Master of Arts [M.A] [English Studies Contemporary Writing] From Queen Mary, University of London

This pathway focuses on cutting-edge developments in literature. It uses notions of ÔwritingÕ and of the ÔpresentÕ as gateways into contemporary debates about the historical present, the nature of time, and the difficulties of periodisation. Special attention will be paid to questions of technology, innovation, and social change. Our approach to contemporary material will be genuinely interdisciplinary and we will explore how such writing plays a role in current theoretical debates, engages with contemporary philosophy, and is transformed within the context of digital culture.

We are home to one of the largest and most diverse groups of staff in this field of any department in the country, and expertise in late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture brings together perspectives that are regional and transnational, theoretical and historicist. Distinctively, the pathway will also give you the opportunity of working with our leading postcolonial scholars, and to think about contemporary cultural production in global contexts of reception.

The pathway is delivered by a strong team of specialists in contemporary literature and culture, with particular expertise in digital cultures, technology, narrative theory and the contemporary novel. Staff on the contemporary pathway includeÊMarkÊCurrie,ÊSam McBean,ÊAndrew van der Vlies,Êkitt priceÊandÊZara Dinnen, whose research interests and publicationsÊaddress topics in digital culture, new media, popular culture, contemporary fiction, American Fiction, science and technology, time, feminism, queer theory,Êtemporality and the theory of narrative.Ê

A range of option modules will enable you to study major novelists and poets from national literary traditions within and beyond an Anglo-American frame. The core module, ÔWriting and the PresentÕ, equips you with a set of critical vocabularies with which to engage historically, formally and philosophically with contemporary literature. The pathway as whole thus facilitates a twin focus on the notions of writing and the present, encouraging you to examine the most urgent intellectual issues of our time that relate to the notion of Ôthe contemporaryÕ, not only in academic contexts but also in lived social experience.