Chinese Studies and English Literature BA Hons

3

3rd for French, German, Spanish, Italian

The Complete University Guide

(2023)

6

6th for Creative Writing

The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide

(2023)

7

7th for English

The Guardian University Guide

(2023)

In this year-long module you will encounter a broad range of literature -- from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, moving from Chaucer, through Shakespeare and Milton, to Virginia Woolf, Alison Bechdel, Paul Muldoon, and many others. You will also encounter a whole range of literary genres including plays, films, short stories, novels, poetry, essays, and the graphic novel. The module is currently focused around themes related to: Englishness and Empire; Authority and Revolution; Gender, Body, and Voice; and Adaptation and Queering. The module concludes with a range of mini-modules relating literary research to real-world scenarios; recent options have included: Mediaeval Manuscripts in the Digital Age; Creating a Literary Podcast; Building Minecraft Worlds for the Teaching of Literature; Creating a Literary Tour; Reading Lancaster Priory; and Re-writing Waiting for Godot.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

Would you like to be able to communicate using Mandarin Chinese? Do you want to acquire key elements to become an expert of Chinese culture, society, and institutions? We focus on teaching absolute beginners how to speak, listen, and read so you can confidently use day-to-day Chinese. You’ll also be given the opportunity to learn about Chinese culture, history, and contemporary society.

You will have the opportunity to learn Chinese pronunciation and intonation, the basics of Chinese grammar, key sentence structures, and insights about the graphical element of writing, such as the significance of types of strokes, radicals, and their ancestral meaning.

To explore Chinese culture, you are given the chance to examine how key moments in Chinese history have shaped contemporary Chinese culture. We will look at examples including films, plays, and novels.

All DeLC first year language programmes are supported by a series of plenary sessions and film screenings designed to offer students further opportunities to expand and consolidate their knowledge and skills base. The DELC100/101 programme runs for 22 weeks and consists of language-specific film screenings relevant to their course(s) in addition to skills-based plenary sessions. The module is non credit-bearing but students are expected to attend so as to acquire complementary skills useful in areas such as oral presentations, essay-writing and engaging with culture alongside useful strategies to enhance autonomous language learning outside the classroom. Towards the end of the programme, to help students prepare for their exams, plenary sessions offer help and advice on managing revision time efficiently and identifying strategies and techniques to suit individual learning styles and needs.

This module comprises of both oral and aural skills, to be taken alongside the corresponding Written Language module. It builds upon skills gained in the first year. Students who have taken the Intensive language course in their first year normally follow this course throughout the second year.

The module aims to enhance students’ linguistic proficiency in spoken Chinese in a range of formal and informal settings (both spontaneous and prepared). Specific attention will be given to developing good, accurate pronunciation and intonations as well as fluency, accuracy of grammar, and vocabulary when speaking the language.

This module also aims at broadening students’ knowledge about different aspects of modern Chinese-speaking societies, politics and culture, and contemporary issues and institutions.

By the end of this module, we hope you will have enhanced your comprehension of the spoken language, as used in both formal speech, and in everyday life situations including those that they may encounter in Chinese-speaking countries.

This module comprises of both oral and aural skills, to be taken alongside the corresponding Written Language module. It builds upon skills gained in the first year of the Intensive course. Students who have taken the Intensive language course in their first year, normally follow this course throughout the second year.

The module aims to enhance students’ linguistic proficiency in spoken Chinese in a range of formal and informal settings (both spontaneous and prepared). Specific attention will be given to developing good, accurate pronunciation and intonations well as fluency, accuracy of grammar, and vocabulary when speaking the language.

This module also aims at broadening students’ knowledge about different aspects of modern society, politics and culture, and contemporary issues and institutions in order to prepare them for residence abroad in their 3rd year.

By the end of this module, students will have had the opportunity to enhance their comprehension of the spoken language, as used in both formal speech, and in everyday life situations including those that they may encounter in Chinese-speaking countries.

