Syllabus
These units introduce students to
methodological and other problems involved in the study of
literature from a wide range of periods. They aim to provide
a literary context for works which will be studied in later
years and to promote a sense of literary history as an
active process of development and change.
Students choose well-known texts to study
which have appeared at any time from 2500 BC to the 20th
century. The feature common to all the texts is that they
have been considered important in the history of Western
literature.
Students will consider historical,
contextual and other problems raised by the individual
texts, as well as relationships between texts. This may
involve looking at the direct influence of one text on
another, different ways in which different texts treat the
same issue, or differences in particular aspects of the
texts (e.g. the way characters are represented, the
construction of narratives, the use of figurative language).
No specific works of criticism, or other
background reading, are prescribed for either unit. Instead,
students are expected to prepare their own study programme,
based on advice offered in the relevant subject guide and
the Handbook.
This unit deals with literature from
Homer to Shakespeare. It is designed to introduce the
student to a range of literature from Classical times to the
Renaissance. It covers a variety of canonical figures and
texts which have had a significant effect on the development
of English literature, as well as introducing the student to
some less well-known writing of the medieval period.
Students will also be introduced to a variety of styles,
genres and themes which have been historically influential
in the English literary tradition.
Prescribed reading will include:
Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey; Sophocles:
Oedipus Rex (Oedipus Tyrannus), Antigone; Virgil:
The Aeneid; Ovid: Metamorphoses; Plato:
The Symposium, The Republic; The Bible (selection from
the King James Version – ‘Genesis’, ‘Exodus’. ‘Job’. ‘Song
of Solomon’, ‘Kings 1 and 2’, ‘The gospel according to St
Matthew’, ‘Revelations’); Dante: The Inferno;
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales: ‘The Wife of Bath’s
Prologue and Tale’, ‘The Merchant’s Prologue and Tale’;
Everyman; Medieval Mystery and Miracle Plays; Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight; More: Utopia; Marlowe:
Dr Faustus, The Jew of Malta; Shakespeare:
Hamlet, The Tempest; selections from The New Oxford
Book of English Verse.
This unit deals with English literature
since Shakespeare. It is designed to introduce students to a
range of works from the early 17th century to the present
day. It covers a variety of canonical figures and texts
which have had a significant effect on the development of
later English literature, as well as introducing the student
to some less well-known writing of this period. Students
will also be introduced to a variety of styles, genres and
themes which have been important in the literature of this
period.
Prescribed reading will include:
Selections from Metaphysical Poets (Penguin, ed. Helen
Gardner); Milton: Paradise Lost, Books 1 and 2;
Pope: ‘The Rape of the Lock’; Fielding: Joseph
Andrews; Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads;
Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience; Austen:
Emma, Pride and Prejudice; C. Brontë: Jane
Eyre, Villette; Dickens: Great Expectations, Hard
Times; Conrad: Heart of Darkness; Joyce:
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Woolf: Mrs
Dalloway; Eliot: Prufrock and Other Observations,
The Waste Land; Beckett: Waiting for Godot,
Endgame; Toni Morrison: Beloved.
This unit considers a range of problems
involved in interpreting literary and non-literary texts and
introduces basic terminology and concepts involved in
analysing such texts (for example metre, symbol, point of
view). Interconnections between interpreting texts in
different media will also be examined.
More specifically, the syllabus aims to
help students to understand the technical means by which
texts produce meaning; to demonstrate how all acts of
interpretation or commentary involve ‘theoretical’
assumptions and positions, even if such concepts are not
explicitly acknowledged; to make inter-connections between
interpreting texts in an academic context and in everyday
life; to enhance understanding of what constitutes a ‘text’,
by comparison of literature with visual images, films, drama
productions, etc.
During study for this unit, students will
develop a glossary of key terms and concepts used in textual
description and analysis and examine why these terms and
concepts matter in the practical analysis of texts in a
range of media, though literature will provide the central
strand of case studies.
Candidates may draw on reading completed
for Explorations 1 and 2 units in answers for Section B, but
must not present substantially the same material twice, in
this or any other Foundation unit examination.
Preliminary reading:
A. Durant and N. Fabb (1990): Literary Studies in
Action; M. Montgomery, A. Durant, N. Fabb, T. Furniss
and S. Mills (1992): Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading
Skills for Students of Literature.
