce the style and methods of the works they studied.

You will explore why early modern writers wrote as they did, and what we can learn from understanding how they produced their works. We will also consider how early modern students learned about the law, philosophy, oratory, and history alongside what we think of as literature.

The module will be assessed through a series of short written pieces which will include imitations of letters, speeches and poems, as well as an essay and an oral assessment in the last seminar in which we will attempt to reproduce a Renaissance oral examination.

History Short Period: American History 1877-2000

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module probes the social, political and economic development of the United States since the end of Reconstruction. It is organised on a broadly chronological basis with primary stress on key topics such as the emergence of racial segregation in the South, the construction of a modern, industrial society, the emergence of the United States as a Great Power, progressive reform, the economic crisis of the 1930s, the American experience in World War II and the ensuing Cold War, the civil rights and New Left movements of the 1960s, and the concomitant rise of conservativism. Notable themes include the growth of federal power, the steady erosion of localism, the development of a corporate-dominated consumer society, the limitations of modern liberalism and the political influence of American religion. The module introduces you to landmark political change such as the failure of Populism and the changing Republican party constituency in the South as well as important legal rulings such as Brown v Board of Education and Roe v Wade. A close analysis of the New Deal, a transformational moment in twentieth-century US history, frames an extended assessment of the rise and fall of the so-called New Deal order. In addition the module familiarises you with critical historiographical debates over the role of American labour, the impact of war on American society and culture, and the growth of the imperial presidency. Although the focus is primarily on domestic events and structural trends, the United States' growing engagement with the wider world receives full attention.

Period of Literature: 1500-1625

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

In this module you will examine literature from the reigns of Henry VIII to James I. The volume, variety and quality of writing produced in this period are astonishing. The 16th century saw the impact of an unprecedented expansion of England's capital city, which produced a thriving environment for professional writing, prompting the birth of commercial theatre in London and a flourishing book trade.

You will consider how literature came to be produced historically, looking at writing in its cultural setting with the help of visual texts such as paintings and architecture. You will address questions of literary history and theory, form and rhetoric within the network of institutions, practices and beliefs that constitute a culture as a whole. The module does not confine itself to major authors, but involves the consideration of appropriate themes and material drawn from various literary genres - drama, poetry and prose.

Topics explored include the rise of the commercial stage; sexualities and the transvestite stage; writing history; popular pamphlet culture; representations of the body; exploration and early colonialism; the sonnet; erotic writing; devotional writing; the city of London and money; religion; gender; death; representations of monarchy; the political stage; revenge tragedy; witchcraft and the birth of science.

Period of Literature: 1625-1750

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines the literary production of the period from the autocratic reign of the Stuart king Charles I to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. At its centre lies the regicide of Charles I in January 1649 - an event T. S. Eliot argued still divided British political society 300 years later. Even now it is a matter of some controversy to refer to the period between 1642 and 1649 as a rebellion or as the English Revolution, and between 1649 and 1660 as the Commonwealth or else as the Interregnum. However it is described, the extraordinary 125 years covered by this module have some claim to be the decisive period in the creation of what we think of as modern politics.

It is also a period of astonishing literary creativity. This is true both in terms of the volume, variety and quality of writing produced, and in terms of radical innovations in styles, in readerships, and in media. This module will include the study of a wide range of poetry, prose and play-texts. At the same time, it will involve trying to understand how this writing came to be produced historically. In particular, it will be concerned with the social life of texts, placing literary artifacts within the network of institutions, practices and beliefs that constitute a culture as a whole.

Period of Literature: 1750-1880

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

The module, taught in seminars supported by a weekly lecture series, will address a selection of authors and themes prominent between 1750 and 1880. The actual content will vary from year to year depending on the expertise of those available to teach it in any given year.

