English Language and Literary Studies MA - 2020 Entry

Course Structure

You will study a range of modules as part of your course, some examples of which are listed below.

Core

• Postgraduate Academic Study Skills

  This course provides a structured programme of support through lectures and small group work as you develop your academic writing and study practices and skills.

Optional

• Affliction: Writing Illness and Disease in the Gothic Mode

  This module will explore Gothic representations of, for example: pain and illness experience, chronic illness, psychiatric confinement, eating disorders, organ harvest and transplantation, genetic testing, and epidemic or disease emergence. Traditional Gothic tropes find ready echoes in illness. Subjects may experience their bodies as uncanny, once familiar but now strange; they may feel helpless and physically vulnerable; they strive to decipher the cryptic signs of the medical record and the body’s symptoms; they endure strange temporalities and carceral hospital sites; they are subjected to rituals of medical monitoring; and they become supplicants to powerful figures with mysterious knowledge. The Gothic mode can be part of a critique of the complex biopolitics of medicine and illness. Yet at the same time, representing illness and pain through a Gothic mode can carry ideological risks, reinforcing problematic cultural assumptions about which human lives are of value. You will explore the promise and perils of the Gothic mode in the arena of health humanities and critical medical humanities.

• Bilingualism

  About half the world’s population are bilingual, but what does this actually mean? This module provides an introduction to the subject of bilingualism and multilingualism, viewed from the perspectives of the individual (for example, how bilinguals code-switch or mix their languages in conversation), the community (what causes a group to give up their ancestral language and change to a new one, and what is the process for this) and the state (issues of language planning, policies and education). This module is designed to provide an introduction to the most important issues, methods and theoretical developments in the study of bilingual/multilingual societies. It aims to introduce different research approaches and to enable you to take a critical view of research in this field, drawing on examples from around the world.

  In teaching we will draw on students’ own experiences of bilingualism and multilingual societies (even ‘monolingual’ societies are very often multilingual in reality) as well as looking at multilingual urban landscapes and multilingualism on the internet.

• Cognitive Linguistics

  The module will cover the field of Cognitive Linguistics. In particular, it will introduce the foundational principles of Cognitive Linguistics locating it in opposition to the more dominant model of Generative Linguistics. Hereafter, a central concern of the module will be the relationship between language and more general cognitive processes in the creation of meaning, as well as the relationship between language, body, and mind. You will therefore be introduced to a number of fundamental cognitive processes understood to support language, including categorisation, metaphor and Gestalt principles of organisation. The module aims to show how such processes underpin the semantics of various domains of cultural as well as physical experience.

• Contemporary British Fiction

  This module examines the range and variety of contemporary British fiction. Discussion will focus on representations of c21st crises, such as the financial crash and Brexit; on competing views of the past; on the poetry of everyday life; and on the futuristic and dystopian qualities of speculative fiction.

• Contemporary Gothic: Text and Screen

  This module addresses the ways that contemporary literature, film and television engage with the Gothic literary tradition. Focusing specifically on texts produced since 2000, it explores the continuing relevance of Gothic in contemporary culture. The module aims to demonstrate the diversity and increasing hybridity of contemporary Gothic and with this in mind, enquires what happens when Gothic cross-fertilises a range of other modes and genres including musical, soap opera, noir, documentary, comedy, science fiction and the historical novel. Indicative themes include: how traditional Gothic personae from vampires and ghosts to guilty fathers and disturbed children may find new life in the twenty-first century; how traditional Gothic spaces from the haunted house to the fairground may be refigured in postmodern British and American culture; what critics mean when they talk about Gothic and the ways in which the term is put to work in both popular media and in academic criticism.

  Each seminar will be based around two parallel strands, covering literature and television/film from 2000 to the present day. Typically, screenings of the relevant films/programmes will be timetabled during the week preceding the seminar. You may find it useful to have some prior knowledge of Gothic literature and/or film, but this is not essential.

• Corpus Linguistics

  Corpus linguistics is a methodology whereby large collections of electronically transcribed texts are used in conjunction with computer tools to investigate language.

  This module aims to provide a general introduction to corpus based language study. It centres around two main parts – corpus methods for exploring linguistic variation and the applications of corpus linguistics such as language teaching, forensic linguistics and discourse analysis.

