Unit Descriptions
These unit descriptions are current as of the 30th July,2008
ENGL106: Literature and the Screen
A series of comparative studies examining cinematographic uses and interpretations made of novels, and other works of the literary imagination. Among topics explored are literary and cinematic images; filmic equivalents of such literary genres as poetic drama, satire, prose fiction, and biography; and problems that arise in translating literary texts to the screen.
ENGL107: Literature and Politics - NEW for 2008
Writers have always addressed political issues, from supporting or resisting revolution, to analysing the ethics of war or the sophistries of diplomatic or political language, to attacking the class politics of industrialisation, the racial exploitation of empire, sexual inequalities, prejudice and domestic violence. Writers have also drawn attention to the nexus between power and language. and the ways in which language masks ideology, normalizes inequality and stifles dissent. That said, writers have also participated in the dissemination of myths, stereotypes and narratives that privilege certain world-views over others. The relationship between politics and literature, is therefore, never simple. This course is designed to spotlight a series of central political issues that writers have addressed from the Renaissance to the present. Each week a writer or writers will be studied in relationship to the political issues or contexts that their work addresses.
ENGL120: Approaches to English Literature
This unit develops skills at university level in critical reading, textual analysis, and writing about literary texts. It equips students with a range of key terms, concepts and practices for further studies in English literature or for any text-based discipline. Short literary texts and weekly critical studies provide focal points for developing detailed and informed ways of interpreting different kinds of narratives. Readings and classes treat themes such as identity and memory, and explore narrative concepts such as genre, characterization, and representing the imaginary in literary texts.
http://online.mq.edu.au/pub/ENGL120/
AUST200 Australian Perspectives
This unit explores the multiple ways in which Australia has been represented
through cultural narratives. It focuses on three ‘places’ in
Australia, including Sydney, examining the different ways in which film,
literature, television, historical writing, life-writing and other cultural
forms have responded to, contested and made sense of the ‘new’ place
that settler Australia has been. It provides training in the inter-disciplinary
approaches of Australian Studies, exposing students to representations
from many sources and periods. Students who have completed AUST100 will
find this of developing interest.
http://online.mq.edu.au/pub/AUST200/
ENGL218: Creative Writing I
This is a practical unit that introduces students to various approaches
to creative writing. The course consists of a series of weekly two-hour
workshops covering a range of creative writing skills and topics. It provides
opportunities for students to write in different genres and encourages
them to be experimental and adventurous in their writing. The workshops
are interactive and aim to increase an understanding of the process of
creative writing. This unit is also offered externally as an online unit.
Students enrolling for the external option must have access to the internet.
http://online.mq.edu.au/pub/ENGL218
ENGL238: Twentieth-Century Drama in Context
The unit explores significant drama texts from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in their social, philosophical and theatrical contexts, with specific focus on the relations between ideological factors and dramatic themes and forms. Topics will include sexual politics, obscenity, the desire for utopia, the instability of identity, theatrical space and form, the nature of social justice, relationships between language and power, the catastrophe of history, experiments in dramatic structure, and aspects of staging and performance. Playtexts studied will be selected from works by Ibsen, O'Neill, Brecht, Pirandello, Genet, Beckett, Stoppard and Kane.
ENGL261: Paradigm Shift: 1700-1830
Drawing on 'Augustan' and on 'Romantic' texts, that is, on texts written in the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries, this unit teaches students ways of understanding how a literary culture changes. The texts will be by writers such as Pope, Swift, Johnson, Marie Wollstonecraft, Blake, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Keats. Students may have the opportunity to study-and write on-a number of films in relation to the texts. The unit will focus on how writers reflect, and even help to create, change in social attitudes to reason, imagination and madness, political and social order, the natural world, and empire. Extracts from theoretical writings by Foucault, Bakhtin and others will be used as providing models for explaining how literary change happens.
ENGL263: Settler Culture Writing
If home is where the heart is, what happens to the imagination and culture of people who move from one country into another and settle in it? How do settlers approach the new place and its alien plants, animals and people? How do the inhabitants of the land react to the experience of being colonised?
This unit concentrates on the reappraisal of self, place and culture at the moment of settlement as represented in a number of Australian, Canadian, and African literary texts, and in records of personal experience. It takes into account the material and cultural violence involved in this moment, as well as the sectarianism and the nostalgia for Home to which it is likely to give rise.
