English: 1850-Present

Module code: 7AAEM609
Credit level: 7

The compulsory core course is interdisciplinary in approach and takes advantage of the English department’s central London location by considering various ways in which theorists, writers, and critics have thought about modernity through significant events in the modern history of the Capital. This enables seminar visits to various cultural institutions (such as the Museum of London and the Women’s Library) and provides students with a unique perspective on the relationship between material culture, literature and urban history through this period.

Module code: 7AAEM643
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: One two-hour weekly seminar


Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4000 word essay

In recent years 'Animal Studies' have come to constitute a powerful field of scholarly enquiry that draws upon philosophy and the history of ideas, upon art history, upon literary and media studies, and upon performance theory. The contributions made by writers such as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Vicki Hearne and Peter Singer, in particular, have brought a sense of pressing urgency as well as of intellectual energy to the work. A Modern Bestiary studies some of the many ways in which animals have been represented artistically over the last century and a half and sets them in their cultural context by considering a wide range of novels, poems, films, and paintings in the light of specific theoretical and philosophical ideas.

Module code: 7AAEM654
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: 1 two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This is a module about the intersection of feminism, anti-colonialism and literature in the period 1880 to 1945. It considers the writing of a number of women from India, Ireland, South Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, and New Zealand, in a range of genres (poetry, short story, essay, novel, autobiography). The module will engage in a recent upsurge in scholarship on women and anti-colonial thought, as well as on the complex relationships between feminism and nationalism. We will consider the political activism of many of these writers, as well as the ways in which their politics are articulated in their writing, whether fiction or non-fiction. All of these women writers, in differing ways, sought to reformulate colonial power relations, and they all placed women's rights at the heart of such debates. Their writing raises crucial questions about discourses of gender and national identity, and about modernity and colonial literatures.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem654.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM638
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: 1 two-hour weekly seminar


Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This option is designed to introduce you to a selection of contemporary Anglophone South Asian women's texts viewed through the lens of postcolonial feminist theory. The course is structured around six inter-related, themed sections. It explores a selection of contemporary texts in relation to ways in which gender inflects representations of national identity and history, the relationship of women to postcolonial politics, violence, and war, alongside gendered perspectives of migration, identity, displacement in an increasing global context.

Module code: 7AAEM250
Credit level: 7

This module covers a wide range of texts which involve issues of writing, culture and gender, both in the eighteenth-century and how they are understood now, for instance through representations of the eighteenth-century on film. It addresses transhistorical concepts such as genre, letter-writing, the body and travel which can be used to connect this module with others, and considers a selection of paradigms of literary history, particularly wit and sensibility. Topics will vary in emphasis, but the module will develop understandings of constructions of gender; production, circulation and reception of different kinds of writings, and key cultural forces. Students are welcome to submit essays on related topics off the syllabus, and to explore material and visual materials in conjunction with literary texts.

Module code: 7AAEM602
Credit level: 7
Credit value: TBC
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: TBC
TBC

This course aims to introduce to the full range of ongoing research by leading workers in the field of Literature and Medicine. It takes the form of a weekly seminar in which a speaker who does not normally teach on the MA in Literature and Medicine describes the approach(es) they have developed to bring the two disciplines into dialogue with one another.

You will gain a detailed knowledge of a range of approaches to interdisciplinary work linking literature and medicine; a good understanding of the current state of this nascent field in the UK and elsewhere and the implications of this for their own research; an ability to assess literary and medical-historical evidence critically, synthesize historical data from printed sources, solve problems of conflicting sources and conflicting interpretations, locate source materials and interpretative studies, use research resources (particularly research library catalogues, archival inventories, on-line catalogues, digital data bases and other traditional and digital resources relevant to the course).