  You will have the opportunity to learn how to use corpus analysis packages such as BNCWeb and Antconc.

• Critical Discourse Analysis

  This module will focus on different methods and issues in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA is broadly concerned with the way that language and other semiotic modalities reflect, legitimate and instantiate power and inequality in social relations. In this course, you are introduced to various methodological approaches to CDA which draw on and apply a range of theoretical frameworks including functional grammar, argumentation theory, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, conversation analysis and pragmatics. A variety of discourses articulated in talk, text and image and operating across a range of social and political fields of action are considered, including discourses of race, immigration, war, national identity, political protest, and corporate responsibility. You will also be encouraged to critically engage, through close textual analysis, with discourses of specific interest to themselves. Throughout the course, you will have the opportunty to engage with a number of theoretical and methodological debates currently ongoing in CDA.

• Emotional Geographies in Early Modern Literature

  This module uses contemporary theoretical models to explore the relationship between emotions and place in examples of early modern English literature. It begins by looking at the ways space is mapped in written and pictorial records, with an introduction to items in the Rare Book Archive in the Library and the electronic archive Early English Books Online. Site specific studies of texts (e.g. in Lancaster Castle and Penshurst Place) combine with study of fantasy sites like More’s Utopia (no-place) and early science fiction and travel writing. The course can be taken as part of the early modern pathway or as a stand alone module for those interested in developing transhistorical understandings of politics and place.

• English Grammar: A Cognitive Approach

  This module provides you with the opportunity to develop a solid foundation in the grammar of English, prominently including the ways in which it interfaces with semantics-pragmatics — as discussed, especially, in the cognitive linguistic approach to grammar, i.e. construction grammar. Yet the module is not restricted to this theoretical framework. Instead, we will explore its research questions, analyses and methods in relation to those representing the more traditional, generative (Chomskian) alternative. A basic tenet of the cognitive (and more broadly speaking: functional) approach is that English grammar (and indeed the grammar of any language) is a tool for effective communication. This leads to an analysis of grammatical structures in terms of, and as to some extent motivated by, their meanings. We will see that this perspective is very different from the generative approach, where grammar is studied more or less in isolation from meaning, i.e. as pure structure. Towards the end of the module some recent applications of the theory of cognitive linguistics are discussed.

• Experimental Approaches to Language and Cognition

  The central aim of the module is to introduce you to modern experimental methods of measuring the ubiquitous relationship between language and cognition, which is a basic theoretical tenet of Cognitive Linguistics. In particular, it will usually begin by presenting language acquisition as a general learning process, and looking at interactions between linguistic and social-cognitive development in children. It will then give you the opportunity to explore the growing body of experimental research that investigates how an individual’s linguistic and cultural background informs their view of the world, and impacts on their thinking processes in adulthood (also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis). Hereafter, a central concern of the module will be the cognitive mechanisms by which languages are learned and processed, examining the role of individual differences, frequency of input, and memory and attention, with particular focus on artificial grammar learning, and second language acquisition and use.

• Experimental Phonetics

  This module gives you the opportunity to explore issues in experimental phonetics, as well as the practical skills necessary to undertake a research project in this area. You will learn how to use acoustic analysis software, such as Praat, and also learn to carry out data processing and analysis using a statistical programming language like R. You will also have the opportunity to look at appropriate statistical methods and aspects of phonetic and linguistic theory.

  This module requires some undergraduate background in phonetics (we assume knowledge of the International Phonetic Alphabet, articulatory descriptions, basic acoustic phonetics).

  The module will usually be taught via practical workshop sessions covering topics including:

  • Acoustic phonetics
  • Sociophonetic variation
  • Sound change
  • Voice quality
  • Articulatory phonology
  • Intonational variation
  • Experimental design
  • Statistical analysis
• Forensic Linguistics

  This module aims to provide you with:

  • an understanding of the history and highly evolving status of forensic linguistics
  • an understanding of the nature of forensic linguistics, including its applications and limits
  • an appreciation of the difference between the broader and more narrowly defined notions of forensic linguistics
  • the ability to carry out basic analyses of a variety of written and spoken texts from the point of view of language and the law
  • an understanding of some of the difficulties in writing up, presenting, and using scientific evidence in a court of law.
• Fusions

  This module is concerned with a range of texts from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century that together suggest a line of broadly modernistic writing that has a fascination both with the city (eg. Paris, Berlin, Oxford, London, Manchester) and with the mixing of genres - in particular, such genres as critical essay, philosophical treatise, poetry, comic dialogue, fragment, novel, anecdote, manifesto, autobiography, history, textual commentary, and travelogue. Special attention will be paid to texts that blur the genre-boundary that, traditionally, separates critical writing from creative writing. You will be invited, if you wish, to submit such texts yourself.

