100-level

ENGL102
Great Works
Description
This course introduces students to university-level English by exploring in depth a sequence of works that have earned the label 'great' for some or all of the following reasons: because of their enduring, wide and deep cultural influence; because of the originality of their creative conception; because of the power of their language; because of the power and appeal of the stories they tell or the characters or images they contain.
Occurrences
Semester One 2024
Points
15 points
ENGL107
Shakespeare
Description
This course is designed to introduce first year students to a range of Shakespeare’s plays as well as to develop their understanding of the different ways in which his plays have been received in recent literary criticism.
Occurrences
Semester Two 2024
Points
15 points
ENGL110
Maori Storytelling
Description
This course introduces students to a wide range of Maori writing in English and situates these works within a vast and vibrant whakapapa of Maori creative production in Aotearoa and beyond. Key themes within the course include: purakau and their contemporary retellings, Maori futurism(s), representations of kai and palate politics, the relationship between birds, writers, and the written word, and narrative sovereignty.
Occurrences
Semester Two 2024
Semester Two 2024 (Distance)
Points
15 points
ENGL117
Writing for Academic Success
Description
Writing for Academic Success fosters the capacity for analytical thought about texts and language. The course also provides training in the writing of clear and effective prose, inculcates awareness of crucial structural and rhetorical features of expository writing, and encourages the application of that awareness to writing in a range of academic and professional contexts.
Occurrences
Semester One 2024
Semester One 2024 (Distance)
Semester Two 2024
Semester Two 2024 (Distance)
Points
15 points
Restrictions
WRIT101
ENGL118
Creative Writing: Skills, Techniques and Practice
Description
This course provides a grounding in the skills, techniques and tricks a writer needs to transform ideas and material into art. Guided exercises will develop students’ creative practice of observation, play and experiment; the study of selected poetry, short prose and dramatic texts will introduce diverse forms and approaches. Students will also develop a feedback and revision practice at the weekly workshops; closely and sensitively engage with both published and peer texts.
Occurrences
Semester One 2024
Points
15 points

200-level

ENGL201
The Essay and Beyond: Creative Non-Fiction
Description
Non-fiction writing has a strong place within the traditions of literature, but has often tended to be neglected as a subject of study. To redress this, we will look at different genres of non-fiction: essays, popular science, travel writing, nature writing, and various types of "life writing". We will question the particular techniques and generic distinctions of texts studied, consider the specific subjects of non-fiction texts, examine how the texts are constructed and discuss their significance in the contexts most relevant to them. In addition, the course will explore the representation of place, displacement and placement; the history of subjectivity; recent interventions into postcolonial, globalisation and literary studies, and ecocriticism and human-animal studies; and the operation of gender and class as they apply to the production and readership of literary non-fiction.
Occurrences
Semester One 2024
Points
15 points
Prerequisites
Any 15 points at 100 level from ENGL, or any 60 points at 100 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
ENGL211
Exceptional Americans: An Introduction to American Literature
Description
This course offers students the chance to engage with some of the most exceptional writers and texts in the American tradition and, at the same time, to think critically about the idea of exceptionalism itself.
Occurrences
Semester Two 2024
Points
15 points
Prerequisites
Any 15 points at 100 level from ENGL, or any 60 points at 100 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Restrictions
ENGL109 and AMST110
ENGL213
Children's Classics: Popular Children's Texts and their Representation on Film
Description
Children's Classics teaches the genre-specific nature of children's literature, its socio-historical contexts, and the significance of its re-readings as film. It introduces a selection of enduring children's texts, illustrating the importance to literary production of changing cultural context, demonstrating the importance of intertextuality in children's literature and how texts change when filmed, and promotes the skills of reading and writing.
Occurrences
Semester Two 2024
Points
15 points
Prerequisites
Any 15 points at 100 level from ENGL, or any 60 points at 100 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Restrictions
CINE224
ENGL220
Creative Writing: Storymaking and the Short Story
Description
This course explores short-form prose storytelling with a focus on the short story. Students will be introduced to a wide range of short story forms and structures, and writing exercises will guide students towards expanding their writing practice and examining their own developing voice and style. This is a workshop process course where discussion, critical attentiveness, supportive insight and diverse ways of thinking will contribute to considered craft and creative exchange.
Occurrences
Semester Two 2024
Points
15 points
Prerequisites
Any 15 points at 100 level from ENGL, or any 60 points at 100 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
ENGL232
Cultural Politics/Cultural Activism
Description
This course offers students a grounding in Cultural Studies theories and methods. It examines the political dynamics and historical foundations of contemporary culture, and the strategic roles that it can play as a force for change. Drawing from a wide variety of examples, it focuses on how culture - as a process, as a practice, and as the production of meaning - functions as a battleground in the assignment of and struggle for social power.
Occurrences
Semester One 2024
Points
15 points
Prerequisites
Any 15 points at 100 level from CULT or ENGL, or any 60 points at 100 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Restrictions
CULT202
ENGL243
Animals on Screen
Description
This course explores cinematic representations of insects, mammals, fish, birds and reptiles, with an emphasis on their special place in horror and science fiction genres. Students will also be introduced to Human-Animal Studies as a field of scholarship.
Occurrences
Semester Two 2024
Points
15 points
Prerequisites
Any 15 points at 100 level from CULT or ENGL, or any 60 points at 100 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Restrictions
AMST236, CULT206, GEND213, AMST331, GEND311, and ENGL349
ENGL252
Crime Stories
Description
The course addresses the usefulness and range of the crime genre as an appropriate focus for the acquisition of the skills (in research, critical analysis, and written expression) peculiar to English studies, as well as a form of social and political critique. It will particularly concentrate on the last two centuries of the representations of crime, detection, confession, and punishments, assaying major trends and preoccupations present in a range of texts and theories. Within a general contextual examination of engagements between these facets, the development of genre forms and concerns will be considered, especially because the genre often speculates the fears and desires of its time in ways that likewise shape wider perceptions of crime and punishment. Students will be expected to read a range of key material, including a small selection of novels, some short fiction, theoretical writings and visual texts that should represent differences and similarities in representation and subject choice that writers and directors negotiate.
Occurrences
Semester One 2024
Points
15 points
Prerequisites
Any 15 points at 100 level from CULT or ENGL, or any 60 points at 100 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Restrictions
ENGL352; CULT252; CULT352