Authors to be studied will be selected from but not necessarily confined to: Johnson, Gray, Sterne, Goldsmith, Blake, Lewis, Austen, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, De Quincey, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Ruskin, Dickens, Gaskell, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, W.M. Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

Themes to be considered may includ sentimentalism and sensibility; slavery and empire; Romantic aesthetics and Romantic poetry; theories of the sublime and the imagination; the Gothic; responses to the French Revolution and the oppression of women; images of women; the condition of England question; progress and evolution; art and society; mind and spirit: the inner life; and culture in crisis

Period of Literature: 1860-1945

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

On this module you will study one of the truly momentous and troubling periods of British and world history. Imperialist conflict, the growth of nationalism, war, migration, feminism and the struggle for women's suffrage, the development of consumerism and of new forms of economic organisation, the emergence of anarchism, socialism, communism and fascism, the creation of the mass press, the radio and cinema: these are some of the contextual forces out of which emerged some of the most challenging, demanding, fascinating, rich and bewildering works of literature in English.

You will examine the links between modernity and modern/modernist literature in a range of texts, genres and authors. You will investigate notions of the avant-garde and the experimental in writing, and explore the ways in which literary texts participated in and responded to the revolutionary intellectual changes that marked this period, from Darwinism to psychoanalysis. Some of the topics we will investigate include: the consequences of science and technology (modernisation, urbanisation, sub-urbanisation); definitions and re-definitions of Englishness; the invention of traditions; the critique of modernity; the fate of liberalism; the impact of photography, the mass media and new forms of communication from the telephone to the motor car.

Primitivism at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Pulp Culture: American Popular Literature

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Popular literature is often overlooked in favour of what is considered more highbrow literary culture, yet an understanding of the cultural history of a nation necessitates an examination of what was popular as well as what became canonical.

This module enables an examination of a variety of mass-produced popular American literatures from the 18th and 19th centuries through to the 20th, from early magazines and comics, dime novels, Westerns and juvenile or sentimental literature, to 'hardboiled' crime fiction, self-help books and 'middlebrow' bestsellers of the 20th century. You will look at the relationship between 'high' and 'low' fiction, as well as examining how the mode of production affected the literature produced at the time. You will also explore both the writing styles that developed as well as the reception and cultural circulation of texts. Included in this will be a consideration of the way that issues of gender, class and race in America affected the discourses of the popular narratives that we will be looking at and how we can understand the society that they emerged from more fully as a result of looking at them.

Representation and the Body

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module will explore representations of the body in painting, photography and - in particular - in poetry, from the Renaissance to the modern period. It will focus on the interrelationships between the body and the poetic-text-as-body, the body and the political body, the body and power, the body and violence, the western and the non-western body, the body and disease, the body and gender, the body and the unconscious, the body and social and urban space, and the body and desire.

Topics covered include: the Renaissance body; body and science; the body and the foreign; the migrant body; Victorian poetry and photography; the body and the city; the body and modernism; the body and gender; the body, war, death and remembrance; and the body and fascism. While the focus of the module will be on English and American poetic texts, and European painting, film and photography, the module will have an interdisciplinary range, encouraging discussions about the relationship of the written word to the culture of images, icons and iconography. 

Sense and Sexuality: Women and Writing in the Eighteenth Century

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the representation of women and the construction of female sexuality and feeling in a wide range of 18th-century writing. Addressing fictional and non-fictional writing by both women and men in novels, medical works, advice books for women and erotic literature, the module explores contemporary debates about the place of women in society, (including personal conduct), and the place of sexuality (both socially-sanctioned and otherwise). A central concern will be attitudes to female feeling, from sexual passion to sensibility, and the ways in which feeling of various kinds enables conformity to, or critical interrogation of, a larger social and cultural order. Attention will also be paid to the relationship between bodies and passion, the social disciplining of feeling, and the relationship between emotion and gender. Your focus on literary works will be supplemented with a range of additional sources that will enable you to contextualise the novels and poems and link them into contemporary debates and attitudes.

Senses of the Self

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The module takes as its starting point a common assumption that one of the roots of modern identity lies in a reconfiguration of ideas concerning subjectivity and the self in the 16th and 17th centuries. This assumption has aroused a great deal of debate in recent years. The whole area of study has been renewed and transformed by the application of new theoretical approaches (from feminism, psychoanalysis, or textuality) to the study of the past and the interpenetration of the past in the present.

