Offers students the opportunity to improve their mastery of skills necessary for success in university study, including time and workload management, written communication, note taking, academic writing, successful use of the library, and approaches to research. Introduces students to University structures, systems, and resources. Helps students assess their own needs and understand where to secure further support.
3 semester credits. This course provides students with the writing skills necessary to produce various genres of writing, including: academic essays, literary analyses, and reflection journals. Students will reinforce critical thinking and cultural competence through the assessment of different texts and they will rely on peer review as a means to enhance their ability to integrate and deliver constructive feedback. The entire writing process will be explored systematically, and students will have the opportunity to bridge theory and practice by working on a variety of writing projects aimed at strengthening their ideas and voices.
3 semester credits. This course will examine excerpts of Dante Alighieri’s greatest passages from the Divine Comedy and other works in relation to the space and history of Florence. Textual analyses will be performed, unpacking the dense symbolism and motifs reflective of the intellectual and moral climate during 14th century Florence. Students will visit churches, piazzas, and palaces within the city and will examine these locations in the context of Dante’s life and surrounding controversy, the accusations and denunciations in his writings, the physical descriptions of the city, and the characters and historical figures present in his works. The classroom approach of this course is based on experiencing the city of Florence as the academic space for learning and engagement. Classes are not held in a traditional, frontal-style setting; each lesson is carefully mapped for curricular content and featured locations: lectures, observations, exercises, analysis, and reflections on presented topics are held in relevant sites that are accounted for in the academic planning, syllabus, and related course material. Coursework and submissions will be regularly assessed on the MyFUA platform through daily assignments in addition to exams, papers, and projects. Learning through the on-site classroom approach fosters a deeper understanding of the cultural environment of Florence and how it is related to the subject of study represented by the course, and allows the overall experience to contribute to the students’ academic and personal enrichment.
Pre-requisite: English Composition 3 or 3H.
Investigation of relationship of literature to one or more other arts, including music (opera, musical theater, popular music, jazz), painting, photography, other visual arts, sculpture and other plastic arts, performance art, dance, architecture. Topics vary and may include not only English literature but foreign literature in translation.
This module aims to introduce students to the life and novels of Jane Austen and explore how her work has been adapted in Hollywood. Students will examine the relationship between source texts and their adaptations, and together we will analyse genre, form, and thematic concerns like feminism and class.
Fears of extra-terrestrial invasion and nuclear apocalypse, of seemingly strange and alien civilizations, and of social, economic, and cultural collapse belie SF’s trash label. This course introduces you to the genre’s deep philosophical dimensions, tracing its progress through the pulp magazine during the late-Nineteenth century fin de siècle and early Twentieth-century inter-war periods in the United Kingdom and the United States respectively, and its later development across the so-called Iron Curtain during the Cold War. This course will also challenge the traditional conventions of Science Fiction – interstellar conflict with alien races – and explore the genre’s diverse progressions: into Ecocriticism, Feminism, sexuality, and the near-future ‘Post-SF’ of the urban and suburban present.
This module has been designed to help students realise their creative potential by producing original and stimulating short fiction. Teaching will consist of specialist workshops conducted by an expert in the field. In addition to engaging with practical aspects of craft and technique, students will learn how to create believable, compelling characters and how to make them live (and die!) on the page. They will also have the opportunity to visit sites of historic importance and natural beauty to inspire their writing.
Excursion(s): The module includes a live ‘reading’ at a leading local arts centre, where you’ll have the chance to share the stage with a prominent Scottish writer.
This module will provide students with an introduction to central medico-literary concepts, and their evolution, surrounding the body between 1400 and 1900 in Britain. After taking this course, students will be familiar with a wide range of literary works that centre the body, as well as key theories in Literature and Medicine Studies: accompanying primary historical and literary materials will be secondary sources which examine conceptual frameworks of both the body and the practice of medicine. This module will critically analyze literary representations of the early modern humoral body, bodily dissection, patient narratives, and Gothic medicine. Primary readings will introduce students to various historic literary genres, such as Renaissance drama, metaphysical poetry, and the Gothic novel. Indicative texts include works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Mary Shelley, Mary Seacole, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
From sparkly vampires to blockbuster monsters, gothic tropes appear to be all-pervasive in contemporary culture. As Catherine Spooner claims in Contemporary Gothic (2006), like ‘a malevolent virus, Gothic narratives have escaped the confines of literature and spread across disciplinary boundaries to infect all kinds of media, from fashion and advertising to the way contemporary events are constructed in mass culture’. What this course aims to do is to introduce students to Gothic’s literary expression in the British nineteenth century, before exploring the many ways in which this dark heritage continues to affect contemporary cultural production.
Focusing on three key texts from the nineteenth century, Frankenstein (1818), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Dracula (1897), this class will discuss their adaptation, appropriation and influence on popular narratives such as those found in fiction, film, tv, fashion and music video. Some of the contemporary texts we will be drawing upon will be Twilight (book & film), True Blood (book & tv), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film & tv), Scream (film), Supernatural (tv), Marilyn Manson (music), Interview with a Vampire (book & film), Blade (film), Blairwitch Project (film) etc.
Excursion(s): A visit to Edinburgh Dungeon and a gothic themed bar are included.
For the past decade, Scotland’s national status has been ‘both dangled before us and tantalizingly withheld’ (poet Don Paterson). With attention focused on the question of independence, recent debates concerning Scottish culture and identity gain a heightened political charge. Literature has not only reflected but actively shaped such debate. In the year the new Scottish Parliament was established (1998), Christopher Whyte argued that ‘in the absence of elected political authority, the task of representing the nation has been repeatedly devolved to its writers’. But what influence have writers played in recent political change, and to what extent has Scottish culture escaped its own stereotypes?
This course examines the literary and political currents shaping contemporary Scottish identity, introducing students to key twentieth- and twenty-first century texts. We encounter and explain a range of cultural debates concerning language, class, democracy and nationhood, attending to the urgency as well as the complexity of recent Scottish writing.
Excursion: There will be an excursion to Edinburgh, visiting the Scottish Parliament building and Scottish Writers Museum.