This module comprises of reading and writing skills to be taken alongside the Oral Skills module.

This module aims to consolidate skills gained by students in the first year of study, and enable them to build a level of competence and confidence required to familiarise themselves with the culture and society of countries where their studied language is spoken.

The module aims to enhance your proficiency in understanding written Chinese, as well as in the writing of Chinese (notes, reports, summaries, essays, projects, etc.) including translation from and into Chinese; and the systematic study of Chinese lexis, grammar and syntax.

The module aims to enhance your linguistic proficiency, with particular emphasis on reading a variety of sources and on writing fluently and accurately in the language, in a variety of registers.

This module comprises of reading and writing skills to be taken alongside the Oral Skills module.

This module aims to consolidate skills you have developed in the first year of study, and enable you to build a level of competence and confidence required to familiarise yourselves with the culture and society of countries where your studied language is spoken.

The module aims to enhance your proficiency in understanding spoken Chinese, as well as in the writing of Chinese (notes, reports, summaries, essays, projects, etc.) including translation from and into Chinese; and the systematic study of Chinese lexis, grammar and syntax.

The module aims to enhance your linguistic proficiency, with particular emphasis on reading a variety of sources and on writing fluently and accurately in the language, in a variety of registers.

This module is designed for students who have already completed an A-level in Chinese or whose Chinese is of a broadly similar standard. The language element aims to enable students both to consolidate and improve their skills in spoken and written Chinese. A further aim is to provide students with an introduction to the historical and cultural development of China in the past, and also to contemporary institutions and society.

Seminars are based on a textbook, and emphasis is placed on the acquisition of vocabulary and a firm grasp of Chinese grammatical structures. You will have the opportunity to develop listening and speaking skills through discussions and activities and with the support of audio and visual materials.

You are given the chance to examine how key moments in Chinese history have shaped contemporary Chinese culture. We will look at examples including films, plays, and novels.

This module is a non-credit bearing module. If you are a major student going abroad in your second or third year you are enrolled on it during the year prior to your departure, and timetabled to attend the events. These include: introduction to the International Placement Year and choice of activities; British Council English Language Assistantships and how to apply; introduction to partner universities and how they function; working in companies abroad; fiNAce during the International Placement Year; research skills and questionnaire design; teaching abroad; curriculum writing and employability skills; and welfare and wellbeing.

This modules focuses on the ‘must-know’ historical moments, political events and aesthetic movements that shaped Chinese and Sinophone cultures in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

You will hone your skills in cultural analysis via diverse media as we explored four topics:

This year-long module enables you to explore both what literary criticism currently is and what it may yet become. You will have the opportunity to consider a whole range of major theoretical and philosophical concepts, such as the body, race, gender, violence, ecology, God, time, death, war, self, and the animal, etc. We currently look at a range of fascinating modern thinkers, ranging from Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, through to more recent figures such as Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Fred Moten, Cornel West, and Sara Ahmed. You will have the opportunity to write in both short and long form, to present orally alongside fellow students, and to explore, if you wish, radically experimental modes of theoretical writing.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This course explores how American Literature has evolved from its colonial origins to the dynamic voices of the nineteenth century. What we call ‘American Literature’ and how we define America and ‘the American experience’ depends on who is writing and to whom. We shall encounter many different voices, many conflicting and contrasting views, a diversity of complex experience and a great range of writing in form and style. The module will be broadly thematic in its approach, aiming to build up through recurring themes, images, questions and stylistic features, an increasingly complex picture of the literature created mostly by English-speaking Americans. We will explore America’s twin fascinations with empire and liberty and think, in particular, about writers who have written with dissenting voices against a variety of forms of oppression. The module engages with the emergence of distinctively American forms of Romanticism and the Gothic.

