This is a core unit for the Master of English Studies. How do literary texts relate to history? When we divide time into different periods ("Renaissance" "Romantic" "Modernist" etc.), what are the implications for interpretation? Focusing on one or two literary periods, this core unit for the Master of English Studies introduces students to historicist literary criticism, developing skills in relating literature to historical context. We read key texts from the designated period(s), conduct research into appropriate archives (including online databases), and identify the theoretical questions that underpin those investigations.

This is a core unit for the Master of English Studies. In this unit students will critically examine significant theoretical definitions of and debates about genre through time. They will apply an advanced understanding of genres (or 'kinds' or 'forms') to representative and problematic texts in order to develop a deep appreciation of the function, limitations and transformations of genre in literature. The complex relationship between formal properties, creativity and historical context will be explored.

This is a core unit for the Master of English Studies. This unit will introduce students to a variety of critical approaches to literature. In addition to developing critical and theoretical literacy, the unit aims to develop advanced skills in identifying how and why such strategies might be brought to bear on reading literary texts, and to evaluate how effective and/or appropriate such strategies might be in specific cases. The unit also aims to critically examine theories of the text as a physical and conceptual object.

This is a core unit for the Master of English Studies. Students will familiarise themselves with critical approaches to a range of literary works written throughout the world in the English language, and they will critically examine ways in which theories of globalisation and place have come to inflect paradigms of local and national identity. Students will evaluate contemporary understandings of the meaning and significance of "English" literature in a new global environment.

This is a capstone unit in the Master of English Studies program. It comprises research and writing towards a 12000 word dissertation. Candidates must formulate a topic and seek permission for enrolment from the Postgraduate Coordinator. Approval is subject to availability of appropriate supervision by an academic staff member. Must be followed by enrolment in ENGL6930.

This is a capstone unit in the Master of English Studies. It comprises completion and submission of a 12000 word dissertation. Candidates must formulate a topic and seek permission for enrolment in the preceding unit, ENGL6929, from the Postgraduate Coordinator. Approval is subject to availability of appropriate supervision by an academic staff member.

This unit is a capstone unit in the Master of English Studies. In this unit students will workshop, plan and execute their own research based project. They will participate in research seminars as required, that will integrate their previous learning with research skills. This will culminate in a project that engages with the current state of the field while reflecting on their encounter with the discipline.

Old English - the ancestor of Modern English - was the language of England from the fifth century until the twelfth. Literature written in Old English includes the epic Beowulf beside a rich variety of other poetry, as well as historical texts. This unit introduces students to the language of the Anglo-Saxons through the study of Old English texts.

The literature of the Anglo-Saxons offers an insight into a range of understandings of the place of human beings in the world and its history. This unit of study will build on students' elementary knowledge of the Old English language, and offer students the opportunity to translate and read a range of texts including historical prose, love poetry and religious texts. These texts will be studied in a range of contexts, from the cultural and historical to their manuscript setting.

Old Norse is the name given to the language of medieval Scandinavia which was spoken by the Viking invaders of Britain in the early Middle Ages. Old Norse literature presents a rich variety, from mythological and legendary poetry to Icelandic sagas. This unit introduces students to the culture that the Vikings brought to Britain by introducing them to the language of medieval Iceland, the literary centre of medieval Scandinavia, through texts written in Old Icelandic.

The American South is frequently conceived as the Problem South, defined by its experiences of military defeat and occupation, economic backwardness and a brutal slave legacy. In this unit, we will investigate the idea of the South in a range of literary and visual texts by examining its most compelling tropes - the southern belle, poor whites, the plantation - to contemplate the region's fundamental importance to conceptions of the nation itself and the value of thinking regionally.

This unit will focus on the narrative and rhetorical strategies used to depict and engage emotion. It will examine the ways in which feeling is both conceptualised and motivated in literary texts, and relate developments in the fictional understanding of emotion to those in philosophy and the natural sciences. It will ask whether emotion can be historicised; how affective responses are engaged in the service of ethical agendas; to what extent do the feelings produced by fiction elude narrative control.

Critical discussion of Australian poetry has long been preoccupied by the status of its modernism, as a function of wider questions regarding the meaning of Australian modernity. Was modernism only belatedly taken up in the 1970s, or were certain older Australian poets modernist avant la lettre? In this unit students will evaluate a selection of key poems and statements about poetry by Australian writers from 1900 to the present, taking in themes such as: Romantic absence and negativity, the Symbolist inheritance, high and vernacular modernisms, avant gardism and reaction, the Generation of 68, and the fate of postmodernism.

