Prerequisites: Admission into Undergraduate Programme

Offered: Semester 1

Coordinator (2024): Prof. Sudesh Mishra

This course introduces students to the key terms and concepts of contemporary literary criticism. Some may be familiar (such as Character), while others may be new (such as Ideology), but all will be considered in new and exciting ways. Students will be shown how to employ these key terms and concepts as analytical tools for unlocking a variety of texts. They will be invited to adopt different perspectives and viewpoints on the same text. By the end of the course, they will have developed a sound critical approach through the art of sustained thinking, reading and interpretation.

Prerequisites: Admission into Undergraduate Programme

Offered:  Semester 2

Coordinator (2024): Dr. Thomas Vranken

This introductory course takes as its focus texts and concepts relating to islands. Students will analyse a broad spectrum of material ranging from short stories, novels, diaries, memories, and histories to songs, images, plays, and films. The course is organised in two parts. The first is a survey of different types of islands, real as well as imagined, while the second accounts for the various character types that have become part of the familiar, often stereotyped, dramatis personae of island literature.

Prerequisites: Admission into Undergraduate Programme

Offered: Semester 2

Coordinator (2024): Dr. Thomas Vranken

Students enrolled in this course will read and critically assess a selection of texts intended for non-adult readers. They will engage with a broad spectrum of narrative types and genres, including picture books, poetry, novels and graphic texts. This course demonstrates how children’s texts invite readers to take up positions that are never wholly innocent of ideology, ethics, contexts and cultural assumptions.

Prerequisites: LT102 or LT104

Offered: Semester 2

Coordinator (2024): Dr. Anurag Subramani

Building on LT102, this course introduces students to more sophisticated key terms and concepts. Students will be shown how to employ these key terms as analytical tools for unlocking a variety of texts. They will be invited to adopt different perspectives and viewpoints on the same text. By the end of the course, they will have developed a more advanced critical approach through the art of sustained thinking, reading and interpretation.

Prerequisites: LT102 or LT104

Offered: Semester 1

Coordinator (2024): Dr. Anurag Subramani

Building on LT104, this course explores the founding myths and governing metaphors of island literature. It examines the special role of islands in various imaginative, philosophical and historical accounts: islands as spaces inspiring narratives of fantastic voyages and encounters with fabulous creatures; islands as locations for projecting idyllic worlds and communities; islands as testing-grounds for utopian and dystopian projects. Students will explore the role of the castaway myth in conceptions of the sovereign European subject, and its complex presence in colonial and postcolonial texts.

Prerequisites: At least one 100 Level course

Offered: Not offered 2024
Coordinator (2024): –

This is a course in film history and theory. It introduces students to seminal moments in cinema history, to important theoretical approaches in film studies as well as to key figures and movies in world cinema. By the end of the course, students will have a better understanding of film history, theory and film aesthetics as well as an appreciation of cinema from different parts of the world.

Prerequisites: LT202 or LT204

Offered: Not offered 2024

Coordinator (2024): –

This course analyses representations of difference through the figure of the other, focusing on gender, race, nationality, life and humanity. It investigates the ways in which different narrative forms present and engage with notions of otherness, from women to slaves, from vampires to ghosts. Through close readings of novels, short stories, plays, poems and films the course will present thorough literary and theoretical pictures of the way in which we engage with the fear, attraction and mystique that surround otherness.

Prerequisites: Any LT course

Offered: Semester 1

Coordinator (2024): Dr. Thomas Vranken

This course explores the speculative (i.e not-yet-invented) technology found in literary Science Fiction. We begin by reading the genre’s English and American origins, before turning to explore how Pacific authors have repurposed Science Fiction in recent years. A key focus will be the ways in which imagining possible future technologies allows authors to powerfully and yet also safely “Otherise” their own society — to reflect on and critique the worlds in which we live.

Prerequisites: LT202 or LT204

Offered: Semester 2

Coordinator (2024): Prof. Sudesh Mishra

Texts and commodities are closely interwoven entities. While cultural texts engage imaginatively with material worlds founded on the pursuit of commodities (such as sugar, slaves, spices, ivory, tea, oil and opium), they also circulate as commodities within a global marketplace. This course explores the relationship between texts and commodities in fiction and poetry from diverse commodity frontiers. Introducing students to new approaches in postcolonial, environmental and materialist criticism, it considers how different literary forms engage with the complex world history of various commodities.

Prerequisites: At least one 200 level course

Offered: Semester 1 (F2F at Laucala only)

Coordinator (2024): Dr. Anurag Subramani

The aim of this course is to give students guided experience in the writing of short stories, poems, plays, screenplays, memoir, travel writing and other imaginative genres. It is intended as a practical exercise in creative skills and is not restricted to students of literature. Students from any department or school within the university may register.