English Literature Courses
The programmes in English Literature include a wide diversity of courses. The foundational course offers a general introduction and the courses at level 2000 focus on reading. Some higher level courses cover historical periods of British literature and others look at American literature and literature from regions like South Asia and Southeast Asia. Others still take a generic or topic approach, with subjects such as film, visual media, critical theory, gender and psychoanalysis.
The range of approaches within courses is also wide. Different courses might emphasise aesthetic, historical, political or theoretical readings. Students are encouraged to check course descriptions on CANVAS or talk to course chairs, if they are uncertain.
Unless otherwise stated, all level 1000–6000 courses carry 4 units.
Level 4000HM coded courses carry 5 units each (for Cohort 2020 and before).
Courses offered in AY2023/2024 Semester 1
Tania ROY
Human beings are ‘tale-telling animals’. We all tell stories, and we all listen to them, read them and watch them. This course looks at the ways in which people tell stories, the kinds of stories they tell, and the meanings those stories generate. It focuses, in particular, upon the telling, and gives special attention to questions concerned with that. Texts include a novel, a play, films, short stories, poems and oral tales.
Pre-requisite: Exempted from NUS Qualifying English Test, or passed NUS Qualifying English Test, or exempted from further CELC Remedial English courses.
ER Yanbing
This course offers an introduction to some of the key concepts and theoretical perspectives in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. We will examine literature and theory as major sources of feminist knowledge production. The course focuses on developing analytical skills for examining the politics of gender and feminism as expressed in the formal, structural, and thematic elements of both critical and creative texts. With an emphasis on cultivating strong writing practices, it also aims to foster effective strategies for academic research and writing that demonstrate an informed awareness of the wider contextual debates and methodologies in feminist and literary studies.
Pre-requisite: EN1101E
Aparna SHUKLA
As if writing itself were not hard enough, literature courses include highly challenging texts. Putting the problem of writing to the fore, this course develops the student’s ability to write persuasive and elegant essays about ambiguity, subjectivity, figurative language, and so forth. While writing essays of various length, students will learn to develop their analyses and to use various kinds of evidence (including secondary criticism and literary theory) with greater precision.
Pre-requisite: EN1101E
Anne THELL
This course focuses on the emergence of the British novel as it develops from the early fiction of the late seventeenth century to the Regency novels of Jane Austen. We will read this famously amorphous genre through a variety historical and theoretical lenses, ranging from the rise of empiricism to the reconfiguration of gender roles to the eighteenth-century appetite for news and facts. Finally, we will examine the novel’s experiments with form and its characteristic features in order to understand how these narratives helped to consolidate new notions of the “modern” individual.
Pre-requisite: (i) EN1101E AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
Valerie WEE
This course is an introductory survey of the history of the motion picture from its invention up to the present. We will look at the way that the medium has developed as an art and a business. In addition, we will examine a number of different film movements around the world as well as key filmmakers and genres. Lectures and readings will consider film’s relationship to society as well as to other cultural forms. This course aims to provide students with a critical perspective on the complex forces that have shaped the motion picture’s evolutionary phases.
Pre-requisite: EN2203 or EN2204
Susan ANG
The course examines the appeal of s/f as a serious fictional engagement with our consensual sense of reality. It addresses fantasy, speculative fiction, and science fiction as forms of narrative engaged in “world-building” and “word-shaping,” studying such fictional constructs as forms of sociological and anthropological knowledge. It also examines the relation between the “strange” and the “real” in terms of the shared and the antithetical elements that relate s/f to realism.
Pre-requisite: (i) EN1101E AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
Valerie WEE
Genre consideration is important to film studies. It enables us to assess the ways in which a director works with or deviates from conventional audience expectations, to consider how a particular film is distinctive from other films whose generic features it reiterates, etc. This course focuses on the “horror genre” to introduce students to the significance of genre analysis in film studies. Invoking this specific genre, students analyze (a) the relationship between film and popular culture; (b) academic debates around the production, meaning, experience, and consumption of “texts”; and (c) film’s commentary on issues of identity, ideology, gender, and sexuality.
Pre-requisite: EN2203
Preclusion: EN2204
David TEH
This course offers an introduction to the study of art, film and media culture. It explores the changing role of visual media across the centuries, from pre-modern societies through to today’s digital, networked cultures. How have technological and economic changes generated new visual media? How have these media in turn shaped social and economic life? A range of case studies will be drawn from art history, film, popular culture and online media. What are the differences between art, film and other visual culture, and are these differences still relevant in the ‘convergent’ world of digital media culture?