Module code: 7AAE665
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay, 100% of final mark

The genres of Life-Writing will be introduced (including biography, autobiography, letters, and journals), as will the theoretical problems involved in considering Life-Writing in terms of genre. The module will also introduce the literary history of Life-Writing in English from the Early Modern period. Finally, it will integrate these elements with discussion of practical methods: not only the use of archival sources, including manuscript material such as wills and letters; or the conducting of interviews; but also practical applications of theoretical ideas, such as in biographical interpretations of literary works, or psychoanalytic interpretations of auto/biographical subjects.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem665.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM631
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: 1 two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module will explore a variety of illness narratives: fictional and non-fictional, by patients and carers, written singly or collectively. We will consider how far illness narrative can claim to be a genre in its own right as well its relation to other forms of life-writing (especially trauma narrative and testimony). We will also read and critique the body of criticism to which illness narrative has given rise, both academic and extra-mural. There are specific questions in life writing that illness seems to throw into especially sharp relief. Chief among these is the question of authenticity.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem631.aspx

Teaching staff: Dr Elizabeth Eger
Module code: 7AAEM607
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: Two one hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module offers the opportunity to analyse a wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lifewritings. We will consider the porous boundary between the terms ‘biography’ and ‘autobiography’, the latter only appearing at the end of the eighteenth century. We will start with classical biography, using Johnson as our exemplar. Emerging philosophical ideas about the nature of identity will then be discussed in relation to the evolution of Romantic biography. We will also consider the genre of letters, familiar and literary. William Mason was the first writer to challenge the taboo surrounding the publication of private letters in biography. His Life of Thomas Gray (1775) in which he announced that, through his letters, Gray would ‘become his own biographer’, had an enduring influence on literary biography. Memoirs, confessions, and journals will also contribute to our study.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2012-13/level7/7aaem607.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM645
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: Weekly two-hour seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module concentrates on literature in English from the 1870s to the 1930s, in which the forms of Life-Writing (such as literary portrait, autobiography, diary, journal, letters, etc) are increasingly used as resources for fiction. The resulting hybrid forms will be shown to play an important part in the literary history of the period. The module is designed for students wishing to deepen their knowledge of late 19th- and early 20th-century literature, and of the history of life-writing; and who have an interest in the theoretical considerations raised by such blurring of generic boundaries. It will focus on major texts from the late Victorian period, the fin-de-siècle, the Edwardian period, and Modernism. It will not only consider these texts from the perspective of recent theoretical accounts of autobiography, but will examine the ways in which such formal experiments were articulated and received by their contemporaries.

 

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem645.aspx

Teaching staff: Dr Hope Wolf
Module code: 7AAEM635
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: One two hour seminar weekly
Assessment:  coursework;  practical/s; 
1 x 2,000 - 2,500 word critical essay (50%); 1 x 2,000 - 2,500 practical exercise (50%)

This module will combine the reading of certain significant eighteenth and early nineteenth century biographies with a study of more recent biographies of the same figures. Focusing on lives of (and by) Dr Johnson and Hester Thrale, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Jane Austen, we will consider not only how biography has developed as a genre, but also how myths are formed and conceptions of identity have changed.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2012-13/level7/7aaem635.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM633
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: 1 two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module's primary aim is to explore the representation of the clinical practice of psychiatry and psychiatric theory in twentieth-century literature and film. It is not, therefore, a course in the psychoanalytic interpretation of literary texts. Although psychoanalysis has had a profound impact on the representation of psychiatry and of mental disorder more generally in twentieth-century European culture, the course will examine a broad range of representations of psychiatrists and psychiatry (early twentieth-century neurology, psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, psychiatry based on developments in clinical pharmacology from the 1950s onwards, and contemporary medical or evolutionary psychology). It will also pay special attention to contemporary depictions of psychiatry before 1920.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem633.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM628
Credit level: 7

This course explores representations of places, communities and local cultures in the context of migration, within British literature from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to 1900. In this period literature is said to have been ‘localised’: it tells stories set in identifiable places (e.g. Wordsworth’s Lake District, Eliot’s Midlands, Dickens’s London, Hardy’s Wessex) which provide the parameters and conditions for action. Moreover, these places are usually seen in terms of stability: change occurs gradually, the past remains present in the local terrain, and communities retain continuity over generations. Despite this emphasis on stability, however, the period witnessed new forms of demographic mobility, both internally within the United Kingdom, and externally to the colonies through state-sponsored and privately financed schemes. How are the new conditions of mobility registered within the literature of the period?