The seminar programme has been designed to make use of the tremendous range of material offered by the Norton as well as focusing on certain important authors and texts. So sometimes we shall be reading a number of shorter selections on a particular theme, and at other times we’ll spend one or two whole seminars on a single text or writer. The early seminars on the course are meant to introduce a number of important issues that will give you a framework for later texts (their relevance will become increasingly clear), but the texts are also important in their own right though they may seem strange to you. You’re encouraged to use your Norton and read beyond the texts selected for the seminars, especially when writing your essays. Read the headnotes for every author whose work you're asked to read for a seminar.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module is divided into key areas across the two terms: Revolution; The Self; Politics and Poetics; and the Gothic.

We will begin by examining revolutionary writing of the Romantic period, including the poetry of such writers as Anna Barbauld, William Blake, and William Wordsworth, and the prose of such writers as Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft. We will then consider ideas of the self in the poetry of such writers as Charlotte Smith and Letitia Landon, Lord Byron’s Manfred, and the labouring-class writing of John Clare.

We also examine the relationship between politics and poetics for the second-generation poets such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and then, the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and the orientalism of S. T. Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey. Finally, the module will turn its attention to the popular literary movement of ‘Gothic’ which emerges during the Romantic period, exploring its manifestation in a range of texts that may include Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Joanna Baillie’s play De Montfort, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The module aims to give students a sense of the diverse range of writers in this period. We will use the close knowledge of key texts to tackle some of the wider, more abstract ideas such as: nature, the imagination, and the sublime. We will also consider literary ideas within a broader social, historical and philosophical context.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

The details of this module (for example, the materials studied) vary from year to year.

How do films deal with topics such as immigration, environment, the posthuman and gender? Do they entertain viewers, instruct them, or both?

This module explores European, Latin American, and Chinese films in their social and historical contexts; the topics mentioned are the focus of key lectures and seminars. The module begins with introductory lectures on cinema and society and on film aesthetics and content. The main aim is to make connections between the films and such contexts not only on the level of narrative, characterisation and dialogue, but also on that of form and technique.

The years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) saw great social, political, and cultural change, as new technologies radically altered the ways in which many people thought about themselves and the world. Examining a wide range of Victorian texts, this module is structured around four major themes: ‘Socio-Political Change’; ‘Realism, Idealism, and Fantasy’; ‘Falls and Losses’; and ‘Personal Experience and Perspective.’ This year-long module will explore the role literature plays in debates about progress, science, revolution, Englishness, empire, class, death, and sexuality; and will examine a wide range of Victorian authors including, for example, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Bronte, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

As part of The International Placement Year you will normally spend at least eight months abroad in your third year. You will have the opportunity to:

This module includes authentic texts only slightly adapted from the originals, with a special focus on contemporary Chinese society and institutions. You will have the opportunity to learn how to communicate comprehensively and systematically using the appropriate expressions and language norms in the right context.

You’ll have the opportunity to develop your skills in understanding and joining political, academic and journalistic discussions using advanced Chinese language skills. An aim of this module is for you to be able to translate between English and Chinese and develop an idiomatic style of formal writing.

It’s not necessary to have studied the Part I, Chinese Language 2 or 3 modules in order to continue on to this module. However you must have reached a CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) B1-B2 level of Chinese proficiency.

This module is integrated with the Chinese Language 4 module.

This module has two main aims. The first one is to enhance your linguistic proficiency with emphasis on understanding of spoken and written Chinese, the speaking of Chinese (prepared and spontaneous) in both formal and informal settings, the writing of Chinese, and the systematic study of Chinese lexis, grammar and syntax. The second aim is to increase your awareness, knowledge and understanding of contemporary China.

By the end of this module we aim for you to have an informed interest in the society and culture of the Chinese-speaking world. You should also have acquired almost native-speaker abilities in both spoken and written language.

Course Aims and Objectives:

The final-year Dissertation is your opportunity to devise, research, and explore a topic of your own choice through a programme of directed independent study. You will be helped to begin your thinking at the end of your second year and then, through your third year, you will develop your research, thinking, and writing, as you build toward a maximum of 10,000 words. You will be supported throughout by your appointed supervisor, with whom you will have four 40-minite one-to-one tutorials. In addition, there are two overview lectures (one in the Michaelmas Term and one in the Lent Term) as well as four research skills seminars.