• Introduction to Discourse Studies

  The term “discourse” is understood in various ways in the social sciences and humanities. In this module we approach discourse in two principal ways. On the one hand, we regard discourse as structured use of language consisting of more than one sentence. The analysis of discourse in this sense involves investigation of the ways in which words, phrases and sentences hang together and make sense in contexts of use. At this level linguistic theories and methods of linguistic description are of special relevance. On the other hand, discourse is often thought of as language use as social practice that is based on, and influences, cognition. Thus, for example, we speak of media discourse, nationalist discourse, discourses on the economy, legal discourse, and the like. Here we ask questions about the linguistic characteristics of these different discourses. In addition we relate the texts that instantiate these discourse to the context of their production, distribution and reception, as well as to their wider social context.

  The module aims to familiarise students with the range of theories in Discourse Studies. It also aims to provide practical analytical skills and methodologies for analysing spoken, written and visual texts of different genres. Acquiring sufficient technical knowledge of linguistic description is regarded as an important practical goal. Hands-on practical work with texts will be an important element of the course.

• Literature and the Environment in Early Modern England

  How did people in the early modern period conceive of the relationships between themselves and the natural world? During a period characterised by extreme weather variation, a rapidly increasing population, the rise of industry, widespread food shortages and plague, how did early modern society react to and characterise environmental problems that seem particularly familiar to our own modern context? This module will explore the many roles that literature played not just in reflecting these environmental problems, but also in constructing and shaping human interactions with the natural world. The module examines a major environmental problem of the early modern period each week as represented in the literature of the period and investigates the kinds of social unrest they triggered in order to address the above questions. We will work with theoretical approaches such as ecocriticism and encounter a wide range of primary source material that documents early modern human interaction with the environment.

• On Location in the Lakes

  This module is about reading poetry and some other representative texts in relation to place. It focuses mainly on Wordsworth, both in himself and as a representative figure, but includes other writers and theorists.

  We will be combining close study of texts and ideas of how landscape was (and is) viewed, with use of actual locations and a strong sense of place on the summer term field trip. The course aims to provide participants with a strong sense of Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century perceptions of place, through close study of key concepts such as the Picturesque and the Sublime and travel writings about the Lake District. It will then go on to focus on a range of Romantic authors looking at poetic and other texts in relation to issues of place and space. In particular we will dwell upon Wordsworth as the pre-eminent poet of place in relation to the Lakes, but the course will also study other Romantic and Victorian writing.

  The module will consider key issues in relation to selected texts: the representation of real places and inhabitants in literature; different ways of “dwelling”; the value and importance of place names; imaginative appropriation of the actual. At the same time it will also place such ideas within a wider context in terms of current methodologies, particularly links between Romanticism and the conservation movement (“Romantic Ecology”), heritage and phenomenology of place as well as theories of representations which will be applied to literary texts, paintings, and buildings.

• Postcolonial Women's Writing

  This module – distinctive in its focus on the wider Middle East – explores twentieth and twenty-first century narrative texts by women writers, examining creative literary engagements with (post)colonial histories, societies and politics. Novels and memoirs are read alongside theory drawn from disciplines that might include literary criticism, history, geography, sociology and anthropology. The texts represent a range of responses to colonialism, national identity, patriarchy, Islam, migration and transnationalism. Indicative themes are: revolution; the female body in private and public space; violence; education; modes of resistance; memory; testimony; and the politics of representation.