Through reading a range of literary texts from the period against the backdrop of an ambient culture of migration and emigration, we will ask what kinds of spatial regimes do literary texts produce under the pressure of migration and, especially, emigration? How do literary texts shape the contemporary apprehension of British geography and landscape, the ways in which British topography is imagined and inhabited? To investigate these questions we will consider some of the theoretical debates about place, space and mobility in recent literary theory, including those sparked by Raymond Williams’ Country and the City, debates about metropolis and colony in postcolonial theory, and Henri Lefebvre’s account of the production of space.

Module code: 7AAEM651
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: 1 x 3 hour seminar and screening


Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module seeks to understand the complex relations between medicine and cinema by critically examining the large body of fiction films that feature doctors and medical care. How have films portrayed doctors and other health professionals, and what does this tell us about societal expectations of – and misgivings about - medicine? What uses has medicine been put to in film? What kinds of narratives recur? Films are drawn from a wide range of periods, countries and genres – from Dr Kildare to Cristi Puiu ('Death of Mr Lazarescu') via Powell and Pressburger's 'A Matter of Life and Death', Akira Kurosawa's 'Drunken Angel' and Michael Crichton's 'Coma'!

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem651.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM606
Credit level: 7

This course will focus on urban literature from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. The emphasis throughout will be on the ways writers in (primarily) the nineteenth century defined the modern metropolis as a place of disorder, a labyrinthine city of Babylon. The interface between the European city and the American city, and the ways writers and artists have crossed national boundaries in imagining the city, will be central to discussions, and we’ll be interested thinking about how different cities suggest different ways of thinking about the modern experience. However, each city being studied also suggests a distinct notion of urban modernity. The course is organized both thematically – allowing us to highlight and explore some of the primary ideas in urban modernity – and broadly chronologically – giving us the opportunity to think about how the 19th century metropolis developments and shifts over time.

Module code: 7AAEM662
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: 1 two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 5,000 word essay

This module is the core course of the Literature and Medicine MA. It explores commonalities and differences in assumptions and methods of two distinct yet overlapping fields and provides the intellectual tools and theoretical basis for productive dialogue between them. The module concentrates on narrative and the various ways in which arrangements of information, encoded in language and/or gesture, can be conceptualised as narratives in radically different ways, for example, by literary theory, ethnography, qualitative studies methodology and narrative medicine.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem624.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM201
Credit level: 0
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 

This course proposes to examine the literary works of writers in prison. We shall explore ideas of the writer as hero in a European intellectual tradition with examples drawn from Antiquity to the present. All texts may be read in English.

The course is organized to focus on different writers' responses to their situations as various kinds of resistance tactics: either, in defence of civilization and for the preservation of selfhood; or, survivors' stories and testimony for mankind. In addition we shall consider more general literary uses of the image of the prisoner as a type variously representative of the human condition. The principal authors studied will normally include: Boethius and Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Thomas More and Antonio Gramsci; John Bunyan and Oscar Wilde; Mme Roland (Marie-Jeanne Phlipon) and Anne Frank; Jean Cassou and Irina Ratushinskaya; Sylvio Pellico and Primo Levi; William Shakespeare and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/pgtmods.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM626
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: 1 two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

What is queer theory? What models does it offer for exploring gender and sexuality historically? How might queer theories of the past connect with present and future configurations of identity, subjectivity and desire? Refusing the contemporary bias in much queer scholarship, this interdisciplinary module often uses examples from premodernity as a means of examining the key methods and assumptions of a queer approach to time and history. The module also provides opportunities to think about the interface between queerness and history in contemporary public culture, say in the context of museums and galleries. Familiarity with premodern literature and history isn't essential (where necessary texts can be circulated in translation). The module is aimed at students who wish to develop, discuss and critique a range of theoretical perspectives on gender, sexuality, history and temporality, whether or not they have a prior background in medieval or renaissance studies.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem626.aspx

Teaching staff: Professor Richard Kirkland
Module code: 7AAEM601
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: 1 x 2 hour seminar weekly
Assessment:  coursework 
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem601.aspx

