King's College London

On the MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture & Theory you’ll explore a range of texts and concepts from 1945 to the present, with an emphasis on the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The course offers you the opportunity to study cutting-edge topics such as literary production after 1999; imperialism and sexuality; queer American poetry; theories of gender and race; realism and its others; emerging concepts of the human; theories and histories of violence; Marxist theories of value; the aesthetics and politics of secrecy; performance studies; and cultures of conflict and dissent from Africa to the Middle East.

You’ll start this Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory MA with a required module that looks at literature, culture, and theory post-1945. Each week you’ll learn from a different academic, who’ll share their expertise as you review a set of texts and consider the representational problematics of 20th and 21st-century literature. You’ll learn how to conceptualise the contemporary as a distinctive historical entity while also reading the contemporary as it has been constituted differently by various writers, practitioners, and theorists in each decade.

The second required module will teach you how to understand the complex and uneven relationship between contemporary fiction and theory beyond the application of the postmodernist rubric. Instead of applying theory to literature, you’ll consider how literature and theory represent distinct but linked approaches to topics including disposability, social reproduction, settler colonialism, and anti-blackness. You will also get the opportunity to produce original work on texts produced after 1999 that aren’t often studied.

Alongside the core modules, you will choose two optional modules from a broad list that covers cutting-edge topics like imperialism and sexuality; contemporary experimental poetry; new directions in gender and race theory; realism and its others; emerging concepts of the human; theories and histories of violence; Marxist theories of value; urban culture; performance studies; and cultures of conflict and dissent from Africa to the Middle East.

Your final required module in this contemporary literature, culture and theory master’s will be taught over the year to equip you with the skills needed to advance your critical writing and research methods. A blend of general skills workshops, advanced research seminars, and one-on-one supervision will prepare you to produce your own research project as a dissertation.