• Posthumanism: Literature after the human

  This module focuses on the idea of the ‘posthuman’ in fiction and film. It explores a range of literary and filmic texts from Romanticism to Postmodernism that have explored the question of what, if anything, might come ‘after’ the human race. To explore the figure of the posthuman in more detail, we will focus on a series of recurring tropes in posthumanist literature from H. G. Wells to Lars von Trier that might include: the god, the monster; the robot; the cyborg and the clone. We will also place these texts in the context of various contemporary philosophical, religious, political and scientific debates surrounding the meaning (or meaninglessness) of human existence. In summary, the module will ask such questions as: why is the end of the human race such an enduring subject of fascination for writers and film-makers? Is it possible for human beings to imagine a world without human beings? Finally, what might a world after the human race look like?

• Pragmatics

  This module considers how meanings are constructed in communication.

  This module aims to:

  • cover the major areas in pragmatic theory,
  • introduce the latest developments in those areas,
  • apply the theory to real data.
• Research Methodology and Reflective Practice in English Literature I

  The two core modules, Research Methodology and Reflective Practice in English Literature I and II, are compulsory for all MA English/English with Creative Writing students and for new first year PhD English students who have not taken an MA at Lancaster. They are designed in accordance with UK research councils training guidance. Seminars will run across terms 1 and 2, and dissertation supervision and a conference will take place in term 3. The two modules together aim to equip you with a range of skills, approaches and competences to draw on as early career researchers in the field of English Literary Studies and/or Creative Writing. Even if you are not considering a research career, we will cover skills that are valuable for any postgraduate student of literature.

  The two core modules are designed to complement the more specialist topics covered on MA English programmes through specific module seminars and dissertation supervisions. These core modules typically include sessions on research and writing skills, working with archives, and working with theory, and will encourage reflection on the practice and utility of literary research. The modules will be assessed by an ongoing portfolio of tasks. In the summer term, the module will conclude with a conference – organised by the students themselves – at which each of you will give a paper relating to your research.

• Research Methodology and Reflective Practice in English Literature II

  The two core modules, Research Methodology and Reflective Practice in English Literature I and II, are compulsory for all MA English/English with Creative Writing students and for new first year PhD English students who have not taken an MA at Lancaster. They are designed in accordance with UK research councils training guidance. Seminars will run across terms 1 and 2, and dissertation supervision and a conference will take place in term 3. The two modules together aim to equip you with a range of skills, approaches and competences to draw on as early career researchers in the field of English Literary Studies and/or Creative Writing. Even if you are not considering a research career, we will cover skills that are valuable for any postgraduate student of literature.

  The two core modules are designed to complement the more specialist topics covered on MA English programmes through specific module seminars and dissertation supervisions. These core modules include sessions on research and writing skills, working with archives, and working with theory, and will encourage reflection on the practice and utility of literary research. The modules will be assessed by an ongoing portfolio of tasks, the final two of which are a dissertation proposal and a conference abstract. This prepares you for the summer term, which involves a conference – organised by the students themselves – at which each of you will give a paper relating to your research, and dissertation writing with allocated supervisors.

• Research Methods in Linguistics and English Language

  This module usually addresses three main themes:

  • qualitative research methods,
  • quantitative research methods
  • statistics in linguistics research

  Each thematic area will be covered throughout the module. More specifically, the following provides an indicative list of topics to be covered under these three rubrics:

  • Ethnography and field work
  • Focus groups and interviews
  • Text and discourse analysis
  • Corpora and big data
  • Questionnaires and surveys
  • Experimental paradigms
  • Visualization and descriptive statistics
  • Inferential statistics
  • Research Ethics

  The module deals with theoretical, ethical and methodological issues that are central to the study of language. We aim to enhance your knowledge of various research methods and the techniques of obtaining, analyzing, presenting, and disseminating research data relating to language, give you the opportunity to develop necessary skills to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research in linguistics and to produce and interpret statistical data, prepare you for independent research and conduction of theoretical/empirical work in the fields of linguistics and applied linguistics

• Rethinking Religion in the Victorian Novel

  Religion was frequently absent from the critical accounts of the Victoran novel offered in the second half of the twentieth century. When religion was mentioned, it was usually positioned as the losing contestant in a battle with secularism. For the influential critic George Levine, the novel is an inherently secular form, with theological explanations supplanted by the material and everyday concerns of the modern world. Levine was far from alone in his view. But as we will see in this module, religion is not so easily removed from our critical histories. Drawing on theorists such as Charles Taylor and Talal Asad, who have helped us think about the relationship between the sacred and secular in a more sophisticated manner, and an array of twenty-first century literary critics, historians, theorists and theologians, the module will explore the different ways in which religion and modernity co-exist throughout the pages of the Victorian novel.