Pre-requisite: (i) EN1101E AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
Irving GOH
This course traces the development of how we have come to our contemporary “affective turn.” We will begin with where the question of affects supposedly begun: Spinoza. We will then read how Deleuze underscored its importance, and how that has been carried through politically by Brian Massumi today. At the same time, we will be equally invested in Eve Sedgwick’s development of affect for feminist and queer theory in Berlant, Cvetkovich, Love, Edelman, Stewart, Nelson, and others. Finally, we will explore how affect theory affects literary studies with a reading of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
Pre-requisite: (i) EN1101E AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
GWEE Li Sui
Using selected Singapore texts from a variety of different genres, this course aims to enable students to explore the historical roots and contemporary relevance of literary production in Singapore. Beginning with colonial writing, the course moves through considerations of national and postcolonial literatures to contemporary concerns. Given Singapore’s history, the notion of a “Singapore” text will be used creatively in order to reflect upon the growth of Singaporean identity and culture, and literary texts from other countries in the region may be used for comparative purposes.
Pre-requisite: EN1101E or GCE ‘A’ Level Literature or equivalent, AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
Tania ROY
This course provides an intensive introduction to key topics in post-colonial theory through an overview of representative literary and theoretical texts. The syllabus demonstrates the vexed significance of the “post” in post-colonial cultural traditions. In tracing how decolonization remains bound up with older, colonial forms of knowledge/power, we approach post-coloniality as an aftermath. Through a range of writerly forms and cultural media, we identify the post-colonial in the question of “tradition” and its centrality to “non-Western” modernity; in inscriptions of race/ethnicity/sexuality into Third World humanism; as the mourning for a vanishing past; as aesthetic resistance to homogenizing processes of modernization.
Pre-requisite: (i) EN1101E AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
John WHALEN-BRIDGE
This course, which is aimed at upper level English Literature majors and cross-faculty students who have some experience with literary analysis, will focus on American literary orientalism in order to continue to examine questions of race, gender, ethnicity and literary form in the (mainly postwar) American imagination.
Pre-requisite for EN4232: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 80 units including 20 units in EN.
Preclusion for EN4232: EN4232HM
Pre-requisite for EN4232HM: Cohort 2020 and before: Completed 80 units including 28 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20 or be on the Honours track.
Preclusion for EN4232HM: EN4232
David TEH
This course examines the poetics of information in post-industrial society. The novels of Thomas Pynchon will be read as a critical meta-narrative of the informational turn in Western societies since the 1960s. Besides its obvious technological and economic effects, how has the new informational paradigm affected our psychology, everyday life and work; our understandings of place and community, of history and culture? The seminars will explore key themes of Pynchon’s oeuvre – such as alienation, entropy and paranoia – drawing on a wide range of critical theory, cultural history, and critiques of globalisation and technology.
Pre-requisite for EN4234: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 80 units including 20 units in EN.
Preclusion for EN4234: EN4234HM
Pre-requisite for EN4234HM: Cohort 2020 and before: Completed 80 units including 28 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20 or be on the Honours track.
Preclusion for EN4234HM: EN4234
Anne THELL
This course focuses on the work of one of most celebrated Anglo-Irish writers of the eighteenth century: Jonathan Swift. By tracking Swift’s dazzling literary output from 1690 to 1740, we will bring into better focus both the eighteenth century as a historical period and the ideas of historicity and modernity themselves. We will investigate a variety of literary modes, from satire to pamphlet polemics to the early novel, while we will also learn about the development of our own discipline by tracing Swift criticism from its inception to the present day and by entertaining a variety of critical perspectives.
Pre-requisite for EN4251: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 80 units including 20 units in EN
Preclusion for EN4251: EN4251HM
Pre-requisite for EN4251HM: Cohort 2020 and before: Completed 80 units including 28 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20 or be on the Honours track.
Preclusion for EN4251HM: EN4251
Susan ANG
This course focuses on the “nouveau roman”, a term applied to a sub-genre of twentieth-century fiction, which consciously and self-consciously interrogates, problematises and plays with traditional conventions and premises of the novel. These include characterisation, plot, chronology, narrative authority, author-reader reciprocity and language as agent of meaning and communication.
