Modern and Contemporary Literature (MA) - 2013/2014 entry

This programme begins with an investigation of literary and theoretical conceptions of modernity in early twentieth-century literature, focusing on topics such as urbanisation, technology, mass culture, individualism and subjectivity.

You will also have the chance to analyse the historical transformations of literature and cultural thought from 1945, using the contexts of post-war reconstruction, decolonisation, the fate of avant-garde art, and theories of postmodernity and globalisation. The emergence of international literary paradigms during the twentieth century is reflected in the choice of texts from British, American and post-colonial contexts.

• Gain a thorough grounding in the key concepts of modernism, modernity and the contemporary.
• You will be introduced to key texts and paradigms that shape our conception of literature from the early twentieth century to the present.
• Opportunities to join a number of graduate seminars and reading groups, and occasional discussions with practising novelists and poets.
• Find out what our students say about our courses.

Core modules:

• Becoming Modern: includes James Joyce, Ulysses; Virginia Woolf, Orlando; TS Eliot, The Waste Land; short stories by Katherine Mansfield; peoms by Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy and Hope Mirrlees; Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life; Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life; Futurist Manifestos;
• Post-War to Contemporary: includes Fredric Jameson, Post-modernism; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying Lot of 49; Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve; Jackie Kay, Trumpet; David Mitchell, Ghostwritten.

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 British Poetry
• Contemporary US Fiction
• Language Matters: Language, the Brain and the Twentieth-Century Word
• Modernist Writers and the First World War
• Modernism and Vulgarity
• Narrating the Nation after 9/11
• The Horror, The Horror!
• TS Eliot
• Twenty-First Century Feminist Fiction and the World in Crisis
• Voiceworks.

Dissertation on any aspect of twentieth-century and contemporary literature, written from Easter to September in your final year.

Find out more in our departmental handbook.

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.

The University of London Library has an outstanding collection of literary periodicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the nearby University College London Library also has an important James Joyce archive. The Poetry Library at London’s South Bank Centre on the River Thames is rich in twentieth-century poetry. Birkbeck's School of Arts hosts the international acclaimed Centre for Contemporary Poetics, which regularly features visiting poetic practitioners.

Find out more about our range of world-class research resources.

If you are interested in further research, we offer a PhD/MPhil in English.

Graduates go on to careers in writing and journalism, editing, publishing, research, marketing, public relations and teaching.