Literature and Languages
Postgraduate Applicants
M.Litt in Modern Scottish Writing
Calum Colvin, 'Twa Dogs' (2000)
Is Scotland different? Is Scotland real?
Modern Scottish Writing
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More than a decade after devolution, Scotland’s national status ‘is both dangled before us and tantalisingly withheld’ (Don Paterson).
The Stirling Masters programme views Scottish literature in the light of this ambiguity, from a perspective shaped by critical theory as well as traditional literary history. The provisional and unstable nature of writing resonates powerfully, in Scotland, with recent cultural history. Familiar critical questions about language, representation and canonicity are not merely theoretical, but urgently relevant to ongoing debates. The divisions at the heart of Burns’s poem ‘The Twa Dogs’ are a familiar part of the cultural furniture in Scotland – but the meaning and ‘reality’ of these divisions is continually being contested, by contemporary writers such as James Kelman, Liz Lochhead and Irvine Welsh.
This taught MLitt course explores how modern Scottish writing both reflects, and has helped to produce, this ambivalent cultural condition.
Overview
The programme lasts 12 months full-time, or 27 months part-time, running from September to August. The teaching methods encourage independent research and scholarship within a structured framework of core and optional modules. Students are assessed by coursework; there are no examinations. Completing a Masters degree as a prelude to research is an increasingly common pattern of study for young scholars, and this route is being encouraged by the AHRC. This course provides an ideal introduction to further postgraduate work and an effective transition to a research degree. The course is also well-suited to students simply wanting to gain a fuller appreciation of modern Scottish literature and intellectual history.
As debate intensifies regarding the status of Scottish culture and the 'unfinished project' of cultural modernity, this programme encourages critical thinking about the relationship between history, culture and tradition which 'modernity' implies, and explores the ambivalent role of this category in Scottish literature and culture.
Teaching Programme
The MLitt in Modern Scottish Writing explores Scottish writing in the context of 'cultural modernity', and examines writers and themes such as:
- The ‘Scottish invention’ of historical fiction, from Walter Scott and James Hogg to James Robertson
- Language, voice and authenticity from Robert Burns to Liz Lochhead and Suhayl Saadi
- Scotland and the romance of Empire, from John Buchan and R.L. Stevenson to Irvine Welsh
- The possibility of poetic tradition, from Ossian to Hugh MacDiarmid to Edwin Morgan
- Scotland’s extended modernism, from Sorley MacLean to James Kelman and Janice Galloway
- Postmodernity and the ‘postnation’ in Muriel Spark and Alasdair Gray
The programme covers writing from Robert Burns, Walter Scott and James Hogg, through Victorian and late 19th-century writers (Galt, Buchan, Stevenson) to the modernist experiments of Hugh MacDiarmid and his followers, and on to provocative twentieth-century experiments in language, textuality and historical re-telling (Welsh, Galloway, Kelman, Spark, Gray, Saadi, Robertson). No previous experience in studying Scottish literature is required. The course aims to provide students with the literary grounding and critical vocabulary to consider how Scotland became estranged from the normative cultural modernity to which its own Enlightenment and Romantic literature made a crucial contribution. Leading Scottish writers and critics feature prominently in assigned reading, as do theorists of place, narrative and modernity.
Structure and Content
The teaching year at Stirling is divided into two semesters, which run from mid-September to Christmas, and from mid-February to the end of May. Both full-time and part-time students take a core module in Modern Scottish Writing over two semesters. For part-time students this is in Year One.
The first semester provides a thematic and historical overview of the programme (doubling as a survey course in modern Scottish literature); the second semester challenges cultural historicism by proposing connections between Romantic and Modernist writing, in relation to themes of authenticity, representation and democracy.
In parallel with the core module, other modules allow you to develop a more specialised knowledge of specific texts and issues. You will take one of these modules each semester. If you are on the part-time programme you will take the two optional modules in Year Two.
