- UCAS course code
- RQ23
- UCAS institution code
- M20
Early clearing information
This course is available through clearing for home and international applicants
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
BA English Literature and German
Study English and American literature alongside German language and intercultural skills.
- Typical A-level offer: ABB including specific subjects
- Typical contextual A-level offer: BBC including specific subjects
- Refugee/care-experienced offer: BBC including specific subjects
- Typical International Baccalaureate offer: 34 points overall with 6,5,5 at HL including specific subjects
Course unit details:
Queer Forms: Objects and Animals in Eighteenth-Century Poetry
Unit code | ENGL31282 |
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Credit rating | 20 |
Unit level | Level 3 |
Teaching period(s) | Semester 2 |
Available as a free choice unit? | No |
Aims
· explore a range of canonical and noncanonical poems written by women in Britain and America across the long eighteenth century;
· use these texts to introduce students to eighteenth-century poetry – its history and development, its critical reception today (including legacies of feminist recovery), and some of its principal preoccupations across forms and genres;
· examine this poetry’s renewed importance for the intersecting research fields of gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and poetic form / formalism
· build on critical skills and vocabularies developed in such courses as Theory and Text; Literature and History; Gender, Sexuality and the Body: Theories and Histories; Romanticism (1776-1832); and Satire and the Novel: English Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century.
Teaching and learning methods
1 x 1hour Lecture and 1 x 2 hour seminar
Knowledge and understanding
-Confidently engage with work in eighteenth-century poetry, from feminist recoveries of poems by women to the enduring significance of these texts for research in gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and poetic form / formalism
-Demonstrate understanding of cultural contexts for eighteenth-century poetry, including debates about gender and sexuality, the body and its aesthetic representation, class and race, objects and animals, and the construction of the canon
-Display aptitude for writing critically about poems from a range of theoretically informed perspectives
Intellectual skills
-Analyse how encounters with the nonhuman in eighteenth-century women’s poetry generate opportunities to think beyond the limits of the human and its normative categories
-Discuss how this project of revising existing orders of knowledge and representation can be read in new ways through queer, gender, and critical race, and environmental studies
-Demonstrate proficiency with critical and theoretical vocabularies from studies in poetics, gender and sexuality, race, and environmental humanities
Practical skills
-Sustain a sophisticated scholarly argument focusing on how and why poetry is especially adept at facilitating these explorations, engaging with current ideas about form / formalism
-Sharpen skills in close reading
-Independently develop concepts and critical practices in an assessed portfolio of close readings of poems and an essay, informed by critical theory from the course
Transferable skills and personal qualities
-Close reading and textual analysis
-Argumentation and criticality: the construction of clear, rigorous, and detailed critical writing
-Interpersonal and presentation skills in posing and defending perspectives to a group
Employability skills
- Analytical skills
- Group/team working
- Oral communication
- Written communication
Assessment methods
Method | Weight |
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Written assignment (inc essay) | 60% |
Portfolio | 40% |
Feedback methods
Feedback method | Formative or Summative |
Written Feedback | Summative |
Recommended reading
Indicative primary reading: poetry by Anne Finch, Jane Holt, Elizabeth Thomas, Mary Leapor, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and others.
Selected Course Preparatory Reading:
· Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez (eds), ‘Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social’, ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (2017)
· Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Johns Hopkins, 2005)
· Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne (eds), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
· Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano (eds), ‘Queer Inhumanisms’ special issue, GLQ 21, nos. 2–3 (2015)
· Jeremy Chow (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (Bucknell, 2022)
· Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms (NYU, 2022)
· Lynn Festa, Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Pennsylvania, 2019)
· Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke, 2020)
· Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU, 2020)
· Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Pennsylvania, 2016)
· Lisa L. Moore, Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (Minnesota, 2011)
· Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke, 2014)
Teaching staff
Staff member | Role |
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James Metcalf | Unit coordinator |