The curriculum brings contemporary literature in English into conversation with the political, ecological, and cultural forces shaping our world. Across one intensive year, you explore how stories register, refract, and reshape the imaginaries of the present — and how literary and cultural theory gives you the tools to analyse those imaginaries critically. You work with narrative experiments, hybrid media, and global Anglophone voices that challenge ideas of identity, power, and representation. Whether you are analysing how speculative fiction imagines alternative futures, how the Gothic processes ecological dread, or how comics intervene in public health discourse, you learn to read literature as a dynamic site of critique.
In seminars, you read across media — novels, comics, films, hybrid texts — and across theoretical traditions, including postcolonial theory, queer theory, disability studies, ecocriticism, and political theory. You learn how to place literary texts in relation to the cultural work they do: how they circulate globally, rework the canon, interrogate genre, and shape public discourse.
Your teachers are researchers actively engaged in debates around contemporary literature and culture. You become part of a scholarly community that treats literature as a way of thinking with — and against — the world: interpreting crises of climate, care, belonging, and imagination through form and narrative.
The year builds towards an independent, research-driven thesis that allows you to pursue a topic of your own choosing. As you develop your project, you refine your critical voice, learn to work with literary and visual archives, and contribute to the ongoing conversations that define the field of contemporary literary studies.