Pre-requisite for EN4261: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 80 units including 20 units in EN.
Preclusion for EN4261: EN4261HM
Pre-requisite for EN4261HM : Cohort 2020 and before: Completed 80 units including 28 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20 or be on the Honours track.
Preclusion for EN4261HM : EN4261
Walter LIM
This course explores the twinned ideas of usurpation and transgression in English Renaissance literature, analyzing the attempt to cross boundaries that define the norm in the polity and in moral, religious, and sexual spheres. We will look at how hierarchies established by religion, government, and custom seek to maintain and to justify the status quo. We will ask how literary texts register awareness of, and enter into dialogue with, these hierarchies. Different genres such as the play, the love lyric, the devotional lyric, and the epic will be invoked for our analysis of the cultural preoccupation with usurpation and transgression.
Pre-requisite for EN4880A: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 80 units including 20 units in EN.
Preclusion for EN4880A: EN4880AHM
Pre-requisite for EN4880AHM: Cohort 2020 and before: Completed 80 units including 28 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20 or be on the Honours track.
Preclusion for EN4880AHM: EN4880A
EN4401 (8 units)
EN4401HM (15 units)
The Honours Thesis is usually done in the final semester of a student’s pursuing an Honours degree.
Pre-requisite for EN4401: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 110 units including 40 units of EN major requirements with a minimum SJAP of 4.00 and GPA of 3.50, or with recommendation by the programme committee.
Preclusion for EN4401: EN4660, EN4401HM, EN4660HM
Pre-requisite for EN4401HM: Cohort 2016 to Cohort 2020: Completed 110 units including 44 units of EN major requirements with a minimum SJAP of 4.00 and GPA of 3.50, or with recommendation by the programme committee.
Preclusion for EN4401HM: EN4660, EN4401, EN4660HM
Note: Please register for the Honours Thesis manually with the Department.
Documents containing important information on EN4401 should be downloaded from “Documents and Forms.”
The Independent Study course is designed to enable the student to explore an approved topic within the discipline in depth. The student should approach a lecturer to work out an agreed topic, readings, and assignments for the course. A formal, written agreement is to be drawn up, giving a clear account of the topic, programme of study, assignments, evaluation, and other pertinent details. Head’s and/or Honours Coordinator’s approval of the written agreement is required. Regular meetings and reports are expected. Evaluation is based on 100% Continuous Assessment and must be worked out between the student and the lecturer prior to seeking departmental approval.
Pre-requisite for EN4660: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 100 units, including 40 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20.
Preclusion for EN4660: EN4401, EN4660HM, EN4401HM
Pre-requisite for EN4660HM: Cohort 2016 to Cohort 2020: Completed 100 units, including 44 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20.
Preclusion for EN4660HM: EN4401, EN4401HM, EN4660
Note: Please register for the Independent Study course manually with the Department.
Documents containing important information on the Independent Study course should be downloaded from “Documents and Forms.”
Aparna SHUKLA
This course, specifically designed for MA by Coursework students, prepares them for a Masters in Literary Studies through a two-pronged approach: First, to obtain a general overview of the discipline in order to approach the field with a better understanding of its academic demands. Through gradual but consistent exposure to articles on various critical approaches and research methods, students will gain an understanding of broad theoretical perspectives. Next, through extensive practice: working through several short writing assignments, revising and resubmitting these through the course of the semester, students' comprehension about disciplinary practices and about field-specific academic writing, will increase substantially.
Preclusion: EN5249
Grace LIM
The course introduces issues, challenges and questions raised by advanced study in literature and culture. Students approach the study of texts by developing a working understanding of appropriate questions and methods. The course covers the nature of scholarship in literary studies and explores the importance of literary history when approaching a given author or text. It introduces the connections between formal study and historical approaches and the relations between textual and cultural experience. Students pursue their choice of approach from a broad base of critical theory. The course also addresses the role of literature within the intersectional and environmental humanities.
GWEE Li Sui
The course introduces students to the emerging field of Global Anglophone Literature, which analyses texts associated with postcolonial and decolonised regions, including Asia, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Trinidad, Nigeria, South Africa, as well as Great Britain and North America. The course introduces some foundational material on the history and cultures of Empire, and introduces texts from the greater Anglophone world, asking how these fictional works illuminate the forces that shape the globalized yet unequal world we currently inhabit. Critical contexts include those of race, aboriginality, gender, political economy, migration, cosmopolitanism, technology, and war.