Almost anything is possible: some students explore famous literary names or themes, whilst others explore obscure figures and unusual topics; some draw on the University Library’s special collections or those housed within The Ruskin Library, whilst others go way beyond Lancaster to develop their research; some are inspired by the medievalism of historic Lancaster or the Romanticism of nearby Lake District, whilst others are drawn to the far textual shores of the digital world; some build towards MA study, whilst others build toward the world of work; and, finally, some write in classic literary critical styles, whilst others push the boundaries of literary studies in all sorts of new and startling ways.

Recent topics have included:

In 21st Century Theory, we will build upon the general introduction to critical and cultural theory given on ENGL201 by focusing on one specific theme in contemporary theory: biopolitics. To explore biopolitics – or the politics of life itself – we will examine a selection of classic theoretical works by Michel Foucault, Georgio Agamben and others and then read them alongside some key literary and filmic texts from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to the Batman Trilogy. This course will seek to address the following questions. What exactly is biopolitics? How have theorists, novelists and film-makers imagined such concepts as sovereign power, bare life, the state of exception and so on? To what extent might it be possible to resist the biopolitical hold over our political imaginary?

The course will begin with writing that looks back to the First World War, and end with writing that anticipates the Second World War. In between, you will explore and interrogate the inter-war ‘moment’ through close attention to texts by such as

D.H. Lawrence,

The details of this module (for example the texts or authors studied) may vary from year to year.

In this module we will look at a selection of biblical texts alongside literary works that appropriate, rewrite, and subvert them. We will be thinking about the Bible as literature; the reciprocal relationship between the Bible and literature; what the Bible does to a literary text. We will explore questions such as: in what ways does awareness of the Bible provoke more profound readings of a literary text? and does rewriting refine or subvert the Bible? We currently study work by such as Margaret Attwood, William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Angela Carter, John Donne, and Sylvia Plath, as well as Terence Mallick’s film The Tree of Life.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module will focus upon the motif of ‘the child’ within 20th and 21st century horror fiction and film, and aims to explore the cultural significance of this motif through analysis of themes such as innocence and evil, psychic powers, child abuse, parenting, technology and grief. The module will develop in students a sophisticated ability to think critically and analytically about how an exploration of popular fiction and film can reveal deep cultural anxieties and fixations at both historical and psychological levels. We currently explore literary texts such as Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898), Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now (1973), and Stephen King, The Shining (1977), and films such as The Bad Seed (1956), dir. Mervyn LeRoy, The Exorcist (1973), dir. William Friedkin, and Hereditary (2018), dir. Ari Aster.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module introduces you to major themes that shape the experience of contemporary city dwellers: gender, social inequality, and practices of citizenship. These interlinking themes will be introduced through novels, poetry and films on the following European, North American (with the emphasis on immigrant communities within its cities) and Latin American cities: New York, Mexico City, Santiago de Chile, Barcelona, Berlin, and Los Angeles.

Each topic will be covered though an introductory lecture and a core text, followed by a range of additional texts for students to analyse. During workshops students will share their findings and opinions, emphasizing on identifying links between the topics studied, aiming to encourage discussion.

The format of the module encourages cross-referencing between the themes of the module (for example, gender and sexuality are relevant to an analysis of social inequality, and vice versa).

This module explores different kinds of contemporary literature: postmodern, Gothic, postcolonial/world, post-9/11, feminist/queer, experimental, etc. Beginning in the 1950s, we consider the explosion of new literatures from the decolonising
ewly postcolonial world and the rise of new literary forms in the post-war period. Recurrent themes include borders, margins, haunting, apocalypse, rewriting, migration, and metamorphosis. Texts currently studied include Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958), Alan Moore,?& D. Gibbons, Watchmen (1987), Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places (2000), Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000), Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003), Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (2008), Mary Talbot and Bryan Talbot, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (2012), and Sally Rooney, Normal People (2018).