During the module you will study a broad range of texts (from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the 14th century to Swift's Gulliver's Travels in the 18th), in order to investigate changes in the construction of personal and sexual identity through history. The module contains both canonical and non-canonical texts, including some European authors studied in translation. Issues covered will range from philosophy to pornography, mythology to autobiography, and medicine to travel literature.

Short Period: American History 1877-2000

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

Staging the Renaissance: Shakespeare

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module considers a range of Shakespeare's plays (comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies and romances) from different stages of his career, analysing the playwright's stagecraft, his use of language, and his reworking of traditional forms for the
commercial stage. Although you will explore some recent adaptations for stage and screen, you wil focus particularly on the plays as produced in their original historical and cultural contexts.

The module will familiarise you with Renaissance drama's negotiation of contested social and political issues at the turn of the 17th century. You will investigate the social processes of the theatre - notably the playhouses used by Shakespeare's company (the Theatre, the Globe and Blackfriars) - and focus on the interplay of Shakespearean texts and their performance in the production of meaning.

The African American Experience

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines the rich history of African Americans in the United States, from 1863 to the present. One of your main objectives will be to contextualise and analyse the debates, disagreements, and downright fights that African Americans have had among themselves between emancipation and the beginnings of the modern Civil Rights Movement, thus establishing a deep historical understanding of the ongoing freedom struggle in the late 20th- and early 21st centuries.

You will critique arguments over the proper relationship of blacks to the US government, over racial and class identities, and over diverse tactics and strategies for the advancement of the race. In addition, the lectures will interrogate the connections between African American history and its broader, more diffuse, cultural mythology.  Full attention is given not only to well-known black leaders - such as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King - but also to less celebrated figures such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker.

The Novel

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the complex history of the novel as a form, from the 17th century to the modern period. The aim of the module is to describe the development of different traditions of novel writing, examine innovations to the novel as a form made since the 17th century, place the English novel in the context of the European novel, and introduce you to a range of important discussions about the novel as a genre, its audiences, its cultural functions and its relation to the social world. Novelists discussed will include Aphra Behn, Madame de Lafayette, Daniel Defoe, Johann Goethe, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. At the end of the module, you will be able to  understand and apply the concept of genre in literary analysis; think creatively and critically about the ways in which specific generic conventions have been used in the novels you are reading; and synthesise formal, cultural and historical levels of analysis.

Time and Place: 1861: The Coming of the American Civil War

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Transatlantic Rhetoric: Public Speech and Anglo-American Writing 1750-1900

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Travel, Landscape and the Imagination in Medieval Literature

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

American Mandatory Year Abroad - American Studies

120 credits
Undergraduate academic year, Year 3

English Research Colloquium

0 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 4

America in the 21st Century

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

American Culture and Consumption

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Capital Culture: Money, Commerce and Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

Documentary America: Non-Fiction Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

The study of American fiction often precludes an examination of some of the best writing and forms of self-representation that America has produced: political and photo-essays, social science publications, journalism, reportage, and documentary films. On this module you examine the development of iconic non-fictional literature and other forms of visual representation (such as film and photography) from the 19th and 20th centuries.

You will look at the style, content and circulation of non-fictional forms and examine their relationship within wider discourses of cultural, social and political representation in America. You will also consider the ways that these forms intersect with the development of modernist and postmodernist literature in the US more broadly. For this module you will have to read from a broad selection of materials that do not necessarily fit into conventional literary genres, and you will be watching a number of realist and neo-realist American documentaries. You will analyse why writers and artists have chosen to represent events in the way that they do and the wider cultural impact of those forms.

Global Subjects: Caribbean and Diaspora Fictions

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

On this module you explore Caribbean writing in the context of the long and diverse history of travel and migration that has been a defining feature of the region, from Columbus' arrival in the 'New World' in 1492 to the present day. The Caribbean is a region characterized by a violent and turbulent history; as the editors of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture argue, "there is probably no other region in the world that has been so radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean."