This course develops a critical evaluation of modern drama from its roots in the nineteenth century and its legacy in a selection of contemporary play texts. The course situates developments in dramatic theory and practice alongside dominant social and intellectual trends of the past century (political tyranny/liberation, class structure, women's emancipation, censorship, technological change, the rise of global capital). Students will critically evaluate dramatic texts and performance using a variety of theoretical frameworks.

This unit of study investigates the development and circulation of the novel during the eighteenth century. We will read novels that have since been canonised as well as material normally excluded from the story of the novel's rise, such as whore narratives and the popular genre of it-narratives (stories told from the point-of-view of an object or animal). We will consider this material through a number of theoretical lenses, including those provided by Michael McKeon, Lennard Davis and Catherine Gallagher.

We pose two interdependent questions. First, how and why have English authors from Tudor to Victorian times narrated and analysed historical matters in different literary genres - verse, prose, prose-drama, and verse-drama? Second, how and why have these authors and their audiences deemed such historical writings to be literary or not? To determine the interdependence of these questions we pose a third. What are the literary and historical relations between literature and history?

Heroines of medieval romance were not all swooning damsels waiting to be chosen by daring knights. A strong alternative current is the figure of the wooing woman, who used a range of strategies to realise her desires. In this unit students will apply advanced critical methods to readings of wooing women in Middle English romance. Students will reflect upon these readings alongside medieval theories of feminine sexuality and contemporary reconsiderations. Texts include selections from 12th to 15th centuries.

This course explores twentieth century attempts to understand the relation of language and linguistic meaning to the individual subject. We will consider two traditions: a 'naturalistic' approach centred around Chomsky's 'generative enterprise', and the phenomenological/hermeneutic tradition in Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. Students will familiarize themselves with various putatively scientific attempts to understand the place of language in the world and will explore some general features of the relation between meaning and experience. No prior acquaintance with these fields is assumed.

Suburbia is a bad object in Australian literature. Neither city nor bush, suburbs can seem culturally bland zones of consumerist domesticity from which artists and writers want to escape. Yet loathing of suburbia can be mixed with desire. This unit explores various topographies of suburbia in fiction, poetry, non-fiction and film. Why do writers return to suburbia? How do suburbs give shape to settler modernity, or stimulate literary modernism? Is the suburb a national or transnational scene in Australian writing?

This unit introduces students to the practice, craft skills and critical reflection involved in writing fiction (particularly the short story form). Narrative writing skills will be explored and developed through close readings of a range of short fiction, as well as in-class and at-home writing exercises, building towards more sustained pieces of work. Writing and critical skills are developed through discussion and participation in the workshop process, focusing on reading and creative strategies to generate new material as well as processes of editing and revision.

This unit of study is a workshop in writing poetry conducted by a distinguished poet. Students are required to produce their own works throughout the unit and these works will provide the basis for constructive discussion aimed at developing different methods of writing.

This unit is a compulsory core unit in the Master of Creative Writing. It complements the other core units by focussing on how creative writing connects with major scholarly and critical debates in literary and cultural theory, focussing in particular on writers, like Susan Sontag, whose work is both creative and theoretical. Indicative topics include: theories of authorship; the history of the book; the ethics and politics of writing; aesthetic hierarchy and value; close and distant reading; form, genre and style; writing, sex and embodiment.

This unit explores Sydney as a significant literary city in the context of influential debates on community, cosmopolitanism and the poetics of place. We will read key Sydney texts and explore Sydney's major cultural institutions and events, including the Sydney Writers Festival. Students will produce their own creative project in response to Sydney and its storied locales.

This unit focusses attention on the work of writing from the perspective of writers. What kinds of labour are entailed in literary production and publication? What does it mean to describe oneself, or be described, as a writer? Who does a writer work for and what processes produce the literary work as we encounter it? What about 'writer's block'? We will explore different aspects, contexts and genres of writers at work through a mixture of detailed case studies and representations, always with an eye to relations between particular writers, works and readers.

This unit introduces students to literary movements as a way of thinking about literary texts and their reception in terms of processes broader than any individual author or work. Claims to movement status are inherently polemical. They can emerge from within a community in the form of manifestos and collaborative publications or describe more diffuse networks and alliances. Through case studies we will consider what is at stake in the designation and commodification of literary movements and what benefits or problems flow from such claims.

This unit celebrates magazines as an important but often over-looked part of Australian print and digital culture. Starting with an overview of the history of print culture in Australia and the role of iconic magazines like the Bulletin and Women's Weekly in constructing literary and popular culture, we then examine a cross-section of publications from 'little' literary magazines to fashion, gossip, sports, special-interest, custom and online magazines.