These modules vary from year to year, but may include:
• Enlightenment Scotland and the Historical Novel: An examination of the ‘invention’ and development of the historical novel in Scotland, and the powerful influence of this genre in the structuring of cultural memory.
• Language and Scottish Poetry: An exploration of a series of paradoxes surrounding orality, tradition and cultural identity in modern Scottish poetry.
• Writing Difference: Scottish Women Writers and Tradition: A study of the place and function of women’s writing in the formation of a national canon.
• Scottish Gothic: Focuses on the contribution of Scottish writing to the emergence of the Gothic as a counter-discourse within Enlightenment modernity.
• Writing Home: Scottish Landscape and Narrative: Explores questions of home, territory and ‘place’ in modern Scottish writing by examining literary representations – and productions – of distinctive cultural and national geographies.
• Comparative Approaches to Vernacular Texts: An exploration of vernacular, non-standard and ‘foreign’ English writing in relation to Scottish, American, and post-colonial cultures.
Additionally, an Arts Research Training module is taken by all Stirling Master's students in the Arts & Humanities. Students choose their own programme of training from a menu of activities and seminars, ranging from writing a PhD proposal, to completing a course of directed reading, to attending research seminars in another subject. In order to complete this degree requirement, students must complete a reflective journal about their training activities.
Delivery and Assessment
Assessment in each semester will be based on coursework and essays. Methods of assessment for each of the non-core option modules will vary but will often consist of a single essay. Teaching will take the form of regular tutorials in small groups. Though all the modules will offer close and careful supervision, participants are expected to take proper responsibility for their own studies. The aim in all cases is to foster student-led learning in expert, stimulating and congenial company.
The Dissertation
The most significant piece of work on the programme will be a dissertation of 15,000 words, written during the summer, on a subject of your choosing in consultation with a member of the Department. Students are encouraged to develop their own personal interests within the broad field of modern Scottish writing. This is an intensive piece of research; each student is assigned a supervisor who provides advice in both the researching and the writing of the dissertation. You may choose to develop work initiated on one of the modules you have studied. Those who do not embark on the dissertation may be awarded a Diploma. The work of the best students completing the programme may be deemed worthy of an MLitt with Distinction.
Other Activities
Each semester we organise at least one field trip to a site or event of particular relevance to the themes of the course. This may involve attending the performance of modern Scottish theatre, a lecture or reading from a prominent Scottish writer, an exhibition of modern Scottish art, or a screening of a film.
English Studies hosts an annual postgraduate conference, organised by postgraduates, and students on the MLitt course are encouraged to contribute through such activities as giving papers and chairing sessions.
Teaching Staff
Dr Suzanne Gilbert
"My research interests lie in eighteenth and nineteenth century Scottish literature, Romanticism, and oral traditions. I’ve published numerous articles on Scottish literature (especially Hogg, Burns, and ballads), and am one of two Associate General Editors of the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Works of James Hogg, published by Edinburgh UP, as well as Stirling Co-ordinator for the project. I edited two volumes in the series: Hogg’s Queen Hynde (1998), with Douglas S. Mack, and The Mountain Bard (2007). Work in progress focuses on issues of authenticity, orality and print, reception, and genre, and includes a monograph on the ballad as a genre; a study of ‘lyrical ballad-making’, which theorises the Romantic writers’ uses of the ballad; a co-edited volume of critical essays on ‘Scottish traditional literatures’; and a third volume for the Hogg Edition, Scottish Pastorals and Other Early Poems."
Dr Scott Hames
"My research interests centre on contemporary Scottish writing, and in particular the politics of language and literary form in writers following James Kelman. I’ve published numerous articles on James Kelman (and masculinity, existentialism, modernism, canonicity), and also edited the Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman. I've also published on Don Paterson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alan Warner, William McIlvanney, and Scottish novels of education. Ongoing interests include a general theory of ‘vernacular’ textuality, and the aesthetics of cultural nationalism. I co-edit the International Journal of Scottish Literature (www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk), and am currently finishing a monograph on Kelman and the literary vernacular."