ENGL264: Contemporary and Postmodernist Literature
This unit examines some major directions taken by literature in the latter half of the twentieth century. Topics covered will vary from year to year. The subjects of special study will be Beat writing, postmodernist poetry and fiction and the effects on contemporary fiction of previous postmodernist writing.
ENGL265: Literature, History and Cultural Memory
.This unit examines the interrelationships of texts and the cultures of which they form a part. Particular attention will be paid to the historical, social, political and intellectual contexts in which texts are produced. In 2008 the topic will be ‘Representations of the Medieval'. We will examine both the transmission and also the reconstruction of medieval ideas, themes, motifs, and texts in later cultures. Of particular interest are the prevalence of medieval traditions, such as King Arthur, chivalry and the quest, in later literature, and the deployment of these medieval traditions for particular purposes (such as to entertain or to communicate political ideas). The unit concludes with a study of Umberto Eco's novel, The Name of the Rose .
As part of our consideration of literature and culture, the unit will focus on ways of reading and writing about literary texts, with instruction on and practice in critical thinking, textual analysis, and academic writing.
ENGL267: Medieval Literature: Community, Identity, Gender, 1350-1550
This unit introduces students to a broad variety of texts from the medieval period through three interlinked four-week modules focused on the themes of politics, religion, and sexuality. The first block will read Chaucer's The Wife of Bath, alongside The Book of Margery Kempe, the second places Robin Hood ballads next to medieval drame such as Everyman, and the third will involve a more detailed analysis of Gawain and the Green Knight. Students will develop an ability to read prose, poetry and drama texts in Middle English and to study them in their historical and political contexts, making comparisions with assumptions in our own times about identity and character. In analysing these medieval texts we shall also ask how we connect the present to the past, and what we can learn from that for the future.
ENGL270: Australian Literature
Writing in Australia has always provided a compelling forum for social anxieties and crises in a fragile national identity. This unit explores the relation between Australian society and the forms of culture it has produced in the twentieth century. ‘Literature’ is broadly conceived through its functions as social critique or social ‘settlement’, with a focus on the questions asked by Indigenous Australian writing. Students will be introduced to novels, poetry, theatre and film from across the century, including contemporary Australian writing. The representation of relations between place and culture, the city/bush divide, history, memory and subjectivity, class and social change, gender codes and sexuality, recent challenges to unifying national myths, Indigenous writing and (post) colonial frames form some of the unit’s concerns.
ENGL271: Gothic Visions: From Sublime to Suburban Gothic
This course tracks the cultural history of the gothic genre from the sublime
landscapes and haunted castles of Anne Radcliffe to the hyper-real suburban
universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. From its inception the Gothic genre
has been a popular and controversial cultural phenomenon, which has dramatised
the darker side of the senses and imagination, as well as testing the boundaries
of literary taste. In Gothic fiction nothing is ever certain. The domestic
and familiar are merely comforting illusions that veil the darker reality
of unspoken fears and desires. Home, city, work, identity, sexuality, the
body and the mind are all sites that are open to the destabilising play
and uncanny effects of the Gothic imagination as the selected texts, films
and TV series, which range from the popular to the canonical exemplify.
http://online.mq.edu.au/pub/ENGL271/
ENGL273: Literature of Migration
The migration and displacement of peoples since the beginning of colonialism, including migration to Australia, has resulted in the establishment of global diaspora communities. Both forced and voluntary migrations have created different experiences of identity, nationality, home and place, resulting in a range of creative expressions in literature and other artistic forms.
This unit will examine a range of literary texts, film and selected art
works in order to develop deeper understandings of the experience of migration
and exile. There will be opportunity for students to position and understand
their own cultural or family experiences in these contexts. The unit will
include a component of students' own creative writing or other creative
expression.
http://online.mq.edu.au/pub/ENGL273
ENGL275: World Literature in English - NEW for 2008
This unit examines writing in English or in English translation from the formerly colonized nations or the world. It explores the rich literature generated by a confrontation with real political and global concerns, and the influence of more than one literary tradition on the formation of texts. Topics covered include issues of authenticity, place and history, the crisis of identity in the postcolonial world and national and cultural reconstruction. Indigenous writing in colonized nations and the writing of the postcolonial diaspora are also considered, in relation to concepts of disenfranchisement, memory, globalisation and exile.
