Faculty of Arts & Society
School of Cultural Studies
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MA English: Twentieth Century Literature
Course Overview
The MA in English provides an opportunity for students to explore a range of challenging literary texts and to interrogate a number of influential theoretical models and conceptual frameworks that provide ways of understanding the diversity of twentieth-century English Literature.
Course Contents
Students complete eight modules for the award of the MA degree: three core and five specialist. The core modules are Scholarly Practice and Research Methods, Research Workshop and Dissertation. The extensive range of specialist modules reflects both the design framework of the course and the research and teaching expertise of the staff.
Core Modules
Scholarly Practice and Research Methods is taken first and enables students to acquire and develop the knowledge and skills necessary to undertake advanced research in the field of English Studies. As such, it provides a transition from undergraduate to master's level study. By focusing on an exemplary literary text, and through carrying out a series of research tasks in relation to it, the module provides a model of how these skills will be employed and further developed both on the course itself and in any subsequent study. Alongside the emphasis on research skills, this module is concerned with questions of intellectual development, levels and types of critical argumentation, issues surrounding interdisciplinary research, the interface between theory and criticism, and current debates in the field of twentieth-century literature and criticism.
Research Workshop is primarily designed to prepare students for their dissertation, and to equip them with research skills and strategies appropriate to study at a higher level (such as MPhil and PhD). These transferable skills are pertinent to jobs in industry and professions requiring knowledge, skill and experience of advanced research procedures. In preparing for a substantial research project, students develop skills in advanced methods of literature search and retrieval using CD-ROM and Internet facilities in the Library, forward planning and time management, conducting a synoptic analysis (literature review), and competence in the scholarly presentation of references and bibliographies.
Dissertation presents the opportunity for students to synthesize the knowledge and skills acquired throughout the course and to engage deeply in a substantial piece of supervised research culminating in the production of their Master's dissertation.
Specialist Modules
Modules available in the academic year 2003/2004
Joyce and Bakhtin places Bakhtin's poetics of the novel in a dialogic relationship with Joyce's writing, focusing in particular on Ulysses. Bakhtin's writings (especially those concerned with the dialogic nature of language, representation of time and space in the novel and the carnivalesque) are explored in relation to Joyce's use of parody, pastiche and intertextuality as key strategies in his project to assimilate and juxtapose a wide range of 'classical' and 'popular' discourses in his work. Joyce's experiments in and with language, in turn, serve to focus attention on the efficacy (or otherwise) of Bakhtin's ideas as an explanatory theory of prose fiction.
Virginia Woolf, Gender and Sexuality introduces students to a selection of Woolf's novels and essays and to the writings of a number of contemporary theorists of gender and sexuality. Woolf's place in the modernist canon is analysed with particular attention to her construction, both thematically and formally, of a specifically gendered modernist aesthetic. Woolf's anticipation of ideas such as mimesis, masquerade and performativity are addressed. The module also places the work of Woolf and the theories of Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler alongside key concepts in psychoanalytic theory that were contemporary to Woolf and have been influential in the thinking of recent gender theorists.
Poetry and Poetics sets some of the most important modern and contemporary poetry written in English (by, among others, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Derek Walcott and Paul Muldoon) within a theoretical context in which poetry and poetic language are interrogated. This module does not purport to apply generic literary theory to the study of poetry; the aim is rather to consider the ways in which poetry - as a distinct use of language, form and space - has generated, and has been subject to, specifically poetic theorizations.
Writing Poetry: Subjectivity and Process focuses on the practice of writing poetry, connecting it with reflections on Julia Kristeva's notion of the 'subject in process' and with Freudian and Lacanian theories of subjectivity. It complements Poetry and Poetics in that students are encouraged to allow their theoretically-focused reading of other poets to inform their own practice. The assignment, which takes the form of an e-mail dialogue, centres on each student's own (unassessed) poetry and involves a discussion of processes such as free association, dream, mourning and abjection.
Post-Structuralist Theory: Foucault and Derrida provides an opportunity for students to develop their understanding of two of the most influential theorists in twentieth-century literary studies. The module focuses on a selection of theoretical strands in Michel Foucault's and Jacques Derrida's work in order to provide a means through which students can negotiate the complex and challenging thought of these figures. The specific strands are (re)conceptions of history, temporality, power and signification and have been selected to emphasize points of potential confluence, tension and conflict between the post-structuralist positions of Foucault and Derrida.
The Woman Author: Birth, Death and Resurrection examines the figure of the woman author as it features in contemporary fiction. The module considers representations of this figure and seeks to account for her frequent appearance. Students will explore a range of critical opinion that suggests that the focus on the figure of the woman author indicates both cultural interest and anxiety, and that the figure functions as a site of struggle about access, authority, acceptability and ownership. Texts are situated in relation to a number of theoretical contexts: the 'death of the author' thesis; feminism's retrieval of the woman author and its interest in women's literary production; the cultural work of Pierre Bourdieu; postmodern concepts of metafictionality.
