English: Issues in Modern Culture MA

The core module develops a close reading of works by writers of the period, while the optional modules offer the opportunity to analyse some of the technologies, media, philosophical perspectives and art forms whose development during the 20th century has made itself felt in modernist and postmodernist writing.

Students undertake modules to the value of 180 credits.

The programme consists of one core module (60 credits), three optional modules (60 credits) and a research dissertation (60 credits).

• Authors (including Gustave Flaubert, D.H. Lawrence; T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Alfred Hitchcock, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Alan Hollinghurst, David Foster Wallace). Please see UCL English website for more.

• The Body and Technology
• Catastrophe and the City
• Psychogeography
• Class and the City
• The Harlem Renaissance
• Hollywood Fiction
• Queer Fictions and the City
• Students then take further optional modules. Options available change every year, but in recent years have included:
• Contemporary Poetry
• American Counter-Culture
• 21st Century Fiction
• Modernism, Sex and Redemption
• Afrofuturism
• Inventions of Cinema
• Marxist Aesthetics in the 20th Century
• Cultures of Chance: Accident, Error, and Catastrophe in post-1945 Literature and Culture
• Global Anglophone Literature

All MA students undertake an independent research project which culminates in a dissertation of 12,000 words.

Each module is taught through a weekly seminar. Assessment is through take-home written examination, essays and the research dissertation.