ENGL276: Reading Theory- NEW for 2008
How does meaning work? This unit equips students to explore the concepts that underpin our understanding of literary texts and writing. It surveys the major literary theories of the twentieth century, examining the theoretical languages and approaches. Questions raised include: How should we read? What is an author? Is it possible to arrive at a single correct interpretation? How are texts related to other texts? How are texts related to their historical and social contexts? To what extent do factors such as gender and racial difference impact upon literary production and reception? How does a reading of literary texts assist us in understanding the larger contexts of contemporary culture? This unit will provide all students with skills in revealing analysis, and is recommended for students intending to major in English or to progress to honours level.
ENGL286: Children's Literature
A study of the range of literature, both past and current, written for children, including picture books, poetry, and a variety of realistic and fantastic fiction for young readers and for adolescents. Issues addressed include: the idea of a literature for children; notions of genre; gender representation; the place of books in the socialisation of children.
ENGL288: The Metamorphosis of Myth
Examines the use of classical myth in literature, and explores the transformations of themes and mythological figures in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Virgil's Aeneid and selected works from the sixteeth to the twentieth centuries.
ENGL300/301 Literary Studies A and B
The topics in these units will vary from time to time and reflect the research interests of staff.
One or more of the following may be offered: Popular Theatre as Mirror, Polemic and Satire; From Doll to Cyborg; Dreams and the Imaginary in Early English Literature
ENGL300, ENGL301 are special interest seminars offered for 4 credit points.
Students should consult with the Department for current details of offerings available this year.
ENGL 302, Narrative and the Novel
This unit explores narrative technique in the novel and ways of
interpreting these texts, using selected examples from the late
nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. We will study recent
theories of how narratives work and apply these ideas to the
interpretation of novels with apparently different aims and strategies,
including realism, experimentation with form, and the use of the genre
as a vehicle for social commentary or humour. Particular attention will
be paid to reconceptualisations of the genre, and the various
Structuralist and Post-structuralist theories accounting for the
construction of meaning in narrative. In this unit, students will learn
advanced textual analysis and critical practice, including how to
interpret and describe the way time and pace are managed; the
representation of character and agency; the presentation of
consciousness and memory; subjectivity; metafiction; and style and
rhetoric in prose fiction.
http://www.engl.mq.edu.au/units/ENGL302/
ENGL317: Victorian Literary Culture
Victorians were as concerned as we are with what it means to be modern. Faced with rapid urbanisation, industrialisation, and imperial expansion, writers struggled to adapt to an increasingly diverse literary marketplace. The novel, poetry, the popular essay, journalism, as well as a variety of new visual media such as photography and proto-cinematic forms, were radically redefining the cultual and public sphere. This was also the age of emerging mass readerships and literary celebrities, such as Dickens and Tennyson. Taking a selection of texts as a starting point, this course explores Victorian culture as a dynamic and diverse historical period which continues to haunt the present, not only in the more visible form of cinematic adaptations, but in ideological and institutional forms and contexts as well.
ENGL319: Creative Writing II
This unit continues the practical work undertaken in the prerequisite
unit ENGL218 and will be run on a similar basis. The course will also encourage
creative responses to different approaches to writing, such as postmodernist,
post-structuralist, post-colonial and feminist writings. The aim of the
course is to encourage students to attempt new ways of writing and to develop
their work into finished texts. This unit is also offered externally as
an online unit. Students enrolling for the external option in 2006 must
have access to the internet.
http://online.mq.edu.au/pub/ENGL319
ENGL320: Modernism
This unit examines the upheavals that took place in literature and culture 1900-1940. Issues to be discussed include imperialism and colonialism, the death of God, the cataclysm of the First World War, the crisis in representation and ‘revolution of the word', changing gender relations, the nightmare of history, the propagation of myth. These will be examined through the manifestos of the major aesthetic movements (Impressionism, Imagism, Vorticism) and related themes (impersonality, anti-self). Texts to be studied include works from novelists and poets (Conrad, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Woolf), philosophers (Nietzsche and Freud), visual artists (Lewis) and filmmakers (Bergman and Haneke).