This unit aims to provide students with
an introduction to the works of Shakespeare and Jonson
within the genre of ‘comedy’, and seeks to draw attention to
the principles of classification which enable these plays to
be seen as forming a group. Starting with the hypothesis
that the plays themselves may problematise such
formulations, the syllabus will examine the cultural
specificity of the term ‘comedy’, and the extent to which
these plays are part of a process which redefined the role
of drama in Elizabethan/Jacobean society.
The plays will be treated primarily as
literary texts but students will be encouraged to consider
the possibilities for interpretation which a ‘stage-centred’
critical approach produces.
The plays will be placed in the context
of a new dramatic practice which arose within a London of
competing commercial and political interests, and students
will be required to grasp an overview of the forces shaping
the creative production of Shakespeare and Jonson. The
demands of the market for which the dramatists were
producing, the operation of patronage, the expectations of
theatre audiences and the role of censorship will be
considered, and the unit will attempt to read through the
plays to find the ‘marks’ of these influences.
Topics for special consideration will
include:
-
violation of Classical formulations
(e.g. Unities of Place, Action and Time)
-
the choice of ‘setting’ and how it
affects an audience’s responses
-
the distinction between high and low
comedy
-
genre problems created by these plays
-
the cultural specificity of the
‘comedy’
-
gender and class transgression.
Candidates may write on the same play/s
in more than one answer provided that the arguments made are
substantially different.
Prescribed reading will include:
Jonson: Bartholomew Fair, Volpone, The Alchemist, Every
Man in his Humour, Eastward Ho!, Epicoene, or the
Silent Woman; Shakespeare: Much Ado about Nothing,
As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night.
Advanced Units - Group A
(at least four units must be chosen from this group)
This unit offers an introduction to
English literature of the later Middle Ages, placed within a
broad historical and cultural context. A diversity of
genres, styles, dialects and literary traditions may be
explored.
Among topics which students may study
are: social satire; the Arthurian tradition and uses of the
Arthurian myth; shifts in literary technique, genre and
attitudes toward women; myths of social and literary
decadence; ideas of society and the individual; high and low
culture; spirituality and secularity; chivalry and the
figure of the knight; literacy and education; art and
architecture; magic and the supernatural; medieval Scotland
and the Scottish Chaucerians.
Among texts and authors which students
may choose to study are: Chaucer, Malory, Henryson, the
Gawain poet, the Breton lai, selected lyrics.
This unit offers an overview of English
literature and literary culture in the period from the reign
of Henry VIII (the lyric poets Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of
Surrey) to the satirists and dramatists of the Restoration.
Among topics which students may study
are: women and writing in the early modern period; Jacobean
drama; the origins of Elizabethan tragedy; literature of the
commonwealth; Restoration comedy; surveys of the period and
other more specialist topics.
Among texts and authors which students
may choose to study are: Wyatt, Surrey, Castiglione,
Machiavelli, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson,
Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Rochester, Bunyan, Locke,
Hobbes, Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Wroth, Jacobean tragedy, the
Metaphysical poets, Restoration comedy.
This unit draws together two periods of
English literary history that have traditionally been seen
in strong contrast; an antithesis which was frequently
underscored by critical manifestos issued during the 18th
and early 19th centuries. The unit explores what appear to
be the important distinctions, but also considers
continuities that may exist between the two periods.
Among topics which students may study
are: prose and verse satires of the early 18th century; the
emergent novel; attitudes towards the language of poetry;
Romantic poetry; author-based studies.
Among authors whose work students may
choose to study are:
Swift, Defoe, Gay, Pope, Thomson, Richardson, Fielding,
Sterne, Gray, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Blake, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Keats, Austen.
This unit considers a range of textual
forms typical of the Victorian period.
Among topics which students may choose to
study are: the narrative poem; the social problem novel; the
literary avocation of the woman’s role; Darwinism; faith and
doubt; social unease; decadence; author-based studies.
Among authors whose work students may
choose to study are:
Thackeray, Hopkins, Mrs Gaskell, Tennyson, Dickens,
Christina Rossetti, Hardy, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë,
Emily Brontë, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
This unit is concerned with poetry,
fiction and drama in the 20th century.