John WHALEN-BRIDGE
This course is a focused examination of the various senses of “political literature”. One may say “all literature is ideological”, but this course raises doubts that “everything is political” in a significant way. This course examines the differences between “ideology” and “politics” in relation to literature. The course considers works that challenge conventional distinctions such as that between “propaganda” and “literature”. Students will test definitions of “the political” on a variety of texts.
Preclusion: EN5235
Heather BRINK-ROBY
The course will examine Victorian literature with an emphasis on its historical, political, and cultural context. Topics addressed may include significant literary genres and movements (e.g. The Industrial Novel, Aestheticism and Decadence) major authors (e.g. George Eliot, Oscar Wilde), or broader thematic explorations of the diverse literary productions of nineteenth-century Britain (e.g. Gender and Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century, Imperialism and Victorian Writing). This course will also familiarize students with contemporary critical approaches to the study of Victorian literature and culture.
Preclusion: EN5247
Independent research plays an important role in graduate education. The Independent Study course is designed to enable the student to explore an approved topic in English Literature in depth. The student should approach a lecturer to work out an agreed topic, readings, and assignments for the course. A formal, written agreement is to be drawn up, giving a clear account of the topic, programme of study, assignments, evaluation, and other pertinent details. The Head’s and/or Graduate Coordinator’s approval of the written agreement is required. Regular meetings and reports are expected. Evaluation is based on 100% Continuous Assessment and must be worked out between the student and the lecturer prior to seeking departmental approval.
Note: (1) Word limit: 5,000 – 6,000 words. (2) Workload: Minimum 10 hours per week. The precise breakdown of contact hours, assignment and preparation is to be worked out between the lecturer and the student, subject to Departmental approval.
Independent research plays an important role in graduate education. The Independent Study Course is designed to enable the student to explore an approved topic in English Literature in depth. The student should approach a lecturer to work out an agreed topic, readings, and assignments for the course. A formal, written agreement is to be drawn up, giving a clear account of the topic, programme of study, assignments, evaluation, and other pertinent details. The Head’s and/or Graduate Coordinator’s approval of the written agreement is required. Regular meetings and reports are expected. Evaluation is based on 100% Continuous Assessment and must be worked out between the student and the lecturer prior to seeking departmental approval.
Note: (1) Word limit: 7,000 – 8,000 words. (2) Workload: Minimum 10 hours per week. The precise breakdown of contact hours, assignment and preparation is to be worked out between the lecturer and the student, subject to Departmental approval.
Courses offered in AY2023/2024 Semester 2
Gilbert YEOH
Human beings are ‘tale-telling animals’. We all tell stories, and we all listen to them, read them and watch them. This course looks at the ways in which people tell stories, the kinds of stories they tell, and the meanings those stories generate. It focuses, in particular, upon the telling, and gives special attention to questions concerned with that. Texts include a novel, a play, films, short stories, poems and oral tales.
Pre-requisite: Exempted from NUS Qualifying English Test, or passed NUS Qualifying English Test, or exempted from further CELC Remedial English courses.
Susan ANG
Critical reading is the essential skill of literary studies. It involves close attention to individual words and phrases, to figures of speech, to the structures of sentences and texts, to literary form and genre, and to historical context. It gives attention to the implicit connotations of language, as well as to its explicit denotations. This course sets out to inculcate in students the skills of critical reading and help them pay attention to and evaluate textual detail. It will be organised as a series of seminars in which students develop and practice skills by reading short texts and extracts.
Pre-requisite: EN1101E
Valerie WEE
This course begins with two fundamental questions: How do films work? And, more importantly, how do you write about it? This course trains students to critically engage with and analyze popular film texts. By the end of the course, the student must (i) understand how mise-en-scene, editing, lighting, cinematography, and sound function to create meaning; and (ii) be able to write clearly and knowledgeably about how larger cultural, aesthetic, social, and philosophical contexts shape cinematic production and reception.