300-level

ENGL305
European Novels and Film Adaptations
Description
A study of important European novels and their film adaptations.
Occurrences
Semester Two 2024
Points
30 points
Prerequisites
Any 30 points at 200 level from CINE, ENGL, EURA, or RUSS, or any 60 points at 200 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Restrictions
EULC204, EULC304, EURA204, EURA304, CINE214, RUSS215, RUSS216
ENGL315
The Contemporary Novel
Description
The novelist and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once described the experience of the contemporary as like looking out the back of a moving car: the present, glimpsed through the side windows, appears as a blur, but as one looks through the rear window the blur begins to take the forms we recognise as constituents of contemporary experience, now seen with the aid of perspective. To study the contemporary novel is to read for what the poet T.S. Eliot called the ‘pastness’ of the present, which involves reading for the ways in which the novel form has been, and will continue to be, used to question, critique, and imagine the contemporary.The course will look primarily at novels from the Twentieth Century, but will conclude with a look towards recent twenty-first century fiction.
Occurrences
Semester Two 2024
Points
30 points
Prerequisites
Any 30 points at 200 level from ENGL, or any 60 points at 200 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
ENGL317
Special Topic: Modern Poetry
Description
This course takes a broad view of modern poetry. We begin with a selection of English and American poets identified with literary modernism, before widening our reading to encompass poets of other places and more recent eras who have responded in a variety of ways to modernist forms, techniques and preoccupations.
Occurrences
Semester One 2024
Points
30 points
Prerequisites
Any 30 points at 200 level from ENGL, or any 60 points at 200 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Restrictions
ENGL434
ENGL318
Animals in Culture
Description
This course explores the role of imagery and narrative in producing historical and contemporary ideas about ‘animality’ and ‘speciesism’ across a range of texts and media (including mythology, fables and bestiaries; wildlife documentaries; contemporary art; graphic novels; animal biographies; online activism; social media). Students will also learn about intersectional theory and its use in the field of Critical Animal Studies.
Occurrences
Semester Two 2024
Points
30 points
Prerequisites
Any 30 points at 200 level from CULT or ENGL, or any 60 points at 200 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Restrictions
CULT335
ENGL332
Sexualities in Culture
Description
This course analyses representations and models of 'normal' and 'abnormal' sexuality as these occur in sexology, psychiatry, self-help psychology, cinema and popular culture, and queer activism.
Occurrences
Semester One 2024
Points
30 points
Prerequisites
Any 30 points at 200 level from CULT or ENGL, or any 60 points at 200 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Restrictions
AMST332, CULT303, GEND307, GEND211
ENGL352
Crime Stories
Description
The course addresses the usefulness and range of the crime genre as an appropriate focus for the acquisition of the skills (in research, critical analysis, and written expression) peculiar to English studies, as well as a form of social and political critique. It will particularly concentrate on the last two centuries of the representations of crime, detection, confession, and punishments, assaying major trends and preoccupations present in a range of texts and theories. Within a general contextual examination of engagements between these facets, the development of genre forms and concerns will be considered, especially because the genre often speculates the fears and desires of its time in ways that likewise shape wider perceptions of crime and punishment. Students will be expected to read a range of key material, including a small selection of novels, some short fiction, theoretical writings and visual texts that should represent differences and similarities in representation and subject choice that writers and directors negotiate.
Occurrences
Semester One 2024
Points
30 points
Prerequisites
Any 30 points at 200 level from CULT or ENGL, or any 60 points at 200 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Restrictions
ENGL252; CULT252; CULT352