Among topics which students may study
are: the definition and function of terms such as ‘modern’,
‘modernism’, ‘post-modernism’; the effects of war and
technological change on literary production; the link
between art and politics; the proletarian novel; feminist
drama; regional literatures (such as Scottish poetry or
Caribbean novels); the fiction of empire; poetry of the
First World War; post-modern fiction; author-based studies.
Some authors whose works students may
choose to study are:
Woolf, Conrad, Joyce, Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, W.H.
Auden, Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Lovelace, George Barker,
Larkin, Plath, Orwell, Lewis Jones, Somerfield, Osborne,
Sillitoe, Braine, Spark, Pinter, Vonnegut, Nabokov, J.G.
Farrell, Rhys, Beckett, Lessing, Fowles, Tutuola, Angela
Carter.
Advanced Units - Group B
(at least three units must be chosen from this group)
In this unit, students are encouraged to
follow a largely chronological sequence and to consider some
of the recurrent debates that have occupied literary
theorists from Classical times to the 19th century. Among
topics which students may study are: the nature of tragedy;
literary ‘decorum’; the sublime; the ideal and the real;
tradition and originality; ‘poetic’ diction; theories of the
imagination; literature as a ‘criticism of life’.
Students will choose texts for more
detailed study from the following list:
Plato: The Republic, Ion; Aristotle: Poetics;
Aeschylus: The Oresteia; Sophocles: Oedipus
Tyrannus; Horace: Ars Poetica; Longinus:
On the Sublime; Ascham: The Schoolmaster;
Elyot: The Governour; Sidney: An Apologie for
Poetry; Jonson: Discoveries; Dryden: An
Essay of Dramatic Poesie; Addison and Steele: The
Spectator, The Guardian, The Tatler (selected essays);
Pope: Essay on Criticism; Johnson: Lives,
Prefaces, Essays; Wordsworth: Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads, Preface to the Poems of 1815, Essay,
Supplemental; Coleridge:Bibliographia Literaria
(selections); Peacock: The Four Ages of Poetry;
Shelley: A Defence of Poetry; Arnold: Preface
to the Poems (1853), Culture and Anarchy; Pater:
Essays (selected).
This unit aims to analyse varieties of
language in conversation and literature.
It explores how varying aspects of
language0use convey information about the speaker/writer
over and above its factual content, and how such varieties
function in literature. Variation in terms of gender, race
and class, and differing conceptions of ‘bad language’, will
be considered.
Questions which students may consider
include:
-
General
-
how to identify linguistic
differences between gender, class or ethnic groups?
-
what is the meaning of women’s language
and feminist writing?
-
do social class/ethnic group dialects
exist?
-
what is the basis for stereotypes?
-
Gender
-
do men and women speak/write
differently?
-
what is sexist language and feminist
writing?
-
who controls what words mean?
-
the syllabus will use texts written
both by and about women.
-
Class and dialect
-
what is social class?
-
can judge a person’s social class
by their language?
-
what is the dialect of, and how is
social class represented in, literature?
-
Race and ethnicity
-
is there any connection between a
language and race?
-
to what extent is a language a
defining or an identifying characteristic of ethnic
group membership?
-
how do ethnic groups serve to
characterise literature (e.g. Irish poetry, Caribbean
literature)?
The unit concludes with an overview. Are
these varieties a sociolinguistic reality or are they an
artefact of literary/linguistic reality, or are they an
artefact of literary/linguistic theorising? The paper will
cover the full scope of the syllabus. Students will be
expected to demonstrate an understanding of concepts
covered, and problems with those concepts, illustrating from
literary and nonliterary texts where appropriate.
Preliminary reading:
A. Durant and N. Fabb (1990): Literary Studies in
Action; E. Traugott and M. Pratt (1980):
Linguistics for Students of Literature; P. Trudgill
(1974): Sociolinguistics: an Introduction.
This unit will examine a selection of
women’s writing from the 1790s to the 1990s, from Mary
Wollstonecraft to Alice Walker. It will look at the ways in
which particular themes (e.g. sexuality, identity, marriage)
are presented in poetry, fiction and other kinds of writing
and ask how these relate to the historical position of women
at the time.