Heather BRINK-ROBY
How has the role of art in the quest for a just society been framed and re-framed in response to radical transformations in 1) ideas about what it means for a society to be “just” and 2) ideas about what art essentially is? More importantly, how are these two histories of transformation themselves linked? Texts include novels, plays, poems, short stories, and films by authors including Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Henrik Ibsen, Bertolt Brecht, Steven Spielberg, Zadie Smith, and Claudia Rankine.
Pre-requisite: EN1101E
Heather BRINK-ROBY
Epic, romance, drama, novel, film, and TV: each symbolizes and defines a specific era in Britain, an era that is that form’s own “golden age.” What is at stake (politically, artistically, and epistemically) in describing, for instance, the 19th century as the “age of the novel” rather than as the “age of drama”? As we examine this epochizing of artforms, we’ll explore transformations in story and pleasure from the Medieval period to the present, and we’ll consider the changing roles of genre and medium in the internet and DH era. Texts include Beowulf, Doctor Faustus, Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations.
Pre-requisite: (i) EN1101E AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
Gilbert YEOH
Drawing from all three genres of fiction, drama and poetry, this course presents a survey of Anglophone literature in the 20th-century. We explore the writing of this century through two of its most important literary paradigms, namely the literary modernism of the early decades and the postmodern era following WWII. Students will encounter a century characterised by extensive aesthetic innovation, active political engagement and the acute registering of social change. Subjects covered include modernism, postmodernism and issues of art, language and representation. Writers we study may include T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Harold Pinter, Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf.
Pre-requisite: (i) EN1101E AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
Walter LIM
Shakespeare occupies an iconic position in English literature and acquaintance with his plays is expected of the informed reader. This course offers an introduction to a representative range of Shakespeare's works. It approaches them through genre and the informing background of English Renaissance history, culture, and politics. By the end of the course, students will have a good understanding of the major themes of Shakespeare’s plays and the milieu within which he wrote and performed.
Pre-requisite: (i) EN1101E AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
Tania ROY
Since its articulation at the turn of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis has claimed a privileged relation to literature. Many of its foundational concepts sprang from Freud’s life-long engagement with literature. The ‘application’ of psychoanalytic concepts to the interpretation of literary works will therefore be an important part of our approach. In applying theory to texts, we will identify and explore the plural and contradictory desires that make up literary discourse in particular, and the production of meaning, generally, just as our selections of literary works will help to exemplify key concepts in the psychoanalytic tradition.
Pre-requisite: (i) EN1101E AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
ER Yanbing
What is “the contemporary”? How has contemporary literature since the turn of the twenty-first century engaged with some of the most pressing social, political, and cultural concerns of the current moment? This course takes the experience and representation of time as its central analytic for examining these questions. Through a range of novels written since the turn of the twenty-first century, the course aims to introduce students to the emergent social, political, and cultural concerns currently occupying the contemporary imagination.
Pre-requisite: (i) EN1101E AND (ii) at least one of the following courses (EN2201, EN2202, EN2203, EN2204, EN2205, EN2206, EN2207, EN2275, EN2276, EN2277)
Beryl PONG
Cultural Studies seeks out provocative juxtapositions and surprising connections between apparently disparate phenomena, such as entertainment and global economics, personal and private domains, identity formation and desire, military strategy/technology and aesthetics. It conducts a critical inquiry into the formation of daily existence through the examination of discursive practices, ideologies, technology and/or mass media. The course provides a means for exploring in depth the work of one or more Cultural Studies theorists while contextualising these inquiries in more specific intellectual domains and exploring, critically, the possibilities provided by these critical interventions.
Pre-requisite for EN4244: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 80 units including 20 units in EN.
Preclusion for EN4244: EN4244HM
Pre-requisite for EN4244HM: Cohort 2020 and before: Completed 80 units including 28 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20 or be on the Honours track.
Preclusion for EN4244HM: EN4244
Irving GOH
This course seeks a critical understanding of the term “autotheory” (The Argonauts, 2015). It asks: What does the “auto” in the term imply? Does it signal a regression to the Self/Subject as already critiqued by theory in the 1980s? Or is it a reflection of a narcissism made possible today by social media apparatuses? Or else, does it pave the way for a new “care for the self” (Foucault)? And how does it influence our readings of contemporary autofiction, and vice versa? Writers read in this course include Maggie Nelson, Paul Preciado, Yiyun Li, Rachel Cusk, and Ottessa Moshfegh.