The module will introduce you to the history that has made the Caribbean such a volatile and tensely-hybrid cultural context, including: white settlement, the decimation of indigenous peoples, enslavement of Africans, indentureship of Indians (and others) through to more recent migrations to Britain and North America. Focusing on a range of genres (poetry, novels, memoir, travel and music), the module will offer comparative readings of narratives of leave-taking, sea-crossings and arrival and the debates about identity, belonging, home and homeland that these generate. You will focus on the global networks, starting with the slave trade, that have connected the Caribbean to Europe, Africa and North America and will explore the cultural and historical continuities of economic exploitation of the region's natural resources (including gold, sugar, cocoa, coffee, sun-sea-sand and labour in the sex, service, culture and tourist industries).

The selected texts allow exploration of the traffic in ideas and culture that have travelled in these circuits of trade and have made Caribbean subjects appear innately cosmopolitan. The texts that this module focuses on suggest a longer history as well as a more fraught idea of the Caribbean subject as the archetypally 'global subject'.

History Special Dissertation

30 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 4

Immigrant America

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

Irish Writing after Joyce

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

This module follows some developments in anglophone Irish literature during the 20th century, paying particular attention to the influence of James Joyce on his contemporaries and on later writers. It concentrates on the ways in which Irish writing has been central to modernist and postcolonial projects. Topics may include parochialism, regionalism, bilingualism, neutrality, partition, sexuality, violence, commemoration and diaspora. You will discuss the emergence of distinctly Irish responses to the challenges of literary forms to 20th-century experience. You should gain an understanding of the development of literary culture in a small nation whose oral traditions and poetic traditions were established in an apparently vanishing language, while the majority of the people spoke and read English. You should learn enough about Irish history, politics and culture in the 20th century to provide an adequate context for understanding how writers such as Joyce, Bowen, Beckett, Heaney and Muldoon emerged from a culture both vexed and enriched by certain conflicts and heritages.

Islam, Literature and the 'West'

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

In both domestic and international contemporary politics, few issues are more urgent than the widely perceived clash between the ideologies of western European capitalism and Islamic radicalism. This module offers you the opportunity to examine in detail the shifting terms in which the encounter between a Christian west and an Islamic east has been conducted in predominantly English literatures, from the rhetoric of the early crusades to the present day. Covering a broad range of texts and genres, and including some journalism and film, emphasis will be placed upon: concepts of holy war; Islam on the early modern English stage; the emerging study of the ‘orient’ in the 17th century and the first English Qur’an; Enlightenment fantasies of the East and Muhammad; the romantics and the East; the Rushdie affair; and more recent developments of this encounter both before and after  11 September 2001.

Queer Literatures

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

Recent American Writing

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

The period spanning the late twentieth century to the present has been a rich one for American writing and has seen the emergence of many types of experimentalism and indeed conservatism, at times subsumed under the rubric of the "postmodern." This module explores a range of texts from the mid-80s to the contemporary period to examine how writers have responded to the challenge of America's recent history - its various emergencies and crises, from the consequences of the Vietnam War, the end of Fordist economics, shifts in global migrancy, to the attacks of 9/11 and beyond. It asks whether the label "postmodern" - developed as a concept over the same period - is helpful to describe the ways in which writers have managed literature's traditional concerns with class, gender, ethnicity, capital, the family, the past. It also examines diasporic and "peripheral" literatures like those of the Caribbean as American-ness becomes an increasingly dominant and hegemonic shaper of cultural identity. America's relation to the wider "globalized" world is considered too. All these questions are addressed through close readings and appropriate theoretical commentaries.

Single Author Study

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

In addition to studying primary texts by your chosen author, you will be expected to use appropriate critical and theoretical material. There will be a series of individual and group sessions across the Spring term leading to the completion of a lengthy self-directed dissertation on the chosen author.