This unit explores selected works of Shakespeare in the historical context of the 20th and 21st centuries. It provides an introduction to the modern Shakespeare industry with particular focus on recent developments in theatrical performance, film, and other adaptations, and theoretical approaches. Detailed attention will be paid to both the texts of the plays and to their modern manifestations.

This unit of study introduces students to the principles and practices of creative non-fiction, also known as literary journalism. This diverse genre includes travel, memoir, biography, essays, historical, medical or investigative narratives. The unit provides a scholarly framework to creative non-fiction and the work of writers such as essayists and literary journalists. In addition to the content provided by the coordinators, three major contemporary non-fiction writers take participants through the process of composition of their recent works.

The unit explores important works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the contexts of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England. The unit will analyse the texts and authors in relation to one another to uncover key discourses of the period relating to politics, humanism, drama, poetry, gender and genre. Students will gain valuable insights into the literary and cultural richness of the period and come to a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's relevance and significance in his day.

This unit is designed for students who have already begun the practice of writing poetry, and who wish to work on a large portfolio of poems which has been developed to an advanced stage of composition. In the seminars, students will use this portfolio to refine and develop their writing style and technique in dialogue with the seminar leader.

This unit builds on the introductory creative writing fiction workshop ENGL6901 and assumes that students are familiar with the craft skills, writing practice and critical reflection involved in producing quality fiction. The focus is on developing narrative writing skills toward the production of larger prose forms (a novel or linked stories), through writing exercises, critical reading, the workshop process, and exposure to advanced areas of writing craft. Students also learn to develop a sustainable writing practice, present their project and engage in processes of critiquing, editing and revision.

This unit examines a selection of Australian works that have - or have not - achieved the status of 'classics'. It will explore both theoretically and historically the processes of literary canon formation and the economy of literary prestige, developing techniques of close reading while also attending to the wider social contexts of reception and reputation-making both nationally and internationally.

In addition to writing distinctive short stories and novels, Henry James was a voluminous critic whose writings on the art of fiction have shaped modern approaches to the novel. In this unit, we read selections from James's critical writings alongside his novels and tales to compare the author's evolving theory of fiction with his practice of it. Matters of special interest include Anglo-American literary culture; strategies of characterization and narration; experiments in literary style; the purpose of fiction; and the ethics of representation.

What is the relation between femininity, masculinity and culture? Does sexual difference affect our identity and, if so, how and in what circumstances? Does it affect our relations with others? Is there any link between cultural and racial difference and sexual difference? What contexts may shape such links? Where does equality fit into all this? Drawing on the work of major cultural theorists and feminist thinkers this unit examines various theoretical conceptualizations and popular representations of gender; the issue of embodiment; and how sex and race are articulated within gendered conceptual frames.

This unit explores the relationship between 'American cinema' and Hollywood cinema. 'American cinema' draws inspiration from and attempts to contribute to cultural movements and contexts that include Hollywood but extend to literature and the visual arts more generally. Hollywood's power as a cultural sign will be examined in relation to alternative and independent film cultures. This will include not only analysis of feature films but also of writings by filmmakers and theorists. Questions of cinematic subjectivity and authorship will be a focus of the unit.

This elective is designed for International postgraduates who are new to study in an English language university. It supports the development of study, research, and critical thinking abilities, spoken English and academic language. Knowledge acquired in this unit will strengthen written and spoken English to help meet the standards necessary for successful completion of FASS Masters by coursework degrees. It is recommended that this elective be taken during the first semester.

This elective supports development of skills in critical analysis, writing in different genres, research, presentation, and developing individual scholarly 'voice'. While valuable for all commencing postgraduates, it is of particular benefit to those returning to academia after an extended break, or for International students wishing to orient themselves to local standards of practice for academic communication. This unit is structured to have additional seminars and lectures early in the semester and fewer later in the semester so students have the opportunity to apply new skills to all their coursework. The unit is ideally taken in the first semester of study.

This unit introduces theories of professional writing with a specific focus on composing in the workplace. Students will develop abilities in analysing, writing, revising, and delivering workplace texts, both print and multimedia. By examining and discussing a range of actual workplace documents, from emails to websites, students will gain a broader understanding of the rhetorical principles and ethical responsibilities inherent in professional writing practice. They will improve their ability to negotiate the relationships, tensions, and politics that influence workplace writing contexts.

This unit introduces practical techniques for editing workplace documents for increased clarity and effectiveness. Applying theories and principles of visual rhetoric, students will learn how to improve the readability and reception of workplace texts according to audience conventions and expectations. By analysing actual workplace documents, students will develop their critical reading abilities and gain a better understanding of how to edit texts for word economy, improved design and layout, and inclusive language. Editing print texts for digital or oral presentation will also be emphasised.