As well as looking at the qualities of
individual texts, students will consider their chosen
examples in relation to questions about genre and gender,
authority and authorship, voice and language. Do women write
about different things from men? Or is it a question of
style? Do women have a literature of their own and what, if
anything, is distinctive about women’s writing? How does
women’s writing relate to the changing history of women in
the last two centuries?
Particular attention may be given to the
following topics: the rise of the woman novelist (Behn,
Wollstonecraft, Austen) and the nature of women’s conduct
books in the early 19th century; the struggle to find a
poetic voice in the mid-19th century (Barrett Browning,
Rossetti and Brontë); women’s contribution to modernism in
the early 20th century (Woolf, Richardson, Mansfield); and
contemporary women’s writing which related gender to race
and class (Morrison, Walker, Barker).
Students will also be encouraged to
consider the different theoretical and historical
explanations of women’s writing in feminist criticism by
Woolf, Showalter, Cixous, Kristeva and others.
Preliminary reading:
Toril Moi (1985): Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist
Literary Theory; Janet Todd (1988): Feminist
Literary History; Virginia Woolf (1929): A Room of
One’s Own.
The aim of this unit is to enhance the
student’s understanding of Shakespeare’s writing and, more
particularly, his relationship to the theatrical milieu and
the literary conventions of his time. The unit is
designed to help the student identify what is characteristic
of Shakespeare’s writing, to develop an understanding of the
early
modern theatre industry, to locate the plays in their
socio-cultural contexts, and to apply a range of critical
approaches to Shakespeare. Among topics which students may
wish to study are gender politics,
staging, the expanding world of Elizabethan and Jacobean
England, and contemporary debates about governance. As well
as studying thematic issues, students will be encouraged to
examine formal questions of
dramatic and poetic genre, verse construction, the
relationship between
diction and dramatic characterisation, and dramatic
structure. The syllabus comprises Shakespeare’s works,
dramatic and poetic, with the exception of those plays
listed on the syllabi of Explorations I and
Renaissance Comedy: i.e. Hamlet, The Tempest,
Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It,
The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's
Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth
Night.
This unit aims to provide students with
some historical and critical perspectives on an evolving
aesthetic form central to English studies. Focusing on both
works originally written in English and ones in translation,
the unit surveys selected novels in three broad
chronological groupings: 18th- and 19th-century realist
novels; early 20th-century modernist novels; and finally a
wide-ranging exploration of the major themes and
characteristic narrative strategies associated with
‘anti-realist’ or ‘post-modern’ works of fiction.
The syllabus encourages students to
consider some relevant theoretical questions on the nature
of narrative and the role of the reader, together with
critical writing on a variety of topics, ranging from
mimesis to genre. Attention will also be given to narrative
techniques, including characterisation, use of imagery,
narrative voice, scene-making – the strategies of fiction
whereby novelists develop individual structures that enable
them to say something new in fictional terms.
Among texts which may be studied for this
unit are:
Defoe: Moll Flanders; Laclos: Les Liaisons
Dangereuses; Zola: Germinal; Tolstoy: Anna
Karenina; Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment;
James:The Turn of the Screw; Woolf: To the
Lighthouse; Nabokov: Lolita; Robbe-Grillet:
In the Labyrinth; Calvino: If, On a Winter’s Night,
A Traveller; Rushdie: Midnight’s Children.
This unit examines a broad range of
American literature, examining genres, schools, cultural
trends, and literary and critical developments throughout
the 20th century. There is ample opportunity to investigate
the cultural and ethnic diversity of American society, as
well as to read one’s way around the country, from the
Harlem Renaissance in New York to Southern Gothic in New
Orleans, and on the road to the gathering of the Beat
Generation in San Francisco.
The syllabus comprises novels, short
stories, poetry and drama, allowing students to develop an
understanding of the change and continuity in the literary
culture of the period, whilst providing a context for the
application of a wide range of critical approaches.
Students will be expected to combine a
close analysis of the chosen texts with supplementary
reading of critical material to illustrate aspects of
American literature, including modernism, imagism,
post-modernism, developments within and across genre,
feminism, and the text as both cultural artefact and
political response.
