The final year provides the opportunity to extend your analysis of specialist themes and develop your research skills through independent study. In American studies, you will choose from a wide selection of advanced-level modules in North American history, literature, culture and film. In English, you will choose from a range of advanced-level options enabling you to specialise in key areas. You will also write a dissertation in American studies on a topic of your choice and for which you have developed genuine aptitude and enthusiasm. As the culmination of your degree, the dissertation might be used to compare topics, writers or texts in North American and British cultures, or to examine literary forms, genres and cultures in their broadest sense in both national and international contexts.
The American Theatre
This module explores the main developments in North American drama from the late-18th century to the present day. It examines how different theatrical movements - melodrama, minstrelsy, the 'freak' show, expressionism, social realism, the musical - connect with major historical events such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression and the Cold War. The module includes practical workshops around the staging, acting, directing and promotion of specific plays. You will spend four hours per week studying this module.
Prohibition America
Why did National Prohibition officially begin in the United States in 1920?
What were the goals and intentions of the powerful women's reform movements and religious pressure groups calling for dramatic restrictions on alcohol?
Why was there so much political support for state and national restrictions, particularly during the First World War? Why was prohibition so hard to police during the 1920s?
The restrictions on what and how you could drink reshaped American society, politics, and culture during the 1920s and 1930s. Prohibition transformed alcohol consumption, opened up new leisure activities, and increased bootlegging, smuggling, and other criminal activities. However, popular histories and media representations of the prohibition years are full of myths and stereotypes. On this module, you will challenge these to build a better understanding of an important period in the 20th century United States.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Ethnic and New Immigrant Writing
This module will consider the development of ‘ethnic’ and new immigrant literature in the United States from the late 19th century to the contemporary era. You will examine a range of texts from life-writing to short fiction and the novel by writers from a range of ethno-cultural backgrounds, including Irish, Jewish, Caribbean and Asian American. Issues for discussion will include the claiming of the United States by new immigrant and ‘ethnic’ writers; race and ethnicity; gender, class and sexuality; labour and economic status; the uses and re-writing of American history and ‘master narratives’; the impact of US regionalism; how writers engage with the American canon; multiculturalism and the ‘culture wars’; and the growth of ‘ethnic’ American writing and Ethnic Studies as academic fields.
American Sexuality
This module examines Americans' differing attitudes toward sexuality over time. Representative topics may include marriage and adultery, homosexuality and heterosexuality, nudity, abortion, birth control, prostitution, free love, and rape. The module covers a range of debates about sexuality from colonial America's family-centred production and Puritanism to slavery, "miscegenation" and interracial sexuality, and contraceptive technologies including the pill. You will spend three hours per week studying this module.
Latino Cultures
Latino cultural expression will be examined, exploring genres, forms and sites involved in the production and consumption of Latino culture and its positioning within mainstream US society. You'll spend around three hours per week in lectures and seminars studying this module.
Contemporary Canadian Literature
Focusing on Canadian authors, this module examines literature published since 2000. It examines how the Canadian nation is imagined through key literary texts in an increasingly globalised world. Discussions will include contemporary Canadian literature's relationships to postcolonialism, globalisation, multiculturalism, Indigeneity, genre, and the US and 9/11. You will spend four hours per week studying this module.
Popular Music Cultures and Countercultures
This module examines the role played by American popular music in countercultural movements. We focus on the ways in which marginalised, subordinate or dissenting social groups have used popular music as a vehicle for self-definition and for re-negotiating their relationship to the social, economic and cultural mainstream. We explore how the mainstream has responded to music countercultures in ways that range from repression to co-optation and analyse how the music and the movements have been represented and reflected on in fiction, film, poetry, journalism and theory. Among the key moments examined are the folk revival and the 1930s Popular Front, rock 'n' roll and desegregation in the 1950s, rock music and the 1960s counterculture, and postmodernism and identity politics in the music of the MTV age.
Recent Queer Writing
This module explores lesbian, gay, transgender and queer writing, focusing especially on the search for agency and the representation of gender and sexuality in selected contemporary texts. The majority of writers studied will be Canadian, although some American examples will also be included. The module is multi-generic, engaging with forms including novels, short fiction, life writing, poetry, drama and graphic narratives. Topics for discussion will include:
- LGBTQ sexuality;
- constructions of masculinity and femininity;
- the politics of representation: the extent to which writing can enable agency as subjects or citizens;
- intersections between race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, and the construction of gender and sexual identites
- writing for LGBTQ youth
- literature studies will be contextualized in relation to relevant debates in feminist, queer, post-colonial and transnational theories
Representative authors for study may include James Baldwin, Jane Rule, Dionne Brand, Dorothy Allison, Shyam Selvadurai, Tomson Highway, Leslie Feinberg, and Ivan Coyote.