The details of this module (for example the texts or authors studied) may vary from year to year.

The twenty-first century has seen the emergence of Middle Eastern literature in English and translation as one of the most exciting new areas of world literature. The region has experienced, so far this century, the ‘war on terror’, revolutions and wintery aftermaths, civil wars, sectarian violence, the rise and fall of ‘Islamic State’, and an ongoing refugee crisis. On this course, we will explore some of the shapes and styles of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, the concerns and aspirations that drive it, and its growing international visibility. We will study novels, short stories, and new genres from the region, in English and in translation.

No prior knowledge is needed.

Course Outline:

This module is run by the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, with the support of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Engagement team and the central Careers Team. It aims to enhance students’ employability by providing an assessed work placement opportunity as an optional module It will also encourage students actively to think about the transferability of skills gained through the study of English Literature and/or Creative Writing.

The Department, via the FASS Engagement team, will set up a number of work placements in the (broadly defined) culture, heritage and creative sectors: with, for example, publishers, museums, newspapers, heritage sites, and arts venues. Students may alternatively source their own work placements, subject to prior discussion with the FASS Placements provider. Information on how to source a placement will be circulated to all enrolled students during summer.

Recent placements include: Copywriter at Copify; Publishing and Editorial Intern at Saraband; Project Assistant at Lancaster City Council; Communications Assistant at Three Left Feet Theatre Company.

Students must be prepared to pay their own transport/accommodation costs, though a small Departmental contribution toward travel can be applied for. It is expected that placements will be either close to Lancaster University or to the student’s home; many placements occur remotely. Students typically work for 30-40 hours with their host organization (not all of which will necessarily be on-site) in the Lent term.

They maintain contact with both the departmental course convenor and FASS placements team throughout the placement period. Placement providers are required to complete risk assessment and health and safety forms and to ensure an induction process. Both students and placement providers are required to sign a Learning Agreement.

Please note that you

cannot

both

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Please also note that the maximum number of students on this course is

fixed

This module aims at exploring the nature of the relationship between the individual and society, notions of progress and economic justice, as these are still widely debated topics in contemporary Europe in light of the current economic and political crisis.

This module will use the concepts of utopia, dystopia and ideology as a forum for discussion on the relationship between individual imagination and social discourse in the nineteenth century, as well as the relationship between fiction and political discourse. You will look at the major intellectual debates which influenced the contemporary European thought after the French Revolution.

You will explore the development of major ideologies and cultural movements such as Romanticism, Marxism, Socialism and Positivism, spanning from the period immediately following the French Revolution to the middle of the nineteenth century.

This module will give students the opportunity to study all the major works of one of the most celebrated novelists in English literary history. It will combine close attention to the stylistic textures and narrative strategies of Jane Austen’s fiction with broader consideration of key themes and preoccupations such as friendship, desire, matchmaking, snobbery, illness, resistance, transgression and secrecy.

Film historians consider 1939 to be ‘the greatest year in the history of Hollywood,’ a year in which 365 films were released and 80 million tickets sold. This module considers how literature and film interact and conflict in that year to construct mythologies of the American past and present in the context of the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War. The module also considers the context of Hollywood, the functions of motion picture palaces, American film’s relationship to British literature, and more. Texts currently studied include John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937), Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1846), and Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and films such as Mr Smith Goes to Washington, dir. Frank Capra, Gunga Din, dir. George Stevens, and Gone with the Wind, dir. Victor Fleming.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

Friedrich Nietzsche was far from alone in suggesting that God had died by the end of the nineteenth century; however, the literature of the fin de siècle (c. 1880-1914) paints a very different picture from the one offered by those who suggest that religion simply disappeared. A number of prominent writers in the period converted to Catholicism, whilst others explored the permeable boundaries between orthodox belief and esoteric spirituality. Those who turned to literature to think about religion did so in a wide variety of ways: experimenting with form, narrating religious experience, exploring the relationship between spirit and matter, and thinking about religious practice in ways both conventional and bizarre. Texts currently studied include: Oscar Wilde, Salome, G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown, and poetry produced by the Decadent movement.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