Not Offered Courses in 2024

100-level

ENGL103
The Outsider
Description
However you think about the outsider - as artist, as outlaw or anarchist, as hero or scapegoat, as criminal or critic - it is clear that this figure is a constant in the study of literature. In this course we shall investigate the way the figure of the outsider has been represented in the traditions of American and New Zealand literature. Furthermore, we will bring to bear on this figure three key critical contexts: romanticism, modernism and post-colonialism.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2018 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 , 2023
For further information see ENGL103 course details
Points
15 points
ENGL104
The Stage and Stagecraft
Description
This course covers the European historical backgrounds informing the modern stage. It also examines how the same fundamental dynamics occur in contemporary theatres, and in other performance situations nowadays, such as marae theatre, passion plays and other site-specific shows.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2016 , 2017 , 2018
For further information see ENGL104 course details
Points
15 points
ENGL115
Childhood in Children's Literature
Description
An introduction to the changing representations of the child and childhood in children's literature form the late 18th century to the present.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2012 , 2014 , 2015 , 2017
For further information see ENGL115 course details
Points
15 points
ENGL132
Cultural Studies: Reading Culture
Description
This course is an introduction to Cultural Studies, emphasising aspects of the field that are most pertinent to English Studies. Drawing from a wide range of examples, it demonstrates how our everyday life is a constant exercise in encoding and decoding our cultural environment through an exploration of the textuality and 'readability' of cultural forms and practices.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024
For further information see ENGL132 course details
Points
15 points

200-level

ENGL202
Rebels, Devils and Cannibals: Literature and the Origins of Modernity
Description
Examining a range of literary texts in English from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, ENGL202/302 focuses on how the chosen works represent and are shaped by the first glimmerings of modern forms of culture and consciousness.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2018 , 2020 , 2021 , 2023
For further information see ENGL202 course details
Points
15 points
ENGL206
Science, Technology and Literature
Description
This course will particularly concentrate on the last two centuries of intersections between science, technology and literature, assaying major trends and preoccupations present in a range of texts and theories. Within a general examination of literature's engagements, the development of science fiction forms and concerns will be considered, especially because of the way that the genre often speculates the fears and desires of its time onto both futuristic settings and "alternate realities". Students will be expected to read a range of key material, including a small selection of novels, some short fiction, theoretical writings and visual texts.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 , 2023
For further information see ENGL206 course details
Points
15 points
ENGL210
Inventing New Zealand in Literature
Description
ENGL 210 is an introduction to New Zealand literature. The course has a twentieth-century focus, and, in its survey of the century, examines texts that engage the issues of translation (a politics of metaphor) by which different ideas of ‘New Zealandness’ have been established and critiqued. What is it we mean when we speak of New Zealand literature? What are the assumptions, readings and interpretations employed in the formation of something like New Zealand identity, and what are their contexts?
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2019 , 2020 , 2022
For further information see ENGL210 course details
Points
15 points
ENGL231
Creative Writing: Poetry
Description
This course offers instruction and advice in the practice of writing poetry. A number of forms and styles will be studied, and writing exercises will be used to extend and develop the individual student's range of competencies. The course will culminate in the production by each student of a portfolio of his or her original work.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2012
For further information see ENGL231 course details
Points
15 points
ENGL233
Creative Writing for Stage
Description
This course combines the development of students' creative writing with teaching of the practical skills and dramaturgic techniques of scripting for stage.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024
For further information see ENGL233 course details
Points
15 points
ENGL238
Creative Writing for Screen
Description
The objective of the course is to combine the development of students' creative writing with the practical skills and dramaturgic techniques of writing for film.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2020 , 2021
For further information see ENGL238 course details
Points
15 points

