Subect Area: English

Module offered in Semester 2, 2011, to be announced.


Module: "Epic - Theory, Performance, Text"
This module begins by acknowledging some of the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that has revealed how western epic poetry originates in oral performance and then becomes what we think of as a "text" and "literature." Students read Homer's 'Iliad' as a literary text that derives from oral performance and that represents heroes, such as Achilles, Nestor, and Asklepios, as humans who are the best at particular endeavors, such as hand-to-hand combat, counseling, and healing wounds to the body. Students then read Virgil's story of the sacking of Troy, the love of Dido and Aeneas, and the founding of Rome, and observe how heroism includes piety, patriotism, and patience. The module ends with Milton's 'Paradise Lost', attending to the complex ways in which this early modern Christian epic about God, Satan, Adam, and Eve both imitates and challenges the norms of the genre as they were established in ancient Greece and Rome.

Module: "Crime Fiction"
This module offers an unconventional approach to Crime Fiction, sidestepping the supposedly 'canonical' works of detective fiction and approaching the genre by way of Elizabethan revenge tragedy and fictional prose. These, like modern crime fiction, were highly-popular forms of engagement with issues of justice, crime detection and law enforcement. This module is also unconventional in focussing on texts which problematise, in explicit and developed ways, criminological issues. Without ignoring the entertainment value or literary quality of the texts, we shall be broadly concerned with the relationship between legal justice, morality and politics, and particularly with the way in which the institutionalisation of justice causes alienation of significant sections of the community. Texts have been chosen to take some account of 'development' in the genre in different media and cultures.