Pre-requisite for EN4249: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 80 units including 20 units in EN.
Preclusion for EN4249: EN4249HM
Pre-requisite for EN4249HM: Cohort 2020 and before: Completed 80 units including 28 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20 or be on the Honours track.
Preclusion for EN4249HM: EN4249
Steve GREEN
This course, which assumes no prior knowledge of the ancient world, will: (a) provide students with an insight into the historical or mythical background behind a range of popular figures and stories from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and; (b) allow students to appreciate the reasons why these figures and stories have been revisited, reinterpreted, and distorted over the past two millennia, with particular emphasis on twentieth- and twenty-first-century film. Topics include the figure of the gladiator (Spartacus, Gladiator), Cleopatra, the story of the Trojan War, and the Greek myths of Perseus, and Jason and the Argonauts.
Pre-requisite for EN4252: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 80 units including 20 units in EN.
Preclusion for EN4252: EN4252HM
Pre-requisite for EN4252HM: Cohort 2020 and before: Completed 80 units including 28 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20 or be on the Honours track.
Preclusion for EN4252HM: EN4252
Chitra SANKARAN
Literary Studies has prided itself on constantly being in flux in the postmodern era as a sign that it responds to ideological and social changes. The most pressing contemporary issue that affects all of humanity is the global environmental crisis. In keeping with its revisionist energies, one important field of literary study that has opened up over the past two decades is ecocriticism, which explores the connections between literature and the environment. Ecocriticism critiques anthropocentrism and offers a radical revaluation of human relationship with the non-human ‘other’.
Pre-requisite for EN4267: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 80 units including 20 units in EN.
Preclusion for EN4267: EN4267HM
Pre-requisite for EN4267HM: Cohort 2020 and before: Completed 80 units including 28 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20 or be on the Honours track.
Preclusion for EN4267HM: EN4267
Irving GOH
This course introduces some key texts of the major theorists (Casanova, Damrosch, Moretti, Apter, etc.) of World Literature today. This is to enable students to better approach World Literature in the 21st century. In that respect, we will also touch on some methodologies that are rather unique to World Literature research. We will then bring these theoretical and methodological aspects, along with other thematic issues pertinent to World Literature (particularly the question of citizenship), to bear in our readings of writers including Mohsin Hamid, Ocean Vuong, and Han Kang.
Pre-requisite for EN4268: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 80 units including 20 units in EN.
Preclusion for EN4268: EN4268HM
Pre-requisite for EN4268HM: Cohort 2020 and before: Completed 80 units including 28 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20 or be on the Honours track.
Preclusion for EN4268HM: EN4268
EN4401 (8 units)
EN4401HM (15 units)
The Honours Thesis is usually done in the final semester of a student’s pursuing an Honours degree.
Pre-requisite for EN4401: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 110 units including 40 units of EN major requirements with a minimum SJAP of 4.00 and GPA of 3.50, or with recommendation by the programme committee.
Preclusion for EN4401: EN4660, EN4401HM, EN4660HM
Pre-requisite for EN4401HM: Cohort 2016 to Cohort 2020: Completed 110 units including 44 units of EN major requirements with a minimum SJAP of 4.00 and GPA of 3.50, or with recommendation by the programme committee.
Preclusion for EN4401HM: EN4660, EN4401, EN4660HM
Note: Please register for the Honours Thesis manually with the Department.
Documents containing important information on EN4401 should be downloaded from “Documents and Forms.”
The Independent Study course is designed to enable the student to explore an approved topic within the discipline in depth. The student should approach a lecturer to work out an agreed topic, readings, and assignments for the course. A formal, written agreement is to be drawn up, giving a clear account of the topic, programme of study, assignments, evaluation, and other pertinent details. Head’s and/or Honours Coordinator’s approval of the written agreement is required. Regular meetings and reports are expected. Evaluation is based on 100% Continuous Assessment and must be worked out between the student and the lecturer prior to seeking departmental approval.
Pre-requisite for EN4660: Cohort 2021 onwards: Completed 100 units, including 40 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20.
Preclusion for EN4660: EN4401, EN4660HM, EN4401HM
Pre-requisite for EN4660HM: Cohort 2016 to Cohort 2020: Completed 100 units, including 44 units in EN, with a minimum GPA of 3.20.
Preclusion for EN4660HM: EN4401, EN4401HM, EN4660
Note: Please register for the Independent Study course manually with the Department.
