The literary studies program offers six undergraduate units which can be taken as part of a minor or major sequence, or as individual electives.

8142 – Literary Studies:  Performance Texts
Performance Texts features an introduction to some "classic" performance texts (eg Homer, Shakespeare) and how later authors have appropriated such texts. It introduces plays and other performance pieces, including new media performance, selected from early works through to very recent examples.

8139 – Literary Studies:  Experimental Writing
Experimental Writing introduces students to a variety of experimental writing from a range of different time periods, forms and genres including in poetry, prose, theory and hypertext, as well as writing that crosses all of these boundaries.

8144 – Literary Studies:  The Novel
The Novel is a general introduction to the study of the novel as a dominant (post)modern literary form and to theoretical approaches to the novel. Through a close reading of a diverse and challenging range of literary texts, we will identify the conventions that characterize the novelistic genre, situating them in their specific literary contexts and their broader historical, social, and political dimensions.

8141 – Literary Studies:  Literature for 0–18
Literature for 0-18 allows students to read and respond to literature in many forms, including poetry, novels and hypertext, written for young people between the ages of 0 and 18. Students also read selections from critical and theoretical debates within the fields of young peoples’ literature and of literary studies.

8140 – Literary Studies:  Literature and Law
Literature and Law focuses on the topic of law in/and literature, which it explores through a range of literary and filmic texts and through literary theory. Students will read a range of works with a legal inflection, and investigate them by applying concepts drawn from philosophy and literary theory, including judgment and genre. They will study novels, poetry, philosophy, and extracts from Hansard, judgments and other dicta with the aim of understanding how law and literature intertwine. Is it possible to write or to read outside generic and other social conventions?

8143 – Literary Studies:  Poetry and Criticism
Students undertake the study of twentieth and twenty-first century English language poetry, and training in contemporary critical practice with an eye to its historical antecedents. Students read a major body of recent poetry in English. As well as an appreciation of this work, they gain insight into possible critical angles to take upon it through a survey of key works of criticism, from the 18th century and into the present. Students are trained to develop and defend their own independent critical stances. They also receive an introduction to the philosophy of judgment.

Course Convenor

Dr Paul Magee

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The two morphed images on this page are by, and courtesy of Sam Hinton 2009.