This unit of study equips students with some general tools for the close analysis of literary language. Grammatical concepts will be introduced and applied to the description of prose, poetry and drama, and students will explore the changing relations between form and meaning in English from the earliest times up to the present. A number of key strands in contemporary language study will also be presented, including semiotic theory, rhetoric and discourse studies and theorizations of the relationship between texts and subjectivity.

This unit explores how Australian authors write in, to and about the wider world. It will open up a range of questions: how international influences work in Australian writing; how Australian texts rewrite authoritative texts of other cultures; how Australian texts imagine other places; how careers, reputations, publication and reception take place within and beyond the nation. In addressing these questions, the unit will focus on issues of authority, identity, representation, translation, borders and authenticity.

Interpretation of texts is the central concern of this unit. Key questions will include: what is 'reading'? what is a 'text'? what might the aims of interpretation be? Topic areas will include an introduction to the history of reading, the role of grammar in interpretation, the importance of the medium of the text (from medieval manuscripts to electronic books) and the role of literary theory. Authors will range from Chaucer and Shakespeare to the present day.

How do form and style structure our experience of film? This unit provides a critical introduction to elements of film making and viewing, moving through an exploration of formal components of film to consider film aesthetics in relation to the history of film scholarship. We will consider films in a variety of cultural and historical contexts, from early cinema to youtube, and introduce a series of "case studies" to explore historical, cultural and material contexts of film production and consumption.

This course takes as its point of departure the notion of America as fashioned by diverse and even conflicting acts of imagination. Beginning with writers in the mid-19th century and working our way to more recent imaginings of filmmakers and songwriters, we will examine the various ways in which visions of America have been put in play in the national consciousness in prose, poetry, song and film, to construct and to challenge the 'imagined community' of the United States.

This unit approaches literary theory and criticism as such in three ways, synoptically, historically, and polemically. First, a generous sampling of kinds of theory and criticism establishes the ambit of the field. Second, a more concentrated sampling explores the history and importance of a particular period or mode of theory and criticism. Third, another such sampling evaluates the nature and significance of a matter of current theoretical and critical controversy.

This unit will explore some of the most interesting and innovative theoretical, literary and multimedia texts of the last half century. Some of the topics to be explored include the relationship between modernism and postmodernism; movements, communities and subcultures; experimentalism and activism; small press publishing and independent cinema; politics, history and cultural value; genre, style and intertextuality; auteurism and the 'death of the author'.

This unit will examine issues arising from a comparative study of literature and cinema, including: the continuities and discontinuities between the two mediums; the cultural and historical contexts of literary and cinematic texts; authorship, auteurism and aesthetic authority; adaptation and intertextuality; the figurative styles of literature and cinema; narrative and narration in literature and cinema; genre study.

This unit explores the cultural negotiations between Europe (especially Britain) and the United States over several centuries. Developing concepts about national literatures, the unit uses comparative theories and practices to assess transnational cultural negotiations. We consider historical changes to the geopolitical order of things, examining how literature and film reflected and contributed to collaborative and combative transnational relationships. Key topics include the decline of British cultural and political power, European influences, and the contested rise of the United States.

Students will study (in modern English translation) the literature of the peoples who lived in Britain in the Early Middle Ages -- Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Lectures and tutorials will cover the literature, history, religion and language of these cultures, focusing on representations of the heroic ideal, as this is embodied in mythic, legendary and historical writing. Texts to be studied include Beowulf, The Wanderer, selections from the Edda, and early Arthurian material.

This unit introduces students to the study of dramatic texts by examining plays from two significant periods in the history of western theatre: classical Athens and Renaissance England. Classes focus on the relationship between dramatic text and performance; the details of how specific scenes may have been realised on stage; the language of scripted drama; and the physical and social conditions of theatre from both periods. We examine two Greek plays in translation, and four plays by contemporaries of Shakespeare.

Jane Austen is an iconic figure, both within the academy and without. In the discipline of English, her novels consolidate generic traditions that are both forward and backward looking. This unit examines Austen's novels in their historical and critical context in order to understand the place of her works, then and now. We will analyse how these novels engage the literary, social and political debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. We will also assess the interpretative traditions her work inaugurated in subsequent centuries.

