English Language and Literature MA

Development, execution, and writing-up of an independent research project on a topic chosen by you. All students will attend regular research seminars. Individual supervision will provide topic-specific guidance.

This module examines in detail English in its multiple varieties and multiple uses in the world: native, nativised and non-native varieties, regional variation within larger speech communities, use by monolinguals and multilinguals, and register differences according to use and user. Furthermore, it gives you the opportunity to carry out original empirical work relating to the concepts and methods you are acquiring.

This module introduces you to the major theoretical frameworks for studying language contact by exploring the different processes, causes, types, effects, and outcomes that emerge from contact contexts: e.g. bilingualism, pidginization, creolisation, diglossia, borrowing, code-switching, linguistic change. The module adopts a cross-linguistic perspective and will include contexts ranging from dominant language ecologies to cases of severe language endangerment.

This module introduces you to current major themes in contemporary literature, with a particular focus on how global crises post-2001 have been mediated in literary texts. Topics will include the representation of capital and financial crisis; migrant narratives; ecology; the Anthropocene; and the contemporary resurgence of populist politics. While maintaining a primary focus on the 21st century, the module also encourages you to think historically and comparatively through 19th and 20th century representations of crisis.

This module introduces you to different perspectives on how selfhood is constructed in literature. It considers the links between identity, personhood, selfhood and writing, with a particular emphasis on how recent literature has critically interrogated the connections between these concepts. Through the close analysis of short literary texts and engagement with theoretical ideas, the module explores issues such as life-writing, autofiction, embodiment, biography, memory, otherness, and the non-human.

This module offers a range of different linguistic tools for exploring texts. They are analysed for lexical and grammatical cohesion, metonymy and metaphor, and register and thematic progression (Hallidayan functional grammar). Texts are also analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). You will acquire a theoretical understanding of the main approaches to discourse analysis, and the practical skills for carrying out these analyses on real texts. You will also gain a broader awareness of how written discourse is constructed by comparing it to spoken discourse, and by discussing it in terms of more general semiotic and communication theories.

This module critically considers different approaches to the sociolinguistic study of language and gender. This includes knowledge of theoretical frameworks used to understand why and how sex and gender can be viewed as significant social categories in relation to language use. The module also aims to equip you with the knowledge and skills to enable you to carry out independent empirical investigations in the field of language and gender research. 

This module explores concepts and issues in sociolinguistics; research methods; languages and factors such as age, class, gender, ethnicity; language variation, choice, planning, change; language in face-to- face interaction.

The module introduces Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The module examines the different requirements in terms of needs, aspirations, and appropriate modes of instruction and assessment, of different types of language learner. It will enable the you to add to your existing ELT knowledge and experience, and to engage meaningfully in relevant LSP/ESP developments.

This module explores how different literary and cultural forms have been used to construct and contest expressions of nationhood, nationality, and nationalism in diverse cultural and historical contexts from the Global North and South. You'll engage with writing from a variety of periods and genres to examine how writers have (re)imagined ideas such as sovereignty, citizenship, belonging, and statelessness. In so doing, you will consider the ways in which literature has shaped, resisted, and responded to seismic historical movements such as imperialism, postcolonialism, mass migration, globalisation, and contemporary neonationalism. These ideas and processes will be explored through readings of key theorists and commentators.

This module examines ways in which the world and 'other worlds' were formed through literary and cultural representation during the later nineteenth century. It focuses on themes such as mapping the Empire and the city, scientific views, the natural world, hauntings, sexology and ideas of gender, and the life of the mind.