• Romance and Realism

  This module explores the evolution of prose fiction from the late Romantic era through the first two decades of Queen Victoria’s reign. A defining focus of the module will be on the ways in which the Victorian novel negotiates with Romantic legacies: the primacy of self, the necessity of intellectual and personal liberty and an ambivalence towards the past are crucial to the development of the genre. The historical frame of the module allows us to move from James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), one of the first novels of the American ‘Renaissance’. Indicative themes include: the shaping presence of other genres in the development of nineteenth-century fiction, including spiritual autobiography and the long poem; historical contexts with particular reference to the religious and political debates of the period; the emergence of the novelist as a major cultural figure; ways in which the writers under review both internalise and contest the ethical, spiritual and economic forces of their historical moment.

• Romanticism: People, plants and animals

  This module will focus on the interdisciplinary relationship between literature, science and medicine in the Romantic period and will examine the ways in which scientific thought is expresssed in culture, history and politics.

  You will have the opportunity to develop a range of interdisciplinary interpretive skills by guided reading of an eclectic range of texts, from scientific speculation, poetry, novels, lectures and periodical essays. The module seeks to identify and cross established discipline boundaries while developing an understanding of Romantic-period literature and culture.

• Sociolinguistics

  This course introduces you to fundamental concepts and approaches involved in the study of the links between language and society. We will look at a number of important approaches to sociolinguistic research, and cover the topics most central to the discipline and its development. These include language variation and change, which usually refers to social, geographical and stylistic differences within a single language and how they change through time; language contact, including pidginisation and creolisation and societal multilingualism, including language shift, language death and language revival.

• Stylistics

  This module is concerned with the linguistic analysis of literary texts. Its main aim is to enable you to use linguistic analysis in order to explain how literary texts achieve their effects (e.g. how they convey new views of reality, how they project text worlds and characters, how they convey different points of view). The module introduces the most central concepts in stylistics, including the most recent advances in the field (especially in cognitive stylistics). The focus is mostly on prose fiction, but poetry and drama will also be considered.

• The Neoliberal Novel: Fiction, Politics and Economics 1979-

  This module explores the relation between the novel and neoliberal politics, economics and philosophy from 1979 to the present. It introduces you to the philosophy of neoliberalism by examining key theoretical texts by, for example, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Michel Foucault, David Harvey and Wendy Brown and tracks how the modern novel historically reflects, reinforces and questions the rise (and fall?) of neoliberalism. This module seeks to map the contours of what Walter Ben Michaels has famously called the Neoliberal Novel by examining its defining genres, tropes, subjectivities, imaginaries, affects and ideologies. We will seek to address the following indicative questions. To what extent is it possible to speak of a Neoliberal Novel? How far do novels from 1979 to the present reflect, anticipate and contest the history of neoliberalism from the collapse of Keynesianism in the mid-1970s, through the monetarist experiments of the Thatcher and Reagan governments in the 1980s, up to the financial crash of 2008 and the rise of 'post-liberal' populists like Trump? To what extent is it possible for the contemporary novel to think with, through and even beyond the neoliberal order?

• Victorian Literature and Other Media

  This module examines the formal, historical, generic, cultural, intercultural, and interhistorical relationships between Victorian literature and other media, including painting, illustration, theatre, music, film, television, and new media.

• Writing the Nineteenth Century City

  This module explores textual constructions of nineteenth-century urban spaces and those who inhabit them. What does it mean to live in the city in the nineteenth century and what might the city mean to its inhabitants and to the English population at large? We will consider the ways in which different types of space – for example the street, the graveyard, the house – are meaningful as well as the different ways more general conceptions of ‘the city’ are articulated across the century. We will pay attention to issues such as mobility, transport, technology, Englishness, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion, and we will engage with different theories of space and place by authors such as Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard and Doreen Massey. Throughout the course we will address the relationship between representation and place and how different types of imaginative literature present their urban spaces.

Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research.