The Irish Literary Revival of the early decades of the twentieth century was one of the most remarkable movements in world literature, transforming the cultural status of Ireland from a peripheral island on the edge of Europe to a major site of artistic production. The course places the Revival in the context of Irish politics, history and culture -- a period of sectarian division, revolutionary politics and a war of independence. Writers studied include WB Yeats, James Joyce, Lady Gregory, JM Synge, Sean O’Casey, George Moore, AE and Alice Milligan. Alongside these writers, we will study such important events as the founding of the Irish National Theatre, the Easter Rising of 1916, the language movement, and the Revival in the North of Ireland. Students will also study non-literary cultural forms such as music, visual arts, memoirs and life-writing.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem601.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM655
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: 1 two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 3,000 word essay; 1 x learning journal (2,000 words minimum)

This module is designed to introduce you to the pleasures and perils of the archive, while also teaching you to think creatively and theoretically about the archive as a concept: about its historical development throughout the nineteenth century, its political and ideological components, and its uses for scholars and writers today. Concepts around the archive that students will be introduced to include: survival (accidental as well as planned); decay; incompleteness and gaps; hidden stories; silences; micro-histories versus macro-history; provenance; organisation; reading 'against the grain'; catalogues; literary responses to the archive.  

 

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem655.aspx

Teaching staff: Professor Mark Turner
Module code: 7AAEM605
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: One two hour seminar weekly
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This course investigates a number of the most significant topics in urban cultural production of the twentieth century. While broadly chronological, the course will not focus on the historical development of the city in the twentieth-century, rather on the shift from modern to postmodern visions of the city, as seen in the culture production of European and American cities. To that end, the course will be led largely by a number of ideas which have been important for writers, artists and critics in conceptualising the twentieth-century city. Among the topics in twentieth-century urban culture to be discussed are: global corporatism; urban identities; urban textualities; dystopias; the city as history; the shift from metropolis to ‘postmetropolis’. The emphasis throughout will be on the conceptual frameworks writers and artists use to provide distinct visions of the city.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2012-13/level7/7aaem605.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM350
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: One two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay. Students will be expected to develop their own questions for essays, in discussion with the tutor.

This course explores the changing representations of sexuality in (primarily) British literature from the 1880s to the 1930s. If reflects the recent growth of theoretical and critical work related to gender and sexuality, which has become one of the most vibrant areas in literary studies. Major works on imaginative literature are studied alongside the writing of contemporary sexologists such as Edward Carpenter, within a theoretical framework drawing on the work of Freud and, more recently, Foucault.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem350.aspx

Module code: 7AAEM656
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: One two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 1,000 word essay (20%) and 1 x 4,000 word essay (80%)

This module focuses on some of the most sensational and popular novels, plays, and other writings of the Victorian period, works which are increasingly seen as rich sites of discovery about Victorian life in Britain and abroad. It encourages you to explore resonances between 19th century scientific methods, new modes within Victorian visual, dramatic, and literary arts, and concepts of Victorian modernity. It introduces: the new materialism of 19th century natural history and physiology; the 'symbolic' aspect of sensory perception in Victorian physiology with its implications for re-modelling the human psyche; the symbolist tendency within Victorian art, literature and drama; and links between all these and the 'Age of Sensation'.

Module code: 7AAEM608
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: 1 two-hour weekly seminar


Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This course will analyse the contribution made by women poets – alongside their male contemporaries – to the definition of imaginative and political liberty in the Romantic period. Recent research into women's writing has dramatically altered the traditional map of Romantic poetry, raising new questions about the gendered nature of aesthetic experience and the relation between history and ideology. Women used poetry as a means of independent intervention in contemporary political argument. A poetic tradition linking female sensibility with the moral responsibility of pleading freedom for others (as in abolitionist poetry) gave rise to the claim for female liberty. Key themes of the course: Writing and Revolution, Private and Public, Individual and National Liberty, the Political and the Imaginary spheres, Sexuality and Romantic freedom, Gender and Nationalism, Lyric and Liberty, Abolitionism and Empire, Reason and Sensibility, Gender and Genre.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem608.aspx