Undergraduate seminars
Click here to view the undergraduate-level seminar timetable.
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
Click here to view the graduate-level seminar timetable.
Old and Middle English Literature
Medieval English literature is extraordinarily diverse, offering, amongst other things, haunting elegies, adventure, pious tracts, ribald verse, biting social commentary and flocks of querulous birds. This course gives glimpse of these delights through a focus on dreams, visions and encounters in a range of poetic texts from the eighth to the fourteenth century. We begin with Dream of the Rood and In a Valley of this Restless Mind, then examine the exquisite grief of Pearl. The focus then turns to questions of identity and who defines it in Gawain and the Green Knight. We end with comic avian encounters in Owl and Nightingale and Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules, poems that revel in the perverse pleasure of a good argument.
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.
Tutor: Sandie Byrne is Professor of English at Oxford University, 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. On this course we shall examine three of their masterpieces: Great Expectations, 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 David Grylls, Emeritus Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, is a specialist in Victorian fiction. His publications include books on Charles Dickens, George Gissing and Victorian parent-child relationships. He has lectured widely in the USA as well as Britain, and also in France, Sweden, Italy, Greece and Gibraltar.
Modernist Literature
What is ‘Modernism’? How did writers in the early twentieth century try to ‘make it new’? Using these central questions 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, James Joyce and others), to look in detail at this experimental, daring period of literature.
Tutor: Dr Charlotte Jones is a 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.
Contemporary Writing
This course looks at contemporary American and British writing from the 1960s to the 2000s, a period of great innovation. In seminars we will discuss key developments, such as the blurring of the ‘popular’ and the ‘literary’. We will also think about changing approaches to ideas of authorship, history, place and nature, ethics and aesthetics. We will read a range of important texts: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places.
Tutor: Dr Rachel Malkin has held posts in the Faculties of English at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She has taught widely in literature from the nineteenth century to the present, with specialisms in twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing. She is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. Her first monograph is forthcoming.