A different range of poetry will be offered each year concentrating on an historical period, an individual poet, and a close study of a poetic form. Readings of individual poems will involve both intensive study of technical and linguistic characteristics, as well as of the broader historical, social, ideological and personal contexts and issues which they reflect. As well, there will be discussion of on-going literary-critical debate about poetry and its function.

This unit of study charts the development of Irish literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day, in the form of drama, short fiction, novels, poetry, biography and autobiography. Prominent themes include: the emergence of the modern Irish nation through resistance, civil war, and independence from Britain; Northern Ireland and the Troubles; expatriation and exile; wit and verbal dexterity; the fate of specifically "Celtic" sensibilities; and the relation of writing to history (ancient, colonial, the Famine, Republicanism).

This unit examines some key historical and theoretical topics in the semiotics of language. We begin with an investigation into the structuralist legacy, concentrating on exegetical and theoretical questions raised by Saussurean "valeur" and "difference". We then discuss analyses of lexical polysemy and alternatives to the Saussurean paradigm provided in the Humboldtian and Soviet traditions and in Relevance Theory. The course ends by assessing the desirability and difficulties of accommodating emotion in theories of linguistic signification.

In this unit we will investigate aesthetic production in the United States since 9/11. Students will explore the most interesting and engaging cultural work done in the US over the last decade, focusing on diverse communities beset by war, poverty, decline, debt, and crisis. We will look at literature, film, television, radio, photography and art. Our centrepiece is a sustained consideration of the television series The Wire.

In this unit, we will map the places and spaces-urban, suburban, regional-of American literature as these are represented in a variety of film and literary texts from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Our study will also include consideration of specific locales-Chicago and Hollywood, for example-that have given rise to important literary movements and cultural forms, as well as consideration of the ideological work that certain regions, such as the South, perform in relation to the nation.

This unit will map the movement of the drivers, passengers, and pedestrians who patrol our streets, pages, and screens. It has a particular focus on the flneur. Starting with writers such as Poe, Dickens, and Baudelaire, students will reconfigure the streets as rhetorical spaces and consider how authors, artists and filmmakers use urban streetscapes as sites to construct representations of class, gender, race, sanity and sexuality. Students will reconsider concepts of authorship and interrogate different kinds of texts.

Old English was the language of England from the fifth century until the twelfth. This earliest phase of the English literary tradition evolved against a background of cultural encounters: as the Anglo-Saxons encountered the culture of Rome, as they adopted and adapted the Christian religion, and as they reflected on their origins on the European continent. This unit introduces students to the language spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons, and presents the opportunity to translate and read Old English texts.

Chaucer's great work draws upon a range of narrative modes: chivalry, romance, beast fable, pathos, and low comedy. In jumping into these worlds, students will become familiar with Chaucer's language and with the means of its production and tansmission, from the early manuscripts written by his scribe Adam Pinkhurst, to the editions in which students usually encounter the Tales, to the digital transcriptions and images of the new millennium.

This unit will introduce students to significant movements in modern and contemporary literary theory to think about what it means to speak of the literary. The unit of study begins by examining the question of "literariness" through its exposition and defence by a number of scholars. We will pursue the applications of their arguments through a selection of theoretical models, including queer and gender theory, psychoanalysis, and race theory, to consider the cultural and ideological work imaginative literature undertakes.

The novels of the Bronte Sisters are among the most enduringly popular Victorian texts, yet they have an ambiguous critical status. The perception that the Brontes are labile and cloistered writers, best interpreted psychoanalytically, raises questions about the relationship between biography and literature, and the ways in which notions of social and historical relevance play into judgments about literary value. We will think about canonical and popular literary status, biography and authorship, gender and writing, and Victorian society.

The Honours program in English consists of a thesis written under the supervision of one, or more, members of academic staff and three seminars, selected from a range of options, that meet once a week for two hours. Students would usually do two seminar options in their first semester, and one in their second semester. One of the first semester options is assessed,
in part, through participation in the English department's honours conference. For more information, contact the English Department Honours Coordinator.

Refer to ENGL4101

Refer to ENGL4101

Refer to ENGL4101