Special Author(s): Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and the Postcolonial Caribbean

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

This module introduces you to the literature of the Caribbean and its diaspora and to some key cultural debates in Caribbean, postcolonial and feminist literary discourses through reading the work of Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid, two of the most prominent women writers from the Caribbean. The module addresses issues such as race and literary constructions of the nation; authenticity, orality and questions of voice; gender, sexuality and resistance; home and belonging; servants and madams; life writing; reception and literary reputations; questions of literary belonging and cultural identity; and writing and authorship after colonialism. The selection of texts includes: Jean Rhys's, Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark, Tigers Are Better Looking, and Smile Please and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, Mr Potter, and Talk Story.

Special Author: Alfred Hitchcock

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

This module will examine the work of one of the most prolific and certainly the most prolifically written-about director in the history of cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, a director whose career spans the history of cinema in the twentieth century, and whose influence can be traced not only in other filmmaking practices, but also in literature, the visual arts, and cultural theory. "Hitchcockian" is a designation that is invoked with as much frequency as "Shakespearean" or "Jamesian"; the term suggests not only the style of a specific body of work, but also of the work it has influenced, in many media. Hitchcock has proved to be not only the most durably engrossing of filmmakers, but also the one through whose work successive waves of critical and theoretical thinking have articulated themselves. Hitchcock and his work are central not only to how we understand the history of cinema, but also the (overlapping and intertwined) histories of authorship and genre, writing, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Hitchcock is, thus, one of the great organising figures for the intellectual and aesthetic production of the twentieth century: it would be hard to think about the century without him. The module will offer you not only the chance to study, broadly and deeply, the work of one of the twentieth century's central authorial figures, but it will also allow you to deepen and complicate your interests in various critical and theoretical paradigms and methods. The module will move chronologically across Hitchcock's career, but will also be organised conceptually around a sequence of theoretical problems. The module will conclude by looking beyond Hitchcock's work to the problem of the 'Hitchcockian'.

Special Author: Christopher Marlowe

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Variously demonised and celebrated as an atheist, sodomite, spy, poetic innovator and dramatic phenomenon, ­ and violently killed at the age of 29, ­ Christopher Marlowe and his work still have the power in the twenty first century to shock and surprise .

This module offers the opportunity to explore Marlowe's extraordinary poetry and drama, from his remarkable debut on the professional stage with Tamburlaine, through his invention of the English history play with Edward II, to his development of Ovidian narrative verse and the lyric in English (and their erotic possibilities).

You will explore the career of this poet and playwright - this "most enigmatic genius of the English literary Renaissance" - paying particular attention to the contexts, content and form of his work.

Special Author: Dickens

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

This module will explore a range of Dickens's work from his early writing to his final uncompleted novel, and will include discussion of his journalism and short stories as well as the well-known novels. We will look at the development of his career as the most successful and popular novelist of his generation, who used his writing to investigate and actively participate in a wide range of contemporary issues and debates about society and the self between the 1830s and 1870. These include the nature of modern society - particularly the city - and the relationships between social classes and between the underworld and dominant forms of power; the family as both a social institution and a psychological space; the representation of childhood and femininity; notions of identity, and the relationship between 'normal' and 'abnormal', conscious and unconscious mental states.

We will explore Dickens use and transformation of particular genres and conventions - fairly tales, ghost stories, gothic fiction, detective fiction and grotesque and documentary realism - discussing how his shifting narrative forms and methods relate to the social and psychological themes of his work.

Special Author: Herman Melville

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Special Author: James Joyce

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Special Author: Jane Austen

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

This module approaches Austen's novels from three distinct perspectives. First, it contextualises them in terms of the 18th-century literature that Austen read, and frequently alludes to. (Likely authors include Cowper, Burney, Edgeworth and Radcliffe.) In addition, the module considers the impact of Austen's fiction on subsequent readers, evident most powerfully in the phenomenon of the Janeites. This module uses literary critical and popular cultural versions of Austen to reflect both on the evolution of Austen's canonical status, and on the part that fantasies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class have played in her reception. Finally, since Austen's novels have provided fodder for innumerable film versions, the module will examine the 'Austen' constructed for us by a selection of recent film and TV adaptations. Although Austen's fiction will be at the heart of the module, you will be expected to read a significant body of additional literature.

