Shakespeare and the History of Ideas is a new Year 1 module for 2012
New Year 1 modules for 2012
After much discussion with staff and students we have redesigned the first year of the degree programme, increasing direct contact time to ten hours per week. This new programme will run from September 2012.
We will have four modules running in Year 1. These are:
Term 1
- Foundations
- Shakespeare and the History of Ideas
Term 2
- Reinventions
- Critical Theory
Alongside these there will be a mandatory course in Academic Literacies running in Terms 1 and 2.
Foundations
2 lectures + seminar
This module provides an introduction to modes of reading and critical analysis broadly informed by an attention to questions of history and genre. The module deals with major conceptual themes including geographical and political space, nationhood, colonialism, identity, and subjectivity by examining foundation texts in the English literary and cultural tradition, including work in translation. The module will pay particular attention to close reading and critical debates, and the interrelationships between texts of different periods. Materials studied range from the classical period to the beginning of the eighteenth century, including The Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Beowulf, and Paradise Lost.
Shakespeare and the History of Ideas
1 lecture + seminar
This module is an introduction to the philosophy of language and literature as it has been practiced through history, using specific examples from Shakespeare such as Hamlet and Measure for Measure. We will consider the history of Western European thought through Shakespeare, explaining how and why critics have approached Shakespeare’s poems and plays from classical and mediaeval Christian perspectives, as well as examining the intellectual and cultural influences on the practice of criticism during the Renaissance, the Augustan period, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Victorian period, Modernism, and in contemporary times. We have designed the module to ease the transition between school/college and university by using familiar Shakespearean texts, and to provide an explicit foundation for second-year core courses and third-year options.
Reinventions
2 lectures + seminar
This module follows on from Foundations and covers writers from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, William Golding, and Margaret Atwood. Texts are presented in close comparative study, again broadly informed by questions of history and genre in order to develop skills of close reading, critical analysis, and an understanding of literary influence and allusion.
Critical Theory
2 lectures + seminar
This module is an introduction to modern and contemporary critical theory. It combines careful study of original essays with ways of reading a range of work. Questions of authorship and intention are, for example, studied in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, while issues of colonialism, the Empire, and the slave trade are debated and investigated in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. This challenging and thought-provoking module therefore follows Shakespeare and the History of Ideas by examining the basis of modern critical approaches to classic and experimental texts.
Academic Literacies
This is a series of skills-based presentations and workshops using relevant literary examples that will help the transition to university by equipping you to approach academic assignments such as annotated bibliographies and essays. Academic Literacies will also introduce employability issues by considering English literary studies in the workplace, whether directly – such as in getting your work published – or indirectly – such as working in the media.