300-level

ENGL302
Rebels, Devils and Cannibals: Literature and the Origins of Modernity
Description
Examining a range of literary texts in English from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, ENGL202/302 focuses on how the chosen works represent and are shaped by the first glimmerings of modern forms of culture and consciousness.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2018 , 2020 , 2021 , 2023
For further information see ENGL302 course details
Points
30 points
ENGL304
Drama: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Description
An analysis of modern plays from a number of societies in terms of naturalism, gender, self-awareness, dramaturgy and the "death of tragedy".
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2019
For further information see ENGL304 course details
Points
30 points
ENGL306
Science, Technology and Literature
Description
This course will particularly concentrate on the last two centuries of intersections between science, technology and literature, assaying major trends and preoccupations present in a range of texts and theories. Within a general examination of literature's engagements, the development of science fiction forms and concerns will be considered, especially because of the way that the genre often speculates the fears and desires of its time onto both futuristic settings and "alternate realities". Students will be expected to read a range of key material, including a small selection of novels, some short fiction, theoretical writings and visual texts.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 , 2023
For further information see ENGL306 course details
Points
30 points
ENGL313
Scream Theory: The Changing Face of Fear
Description
This course examines shifting representations of the fearful, monstrous and abject in visual culture and popular culture more generally. Emphasis is placed on sociocultural, feminist and postmodern interpretations of horror themes in American, Japanese and New Zealand contexts.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024
For further information see ENGL313 course details
Points
30 points
ENGL316
New Zealand Literature 3
Description
A course which is designed to follow ENGL 210 (New Zealand Literature 2), examining in depth the ways in which New Zealand literature can be written about. The course consists of four units, each of which addresses a specific critical context.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2011 , 2012 , 2014
For further information see ENGL316 course details
Points
30 points
ENGL333
The Exotic
Description
A course addressing the concept of the exotic as a category of taste and feeling through which to explore the politics and history of literatures in English. Exoticism will be considered via four main sub-categories: primitivism, orientalism, the marvellous and the introduced. A range of texts from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries will be studied, deriving from locations as diverse as Britain, Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2012 , 2013 , 2015 , 2016 , 2019
For further information see ENGL333 course details
Points
30 points
ENGL345
Reading Digitally: Electronic Texts in Literary Culture
Description
Digital technologies have influenced literary reading and writing at every level, including how we author, publish, distribute, read and study texts. This course equips students with skills for reading and writing in the digital age via a wide-ranging exploration of new media literatures, literature in relation to software cultures, changes to reading practices and cognition, and recent digital research tools and methods. The course will introduce students to new software and some technical concepts, but no special skills or knowledge are required.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2017 , 2018 , 2019
For further information see ENGL345 course details
Points
30 points
ENGL349
Animals on Screen
Description
This course explores cinematic representations of insects, mammals, fish, birds and reptiles, with an emphasis on their special place in horror and science fiction genres. Students will also be introduced to Human-Animal Studies as a field of scholarship.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024
For further information see ENGL349 course details
Points
30 points
ENGL350
Creative Writing Masterclass: Special Topics in Creative Writing
Description
This course teaches a special topic in creative writing varying from year to year and is offered by a distinguished practitioner in the area.
Occurrences
Not offered 2024, offered in 2014 , 2016
For further information see ENGL350 course details
Points
30 points