Contemporary Literature and Culture (MA) - 2013/2014 entry
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Overview
This programme offers you the opportunity to shape your own dynamic programme of study in contemporary literary and cultural studies. The programme provides an introduction to the contemporary period via an overview of some of the historical transformations of literature and cultural thought from 1945, as well as providing a much more recent, post-2000 framework within which to understand contemporary literature and culture. This enables you to view the contemporary moment through a historical lens or to focus more exclusively on very recent cultural production.
Through a range of literary and interdisciplinary options, you have the opportunity to pursue your own interests, whether they lie in exciting developments in contemporary poetics, in US, British, or postcolonial literatures, in contemporary theoretical approaches to art or in socio-historical approaches to the literary and cultural constructions of vectors such as nation, race, diaspora, gender, sexuality and class. The MA provides a comprehensive programme of study that covers the aesthetic, historical and political dimensions of contemporary literature and culture.
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Why study this course at Birkbeck?
- Introduces you to the cutting-edge of contemporary literature and culture, offering the unique opportunity to specialise in the post-2000 period.
- Provides grounding in some of the key concepts that shape understandings of the contemporary world, including terms like 'hybridity', 'performance', 'trauma', 'memory' and 'the uncanny', as well as wider conceptualisations like globalisation and postcoloniality.
- Exposes you to a wider community of scholars and thinkers via graduate seminars, reading groups, guest lectures – including those by practising writers – and the wider arts network accessible in Central London.
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Course structure
Core modules:
- Reading the Contemporary: introduces you to a range of contemporary literary, cinematic, visual and theoretical works published since 2000, tracing some of the major developments in contemporary world literatures at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Authors you can expect to encounter include Slavoj Žižek, Margaret Atwwood, Caryl Phillips and Salam Pax.
- Postwar to Contemporary: provides some crucial historical and literary contexts from 1945 onwards, addressing the contexts of post-war reconstruction, decolonisation, the fate of avant-garde art, and theories of postmodernity and globalisation. Authors you can expect to encounter include Fredric Jameson, Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter and Jackie Kay.
Two option modules, which vary from year to year, and may include:
- A Confusion of Tongues: Illness, Language, Writing
- Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
- Asian and African Film
- Contemporary US Fiction
- Contemporary British Poetry
- Memory, Trauma, and Cultural Identity
- Narrating Nation after 9/11
- Language Matters: Language, the Brain and the Twentieth-Century Word
- The Post-Colonial Novel and the Post-Colonial Discourse
- Twenty-First Century Feminist Fiction and the World in Crisis.
Dissertation on any aspect of contemporary literature and culture, written from Easter to September in your final year.
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Study resources
Birkbeck is at the geographical centre of London’s research library complex, a short distance from the British Library, the University of London Library, and the Institute of Historical Research. Birkbeck's School of Arts hosts the internationally acclaimed Centre for Contemporary Poetics, which regularly features visiting poetic practitioners.
Find out more about our range of world-class research resources.
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Further study opportunities
If you are interested in further research, we offer a PhD/MPhil in English.
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Careers information
Graduates go on to careers in writing and journalism, the arts more generally, editing, publishing, research, marketing, public relations and teaching.
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Apply now
- Application deadlines and interviews
We recommend you apply as early as possible. Later applications may also be considered, subject to availability of places. - Online application
You can apply online from the link below.
- Application deadlines and interviews