Modernities: Literature, Theory & Culture

The MLitt Dissertation

Work towards the Dissertation is meant to provide you with the following skills:-

•    Formulate appropriate objectives (in the form of a research problem) for a four month investigation (which will be written up in a dissertation of up to 15,000 words), together with a methodology for undertaking research, and present these to an audience of peers and supervisors
•    Carry out research of an appropriate volume and depth, which is relevant to the research problem
•    Think independently about the issues raised by the research problem
•    Address the research problem through the analysis of texts and concepts
•    Achieve familiarity with existing scholarship in the chosen field
•    Draft and revise a substantial piece of academic writing, paying particular attention to the structure and demonstration of the argument, and to coverage of issues relevant to the research problem
•    Make effective and accurate use of the appropriate referencing, bibliographic and presentational skills
•    Submit to deadline a corrected final text of up to 15,000 words

Past dissertation topics have included:

‘Violence, Sexuality and the Body in the African Interior’
‘The Spying Child in the Fiction of Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen’
‘Writing and Roots: Negotiating Postcolonial Identities in Post-War London’
‘Dante and the Joycean Archive’
‘The Guilty Object: Confessions in Law and Literature’
‘Other Green Worlds: Delany, Tarkovsky, Greenaway’
‘Writing the Landscape of 1930s Los Angeles’
‘Political Radicalism in Postmodern Art’
‘Prison Writing in the African-American Tradition’
‘H. D’s Embodied Mysticism’
‘W. H. Auden and the Elegiac Impulse’
‘In Pursuit of Subservience: Depictions of Cults in Late-20th Century American Fiction’
‘Faulkner’s Hermeneutics of Becoming’
‘Illusion, Shadow and Dream: Gaiman’s Trickster Tales’
‘The Rupture between Humanity and Nature in W. G. Sebald’
‘Modern Primitivism in T. S. Eliot and Hope Mirrlees’
‘Irish Women in the Work of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’
‘The Poetry of Jorie Graham’
‘What if Jesus Had a Sister? Virginia Woolf’s Messianic Bodies’
‘Man to Mann: Nazi Masculinity and Thomas Mann’s Transgressive Males’