Is it possible to ‘read’ a painting? Can an artist interpret a poem in paint? This module addresses the complex relationship between literature and the visual arts, tracing key debates in aesthetic theory from Romanticism to the twenty-first century. Literature and the Visual Arts will begin with an introduction to key critical terms and an examination of the painting-inspired poetry of, for example, John Keats and W. H. Auden. Subsequent seminars will explore the work of figures such as William Blake, John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites who blur the distinction between literature and art; the revival of the Pop Art tradition and postmodern narrative practices; the advent of photography; and, finally, the fusion of word and image in graphic novels including texts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. The module will draw on the unique resources of the University’s Ruskin Library and rare book archive.

What is the connection between masculinity and modernity? Ideas about modern manhood have had significant influence around the world since the ‘globalisation’ wrought by colonisation and imperialism in the nineteenth century. In the face of the vigorous physicality and scientific education of men trained in the classrooms and sports fields of industrialised Western countries, Confucian models of masculinity such as the talented young scholar and the cultivated gentleman seemed outdated and effete. People began to wonder if the Qing Dynasty’s ‘decline’ in power and status and susceptibility to foreign invasion could somehow be due to the poor quality of her men. Reflecting the link between masculinity and the nation, an unflattering moniker was coined for China: ‘The sick man of East Asia’.

The story of China’s engagement with modernity since then can be told in large part through the shifting models of manhood that have variously appeared, disappeared, or been reworked throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This module focuses on the search for new icons of masculinity in a modernising China, introducing students to key discursive notions such as “Mr Science” and “Mr Democracy” in the Republican era; the worker-soldier-peasant triad in the Mao era; the peasant heroes of the immediate post-Mao years; and the “explosive” nouveau riche, white-collar, migrant worker, and “little fresh meat” masculinities of the market-infused postsocialist era.

You will analyse how cultural products present and critique notions of Chinese masculinities. Material is considered for its significance in key debates about masculinities, and may include novels, short stories, essays, graphic posters, art, music, films, TV drama series and reality shows, online dramas, websites, as well as secondary literature from a range of academic disciplines.

Language: This module is taught in English. Sources are routinely accessed in Chinese, so a working knowledge of the language is required.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

Exploring a range of texts and genres from 1790s to the 1820s, this module will consider the importance of the physical human body, in both health and sickness. Examining the historical context in which these texts were written, we will look at such topics as illness, death, doctors, medical treatments, recreational drug use, pregNAcy, disability, physical strength, sexuality, sensuality, health, race, gender, physiognomy, and phrenology. We shall consider such questions as: how did Romantic poets and prose writers imagine the body? what did they think of the distinction between the mind and body or between the body and soul? how was the body understood medically? and how are people made ‘monsters’ in the period, and for what political purposes? The module will explore how bodies are not to be thought of as neutral or ahistorical but instead as historically-contingent sites of dispute.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

How are acts of desire, murder, fake and ‘real’ deaths represented on stage in early modern drama and how are these experiences gendered? This module will explore both the construction and deconstruction of death, desire, and genders, by focusing on performance. The performativity of gender, on stage and beyond, was materialised in the theatres of early modern England where boys played female roles, thus often representing both female desire and same-sex desire at the same time. We will study texts by Marlowe, Middleton, Heywood, Webster, Wroth as well as some contemporary productions and film adaptations. We will also engage in some short practical explorations -- such as getting the text ‘on its feet’; and the module will culminate in a series of short presentations and performances by the group. No previous experience of (or expertise in) acting is necessary.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