Among authors whose works students may
choose to study are:
Ellison, Faulkner, Neale Hurston, McCullers, Morrison,
Walker, Lowell, Moore, Pound, Ginsberg, Langston Hughes,
Plath, Fierstein, Hellman, Mamet, Arthur Miller, Tennessee
Williams, August Wilson.
This unit offers the opportunity to
explore the evolving literature of the United States in the
century in which the nation itself was formed
geographically, politically and culturally. Students are
encouraged to develop a reading syllabus of authors and
topics which affords insights into the vast social and
political changes of this era, as well as investigating
literary forms, critical issues and emerging American
voices. The range of topics which can be covered in this
unit includes: Realist, Naturalist and Romantic Writing;
Fiction and Social Change; the Transcendentalists; the New
England Tradition; the Evolution of new Regionalisms;
Literature of Slavery; the Civil War; Abolition and
Suffrage; the Melting Pot of Languages; the Connecticut
Wits. In addition the unit will examine the exchange of
influences between American and European writing. The scope
of reading will encompass novels, short stories, poetry,
satire and drama.
The examination for this unit includes
questions on both authors and topics, and is designed to be
sufficiently flexible to address the varied range of reading
suggested.
Among the authors whose works students
may choose to study are:
Alcott, Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Waldo Emerson,
Hawthorne, Ward Howe, Irving, James, Orne Jewett, Melville,
Poe, Beecher Stowe, Thoreau, Twain, Wheatley, Whitman.
This unit aims to provide students with
historical and critical perspectives on the major thematic
and stylistic developments in a selection of British,
American and European drama between 1860 and the present
day. The unit encourages students to trace the relationship
between the theory and practice of the dramatists listed and
seeks to examine the way in which the choice of style or
presentation, be it realism, expressionism or the
avant-garde, might be seen to reflect the thematic concerns
of their plays. The unit will also encourage students to
consider the relationship between the dramatic text on the
page and play in performance, where appropriate.
Among playwrights whose work students may
study are:
Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Yeats, Eliot, Synge, Wilde, O’Casey,
Lorca, Brecht, Beckett, O’Neill, Williams, Miller, Pinter,
Osborne, Delaney, Hellman, Wandor, Gems, Orton, Churchill,
Friel, Roche.
This unit examines a wide range of Irish
literary culture from the 19th and 20th centuries. In the
first part of the syllabus, students will be contextualising
Irish literary forms and their development in terms of
colonial and postcolonial history. Students will be
encouraged to develop a working knowledge of Irish history
in the 19th and 20th centuries, and to apply this knowledge
in their critical strategies for reading literary texts.
Among topics which students may choose to study are:
Anglo–Irish culture; political oratory and pamphleteering;
traditions of Irish comedic; Catholicism and cultural
decolonisation; and modern literary responses to political
and cultural conflict from 1960 onwards.
In addition students will also be
required to undertake a special author study. The critical
approaches adopted here may derive from historical
contextualisation, but students will be encouraged to
develop a range of critical approaches for this part of the
degree.
Among the writers whose works students
may choose to study are:
Ferguson, O’Grady, J.C. Mangan, D.P. Moran, Oscar Wilde, W.B.
Yeats, Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge, George Russell, James
Joyce, Padriac Pearse, Sean O’Casey, J.G. Farrell, Brendan
Behan, Seamus Heaney, Padraic Fiacc, Edna O’Brien, Roddy
Doyle.
The aim of this unit is to introduce the
student to the corpus of texts which deal with Britain’s
history as a colonial, imperial and neo-colonial power.
While focusing principally on the period 1880–1960, and on
British writing, students will also have an opportunity to
consider texts which address questions of overseas
domination in earlier periods and to consider more recent
writing which reflects on the legacy of Britain’s imperial
past.
Among topics which students may wish to
study are: representations of the effects of political and
economic exploitation of empire; the role of questions of
gender, class and sexuality in imperial discourse; the
representation of subject peoples; the anxieties of empire;
the uses of landscape in imperial fiction; the relationship
between colonial and postcolonial writing.
Among authors whom students may study
are:
Kipling, Conrad, Rushdie, Forster, V.S. Naipaul, Behn,
Defoe, Lessing, Cary, Waugh, Burgess, Boyd, Grassic Gibbon,
Greene, Schreiner, Scott, Shakespeare, F.A. Steel, Yeats,
Joyce, etc.