Special Author: John Ashbery

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Starting with American poet John Ashbery's first book 'Some Trees' and working our way through Ashbery's major experiments in form ('The Tennis Court Oath', collaborative books including 'The Vermont Notebook' and 'A Nest Of Ninnies', and his epic 'Flow Chart'), participants in this module will learn not just a great deal about Ashbery's poetry, but about the post-war American avant-garde more generally speaking. Our understanding of Ashbery's work will be informed by reading into his central role in Abstract Expressionism (as art critic for 'Art News', as collaborator with relevant artists, and as a writer who produced a number of important poetic ekphrases); his friendship and collaborations with Beat Generation figures; his exchanges with Pop Art and the Warhol scene; his engagement with experimental cinema practitioners; and, more recently, his emergence as an important voice in queer writing.

Along the way, module participants will delight in Ashbery's complex blend of dismodules that embrace the narrative, the "personal," the metaphysical, and even mystical. We will focus lovingly on individual lines and stanzas of Ashbery's poetry. We will make measured assessments of the poet's work as generally brilliant if at times problematic. We will refuse (for the most part) to adhere to any one of the 'party lines' we associate with Ashbery criticism, even as we learn from them. By the end of the module, we will understand the historical and literary contexts of Ashbery's work, as we will be motivated to return to his poetry anew, curious, and alert.

Special Author: Mary Wollstonecraft

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Special Author: Salman Rushdie

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Rushdie is a complex and challenging writer whose work not only intersects with, but actively influences and informs, a range of cultural and literary debates. Indeed, because his novels, stories and essays have consistently challenged the boundaries of culture, they have tended to generate polarised and often partisan critical responses. On this module, you will venture into the highly contested field of Rushdie criticism by evaluating his key literary texts using a variety of reading strategies and theoretical methodologies. For example, you will explore postmodernist debates on the construction of history and identity as well as postcolonial concerns with race, hybridity and political power. You will address core issues such as intertextuality, cinematic montage and narrative authority. And you will engage with wider cultural concerns relating to representation, performativity and documentation. These diverse critical perspectives will provide you with a sound knowledge of the social, cultural and political influences informing Rushdie’s work, and give you the analytical tools to develop your own lines of enquiry.

Special Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Special Author: Virginia Woolf

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

This module concentrates on the work of one of the best-known and most widely-read women writers of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf. Most students will already have encountered Woolf's work in your Year 2 modules; it is also very likely that you will come to the module with some knowledge of Woolf's life and that of her friends and family. This module will deepen your knowledge and understanding of Woolf's work, both in its historical context and in terms of the kind of conceptual and theoretical questions that her work raises. The module is designed to challenge what you think you already know about Woolf, and the kinds of preconceptions that readers often bring to Woolf and her work, and whether those are positive or negative. You think you may know who Virginia Woolf was, or what she wrote, but what about Virginia Stephen? What would happen if you stopped reading Woolf as a modernist and a woman writer? What other conceptual or historical frames could illuminate her work in new ways? What does Woolf have to do with the development of cinema, or the history of photography and the visual arts?

These are some of the questions that the module will address and encourage you to pursue through independent study. At the end of the module, you will: have read most of Woolf's novels and sampled some of her writing in other genres; have familiarised yourself with the history of the reception of that work; have learnt to challenge your own preconceptions about her work and its historical and conceptual contexts; and have learnt how to devise, structure, pursue and realise an independent research project, following detailed advice from your module tutor.

Special Subject: The American Civil War in Historical Memory

30 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 4

The ongoing Sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War in the United States highlights the continuing capacity of that sanguinary conflict to generate controversy in the present. This module provides you with a detailed examination of the war's impact on generations of Americans since 1865. It focuses specifically on the construction of southern white, African American and official unionist memories of the Civil War. These three key strains of historical memory evolved in the late nineteenth century under the press of postbellum reconciliation between North and South and the concomitant growth of a segregated society. They took a variety forms, notably the potent and profoundly racist 'Lost Cause' memory of the Confederate cause which underpinned the Jim Crow South for more than half a century, a marginalised African-American 'counter-memory' which sought to keep alive remembrance of emancipation and black military service in the armed forces of the United States, and an official national memory which depicted the Civil War as a tragic brothers' war which nevertheless had the effect of unifying and strengthening the United States in preparation for its emergence on the world stage as a Great Power.