ENGL323: Post-Colonial Literature
Examines the dynamic literatures of the world beyond the old centres of Europe and the United States. Post-colonial writers have had to struggle, in the aftermath of nineteenth-century colonial domination, to forge new senses of place, nation, identity and even new hybrid forms and languages in which to express this consciousness. The results are sometimes startling, even shocking, in their confrontation of old orders of thought, representation and writing.
We will study writing from Africa, the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, and the South Pacific, as well as a selection of films that emerge from the post-colonial consciousness. The unit is designed for students with a strong interest in literature, but will also be relevant for students with a sound background in Australian history or post-colonial politics.
ENGL325: Feminism and Literature
This unit directly challenges the popular assumption that feminism is pro-women and anti-men. It focuses on a range of texts from the late nineteenth through to the twenty-first centuries, including texts which have become 'canonical' in terms of women's writing such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and those whose status was and is still controversial such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Through contemporary Australian writing such as Roger McDonald's Shearer's Motel and Dorothy Porter's Wild Surmise we shall look at new ways of representing gender and sexuality. Dorothy Hewitt's Bobbin' Up and Aileen Moreton-Robinson's Talkin' Up to the White Woman, and theoretical ideas such as Althusser's concept of interpellation and Luce Irigaray's concept of the divine will also provide ways of rethinking issues of fundamental importance to feminism and literature today.
ENGL329: North American Literature - NEW for 2008
This unit examines the diversity and complexity of literature in Canada and the USA , with particular focus on the formation of culturally pluralist societies. How have different national contexts shaped the literatures of these neighbouring countries? What is the role of the artist in the construction of national identities, whether as a geographical place or as a cultural idea? How are indigenous voices placed against the dominant settler cultures? How are the effects of migration and slavery evident in the representations of mixed or hybrid cultural identities? In what ways has the literature been affected by broader theoretical issues such as feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism?
ENGL335: Writing Project
This unit is suited to students who are developing skills and confidence with their fiction writing. Students individually devise their own writing ‘project’ early in the semester; for example, 2-3 short stories thematically or stylistically linked or two or more novel chapters, using the semester to write, workshop and revise. Weekly meetings include workshops, and discussion of prose and related readings. The aim is that each student extends her/his technical and thematic creative writing skills through a regular intensive writing practice, and by workshopping their own and others' work. Assessment takes into account the student's creative work, oral presentations, and the student's development of editing and workshop skills.
http://online.mq.edu.au/pub/ENGL335/
ENGL361: Writing Colonial Culture In Australia
This unit explores some questions about how literature functions as the social memory of a nation. How does it register the making of place and identity in a newly encountered world? How was the conflicted terrain and violence of the colonial enterprise negotiated textually? This unit looks closely at a range of different kinds of writing by different writers: English officers, convict men and women, bushmen, upperclass women suffragists, Aborigional petitioners and contemporary rewritings.
ENGL367: Shakespeare and the Renaissance
This unit focuses mainly on plays by Shakespeare and by some of his contemporaries, such as Marlowe and Jonson. But it does not focus only on Renaissance drama or solely on texts written by men. Poems and sometimes novels are also studied; authors of these may include Philip Sidney and Mary Wroth, Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and John Wilmot. The unit examines how Shakespeare and others explore issues concerning gender, sexuality, knowledge, and power, especially by playing with already available myths or inventing their own. Assessment will be by seminar paper and by essay.
ENGL386: Contemporary Australian Children's Literature
This unit examines the relationships between Australia's changing culture and society, and the literature that society produces for its children. It deals mainly with the late twentieth century, and will explore the representations of such issues as: maturation; relationships of self to place; structures of power and authority in society; and the quest for reconciliation between the white 'settler' society and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. These issues will be examined in fiction, picture books, and film.
Credit points
Students can find the rules regarding the credit points required for the Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Creative Arts degree programs in the Undergraduate Handbook.
No fees are charged for Australian residents, but all courses are liable for HECS. The Department extends a warm welcome to international students. Further information about courses and fees can be obtained from the University's International Office .
Detailed information about all the Department's undergraduate units can be found in the online Handbook of Undergraduate Studies.