“By creating we think, by living we learn” Patrick Geddes
With sixteen full-time teachers, we cover all aspects of current literary study, but are small enough to be able to deal personally and individually with our students.
We teach the traditional topics of English Literature but also the literatures of America (North and South), of Scotland, and of many other parts of the English-speaking world.
An exciting new development is the introduction of modules in Film Studies and Creative Writing.
There is an undergraduate Literary Society - visit their website.
Each year, a lively drama group stages a play - perhaps a piece of English mediaeval drama.
Our students take advantage, too, of the extraordinary cultural resources available close-by: Dundee's award-winning repertory theatre and Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), an arts complex including a cutting-edge art gallery and art-cinema facilities.
English is also home to the University's Creative Writing Professor.
| Introduction to Literary Study - EN11001 | Semester 1 | Credits 20 |
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| What makes a novel a novel? What is distinctive about poetry? How do you analyse a play in performance? The course explores a diverse range of drama, fiction and poetry. | ||
| Approaches to Modern Literature - EN12002 | Semester 2 | Credits 20 |
| This module develops the ideas about literature and about ways of thinking about it, introduced in the previous module. The texts covered are a wide-ranging selection of twentieth-century and contemporary writings, reflecting the achievement of a period which produced much that was both great and accessible. | ||
| Reading the Screen: An Introduction to Film Studies - EN11003 | Semesters 1 & 2 | Credits 20 |
| This module will focus on the creative and ideological implications of film, concentrating on topics such as mise en scene, auteur theory, genre and representation. | ||
| Fear and Desire in English Literature - EN21001 | Semester 1 | Credits 20 |
|---|---|---|
| A stimulating new course which forms an imaginative introduction to literature from the Medieval period to the 18th Century. A varied selection of texts of all kinds will be studied, focused by the themes of Fear and Desire. | ||
| Stories of the Self and Other | ||
| A new course, surveying Romantic and Victorian Literature (from Burns to Conrad) and paying particular attention to the way fiction in the 1890s developed out of earlier strands and tendencies. | ||
| Classic Hollywood Cinema: An Excessively Obvious Cinema - EN21003 | Semester 1 | Credits 20 |
| Looking at the economic, political and social implications of The Golden Age of 1930's Hollywood, the module looks at the role of the Studio System, stressing the role of the film industry and its relation to the US Government during the Second World War. | ||
| Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Street - EN22004 | Semester 2 | Credits 20 |
| Film Noir moves the study of film into a dark and abstract environment with a focus on questions of urban social order. | ||
Study Abroad students may take level 3 modules, however, evidence of prior knowledge may be required in the form of transcripts. To find out more about this contact us.
| Film Art - EN32020 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
|---|---|---|
| This module will look at various aspects of film studies such as the art film, the avant-garde and animation to examine the idea of cinema as an art form. The module will consider notions of film as a narrative and industrial medium. It will also explore film's relation to older art forms - such as music and painting - and other facets of popular culture. | ||
| European Cinema - EN31013 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| This course will provide an introduction to European cinema from the 1930s to the present day. It will examine key movements - such as neo-realism and the nouvelle vague - and the work of leading directors - such as Renoir, Fellini, Godard and Herzog - while also looking at notions of art cinema, national cinema and European cinema's relationship with Hollywood. | ||
| Modern Literary Theory - EN31004 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| This module develops students' knowledge of critical principles and theoretical concepts. It introduces students to the critical schools and theoretical approaches that have been most influential in the twentieth century. | ||
| Renaissance Literature - EN31010 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| The course includes representative samples of drama, poetry, and prose from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Epic poems are sampled. Issues discussed comprise gender, the uses and abuses of power, and religious and psychological conflict. | ||
| Mediaeval Literature - EN32003 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| This module introduces students to key texts from the mediaeval period. Students will become familiar with the main literary genres of the 14th and 15th centuries through a detailed study of a selection of mediaeval poetry, drama and prose, read in Modern English translation. | ||
| Other Americas: Ideology and Texts in Contemporary Culture - EN31006 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| The aims of the module are to explore issues of difference and community in contemporary American society and to examine ways in which oppositional voices are represented. Materials for discussion include film as well as literary texts. | ||
| Post-Colonial Texts - EN31011 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| How do writers bear witness to social, cultural and political changes in the aftermath of empire? What is at stake in the definition of cultural identity? Why choose to write in English? This module addresses the impact of colonialism on a small selection of literary and filmic texts from Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and Canada. | ||
| Modernism and Modernity - EN32005 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| This module studies poetry and fiction from 1890-1945. It explores the concept of Modernism, as a series of experimental styles, in relation to modernity, the social and political contexts Modernism responded to (such as technological change, urbanism, psychology, feminism, and the Great War). | ||
| Sensibility, Sublimity and the Gothic in Romantic Period Literature - EN31007 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| This course studies the poetry, prose and fiction of the Romantic Period (1780-1830). Among the topics discussed are the literature of Sensibility, the Gothic Novel, the Sublime and the Beautiful, Oriental Fictions, women poets and Romanticism, landscape and the City. Writers featured on the course include Jane Austen, Anne Radcliffe, Mathew Lewis, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Thomas de Quincey. | ||
| Literature in Scotland after the Union of 1707: 18th and 19th Centuries - EN32002 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| How does a country come to terms with the strange new status in which Scotland found itself after the Union of the Parliaments? And how did Scottish writers reflect the tensions arising from this state? Burns, of course, is one of the authors studied, but he is placed in the context of many others. | ||
| American Literature - EN32001 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| This course confines itself to the 19th century before, during, and after the civil war. It examines the roots and nature of individualism, and the tensions created by such individualism within an emergent society. There are also two first-person slave narratives on the course, along with major prose and poetry by women. | ||
| Victorian Literature - EN32008 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| This module increases students' knowledge of writing in the Victorian period, particularly the novel and poetry, by considering Victorian writing in its literary and cultural context. | ||
| Postmodern Identities/Postmodern Histories 1960-2000 - EN32012 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| This module introduces students to a range of British Literature (drama, fiction and poetry) of the period 1960-2000, especially literature that engages with the key postmodern themes of history and the subject' (identity). | ||
| Old English - EN41004 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
|---|---|---|
| This module aims to introduce students to key texts and their sources from the literature of the period c. 600-1000 the beginnings of English literature, as it were. Though module texts will be read in Modern English translation, students can learn more about the original language (i.e. Old English) in a series of optional, informal language classes. | ||
Study Abroad students may take level 4 modules, however, evidence of prior knowledge may be required in the form of transcripts. To find out more about this contact us.