In the Midst of Wars: The US and the Vietnam Wars, 1945-75
This module seeks to understand the course of American involvement in Vietnam — to explain why the nation ended up fighting a ruinous war there, to chart the long involvement of the US in Vietnamese life and politics after World War Two, and to assess its long-standing legacy in American politics and culture. It does so by looking at US policy, the reasons influencing US thinking, and the role that other international actors — the Vietnamese, the French, the British, the Soviets, the Chinese — played in the unfolding of events. It focuses on the decisions taken by a range of American presidents from FDR through to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. It also looks at the wider context, including the emergence of the Cold War, the onset of decolonization, domestic political pressures, public protests and the powerful anti-war movement. We will also look at the war’s legacy and how the memory of Vietnam has shaped perceptions of the use of American force overseas and how it has informed the nation’s politics and culture.
History of the Civil Rights Movement
This module examines a range of documents and scholarly controversies pertaining to the Civil Rights Movement between 1940 and 1970. Documents will include public and organisational records, photo-journalism, speeches, memoir and personal papers.
Controversies will include those relating to the chronological limits, spatial dynamics, and gender politics of the movement, as well as those relating to the movement’s goals and achievements.
Depending on your module choices in your first and second year, you will choose three modules in your final year in English that cover at least two areas of study.
Literature 1500 to the Present
Studying Literature
The module Studying Literature introduces you to some of the core skills for literary studies, including skills in reading, writing, researching and presentation. The module addresses topics including close reading, constructing an argument, and handling critical material, as well as introducing you to key critical questions about literary form, production and reception. These elements are linked to readings of specific literary texts, focused on poetry and prose selected from the full range of the modern literary period (1500 to the present).
Across the year you will learn about different interpretive approaches and concepts, and will examine literary-historical movements and transitions.
Learning objectives:
- To introduce you to selected literary texts, to deepen your imaginative engagement and analytic response.
- To provide you with a basis of knowledge, working methods and appropriate terminology for subsequent work at university level.
- To provide you with knowledge and understanding of the literary, cultural and historical contexts for literature from the period 1500 to the present, and the relationship between period and genre.
English Language and Applied Linguistics
Studying Language
This module teaches you about the nature of language, as well as how to analyse it for a broad range of purposes, preparing you for studies across all sections of the school.
During the weekly workshops you will learn about levels of language analysis and description, from the sounds and structure of language, through to meaning and discourse. These can be applied to all areas of English study, and will prepare you for future modules. In the lectures you will see how the staff here in the School of English put these skills of analysis and description to use in their own research. This covers the study of language in relation to the mind, literature, culture, society, and more. The seminars will then give you a chance to think about and discuss these topics further.
Learning objectives:
- To provide you with methods of language analysis and description for each linguistic level (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse)
- To prepare you for conducting your own language research across your degree
- To introduce you to the areas of research and study within the school, with particular focus on psycholinguistics, literary linguistics, and sociolinguistics
Medieval Languages and Literatures
Beginnings of English
The module Beginnings of English introduces you to the varied languages, literatures and cultures of medieval England (c.500-1500). You will read a variety of medieval texts which were originally written in Old English, Middle English and Old Norse. We study some texts in translation, but we also introduce you to aspects of Old and Middle English language to enable you to enjoy the nuance and texture of English literary language in its earliest forms.
We will read texts in a variety of genres, from epic and elegy, to saga, romance and fable. We will discuss ideas of Englishness and identity, and learn about the production and transmission of texts in the pre-modern period.
Learning objectives:
- To introduce you to linguistic vocabulary and terminology.
- To enable you to become proficient in reading Old English and Middle English.
- To give you an understanding of the complexities of English grammar, past and present.
- To give you an understanding of the origins of English, and its development over the medieval period.
- To familiarise you with the themes and genre of medieval English literature.
Drama and Performance
Depending on your module choices in your first and second year, you will choose three modules in your final year in English that cover at least two areas of study.
- Theatre Making
- Changing Stages: Theatre Industry and Theatre Art
- Modern Irish Literature and Drama
- Performing the Nation: British Theatre since 1980
- Reformation and Revolution: Early Modern literature and drama 1588-1688
- Writing for Performance