Contemporary Literature and Culture MA

Birkbeck, University of London

COURSE OVERVIEW

Our MA Contemporary Literature and Culture (2000-present) offers you the chance to specialise in twenty-first-century literature and culture, as well as exposing you to the most important literary and theoretical developments of the last few decades.

Informed by our world-class research in contemporary literary and cultural studies, on this course you will examine:

the effects of new technologies on narrative form

the aesthetic, spatial and political coordinates of writing produced in an increasingly networked and globalised world

literature’s role among a vibrant and diverse range of digital, visual and multimedia texts.

You will develop your expertise in key topics, such as: migrants’ narratives and refugee film-making; precarity fiction and emergent pandemic storytelling; anti-gentrification zines and the low-fi aesthetics of resistance; nonhuman forms of agency; post-gender feminism; the relationship of genres such as science fiction, horror and the fantastic to literary fiction; trans aesthetics in film and TV; African American poetry and performance; contemporary black aesthetics.

This MA also gives you the opportunity to pursue your own interests, whether they lie in contemporary poetics; in African American culture, or indigenous futurisms; in literary and cultural responses to environmental crisis; in the changing forms of the book in a digital age; or in historical approaches to issues like nation, race, gender and sexuality.