Documents containing important information on the Independent Study course should be downloaded from “Documents and Forms.”
Gilbert YEOH
This course explores 20th‐century British and American literary production, with a focus on the first half of the century. It will examine the writings of key modernist authors of the early decades (such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) even as it will also survey other literary and artistic activities in this period. The latter may include the avant‐garde movements (such as Dadaism and Surrealism), the Harlem Renaissance, and cinema. Besides the above writers, others to be studied may include Andre Breton, Samuel Beckett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens.
Preclusion: EN5238
ER Yanbing
The objectives of this course are to invite students to reflect on and analyse texts by great women novelists. Topics covered include the choice of genre, the relation between narrative structures and psychological experience and their political implications, the nature of the dilemmas at the heart of each text, and the problems of defining and responding to what is specific to women’s writing.
Preclusion: EN5242
Walter LIM
This course introduces students to representative plays of Shakespeare by considering the relationship between form and content, between genre and theme, in works written for performance on stage. It provides us with a point of entry into the social, cultural, and political world of Shakespeare’s England, inviting critical consideration of the significance of Shakespeare’s plays for his 16th- and 17th-century audience. It also offers opportunity for us to consider the cultural and ideological implications of selected stage and/or film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, adaptations that showcase this iconic playwright’s relevance to audiences historically and culturally distanced from him.
Preclusion: EN5244
Tania ROY
The course addresses issues of historical trauma and cultural memory; through a focus on how such memory is manifested in aesthetic (primarily literary) representation. The course assumes a dual approach to the study of selected texts, requiring attention to the topic of violence and memory on the one hand; and the ethics and politics of representation on the other. Literary texts will illuminate problems of narrative agency, responsibility and testimony in the aftermath of a violent past. The conceptual framework of discussions derives from Maurice Blanchot and his influence on post-structuralism, and from contemporary uses of psychoanalysis by literary theorists.
Preclusion: EN5253
Chitra SANKARAN
This course examines the shifting perceptions of the natural world found in a variety of English literary works. Through the study of key literary texts, the evolution of ideas about nature will be traced from the 17th century’s age of scientific discovery to the 21st century’s idea of environmental crisis. A key element of the model will be the use of ecocritical ideas and concepts as a way to approach and understand connections between literature and the environment.
Preclusion: EN5880A
Independent research plays an important role in graduate education. The Independent Study course is designed to enable the student to explore an approved topic in English Literature in depth. The student should approach a lecturer to work out an agreed topic, readings, and assignments for the course. A formal, written agreement is to be drawn up, giving a clear account of the topic, programme of study, assignments, evaluation, and other pertinent details. The Head’s and/or Graduate Coordinator’s approval of the written agreement is required. Regular meetings and reports are expected. Evaluation is based on 100% Continuous Assessment and must be worked out between the student and the lecturer prior to seeking departmental approval.
Note: (1) Word limit: 5,000 – 6,000 words. (2) Workload: Minimum 10 hours per week. The precise breakdown of contact hours, assignment and preparation is to be worked out between the lecturer and the student, subject to Departmental approval.
Independent research plays an important role in graduate education. The Independent Study course is designed to enable the student to explore an approved topic in English Literature in depth. The student should approach a lecturer to work out an agreed topic, readings, and assignments for the course. A formal, written agreement is to be drawn up, giving a clear account of the topic, programme of study, assignments, evaluation, and other pertinent details. The Head’s and/or Graduate Coordinator’s approval of the written agreement is required. Regular meetings and reports are expected. Evaluation is based on 100% Continuous Assessment and must be worked out between the student and the lecturer prior to seeking departmental approval.
Note: (1) Word limit: 7,000 – 8,000 words. (2) Workload: Minimum 10 hours per week. The precise breakdown of contact hours, assignment and preparation is to be worked out between the lecturer and the student, subject to Departmental approval.
Tania ROY
This is a required course for all research Masters and Ph.D. students admitted from AY2004/05 onwards. The course provides a forum for students and faculty to share their research and to engage one another critically in discussion of their current research projects. The course will include presentations by faculty on research ethics and dissertation writing. Each student is required to present a formal research paper. Active participation in all research presentations is expected. The course may be spread over two semesters and will be graded “Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory” on the basis of student presentation and participation.