Entry requirementsEntry requirements For British applicants we normally require a good honours degree (upper-second class) or its equivalent. For overseas applicants we accept equivalent qualifications. We may ask applicants to submit examples of written work and we will look sympathetically on applications from those who are returning to study after a break of some years.
Academic titleMA European Literature, Culture and Thought
Course descriptionCourse description
This MA is designed to allow you to deepen your knowledge of critical theory and cultural practice and to introduce you to some of the most significant thinkers, movements and cultural forms associated with modern Europe from the early modern period to the present.
Convenor: Professor Edward Hughes
Course content
You will take a course in research methods and skills and a core interdisciplinary module in Critical Reading: Theory and Practice. This course will familiarise you with some of the major developments in critical theory over the past fifty years. It will explore ongoing debates regarding the links and ruptures between structuralism and post-structuralism (Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida); the ethics of writing and reading (Lévinas, Benjamin, Adorno) and subjectivity and post-modernism (Freud, de Beauvoir, Lacan, Irigaray, Butler). The course will comprise a range of teaching methods (lectures, seminars, workshops) and will also involve practice in the skills of argumentation, critical reading and presentation.
You also choose two options from the following range (which may vary from year to year):
* Colonial and Postcolonial: French and Francophone Literature of North Africa
* Comedies of Desire
* History, Fiction and Memory in French Cinema
* Novels Behaving Badly, Experiments in European Fiction
* Reading Images: Painting, Photography, Film
* Thinking Translation
* Transformations of the Self.
A student may be permitted to take one option offered as part of another MA programme in the School or within the Faculty of Arts, provided that the MA convenor agrees that this would be beneficial for the student's intellectual development and research plans. In the case of options outside the School, admission to such courses requires the further agreement of the course convenor.
You will be able to pursue your own particular intellectual interests through the preparation and writing of a dissertation on a topic of your own choice falling within the field covered by the course.
Assessment
Assessment is based entirely on coursework and dissertation. You will complete two essays of 4,000 words each for the core course, a 4,000-word essay for each of the two options and a dissertation of between 10,000 and 12,000 words.