Explore our English Literature taught Master's degree.

P-Q3P1

MA

1 year full-time;
2 years part-time

30 September 2024

English and Comparative Literary Studies

University of Warwick

The English Literature MA offers a varied, flexible approach to graduate study within one of the world's leading English departments. Our department offers options ranging from the Gothic and Postcolonial Theory to Petrofiction and the Anthropocene and allows you to explore these topics while working with those at the cutting intellectual edge of literary studies.

Our MA will train you in the study of writing and culture across a range of periods, cultures, and genres. It has an open and flexible study route. You will choose from a number of modules that address a range of issues and topics in the field of literatures written in English as well as literary theory and World Literature.

Modules range from Feminist Literary Theory and Queer Studies to Ecopoetics, the Gothic, World Literatures, and Drama. You will study four modules, two in Term One and two in Term Two; and undertake a dissertation project on an (approved) topic of your choice with a specialised supervisor in Term Three.

The MA in English Literature comprises a Research Methods module, a core module from a list of critical theory options, three further optional modules, and a Dissertation of 16,000 words. You can take one of your three optional modules from outside of the department, including from the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning.

Seminars consist of 5 to 12 students.

Contact hours comprise 4 hours of seminars a week, 2 office hours per member of staff, weekly reading groups and research seminars, and one-to-one Dissertation supervision in terms 2 and 3.

All essays are marked by two members of staff. The standard length for essays for modules on this course is 6,000 words; the Dissertation is 16,000 words. Marks are given out of 100.

For more information, please visit the English Literature web pageLink opens in a new window on the English website.

Your timetable

Your personalised timetable will be complete when you are registered for all modules, compulsory and optional, and you have been allocated to your lectures, seminars and other small group classes. Your compulsory modules will be registered for you, and you will be able to choose your optional modules when you join us.

65% (or equivalent) in an undergraduate degree in English Literature or a related degree. Applicants may be required to provide a writing sample to demonstrate suitability for the course.

• Band C
• IELTS overall score of 7.5, minimum component scores of two at 6.5/7.0 and the rest at 7.5 or above.

There are no additional entry requirements for this course.

Dissertation

The Dissertation offers you the opportunity to pursue your own distinct research interests. You can develop any idea you’ve discovered in your modules or write on a completely new topic that has always fascinated you. Our students choose an array of topics within the broadly-conceived boundaries of ‘literary studies’, although we’ll discuss your plans with you to make sure an available member of our teaching staff can support your topic.

Students often use their MA dissertations as springboards to PhD projects and have sometimes gone on to publish parts of their work in scholarly journals.

Choose one Critical Theory module from options including:

Critical Theory Today

Critical and Cultural Theory has never been more vibrant, nor more urgently needed, than today. Work in all areas of the Humanities has long been inextricably intertwined with critical reflection, often drawing from a multiplicity of disciplines, from philosophy and sociology to literary and visual studies. This module examines key developments in the development of critical and cultural theories, charting recent cultural and literary theory in historically and philosophically located ways.

Queer Theory and Praxis

This module aims to familiarise students with current theories of gender and sexuality, with a particular focus on literary and historical methodologies. You will learn about the effect of legal, medical, and moral frameworks on the emergence of forms of sexual identity worldwide and the impact of globalization on local forms of sexuality and sexual practice. You will work with Intersectional approaches to literary and cultural study that involve queer theory.

Feminist Theory

This module will consider some of the most important debates and trends in feminist literary theory over the last few decades. The module will consider the intersections of academic and popular, intellectual and activist dimensions of feminist literary theory; we also place emphasis on the articulation of feminist literary practice with representations of race, sexuality and class. Questions of reading practices, genre and canon-formation, as well as those of artistic expressions in response to the collaboration and conflict engaged between 'western', 'multicultural' and 'third world' feminisms will be some of the key themes that the module will explore.

Petrofiction: Studies in World Literature

This module studies the world literature of energy and natural resources, a critical category in the conjoined fields of the Energy and Environmental Humanities. We explore a range of works about that most combustible of planetary resources: oil. Our lives are saturated in oil – the most significant resource of the post-war capitalist world system. It is everywhere, especially in those places where it often appears abstract, scarce, or unseen.

Oil and its myriad refined products determine how and where we live, move, work and play; what we eat, wear, consume. It is heavily invested in the shaping of our political and physical landscapes. To think about oil is not solely to think about automobiles or derricks or spectacular spills or barrel prices. The computer or the phone (or even the paper!) on which you are reading this blurb could not be made – or brought to you – without this mineral. Oil’s universality makes it as controversial as it is ubiquitous in its apparent vitality and necessity as much as its toxicity. Energy, then, is as social a phenomenon as it is technological or a matter for engineering. Modern culture is a Hydrocarbon culture and recent scholarship has begun to engage with it as such, finding that oil, fossil fuels and other energy forms are deeply embedded in modern literature, art and culture.

World Literature in the Anthropocene

This module investigates the implications of the concept of the Anthropocene for literary-cultural studies on a world scale. Participants will read initially in the history of debates surrounding this term – denoting the advent of a geological era in which human action acquires decisive planetary force – as a way of revisiting conventional interpretive frameworks and categories, including questions of periodisation, comparative methodology and the ‘worlding’ of literary study. We will then take up a series of optics prompted by the Anthropocene and its counter-concepts (Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Growthocene et al.) to further explore the challenges of reading ecological crisis and culture in an era when it is no longer feasible to disarticulate human from so-called natural history. Texts range from literary works to field-specific criticism to theoretical writings, with an emphasis on the latter.

• The Development of English Drama, 1558-1669
• Modernism and Psychoanalysis
• Narratives of American Empire
• Victorian Materialities
• Fundamentals of World Literature

For more information, please visit the English Literature web page on the English website.Link opens in a new window

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