The module will focus on the impersonal social and economic forces at work in the construction of these distinctive and frequently intertwined memories as well as the inherently political activities of different groups involved in the memory-making process. These groups include southern white women who founded the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the veterans themselves who contributed significantly to sectional reconciliation, novelists, poets and historians of all kinds, filmmakers and dramatists, and politicians with a wide range of vested interests. The module will introduce you to a broad range of illustrative 'texts' in order to familiarise you with the diverse manifestations of Civil War memory -- not only writings by Ulysses S. Grant, Carl Sandburg, and Douglas Southall Freeman but also monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, movies like Gone With the Wind and Glory, and commemorative events including the ill-fated centennial of the 1960s which was moulded by both the Cold War and the modern civil rights movement.

In many respects the module functions as a detailed case study in historical memory, a concept of growing interest to historians and one that has already generated a rich secondary literature. You will be encouraged to engage closely with this broader literature in order to make cross-national comparisons and to apply at least a modicum of theory to the primary and secondary texts at their disposal.

Special Subject: The Civil Rights Movement

30 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 4

You will assess the triumphs and tragedies of the movement for racial equality in the United States during the decades that followed the Second World War. You will begin by looking at the broader societal forces that created the context for the movement, including the decline of the agricultural economy of the American South, the migration of millions of African Americans from rural to urban communities, and the impact of the Second World War. You will analyse the movement from the perspective not only of its leaders but also grassroots activists and evaluate the intellectual and institutional forces that shaped movement activism, especially the role of Christianity. In assessing the civil rights conflicts of the post-war decades, you will also study the ideology and tactics of white racists who opposed reform.

You will learn how the domestic struggle for civil rights was based in a broader global framework and assess how international events impacted on American race relations. One of the narrative threads woven throughout the module is the influence, both positive and negative, of the Cold War on the black freedom struggle. In the short term, the rise of domestic anti-communism had an adverse effect on civil rights protest since white supremacists used popular fears of political subversion to accuse movement activists of being 'un-American'. Nonetheless, in the longer term Cold War politics impelled positive change. You will also study the influence of other international forces such as the decolonisation of African and Asian nations and the emergence of the United Nations.

Through your study of the civil rights movement, you will address a number of issues that relate to your broader critical understanding of history. In addition to sharpening your ability to engage with historiographical debate, you will tackle such issues as political agency, the strengths and limitations of state power, and the commemoration of controversial events in collective historical memory. You will also be encouraged to hone your skills in the interpretation of a wide range of primary sources, including speeches, publicity material and newsreel footage. You will have access to the extensive electronic primary sources available through the university library, including the Chicago Defender and African American Newspapers Collection.

Spectacular Imaginings: Renaissance and Restoration Theatre

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

This module studies Renaissance and Restoration drama in its historical and sociocultural contexts. Organised thematically, it considers how political events such as the build up to the English civil wars, the revolution itself and then the restoration of the monarchy, impacted on the late 16th- and 17th-century stage. Among the topics explored will be unruly sexualities; violence and eloquence; political pornography; staging London; the court masque; and domestic tragedy. A selection of drama from the following playwrights will feature on the module: Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood, Ford, Massinger, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, Beaumont, Fletcher, Cary, Wycherley, and Behn.

Technologies of Capture: Photography and Nineteenth Century Literature

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

The Literatures of Africa

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

This module will sample the literary and intellectual work of a range of African authors.  Current debates about African identity, postcolonialism, homosexuality, the 'Black Atlantic' and African cultural history are studied alongside the primary texts, and emphasis is placed on the different political and cultural contexts of the material. We look at the ways in which the selected authors construct a locale in their texts to explore geographical and cultural difference, as well as questions of sexual, economic and political power. Other topics to be studied include nationalism and cultural identity; writing the body; oral cultures and art forms; cultural flows; representations of migration, displacement and diaspora; and the literature of post-Apartheid South Africa. Canonical novels from Africa, such as Ngugi wa Thiongo's The River Between and Bessie Head's A Question of Power are studied alongside poems and novels by new African writers and black British writers. Taken together, the authors on this module reveal the multiple, dynamic languages and styles of modern African writers.

