Ma english literature: contemporary writing english

Structure

Please note for 2019/20 entry:

Our MA English Programmes are currently undergoing a review to ensure the content continues to offer an outstanding teaching and learning experience for our students.

Your programme will offer specially-designed core modules alongside the opportunity to choose from a range of electives in specialist areas.

The Contemporary Writing pathway is currently available for one year through full-time study, or two years part-time.

You will take four assessed modules and two non-assessed research training modules before proceeding to the 15,000-word dissertation.

Assessed modules are taught in weekly two-hour seminars. The research-training modules will involve visits to archives and galleries which may each take up an afternoon. The dissertation is supervised through sessions with a specially designated supervisor. In addition to the timetabled sessions, you will be asked to attend meetings with your adviser and course tutor. You will also need to undertake many hours of independent learning and research in order to progress at the required level. When coursework deadlines are approaching independent learning hours may need to increase significantly.

You will take four assessed modules (two in each semester) and two non-assessed research training modules (one in each semester) before proceeding to the 15,000-word dissertation.

We understand the need for flexibility for part-time students. Part-time students take one assessed module per semester, and take the two non-assessed research training modules in Semester One and Two. You are encouraged to begin work on your dissertation at the end of the first year, and will submit it in August of your second year. Teaching is done during the day.

• Writing and the Present
• Resources for Research (non-assessed)
• Researching Modern Culture (non-assessed)
• Dissertation

You choose three modules from a list of options that changes from year to year (one can be from the range of modules offered across the MA English Studies curriculum). In 2017-2018 we hope to offer the following. If members of our specialist research staff win research funding it will mean that their module won’t run, so for that reason this list is indicative only.

• Benjamin and Adorno
• Cultural Legacies of the First World War
• Forms of Modernism
• Literature, Science and Technology
• Peripheral Modernities
• Modernism and After
• Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction
• Reading the Middle East
• The State of the Novel
• Writing the East End

You may, subject to availability and the approval of the School, take one of your option modules from across a range offered by other Schools in the Humanities and Social Science Faculty, or from other Colleges of the University of London.

In addition to taught modules, we run a range of research seminars to which all MA students are invited. Some of these are linked to our interdisciplinary Research Centres, such as the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, the Centre for Religion and Literature in English and the Centre for the History of the Emotions. Others are collaborations with other institutions, such as the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar. With visiting speakers from across the world, these seminars are an opportunity to meet other postgraduate students and members of staff and to learn about the latest developments in research.