University of Winchester, MA, English: Contemporary Literature

Study is based around student-led seminars, but also incorporates visits to literary performances and other cultural events and access to guest lectures from prominent writers and cultural critics; compulsory modules: a critical introduction to contemporary literature and theory; research methods; postgraduate seminar; independent study modules (lead to the completion of the dissertation); optional modules: contemporary British fiction examines British (defined inclusively) writers working in the genre of the novel and the short story such as, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Hanif Kureishi, Ben Okri, David Peace, Salman Rushdie, Rose Tremain, Fay Weldon and Jeanette Winterson; contemporary American fiction, takes students from Kathy Acker to Edmund White, via Don DeLillo, Percival Everett, Jonathan Franzen, Chuck Palahniuk, DBC Pierre, Toni Morrison, Alice Sebold, Lionel Shriver and others; fiction and film, examines literary and film texts as examples of contemporary culture, focusing on issues such as adaptation and multi-culturalism plus the representation of space and identity in depictions of the city, the small town and suburbia; postcolonial literature and theory; fairy tale and gothic horror; new technologies and culture; writing analyses: the artistry and craft of various kinds of non-fiction writing; theories of storytelling; webwriting and hyperfiction.