It’s an illuminating fact that the very phrase ‘climate change’ was first deployed by colonising thinkers who wanted to transform local environments to serve their purposes. Today, it is clearer than ever that the catastrophic effects of global climate change will be most keenly felt by the global poor, especially in colonised or postcolonial spaces. This module explores how postcolonial writing, from a variety of locations, grapples with environmental change, crisis and collapse, especially the looming spectres of the so-called ‘Anthropocene.’ We’ll read established and emerging voices from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Texts currently studied include: Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, J M Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, and V S Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module is run as a partnership between the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing and the University’s Schools Outreach Office, and normally involves a 10-week placement in a local school. This will usually include classroom observation, teacher assistance, and the opportunity to design and develop a teaching-related ‘special project’ to be conducted with a designated group of students or the class as a whole. This will enable you to develop confidence in communicating your subject, as well as an increased awareness of the roles of schools and universities in educational processes and structures.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module will trace the development of science fiction (or SF) in literature and film, providing an insight into the conventions of the genre and, in particular, how the key themes of the science fiction genre have been successfully adapted for the screen. It will encompass narratives of time travel, evolution, and temporal dislocation, and consider journeys, encounters, and species, as well as questions of human subjectivity, gender, race, transcendence, love, and loss. Work currently studied include texts such as: H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895), Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979), and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019); and films such as: La Jetée (1962) 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), and Arrival (2016).

The details of this module (for example the texts or authors studied) may vary from year to year.

Ben Jonson claimed of Shakespeare ‘he was not of an age but for all time.’ This course examines Shakespearean drama and poetry in its own time: as a platform in which early modern debates about agency and government, family, national identity, were put into play, and in relation to how we perceive these issues now. The stage was and is a place in which questions of gender, class, race, gain immediacy through the bodies and voices of actors. By examining texts from across Shakespeare’s career, we will explore their power to shape thoughts and feelings in their own age and in ours. We will consider Shakespeare’s manipulation of genre (poetry, comedy, history, tragedy and romance) and the ways the texts make active use of language (verse, prose, rhyme, rhythm) and theatrical languages (costume, stage positions) to generate meaning. The course will consider how, in the past and in the present, Shakespeare’s texts exploit the emotional and political possibilities of poetry and drama.

As part of their assessment for this course, students may opt to take part in a full-scale public performance of one of the plays we have studied; this is usually staged at Lancaster Castle.

The question at the heart of Sinophone Studies is “What is Chineseness in the modern world?” This question has played out in different fashions across the various Sinophone cultures.

Sinophone cultural production offers crucial counterpoints to the depictions of Chinese identity in mainland Chinese, Han-centric creative works. Drawing from the work of scholars in the nascent field of Sinophone studies, this course understands Sinophone cultures as existing in the “minority nationalities” of China; in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and other locations in the East Asian “Sinosphere”; and in the significant Sinitic-language immigrant populations of the Americas, Australasia, and elsewhere. It recognises Sinophone cultural production as multilingual and multi-ethnic.

This module introduces key Sinophone literary works and films. Discussion focuses on the diverse ways in which Chineseness is imagined, negotiated, or resisted in these works, and the alternative cultural identities that they put forward.

You will consider the significance of a range of materials in key debates about Chineseness, including novels, short stories, and films, as well as secondary literature on Sinophone cultural production.

Language: This module is taught in English. Sources are routinely accessed in Chinese, so a working knowledge of the language is required.

This module lives in the space between the here-and-now and a future made possible by science. You’ll explore perceptions of science across different languages and cultures, from Asia to Europe to the Americas, and explore relationships between the spiritual and the material.

