Seminars Offered (note: only a selection of these can be offered at any one time)

HL7101 Graduate Seminar in the History of Literary Theory

Organized chronologically, the seminar provides students with a broad historical and critical foundation for the advanced study of literary theory from the earliest periods to the present. It surveys literary theory and criticism from the Biblical, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightment, Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Post - Modern periods. It examines theories and criticisms concerned with epic and romance, drama, the novel, poetry, and popular culture, and considers questions of aesthetics, authorship, the body, the canon, tradition, gender and sexuality, ideology, interpretation, language, rhetoric, subjectivity, nation, and the institution of literary studies. Rather than focusing on literary theory and criticism through the lens of primarily modern and contemporary schools and movements, the seminar highlights theory as a dynamic and historically contextual mode of literary study. The primary print text is The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

HL7102 Graduate Seminar in Critical Theory

This course offers an introduction to a variety of topical literary theories for graduate students. It is divided into a number of units. For example, Marxist Literary Theory, which challenges the notion that there can ever be a non-political, value-free interpretive act and examines the implications of ideology and hegemony as critical concepts: New Historicism, which argues that complex structures of power form the background against which social conflict should be understood; Psychoanalysis and Literature, which explores the two faces of psychoanalytic criticism : as pathographical study and hermeneutic reading; Deconstruction and Ethics, which investigates how the text's rhetoric, arrangement,style, and logic mask over gaps, self-refutations, or aporia; Literary Darwinism, which interprets literature using recent discoveries from the field of cognitivism, developmental psychology, and genetics; and Global modernity, which examines how the popular cultural products of contemporary Asia contribute to (re) constituting a sense of the national or the nationness in the context of a desire for cultural globalization. The objective of teh course is to familiarize graduate students with a broad range of topical contemporary theories, a firm grasp of which they will require for their critical writing.

HL7103 Graduate Seminar in Drama

This module will likely cover new ground each time it is taught, providing in-depth analysis of either individual dramatists, historical periods, sub-genres, or theoretical/ theatrical problems in drama. As such, it will focus as much on secondary materials as primary sources, specifically seeking to understand how contemporary aesthetic trends and epistemological commitments are uniquely expressed in the theatre.

HL7104 Graduate Seminar in Film

The seminar provides students with an advanced understanding of the connections between film history, film criticism, and film theory. It explores both mainstream and counter cinema from three major periods of film history: silent cinema,sound film, and digital cinema. It examines film critical approaches to production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. It considers major film theories concerned with montage, realism mise-en-scene film authorship, third cinema, national and intercultural cinemas, cinema semiotics,questions of politics and ethics, film-philosophy, and cultural studies. Relying on primary texts in the form of films, historical publications, and theorethical essays, the seminar concentrates on the relationships between areas of film studies rather than briefly surveying each area separately. Primary print texts include _Film History: Theory and Practice_, _Film Analysis_, and _Film Theory and Criticism_.

HL7105 Graduate Seminar in Renaissance Studies

“The Renaissance" for our purposes embraces the period of time stretching from roughly 1500 to 1660 - from the first consolidation of the English Tudor state to the Restoration of Charles II. Typically thought of as a great age of drama, the Renaissance saw the flourishing of diverse literary forms from lyric to epic to pastoral while also, of course, giving rise to the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and other talented figures. We will examine the social and economic contexts of this diverse literature, including the advent of royal absolutism, the beginnings of empire, and the revolutionary shift from feudal to capitalist modes of production, without neglecting the broader epistemological problems raised by these works with respect to selfhood, virtue, and the nature of truth. Without focusing exclusively on dramatic literature, we will explore how and why the trope of the theatrum mundi or "world as stage" gained an intense hold on the cultural imagination of the period.

HL7106 Graduate Seminar in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

The Restoration and eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a stunning variety of new modes and forms and the revival of still others. Among the "revived" forms satire was by far the most visible and important, especially from 1600 to 1740s. At the same time, from the first decades  of the eighteenth century, the early novel and the poetry of sensibility stake their claims on a new kind of audience ( the literate middle classes) as well as giving expression to new scales of value (evident, for example , in privileging of the "natural" world over the human and of sentiment over reason ) . The shift from a neoclassical to a more recognizably modern aesthethic finds an echo in the drama of the period, as the elaborate Restoration comedy gives away to a homely species of sentimental melodrama. This course proposes to examine such developments in their social and cultural context with special attention to the rapid urbanization and industrialization of English society, the increased literacy of the population and greater availabilty of printed material, and the rise of both empricism and a reaction against it.

HL7107 Graduate Seminar in Romanticism

The Romantic period marks a watershed in the nature of literary products. It is characterized by the appearance of two apparently opposite but nonetheless inseparable tendencies; the use of text to express issues of pressing social relevance and to reflect issues of personal import to the writer. This course explores the nature and implications of this upheaval and its legacy through an investigation of selected texts. Amongst the topics it will address are the rise of radicalism and its effect on literary products, the new abhorrence of social division, the emergence of a new wave of women's writing, the questioning of established ideological convictions, the excitement at the expanding boundaries of the known world, the impact of science on literature, the influence of German idealism on the literature of the period and the insistence on the authority of personal vision and experience. The course will explore works from a wide range of genres including poetry, drama, fiction, philosophy, journalism and critical writing. Its objective will be to expose students to the ambivalence of a literature that marks the origins of a great many debates that are still topical today.