The Uncanny

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

The uncanny is difficult to define: it is mysterious, eerie, at once strange and familiar. It offers especially productive possibilities for exploring issues of identity and liminality, boundaries and interdisciplinarity. This module will engage with the uncanny across a wide range of texts and contexts, from literature (novels, short stories, drama and poetry) to film. Discussion focuses on a number of linked topics, including repetition, doubles, strange coincidences, animism, live burial, telepathy, death and laughter. The module aims to develop your engagement with the notion of the uncanny across a broad range of texts; to develop your reading and critical analysis skills; and to enhance your capacity for critical reflection on your experience of the familiar and the strange, the ordinary and the extra-ordinary.

The United States in the World: in-depth Analysis

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

As the 21st century begins, the United States is still the world's only superpower: no other nation possesses comparable military and economic power or has interests that reach the entire globe. To understand the place and power of the US in the contemporary world, it is vital to understand how its geopolitical strategies function, militarily and economically. Yet because US power is also secured through cultural and discursive strategies, it is equally important to analyse how US cultural/discursive products and processes participate in the construction of the US in all the varied ways it imagines itself. The aim of this module is to analyse how US cultural/discursive strategies participate in imagining the US in the world, either by being embedded within traditional geopolitical strategies or by sitting alongside them. Rather than taking an historical approach, the module is organised around specific theoretical and cultural/discursive themes and practices. These include architectural theory and the building of embassies abroad, design theory and designing the nation through everyday objects, film theory and screening the nation through popular film, remediation theory and virtually remediating the nation, entertainmentality theory and exhibiting the nation in museums, performance/performativity theory and re-enacting the nation though historical re-enactments as well as song, and advertising theory and advertising the nation to US citizens. Along the way, significant foreign and domestic policy debates from Cold War politics to the War on Terror to the US domestic War on Illegal Immigration will be considered through political, cultural, and discursive theories (eg Said's notion of orientalism, Foucault's notion of governmentality, Butler's notion of performativity, and Ranciere's notion of the birth of the nation).

Utopias and Dystopias

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

This module explores the production of utopian and dystopian fictions from the sixteenth century (Thomas More's publication in 1516 of Utopia) to the present day. It examines the production of utopian images and thought in a number of specific cultural and historical contexts. These include the sixteenth century context in which More originally developed the concept of utopia; the production in the eighteenth century of utopian and dystopian responses to the enlightenment (particularly those of Swift and Voltaire); the nineteenth century utopian tradition in the US (Hawthorne, Thoreau); the explosion of utopian thinking at the end of the nineteenth century (with writers such as Bellamy, Wells and Morris); the relationship between modernism and utopia (particularly in relation to Woolf and Kafka); the growth of dystopian responses to modernity in the nineteen thirties and forties (Orwell, Huxley); the importance of utopian thinking in relation to feminism, from Sarah Scott to Wollstonecraft to Shelley to Atwood; and the shifting role of utopian and dystopian thinking in marshalling the political possibilities of literature from the sixties to the present day (from Beckett to Cormac McCarthy).

Throughout this wide ranging module, we will focus closely on a number of central questions. How far is it possible for literary works to imagine a better or a perfect world? How far is it possible for such imaginings to effect actual social change? Are utopian fantasies politically regressive, an opiate to distract us from material social inequality? What is the role of dystopian thinking? Does dystopian fiction contradict utopian thought forms, or can dystopian writing produce utopian possibilities? What is the relationship between utopian thinking and hope? Is there a theological dimension to utopian thought? What is the relation between science and utopia? In addressing these questions, the module will offer a means of thinking broadly but rigorously about the role of literature in transforming social conditions, and making the world a better place.

Ways of Seeing: Early Modern Drama and Visual Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4