You’ll look at some intriguing questions about science and the twenty-first century human condition:

Course Outline:

This half-unit offers the opportunity for detailed examination of work by some major mid-century

British and American poets, through focus on the volumes which can be seen as break-through or

career-defining. We shall study pre-war books by W H Auden and Louis MacNeice, and post-war collections by Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath, which have in common that they were regarded as establishing the pre-eminence of their authors – sometimes signified by their winning prizes and awards. As well enabling close discussion of the constituent poems, as appropriate, the course will also address broader notions of what constitutes a book of

poems. What thematic or other coherences bind its contents, or, in the case of a longer poem such as Autumn Journal, what prevents monotony? In the case of Bishop, the issue arising would involve

thinking about how a poet of meagre output creates a new volume by incorporating an earlier one; in the case of Lowell, the issue arising would involve considering the inclusion of an extended prose

section, as well as the overtly autobiographical matter; in the case of Plath, the issue arising would

concern the fact that Ariel was a posthumous publication, in whose shape her estranged husband

Ted Hughes played a major role. The interaction of these books with the surrounding cultural and political climates in which they were produced will also be considered. Offering this exciting opportunity for extended engagement with the work of poets working at the peak of their powers, the course will appeal to students who, as readers and possibly also writers of poetry, would relish such deep immersion and the chance for exploration that it brings.

(If it is felt that the inclusion of five volumes of poetry is too demanding and prevents an insufficiently close focus then I am happy to consult with those enrolled to consider omitting one of Lowell, Bishop or Plath. This consultation would take place during the summer vacation. )

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

What makes a good translation and how do translations do good? This module aims to help you understand the practice of translation as it has evolved historically from the 18th century to the present across European and American societies. The materials we study include historical textual sources (philosophical essays on the craft of translation from French, German and Hispanic authors of the 19th and 20th centuries), representative fictional texts reflecting on translation processes, and contemporary documents from the EU directorate on translation, PEN and the Translators' Association. We will also make considerable use of contemporary online resources as exemplified by Anglophone advocates of intercultural exchange such as Words Without Borders. Our aim is to look at translation as both a functional process for getting text in one language accurately into another and a culturally-inflected process that varies in its status and purpose from one context to another. We will pay particular attention to the practical role that literary translators play within the contemporary global publishing industry and consider the practicalities of following a career in literary translation in the Anglophone world.

This course explores twentieth and twenty-first century texts about the city that use Gothic generic conventions and modalities. The built environments of the Gothic are often plastic and mutable, the setting for animate, changeable, and malevolent forces. We will explore the ‘architectural uncanny’ and the ‘urban sublime,’ and consider how traditional elements of Gothic fiction are pressed to new ends in response to changing sensory, social and political contexts of urban space and place. While most sources will be textual (currently: Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (1985), N. K. Jemisin, How Long ‘Til Black Future Month (2018), Caitlín R. KierNA, 'Goggles (c.1910)' (2012), and Patrick McGrath, Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (2005)) these will be complemented with reference to screen media, fine art, graphic novel and UrbEx photography.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

The module aims to give a detailed overview of the various ways in which the genre of literary utopia developed from the Renaissance to the present, including its ‘migration’ into science fiction in the later twentieth century. A unifying theme throughout will be: how can literary texts plausibly speak of hope, justice and human perfectibility without falling into mere sociological exposition, or falling foul of the accusation that, in literary terms it is ‘the devil who has the best tunes’. Students will be encouraged to unite a historically contextualised approach, for example looking at the political issues specific to the original moment of each utopian work, with one that is theoretically and generically informed. We shall pay particular attention both to the ways utopias build upon and contest what their predecessors have achieved, and to the complex interaction of ideological content and literary form within each individual work.

In the Victorian period, the decaying castles, corrupt priests and ancestral curses that were so prominent in the first phase of the Gothic novel gave way to an increased emphasis on spectral and monstrous others: ghosts, witches, werewolves, vampires, mummies and other creatures of the night. The module will explore these phenomena in their historical, cultural and literary contexts, with particular focus on emerging discourses of gender, sexuality, colonialism and class. The module will pay special attention to visual aspects of the Gothic, examining book illustration, painting and photography from the period and their relationship with Gothic texts. Students will be asked to consider the relationship between newly emergent forms of modernity (from medical discourses to photography) and the preoccupation with history and the past that is a generic feature of the Gothic. Texts will comprise a selection of novels and short fiction, with additional images and extracts from contextual works provided online and in class.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.