About English Studies
English is taught in the School of English, Communications, and Performance Studies at Monash University. The English section incorporates a broad and eclectic range of teaching and research and supervision interests (you can get some idea of the scope of the latter from our listing of recent and forthcoming books and recent articles).
Teaching
The School of English, Communications, and Performance Studies offers a wide variety of courses in English studies at undergraduate level. Some subjects emphasise the study of English language, some the study of a particular author in depth, some the formal elements of literary genres, some the critical and scholarly methods of studying and writing about English literature. Others consider English literature in a context of social history and the history of ideas, others in relation to film. Some subjects may combine a number of these approaches. Critical Theory is a term which has come to signify a whole series of contemporary approaches to textual and cultural criticism, for example hermeneutics, structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, theories of ideology, psychoanalytic theory, and so on. Such theories have been central to much recent work in literary studies.
The school also offers a sequence of units in writing, including Academic Writing and Professional Writing at first-year level and creative writing (Introduction to Fiction Writing and Advanced Fiction Writing) and Advanced Professional Writing at later year levels.
English literature is taught on the Clayton and Caulfield campuses. For more detail on courses for 2006 go to the Undergraduate page.
Research
Membes of the English section have a correspondingly broad and eclectic range of research interests, all the way from Romantic poetry and Shakespearean theatre to feminist theory and cultural studies; you can get some idea of the scope of this from our listing of recent and forthcoming books. Although the interpretation and re-interpretation of literary works remains an important facet of sectional activity, contemporary theoretical debate has opened up all sorts of questions about what literature is and how texts work, and has widened the scope of literary studies into areas formerly the preserve of linguistics, philosophy, sociology and politics. Among the particular research and supervision interests of staff members are (in no particular order): Romantic literature; the scholarly editing of texts; biographical research; literary history; linguistic criticism and discourse analysis; feminist and post-colonialist approaches to literature; comparative metrics; the Victorian novel; literature and film; Renaissance poetry; the semiotics of legal discourse; feminist poetics; Scottish literature and culture post-1750; semiotics of performance; children's literature; bibliography, textual transmission and manuscript studies; stylistics; intersections of literature and philosophy, literature and theology; West African literature; intellectual life in colonial Australia; contemporary cultural studies.
The Matheson Library at Monash Clayton has in particular an internationally-recognised strength in eighteenth-century English Literature. Its Swift Collection is exceptional, and Clive Probyn would welcome enquiries from graduates interested in researching any aspect of the Enlightenment period. In addition to the books, manuscripts and pamphlet collections in the Rare Book Section, digital databases available to members of the University include Early English Books On Line (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections on line (ECCO).