English Literature: Postcolonial and Global Literatures MA

ESH7000 Dissertation offers students an opportunity to develop and demonstrate their research and writing skills while engaging with a topic suggested by their work on the core and option modules. The research topic must be feasible, academically sound, and related to the concerns of the programme. The dissertation project must develop an appropriate research methodology and demonstrate an advanced understanding of historical and/or theoretical issues. It must also demonstrate an ability to analyse and present complex evidence and to shape and sustain a coherent, persuasive critical argument at masters level. It must observe appropriate stylistic and bibliographic conventions. To support the independent study that is the mainstay of this module, students attend a number of skills-based structured workshops in addition to one-to-one supervision from their allocated supervisors.

Peripheral Modernities seeks to explore how entry to the modern world, or how exclusion from the modern world, is experienced, perceived and explained from the global peripheries. In so doing, it aims to reverse the usual perspective from which modernity itself is considered. The module opens by a conceptual consideration of how we might begin to theorize a 'peripheral' modernity. It is then followed by a range of texts which will focus (variously) on the Caribbean, South Africa/Africa, southern Asia, the Middle East and on those instances of peripheral modernities which underwrite the erstwhile metropolitan nations.