| Dissertation | ||
|---|---|---|
| This module allows students to develop an individual project on an agreed topic and to study it in depth over an extended period. | ||
| Crime and Detection in American Fiction - EN41015 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| This module explores the evolution of crime and detective fiction from Poe through Chandler and Hammett to Walter Mosley and Patricia Cornwell. Issues of race, class and gender are considered, along with the role of the city and the iconography of the private eye. | ||
| H.G.Wells, Science Fiction and Film - EN41016 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| This module studies the synergy between Wells's science fiction and optical technologies, especially cinema, considering critical subject matter, narrative influence and adaptation. It places his texts within the historical and cultural context of modernity, to explore their futuristic speculations about the impact of new media. | ||
| The Films of Akira Kurosawa | ||
| This module will focus on the work of Japanese master Akira Kurosawa from the 1940s to the 1980s. It will examine his complex relationship with Hollywood, world cinema and his own national cinema. The course will enable students to forge an in-depth understanding of Kurosawa's work and trace its development over four decades of film history. | ||
| The Literature of Terror: British and American Gothic Writing - EN42004 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| This course studies the growth and development of Gothic writing in Britain and America from the nineteenth century to the present. It includes topics such as the Gothic novel, the vampire, American Gothic, and the haunted house and engages with contemporary theories of the uncanny and the monstrous. Writers studied include Poe, Stoker, Rice, Hawthorne, Henry James, Stephen King and Thomas Harris. | ||
| Literature of the 20th Century: Scottish Literary Renaissance - EN42007 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| The 20th Century has been one of the greatest of all periods of Scottish Literature, thanks to an astonishing outburst of talent and energy from Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and others. The course looks at a variety of authors and texts in the half-century following 1920. | ||
| The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Modernism and Feminism | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| This module introduces you to Woolf's novels, from The Voyage Out to Between the Acts. Reading them, you will be transported by her elegant, startling, buoyant sentences to a world where everything in modern life (cinema, sexuality, shopping, art, education, feminism, politics, war and so on) is explored and questioned and re-fashioned. | ||
| Two Renaissance Novels: Arcadia (1593) and Don Quixote (1605, 1615) - EN41018 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| 'Two Renaissance Novels' introduces students to two seminal works in the history of the novel, Sidney's Arcadia (1593) and Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615). Through close reading, students learn to appreciate the cultural and political issues, and rhetorical strategies, that characterise these enduring masterpieces. | ||
| Special Author: Shakespeare - EN41001 | Semester 1 | Credits 30 |
| This module explores the relationship between Shakespeare's plays and film versions, adaptations and derivations. Plays covered include comedies, histories and tragedies, with films from the silent era, through the Olivier and Branagh revolutions to contemporary Hollywood. | ||
| Re-Imagining Britain: Literature after the End of Empire - EN42013 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| This module explores the impact of empire, the complex legacy of colonialism on the post-war cultural imagination, and the concept of Britishness. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it explores the responses of multicultural communities as they seek to come to re-imagine a very different vision of a nation and home. | ||
| Mid-Victorian Fiction - EN42003 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| This module introduces students to major mid-Victorian novels and develops the student's understanding of critical and cultural issues related to mid-Victorian fiction. | ||
| Poetry from Victorian to Modern - EN42006 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| The transition from the Victorian period to Modernism was arguably the most significant shift in writing and sensibility since Romanticism, and one which has shaped much subsequent culture down to the present. This course explores the work of four of the greatest poets of the time – Hopkins, Hardy, Eliot, and Yeats. | ||
| American Modernist Poetry: An Introduction - EN42010 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| This module introduces you to some of the finest modern poets of America, many of whom spent their lives in Paris or London; others, who stayed mainly in America, whether in Harlem or New Jersey, still dominated the European scene. | ||
| Vision in Film, Literature and Culture - EN42017 | Semester 2 | Credits 30 |
| This new Level 4 module focuses on the meaning and nature of the visual, the representation of vision and the act of looking or watching. These issues are addressed through a diverse range of texts, including film, television drama, literature, art theory, cultural theory and theory of photography. | ||
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