For the 2020-2021 Academic Year this course is being taught remotely. This means there will be no face-to-face teaching and you will not need to be present in person in Cambridge. The course content will be delivered, and the learning outcomes met, through the use of video-based teaching platforms and a dedicated course Virtual Learning Environment. ”
To transition to remote delivery of the course our academic staff are updating the course structure and timetable. This will allow the course to be academically engaging and of the quality expected from the Institute. A course guide will be available containing this detailed information no later than the end of July. Details of the Unit start dates and assignment submission deadlines are under the Teaching & Assessment tab. For an overview of the course scroll down this page.
What will I be studying?
Through lectures, carefully constructed reading lists and class discussion, you will get to know authors and their works in depth, and discover ideas and debates you may not have encountered before.
Unit 1: Contemporary poetry: roots to now
Introduction and 6 live teaching sessions plus pre-recorded lectures. Live teaching sessions will be on Saturdays between 13.00-15.00 and 16.00-18.00 pm GMT.
What is contemporary poetry in Britain and the USA? What is its provenance and present reality? Tracing the development of twentieth-century poetry from the end of the Victorian period, through the experiments of Modernism and arriving at the contemporary moment, the unit will explore verse in Britain and the USA with classes on a wide range of poets including from Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot to Benjamin Zephaniah and Kate Tempest.
Unit 2: Literature and Place
6 live teaching sessions plus pre-recorded lectures. Live teaching sessions will be on Saturdays between 13.00-15.00 and 16.00-18.00 pm GMT.
This Unit will take a long view of the representation of place and space in literature. We will examine the tensions between the dualism of city and country which operates as an important underlying structure or explicit theme in much literary work. We will begin by exploring this tension in poetry from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century and move on to explore the theme of place as it pertains to a range of modern literature. We will study the history of pastoral and the particular importance of the natural world to the Romantics and investigate the literature of walking, from the poetry of John Clare to contemporary city literature and contemporary nature writing. Students will encounter ideas from ecocriticism and geocriticism alongside their readings in poetry and fiction.
Unit 3: The modern novel: experiments in narrative
6 live teaching sessions plus pre-recorded lectures. Live teaching sessions will be on Saturdays between 13.00-15.00 and 16.00-18.00 pm GMT.
The term 'modern novel’ has been used to describe a vast and extremely varied body of work. Focusing on a range of texts from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, this unit will explore some of the literary and social changes which have influenced the way novelists have worked, including the impact of imperialism, two world wars, and increasing globalization. Touching on key literary movements and moments of the twentieth century we will explore the experiments of modernism and their continuing development in the form and content of contemporary literature.
Find out more
The course guide, giving information about course-content and assignments, will be available shortly.
If you would like an informal discussion on academic matters before making your application, please contact the Course Director, Dr Jenny Bavidge: jrb203@cam.ac.uk
If you have any questions about the application process, contact our Admissions team: ice.admissions@ice.cam.ac.uk or +44 (0)1223 746262.
For all other enquiries, contact: literature@ice.cam.ac.uk or +44 (0)1223 760865 / 746212.