HL7108 Graduate Seminar in Victorian Literature and Culture

This course provides a thematic, instead of a purely chronological, approach to a number of Victorian literary texts. The comparison of canonical nineteenth-century works and only recently reprinted material, including fiction by long forgotten popular writers, will help us to understand the developments that engendered a plethora of controversies, both at the time and in its wake, engendered a versatility of works, and perhaps above all, created the novel genre as the Victorian era's most popular, critical, and representative form of literary expression. In covering a number of emergent subgenres as different as the sensational detective novel and the domestic family chronicle, the course thereby aims at once to offer a grounding in Victorian literary culture and to inspire research on new directions in recovery work as well as in aesthetic analysis.

HL7109 Graduate Seminar in Modernism

This course entails an in depth examination of the major British and Irish works of the modernist period. Historical and cultural contexts, in particular technological innovations and modernization, will be used to understand the time period that produced such formally experimental literature. Texts covered will include James Joyce Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, and the poetry of T.S. Eliot. In addition, we will survey seminal critical works that have shaped how we look at modernism, beginning with what modernist wrote about their own art to the present critical discourses of modernist studies.

 HL7110 Graduate Seminar in Contemporary Literature and Culture

This seminar has a number of different, but related, aims: firstly we will read extracts from recent commentaries on the state of literary studies and assess the claims and counter-claims about various practices of reading and how they intersect with and/ or react against social agendas. We will conclude this discussion with a consideration of the value of aesthetic readings. Secondly, in the context of our discussions about merits of various reading strategies, we will read contemporary literary works from notable writers whose aesthetic commitments intersect those of the secondary reading. Finally, in part responding to our analysis of the three novels, we will attempt to address the precarious question of what constitutes the "contemporary". This will involve a consideration of what is meant by literary postmodernism and investigate the suggestion that postmodernity may have been surpassed by an age of irony - or an age of skepticism.

HL7111 Graduate Seminar in American Literature and Culture

This course will combine a review of the history of the field of American studies with the interpretation of a range of works of American literature. During the first half of the semester, we will focus on the history of American literary scholarship, from the earliest works of Lawrence and Parrington of the 1920's, which attempted an interdisciplinary formulation of the "American mind, " to the myth-symbol works of the 1950's and 60's (Marx . Kolodny. Trachtenberg) , to the more recent dissolution of American studies, in which disciplinary sub-fields have challenged the earlier consensus regarding American identity and have reflected upon the nation's cultural history from a post-humanist perspective. During the second half of the semester, the emphasis will shift to the analysis and interpretation of several representative works of American Literature.

HL7112 Graduate Seminar in Singaporean Literature and Culture

This course will discuss selected Singapore literary and popular cultural texts with a view to establishing the historical, political, social, intellectual and cultural developments that underpin their emergence, as well as the aesthetic and authorial projects that they instantine. Potential authors include but are not limited to : Lee Tzu Pheng , Arthur Yap, Kuo Pao-Kun, Su-Chen Christine Lim, Eleanor Wong , and Alfian Sa'at. Filmic and performance texts may also be included. Links should be made with postcolonial theory and with literary theory in general. Tutors may cover a selection of the following topics:  - Relationship between anglophone writing and various vernacular literatures, - Impact of language policies,  - Relationship between different genres and forms, - The question of a Singaporean literary tradition, - Role and function of identity policies, - Modernity and modernization, - Urban culture, - Literature and technology.    

HL7113 Graduate Seminar in Postcolonial Literature

This course explores the field of postcolonial studies through a detailed engagement with representative works of postcolonial literature and theory. We will be discussing literature from throughout the postcolonial world, and focusing on some of the major social, historical and political issues this literature addresses. The course will also trace the development of postcolonial theory, from the anti-colonial writings of Frantz Fanon and Aim'e Ce'saire to the work of more recent postcolonial critics such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. Finally, we will be subjecting 'postcolonial studies' itself to critical scrutiny, addressing some of the key debates and controversies within the field.

HL7114 Graduate Seminar in Cultural Studies

To provide graduate students with a sound and up-to-date theoretical foundation for Cultural Studies, this course will examine the theoretical and methodological tools that have defined the field of Cultural Studies, starting with an introduction to key theoretical concepts. The course will also examine the production and consumption of a range of popular cultural forms. Having gained a sound theoretical foundation, students will go on to analyse a range of cultural forms and practices including cinema, cyberspace, popular fiction, popular music and television.

HL7888 Directed Study in Literature

This course will provide graduate students with an opportunity to engage in independent research related to their proposed dissertation/thesis and to produce an appropriate example of written work arising from this. The content and requirements of each Directed Study module are to be determined by the student in conjunction with the appointed supervisor/ thesis committee and the Head of Division.

HL7901 Graduate Seminar on Special Topic

This course will provide graduate students the opportunity to engage with the research interests of the faculty and visiting faculty that are not covered by other listed modules. It might consist of an in-depth study of a single author or of a theme. Every time it is offered, the module will be tailor-made to the specific interests of the individual staff teaching it and / or students who enroll for it. The specific topic offered for any semester will be clearly signaled in advance.