Graduate Studies
MPhil in European Literature & Culture | Course Content
Course Content
"The breadth, flexibility and focus upon individual freedom of this course are its great merits. Anything you want to study you can - a brilliant advantage for comparatists and adventurous thinkers."
Ashley (Cambridge), M.Phil 2000
CORE COURSE (obligatory)
The areas of study consist of a Core Course in Critical Theory and a series of Modules. Critical TheoryThe course offers an overview of central aspects of modern literary/cultural theory together with the chance to study in depth the work of two theorists or movements. The overview is provided in the form of a series of eight lectures running throughout the first term which aims to introduce the major issues and show how they can be applied to the reading of literature, whilst the in-depth view takes the form of eight mini seminar courses, four in the first half of term and four in the second half, from which students choose one for each half of term.
The overview course covers the following areas: Structuralist Linguistics and Literary Theory; Russian Formalism and Bakhtin; Psychoanalysis; Deconstruction; Feminism; Queer Theory; Postcolonialism/Postmodernism. (see www.mml.cam.ac.uk/gradstudies/eurolit/current/cc_lectures.html
The in-depth seminar courses cover these areas: Postmodern theories of translation; Nietzsche; Feminism; Subjectivity and Subjectivation; Lacan; Foucault and de Certeau; Umberto Eco, Intellectual history, Language culture in Italy, and Postcolonial Theory. (see www.mml.cam.ac.uk/gradstudies/eurolit/current/cc_seminars.html
Modules (any two to be chosen):(This is a full list of modules, but not all will be offered every year.)
Interdisciplinary
- Europe and the Renaissance
- The History of the Book, 1450 - 1650
- Marginality in the Nineteenth Century
- The Modern City
- Identity and hybridity in Arthurian romance
- Heroes and Humans
- Cultural History and 19th-Century French Literature
- Modern and Contemporary French and Francophone Culture: Articulations of the Real
link to French 'Pathway'
German
- The alterity of medieval literature
- Enlightenment and its Critics from Kant to Foucault
- Memory and Subjectivity in the German Novel
link to German 'Pathway'
Greek
- Myth and history in Modern Greek literature
Italian
- Dante: Experiment and Exegesis
- Women and Writing in Italy, 1530-1650
- New Commitments: Literature, Cinema and Culture in Italy, 1960 - present
Russian
- Russian Literary Theory
- Twentieth Century Russian Culture: Literature, Visual Art and Politics
Spanish & Portuguese
- Al-Andalus and España: Translation and Tolerance
- Golden Age Literature and Culture: The Baroque Marvel
- Latin American Film and Visual Arts
- Latin American Literary Culture
- Realities, concepts and representations of Wrongdoing in Spain, 13c to 20c
- Trauma and its Representations in Iberian Culture
link to Latin American 'Pathway'