This unit will examine the range of
literature produced since 1947 in the regions of the world
formerly under British rule. Students may study literature
from the former ‘white Dominions’ such as Australia and
Canada, as well as literature from Asia, Africa and the
Caribbean and work produced by the various diasporas of
Commonwealth origin within contemporary Western societies
such as Britain.
Among themes which may be studied are:
representations of ‘the metropolitan centre’ and ‘the
periphery’; disillusion with independence; problems of
identity and cultural identification; exile and diaspora;
neo-colonialism; the role of the intellectual and the
artist; the subversion of Western literary form; the usages
of the English language; problems and opportunities of the
postcolonial woman.
Among authors whose work may be studied
are:
Achebe, Ngugi, Soyinka, Narayan, Desai, Aidoo, Harris,
Brathwaite, Collins, Phillips, Atwood, Hulme, Head, Naipaul,
Mo, Rushdie, Lovelace, Emecheta.
This unit aims to acquaint students with
a wide variety of theoretical approaches to literary texts
which have been adopted in literary studies over the past 30
years: marxist, feminist, structuralist, post-structuralist,
new-historicist and psychoanalytic approaches are included,
along with the discussion of the reader’s role in literary
meaning and the elements of ‘narratology’ – the study of the
principles of narrative. Its focus is on the possibilities
for practical applications of reading strategies in the
student’s own encounters with literary works, rather than on
the study of major theorists and their writings. Students
taking this unit should find that their studies on other
units will benefit from acquaintance with a broader
repertoire of interpretative strategies and with arguments
that are fundamental to literary understanding.
The unit’s focus on the multiple
possibilities of reading and interpretation is consolidated
in the special study of a single work and of the critical
approaches appropriate to it: Mary Shelley’s novel
Frankenstein is adopted as the ‘set’ text for this
purpose.
Students will study Frankenstein
in Johanna M. Smith’s critical edition (1992), and will
choose to follow introductory guides to modern theory
including the following:
Raman Selden: Practising Theory and Reading Literature
(1989); David Buchbinder: Contemporary Literary Theory
and the Reading of Poetry (1991); Jeremy Hawthorn:
Unlocking the Text (1987); Terry Eagleton: Literary
Theory (1983); Toril Moi: Sexual/Textual Politics
(1985); Terence Hawkes: Structuralism and Semiotics
(1977).
This unit looks at writing from the
period known as Romantic, which for the purposes of the
syllabus is considered as spanning approximately 40 years,
from 1789 to 1830. It is the poetry of the Romantic period
which tends to be better known, but much interesting and
characteristic prose writing – fiction and non-fiction – was
also produced at this time, from gothic novels to critical
writing. This unit will consider both poetry and prose of
the period.
The topics which may be studied include
the Romantics and revolution, concepts of the Imagination,
the Sublime, Nature, Romantic subjectivities, Romantic
orientalism and Romantic theories of language. There will be
an emphasis on the political and social context and the unit
will include some Romantic political writing.
The following authors are among those you
may choose to study:
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, Blake, Clare, Byron, Shelley,
Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, William Godwin,
Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, James Hogg, Thomas de Quincey.
This unit encourages students to
formulate and complete a personal programme of study.
Students will develop a series of projects, using skills and
concepts which they have encountered in units which have
been studied previously. Some projects may be similar to
work done in other units and some may focus on establishing
links between such units. Other work may address issues and
themes not considered elsewhere on the BA programme.
Individual advanced personal study programmes may include: a
detailed examination of one or more authors; comparison of
works by different authors in relation to particular issues
and themes, or critical problems; more advanced study of
theoretical approaches to literary and cultural studies;
studies of particular genres; an examination of writing
techniques; study of some literature not originally written
in English.
Attention will be given to all phases of
the programme, from deciding on a suitable range of projects
to prepare, to preparing for the examination. No specific
reading is required for this unit, since students will be
constructing their own courses of study, in conjunction with
the advice given in the subject guide and in the
Handbook. In the examination, students will be expected
to demonstrate that they have undertaken some original work,
which is not entirely derived from work in other units of
the degree. The range of topics to be examined will include
literary, theoretical, generic and conceptual areas of
study.
