During Semester 1 you will study the two modern modules. The first of these – Contextualising the Modern – offers an exploration of the radical literary experiments following the First World War in the context of the wider movements in culture and society that informed literary modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century. This course aims to introduce and develop an understanding of the influences and debates that shape literary modernism, through topics which have included primitivism in art, the influence of avant-garde music and early cinema, the crisis of character, gender and modernism, and modernity and mass culture.

In the second module – Reading the Modern – the focus will be on a range of modernist texts, and may include works by poets such as T. S. Eliot, Hugh MacDiarmid, W. H. Auden, Sorley MacLean, and novelists including Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, Jorge Borges, George Orwell and Flann O’Brien. This module offers an exploration of influential British, American and French modernists' pursuit to develop modes of representation compatible with a newly urban, industrialised and mass-oriented age. 

In Semester 2 students move on to the contemporary period, taking two modules: one focused on theory and one on literature. Theorising the Contemporary introduces the key literary and cultural theories of the contemporary period (topics may include the postmodern; poststructuralism; Marxism; postcolonialism; queer theories; minor literature) via the work of prominent post-war thinkers. These might include Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Fredric Jameson and Homi Bhabha.

In the second module, Contemporary Literature and Culture, you will study a global range of late twentieth and early twenty-first century writing in relation to its social and cultural contexts. This module is designed to expose students to a range of contemporary authors, poets and playwrights, which might include Seamus Heaney, Howard Barker, Tom McCarthy, Alan Hollinghurst, Ali Smith, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Christine Brooke-Rose, moving between a detailed focus on highlighted key works and a wider perspective on individual writer’s oeuvres.

An optional Special Topic gives students the opportunity to develop as researchers within a specific area of study. These modules combine student’s individual interests with staff research expertise. Examples of recent specialist modules have included: 

• Difference and Dissensus: Postcolonial Studies in-between Literature and Politics
• ‘Musical’ Fiction
• Modernism and Nature
• W.B. Yeats
• The Short List: World Lit and International Prestige
• Death
• Literature and Environment.