Professor David Richards
"My chief research interests are in the areas of colonial and postcolonial literature, anthropology, art history and cultural theory. My published work includes studies the representation of other cultures in literature, anthropology and art, cultural production in post-colonial cities, and discourses of the ‘archaic’ in colonial and postcolonial cultures. I have published research on Walter Scott and Enlightenment models of cultural description."
Dr Adrian Hunter
"My main research interests are in modernism, American literature and culture, and the short story. I have published editions of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Stephen Crane's Maggie, and my Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English was published in 2007."
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? - MODERN SCOTTISH WRITING GRADUATES
Richie McCaffery graduated with distinction in 2009, having completed a dissertation exploring Sydney Goodsir Smith's poetic masterpiece Under the Eildon Tree. He is currently busy working on a PhD proposal on the modernist poem as secular miracle. Aside from academic work, Richie was recently awarded an Edwin Morgan Bursary for his poetry which allowed him to tour the Hebrides, writing along the way whenever inspiration struck. His poetry has appeared in Magma, Poetry Scotland, Pomegranate and is forthcoming in Envoi and Osprey Journal.
Meghan McAvoy graduated in 2010 with a thesis on Iain Crichton Smith’s English prose. She received a Horizon Studentship Award to undertake a PhD at Stirling entitled ‘A Critique of Scottish Literary Nationalism’. She has presented several papers on Iain Crichton Smith's writing, another on feminism and Surrealist painting, and another on profanity, education and transgression in the work of Tom Leonard and James Kelman. The latter of these will be published this year as part of the proceedings of the Transgression and Its Limits conference. Aside from her academic pursuits, Meghan is often found attached to a violin, on which she plays and composes music in the Scottish traditional idiom.
Michael Stachura graduated with distinction in 2009. He is currently studying for a PhD in Modern Scottish and Old Norse literature at Simon Fraser University, Canada, where he is also employed as a teaching and research assistant. One aspect of the Modern Scottish Writing MLitt that had a particular influence on Michael's research interests was Scottish literature's links with the European Modernist movement. He is now planning to revise sections of his MLitt dissertation on George Mackay Brown's runic verse and its links with Imagism and the minimalist modern poetry of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound for possible publication. He is also planning to learn modern Icelandic and master the basics of Old Norse by the end of his postgraduate career.
Career Opportunities
Completing a Masters degree as a prelude to further academic research is an increasingly common pattern of study for young scholars, and is a route encouraged by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Advanced education in the Arts, the practical experience of research, and the production of a dissertation are significant transferable skills for many careers in business and the professions.
Entrance Requirements
A good 2.i or better Single or Combined Honours degree in a relevant subject or subjects from a UK university or an equivalent qualification. Applicants with other qualifications or other appropriate experience may be admitted on the recommendation of the Course Director.
English Studies
English Studies has created a vibrant research culture as a central part of its work. All members of academic staff are research active, and research students play a crucial role in helping us to remain at the cutting edge of the discipline. English Studies was awarded 5 in the last Research Assessment Exercise (2001). In the recent Quality Assessment of Teaching, we achieved the top grade of Excellent.
Further Information
The course directors would be delighted to discuss the programme further with prospective students, and to welcome them to Stirling to see the campus and meet with staff and students.
To discuss the programme or arrange a visit, please contact either of the Course Directors, Dr Suzanne Gilbert or Dr Scott Hames.
Once the decision to apply has been made, it is possible to apply online for this course.
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Dr Suzanne Gilbert English Studies University of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA UK |
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Tel: + 44 (0) 1786 466-206 |
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Fax: + 44 (0) 1786 466-210 |
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Email: suzanne.gilbert@stir.ac.uk |
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Web: Suzanne Gilbert Staff Profile |
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Dr Scott Hames English Studies University of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA UK |
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Tel: + 44 (0) 1786 466-205 |
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Fax: + 44 (0) 1786 466-210 |
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Email: scott.hames@stir.ac.uk |
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Web: Scott Hames Staff Profile |