Our MA will train you in the study of writing and culture across a range of periods, cultures, and genres. It has an open and flexible study route. You will choose from a number of modules that address a range of issues and topics in the field of literatures written in English as well as literary theory and world literature.
Modules range from Feminist Literary Theory and Queer Studies to Ecopoetics and Gothic, World Literatures and Drama . You will study four modules, two in Term One and two in Term Two; and undertake a dissertation project on an (approved) topic of your choice with a specialised supervisor in Term Three.
Core modules
Dissertation
The Dissertation offers you the opportunity to pursue your own distinct research interests. You can develop any idea you’ve discovered in your modules, or write on a completely new topic that has always fascinated you. Our students choose an array of topics within the broadly-conceived boundaries of ‘literary studies’, although we’ll discuss with you to make sure your subject can be supported by an available member of our teaching staff.
Students often use their MA dissertations as springboards to PhD projects, and have sometimes gone on to publish parts of their work in scholarly journals.
Choose one Critical Theory module from options including:
Critical Theory Today
Critical and Cultural Theory has never been more vibrant, nor more urgently needed, than today. Work in all areas of the Humanities has long been inextricably intertwined with critical reflection, often drawing from a multiplicity of disciplines, from philosophy and sociology, to literary and visual studies.
This module charts key developments in the development of critical and cultural theories, focusing on specific movements or schools, and methodologies, as well as on important figures such as Adorno, Arendt, Brown, Buell, Butler, Derrida, Gramsci, Hall, Lacan, Latour, Mulvey, and Williams. We explore different, often clashing, critical perspectives on culture, from textual, material, philosophical, and other perspectives. These situated, and often transnational, critical platforms, allow us to both map historical developments in the study of the Humanities. The interaction between aesthetics, culture, and societal issues remains a permanent concern throughout the module.
Postcolonial Theory
This seminar will examine the emergence, institutionalization, and a purported 'crisis' of postcolonial theory through a set of key fictional, historical, and political texts. Much, of course, can be said about the academic disciplinarization of postcolonial studies in the Anglo-American academy from the 1980s onwards, occurring in the context of economic and cultural globalization and a new American imperialism. This seminar will consider these issues, but also focus on a range of influential texts written in earlier decades to try and understand the relationship between anti-colonialism and Postcolonialism, and to examine the ways in which these have shaped a host of contemporary academic debates about postcoloniality.
Feminist Theory
This module will consider some of the most important debates and trends in feminist literary theory over the last few decades. The module will consider the intersections of academic and popular, intellectual and activist dimensions of feminist literary theory; we also place emphasis on the articulation of feminist literary practice with representations of race, sexuality and class. Questions of reading practices, genre and canon-formation, as well as those of artistic expressions in response to the collaboration and conflict engaged between 'western', 'multicultural' and 'third world' feminisms will be some of the key themes that the module will explore.
We will examine the 'use' and 'abuse' of writing by black women in the formation of feminist literary theory - the way in which white feminist critics have recuperated black authored texts and have avoided the interrogation of whiteness. We will also address the question of feminist literary theory's relationship with cultural and social theory - Marxism and psychoanalysis were from the outset of the period we are engaged with crucial interlocutors of feminist thought and feminism's encounter with literature was a particularly rich site of these encounters.
We will think about the historicity of feminism's engagement with literature and culture - does it make sense to bring concepts generated by feminism into dialogue with texts or practices chronologically or politically outside of the 'enlightenment' or 'modernity'? As we will see, the demarcation between 'literary' and 'theoretical' texts has always been unstable within feminism and the module sets up a dialogue between the two categories. Key ‘literary’ texts will be used as touchstones for our debates and discussions during the module.
Petrofiction: Studies in World Literature
This module studies the world literature of energy and natural resources, a critical category in the conjoined fields of the Energy and Environmental Humanities. We explore a range of works about that most combustible of planetary resources: oil. Our lives are saturated in oil – the most significant resource of the post-war capitalist world system. It is everywhere, especially in those places where it often appears abstract, scarce, or unseen.
Oil and its myriad refined products determines how and where we live, move, work and play; what we eat, wear, consume. It is heavily invested in the shaping of our political and physical landscapes. To think about oil is not solely to think about automobiles or derricks or spectacular spills or barrel prices. The computer or the phone (or even the paper!) on which you are reading this blurb could not be made – or brought to you – without this mineral. Oil’s universality makes it as controversial as it is ubiquitous in its apparent vitality and necessity as much as its toxicity. Energy, then, is as social a phenomenon as it is technological or a matter for engineering. Modern culture is a Hydrocarbon culture and recent scholarship has begun to engage with it as such, finding that oil, fossil fuels and other energy forms are deeply embedded in modern literature, art and culture.
World Literature and the Anthropocene
This module investigates the implications of the concept of the Anthropocene for literary-cultural studies on a world scale. We read initially in the history of debates surrounding this term, denoting the advent of a geological era in which human action acquires decisive planetary force, as a way of revisiting conventional interpretive frameworks and categories, including questions of periodisation, comparative methodology and the ‘worlding’ of literary study. We will then take up a series of optics prompted by the Anthropocene and its counter-concepts (Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene) to further explore the challenges of reading ecological crisis and culture in an era when it is no longer feasible to disarticulate human from so-called natural history. Texts range from literary to field-specific criticism to theoretical, with an emphasis on the latter.
Optional modules
Optional modules can vary from year to year. Example optional modules may include:
- Early Modern Ecologies Gothic
- The Poetics of Urban Modernism
- Narratives of American Empire
- Shakespeare in Performance
- Romantic Elegy
