Contemporary Literature, Culture & Theory MA

This Master's in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory invites students to explore a range of topics and texts from 1945 to the present across two required and two optional modules. The first core module considers the intersection of literature, culture, and theory by focusing on changing the aesthetic and political value accorded to representation throughout each decade since 1945. The second core module focuses on literature and new areas of theory after 1999. Alongside these modules, students take a year-long module on research and writing skills in preparation for the final dissertation.

You’ll also get to choose two optional modules to tailor your specialism before you produce your large-scale research project.

Key benefits

• Learn from research-active literary experts in the contemporary period.
• Join a dynamic, research-led department with an international reputation for excellence.
• Study a flexible course that offers a range of approaches to contemporary literature, culture, and theory.
• Develop your skills in research methods and practices and demonstrate them with a dissertation.
• Tailor your curriculum by choosing two optional modules that suit your specific research interests.
• Enjoy an unrivalled location in the centre of London, with easy access to the British Library and the major libraries and archives of the capital.

Course Essentials

You’ll start this Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory MA with a required module that looks at literature, culture, and theory post-1945. Each week you’ll learn from a different academic, who’ll share their expertise as you review a set of texts and consider the representational problematics of 20th and 21st-century literature. You’ll learn how to conceptualise the contemporary as a distinctive historical entity while also reading the contemporary as it has been constituted differently by various writers, practitioners, and theorists in each decade.

The second required module will teach you how to understand the complex and uneven relationship between contemporary fiction and theory beyond the application of the postmodernist rubric. Instead of applying theory to literature, you’ll consider how literature and theory represent distinct but linked approaches to topics including disposability, social reproduction, settler colonialism, and anti-blackness. You will also get the opportunity to produce original work on texts produced after 1999 that aren’t often studied.

Alongside the core modules, you will choose two optional modules from a broad list that covers cutting-edge topics like imperialism and sexuality; contemporary experimental poetry; new directions in gender and race theory; realism and its others; emerging concepts of the human; theories and histories of violence; Marxist theories of value; urban culture; performance studies; and cultures of conflict and dissent from Africa to the Middle East.

Your final required module in this contemporary literature, culture and theory master’s will be taught over the year to equip you with the skills needed to advance your critical writing and research methods. A blend of general skills workshops, advanced research seminars, and one-on-one supervision will prepare you to produce your own research project as a dissertation.