Twentieth-Century Gothic introduces students to a range of twentieth-century Gothic texts - both fiction and film - and explores, from a variety of theoretical positions, the aesthetic, ethical and epistemological issues raised by the Gothic. In recent years, the genre has attracted increased attention within the fields of critical and cultural theory, literary and film studies. No longer regarded as non-canonical 'pulp' unworthy of serious academic study, the Gothic has been recognized as one of the dominant literary and cinematic genres of the twentieth century and as one that is perhaps uniquely positioned to interrogate certain aspects of modern and postmodern society.
Writing after Conrad attempts to answer a question posed by Homi Bhabha: 'Why do you think the long shadow of Heart of Darkness falls on so many texts of the postcolonial pedagogy?' Conrad's short novel has been challenged, appropriated and re-worked in a series of texts produced in the era of independence movements and post-independence statehood and, as such, the text is the starting point for an examination - via a series of co-texts that critique and return in altered forms its discursive power - of a rich post-colonial intertextuality. In re-reading Heart of Darkness alongside key post-colonial novels, we trace the ways in which the complex dynamics of colonial encounter and post-colonial forms of resistance operate. The place of Heart of Darkness within post-colonial theory forms an integral part of our consideration of the interface between colonial and post-colonial textualities.
Doris Lessing: Narrating Nation and Identity examines the ways in which Lessing's writing continually negotiates issues of gender, race and nation, situating her fiction in the contexts of recent postcolonial and gender theory and the intersection between them. Texts are related to debates arising from decolonisation and the sexual revolution, such as hybridity, home and exile, the outsider as 'other' and the mimicry and performance of gendered and raced identities. Students are also encouraged to locate Lessing's texts historically in order to test the utility of such hotly contested ideas in recent postcolonial and gender theory.
Appropriating Shakespeare explores some of the ways in which 'Shakespeare' is constructed and mediated through a range of texts, forms and practices in the twentieth century. An attempt is made to consider, not only the ways in which Shakespearean texts have been exploited, reinscribed and reproduced in twentieth-century culture, but also the ways in which 'Shakespeare' functions as a privileged site for the construction and contestation of concepts like nationhood, cultural value, heritage and empire. The module allows students to investigate how twentieth-century culture has contributed to the construction of the myths of Shakespeare. We will also consider oppositional or resistant readings and appropriations of the Bard. These processes are explored through a range of media, including film, television, drama and literary texts, and in relation to a number of places that have become instrumental in the production of Shakespeare in the twentieth century, such as Stratford and the Globe theatre.
Assessment and Teaching Methods
The seven taught modules employ a variety of teaching and learning strategies: informal lectures, small-group discussion, seminar presentations and tutorial support. Students are required to read prescribed texts in advance and to engage in critical discussion led by a tutor who is expert in the field. Assessments take a variety of forms (including essays, seminar papers, e-mail dialogues, book reviews and learning portfolios) and amount to approximately 3,000 words per module. The length of the dissertation is approximately 15,000 words. It is submitted in September.
Full-time students complete the course in one year (October to September), undertaking two modules per semester (usually on Monday and Wednesday evenings, 17:30 - 20:30). Part-time students normally take two years to complete, attending one session per week over four semesters, and submitting their dissertations in the September of their second year.
Learning Outcomes
The course provides an effective training in literary research and a grounding in contemporary critical debates. Concentrating mainly on the genres of poetry and prose, the course enables students to:
- analyse a number of the key forms, themes and issues associated with modernist and postmodernist writing;
- examine influential twentieth-century theorists: in particular, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Said, Bhabha and Kristeva;
- appraise key aspects of psychoanalytic theory and its connection with poetic processes and subjectivity;
- investigate the cultural significance of gender and authorship at particular historical moments;
- evaluate the interface between modernist and contemporary poetry;
- confidently employ key critical terms (such as 'Modernist', 'Postmodernist', 'Gothic', etc.) as aesthetic and generic categories in literary criticism;
- debate key developments in post-colonial writing and theory;
- demonstrate expertise in the use of both traditional and new technology resources available for literary research.
Career Options
The course is aimed at graduates interested in gaining advanced postgraduate expertise in English Literature. It is particularly valuable to English teachers who wish to extend their knowledge base and update their appreciation of recent literary and theoretical debates. Graduates of the MA are qualified and equipped to pursue a higher degree through research (MPhil, PhD) leading on to a career in academia. They also develop a range of transferable skills that are directly relevant to work in the Civil Service, journalism and media research, publishing and editing. The high level of planning and organisational skills demanded, the ability to identify and solve problems, and engage critically with ideas and evidence - developed during the course - are applicable to a variety of careers and professions. The University has a helpful Careers Service that provides advice to students interested in exploring their potential.
MA English: Twentieth Century Literature Open Day
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