Undergraduate seminars
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Critical Reading
Close critical analysis is at the heart of the study of literature and one of the first skills that we need to acquire to become attentive, discriminating, critical readers. In this course we shall look at a selection of poetry and prose from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, paying attention to different aspects of language and form, and using key concepts and terms of the critical idiom. This will enable us to develop and hone the skills required for attentive and effective analyses of literary texts.
Tutor: Dr Edward Clarke teaches English literature for OUDCE and St Catherine’s College, Oxford.
Shakespeare on Stage and Screen
In this seminar we will explore the many different ways in which Shakespeare can be performed on stage and screen. While referring to a wide range of titles, we will focus our discussion on interpretations of three plays – Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V and Macbeth. Viewing extracts which feature actors and directors as diverse as Kenneth Branagh, Patrick Stewart, Julie Taymor and Joss Whedon, we will explore some key differences between stage and screen Shakespeare, consider the variety of approaches taken by directors, and compare different interpretations of the same play or role.
Tutor: Dr John O’Connor is Visiting Senior Lecturer at Cornell University, USA, and was formerly Principal Lecturer in English at Westminster College, Oxford. He has also taught at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Graduate seminar options
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Old and Middle English Literature
Medieval English literature is extraordinarily diverse: it offers, amongst other things, haunting elegies, tales of adventure, pious tracts, ribald verse, biting social commentary and flocks of querulous birds. This course aims to offer a glimpse these manifold delights through a focus on dreams, visions and encounters in texts from the eighth to the fourteenth century. We begin with enigmatic poetry that asks what it means to see, before moving through texts that question the relationship between language and meaning, signs and signification, to end with debates about the purpose of debate – and a man of great authority.
Tutor: Dr Helen Appleton is a member of the Faculty of English at Oxford University. She specialises in the literatures of Britain in the medieval period, especially texts in Old and Early Middle English and their influences.
Shakespeare and Politics: Then and Now
All of Shakespeare’s plays are bound up in the politics of their time, but at given points in history some have seemed more obviously ‘political’ than others. In this seminar we shall discuss plays that had a particular political dimension in the early modern period and which have changed meanings when performed today. In discussions we shall focus mainly on Richard II, Henry V, Macbeth, Hamlet (which should be read in advance) and there will be allusions to many others (prior knowledge of which is not expected), including Henry VI Part 2, Coriolanus, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Sir Thomas More.
Tutor: Dr John O’Connor is Visiting Senior Lecturer at Cornell University, USA, and was formerly Principal Lecturer in English at Westminster College, Oxford. He has also taught at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon.
The English Romantic Poets
The ‘Romantic’ period saw one of the great flowerings of creativity in England, particularly in poetry, alongside a great radicalisation of politics. This course will consider the major poets of the period in their intellectual context, exploring their formal innovations and interests in older traditions, and their new ideas of selfhood and politics. We shall focus on the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and John Keats, with opportunities to explore the works of Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Robinson, John Clare, and others.
Tutor: Dr Tom MacFaul has taught for Oxford University for a number of years and is currently Lecturer in English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. His research interests extend from the Renaissance/early modern period to the Romantics.
Jane Austen
In this course we shall be reading the work of Jane Austen’s maturity: Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park; Emma; Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. We shall read with close critical attention in order to explore the qualities that have kept those novels among the world's favourite fiction for nearly two hundred years. We shall explore the structure and analyse the style of the six major novels, and extracts (which will be provided) from some of the early works and fragments. We shall focus on the English language of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the narrative voice, focalisers and perspective, irony, dialogue, characterisation, and elements of style such as lexis and syntax.
Dr Sandie Byrne is Associate Professor in English Literature and Creative Writing at Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, and Director of the English Literature Summer School. She is the author of a number of books and articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.
Victorian Fiction
The great Victorian novelists produced searching analyses of their society, exploring with pathos, passion and humour its often contradictory values - social aspiration, romantic yearning, moral fervour and religious doubt. Dealing with such issues in compelling narratives, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy showed how the lives of individuals were enmeshed in the cultural forces of the age. We shall examine three of their masterpieces: Bleak House, The Mill on the Floss and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. As well as discussing the novels’ central themes, the course will pay close attention to their structure and use of language.
Tutor: Dr Charlotte Jones is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and a former lecturer at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Her research focuses on the novel, literary realism, philosophy and politics.
Modernist Literature: Poetry and Prose
What is ‘Modernist Literature’ and why is it a term we continue to use? Using this central question as a framework for discussion, this lively but intensive course will consider a selection of poetry and prose (by T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and W. B. Yeats), to look in detail at this experimental, daring period of literature some 100 years on.
Tutor: Tara Stubbs is Associate Professor in English Literature at OUDCE, and a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. Her interests include Irish and American poetry, modernism, and transatlantic exchange.
Contemporary Writing
This course will consider how British and Irish writers have responded to the challenge of the contemporary in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Through close attention to the relationship between literary form and current events, we will examine the ways that recent authors have shaped their novels, short fiction, poetry, and drama to accommodate and critique the present day. Seminar discussions will range from urgent questions about cultural identity and technology to the present state and infrastructure of the literary landscape. Authors will include: Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Seamus Heaney, China Miéville, and Jez Butterworth.
Tutor: Dr Michael Molan has taught English literature from the early modern to the contemporary at Oxford University and the University of East Anglia. His research includes the impact of literary influence on poetry and criticism from modernism to the present, and epistolary networks of writers in the twentieth century.
World Literature
‘World literature’ is a contested term and a much-debated area of literary studies. This course will explore the key debates around the terms ‘world literature’ and ‘postcolonial studies’ alongside relevant texts that have inspired and complicated these debates. Considering how the circulation of texts feeds into their reception, this course considers how and why certain texts are transnational, global, and/or postcolonial. Through the work of authors such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Junot Díaz, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Han Kang, this course examines how texts become ‘world’ literature, what this means for their critical success or popularity and how the poetics and aesthetics of these texts present a conundrum of classification in traditional literary criticism.
Tutor: Dr Bhagya Casaba Somashekar is Lecturer (Education) in English at Brunel University, where she teaches contemporary and postcolonial writing. She has research interests in postcolonial, world, and South Asian literatures, along with representations of political crises, urban writings, speculative fiction, and literature and the Anthropocene.
Feminist Literature and Theory
The word ‘feminist’ did not appear until the 1890s, yet there have been women writing about and advocating equal rights for centuries. This course will examine the development of feminist thinking, engaging with a range of critical debates surrounding the theory and practice of feminist writing. Focusing on three novels - Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet - seminars will explore how these works relate to and critique key issues such as sexuality, gender identity and race, and consider the assumptions and values about gender that are embedded within literature and language as a whole.
Tutor: Dr Terri Mullholland has taught critical theory and modernism for OUDCE. Her research interests are in women’s writing, modernism, and critical and cultural theory.
