Detailed Program
Compulsory subjects
Contemporary Critical Theory
The compulsory subject “Critical Theory” is designed as a seminar-workshop that cuts across the rest of the curriculum, addressing the critical reading, analysis, and debate of theoretical texts relevant to research in literary and cultural studies. A selection of paradigmatic texts from critical theory will be addressed both in a purely theoretical manner and as applied to literary research in the form of case studies. The overall objective of the course is for students to become familiar with the history of critical theory, dating back to its origins in the 1970s, and to learn to use and integrate the tools it offers for study in the field of philology. At a particular level, and beyond traditional critical approaches, the course seeks to provide specialized familiarity with such varied currents, concepts, and theoretical frameworks as hauntology, space and place studies, narratology studies, mythocriticism, violence studies, and affect theory, among others.
Research Methods in Literary and Cultural Studies
This mainly practical course provides students with the knowledge and skills necessary to conduct independent research in literary and cultural studies. Through seminars and workshops, research methodologies are presented, along with the steps to follow in formulating research questions, searching for specialized bibliography, and developing an argument supported by a solid critical analysis. In addition, an introductory guide is provided on the most relevant academic practices in the field, such as presenting papers at conferences or submitting articles to specialized journals, as well as on the importance of academic writing and research ethics. The completion of the course lays the foundation for the proper development of the Master's Thesis.
Master's Thesis
The Master's Thesis (TFM) aims to enable students to demonstrate the skills they have acquired, including knowledge and the ability to apply the analytical tools developed throughout the master's program. This course serves as an introduction to independent research in the field of English-language literature and culture. Each student will develop a research project of their own initiative, under the supervision of a lecturer from the Literature Unit of the Department of English Studies. The individual projects will be integrated into several thematic seminars, where each individual proposal will be shared, discussed, and evaluated.
Elective subjects [OFFERED IN 2026/27]
Women's Poetics from the 20th and 21st Centuries
This course explores how women poets writing in English, primarily from the mid-20th century to the present, have transformed the forms, voices, and even the genre of poetry itself, reshaping the landscape of contemporary literature. From the radical reinventions of poets such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde to innovative contemporary figures such as Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine, the course examines how women's poetics addresses issues of identity, embodiment, politics, ecology, and experimental forms. Equally important to the course are critics and poet-critics, whose work has profoundly influenced the way poetry is read, interpreted, and valued. At a time when questions of voice, justice, and cultural memory are particularly urgent, women's poetics offer essential frameworks for understanding the role of literature in shaping contemporary thought and experience. The course is designed as a reading and research-based seminar; emphasis will be placed on sustained engagement with primary texts, criticism, and digital resources.
Film and Identity
This course studies and analyzes how cinematic manifestations of modernity, postmodernity, and the current posthumanist era have contributed to the creation, negotiation, and establishment of various forms of cultural identity in the English-speaking world (gender, social, sexual, generational, national, regional, local, colonial, religious identity, etc.). The concept of identity will be critically examined, exploring its epistemological consistency, ideological function, and cultural value, as well as its role in the construction of cinema as a text (film). The course will be approached through critical cultural-materialist and neo-materialist tenets, contrasting the intersectional model, more akin to the former framework, with the assembly model, more typical of the latter. Specific identity models will generally be addressed in the contexts of American and British cinema.
Countercultural Voices in the US
The course Countercultural Voices in the US offers an analysis of the counterculture of the “long sixties” as a space of productive tension between normative culture and movements of political and aesthetic dissent. Through a review of literary texts and theoretical materials, the historical and social dimensions of these movements will be addressed, focusing on their complex relationship with power, the market, and hegemonic discourses. Special attention will be paid to texts that serve as direct commentary on the sociopolitical climate of the time. The works will be placed in dialogue with other contemporary forms of expression (New Hollywood cinema, New Journalism, comics, folk and psychedelic music, festivals such as Woodstock and Altamont) in order to examine how responses and challenges to the dominant culture are articulated. The course will invite students to reflect on the possible programmatic systematicity of these movements and the processes of assimilation and commercialization that transform opposition into cultural products.
Children's and Young Adult Literature
This course covers the fundamental theoretical concepts for studying children's and young adult literature in English. It offers a literary, cultural, and historical approach to the field, with a special focus on its main works, trends, and debates. The course explores the generic features and formal conventions of these productions, as well as their ideological and aesthetic implications and the cultural construction of childhood and adolescence. The course does not have a didactic focus, nor does it focus on teaching in school contexts; rather, it proposes a critical literary analysis oriented towards philological research.
The Gothic Imagination in Literature and Other Media
This course explores the evolution of the Gothic universe from the late 18th century to the present day through various literary works and other media, such as graphic novels, music, film adaptations, and television series. It will analyze how the Gothic genre expresses personal and cultural anxieties, from the fear of the unknown and the eroticization of terror to issues of ethnicity, gender, trauma, and identity in the contemporary world. Critical readings of texts will be conducted, and historical contexts, theoretical frameworks, and thematic analyses will be addressed to understand the dynamics, meanings, and current relevance of the Gothic imagination.
The Theatricality of Fiction
It could be said that the modern British novel was born in the early 18th century as a natural rival to the theater. While the novel benefited from the slow but steady rise of literacy and print culture, the theater seemed to decline as popular melodramas came to dominate the scene. However, their cultural rivalry may have been more ideological than real, more symbiotic than antagonistic. The novel learned from the theater, as in the case of Gothic fiction, which used theatricality to challenge the oppressive realism that prevailed in the novels of the time. Moreover, there was a tacit but evident intermedial alliance between theater and the novel, if only because of the way novels were often read aloud among friends and family, and also because of the public performances of the writers themselves. In the 19th century, novelists often sought to have their books adapted for the theater or wrote plays themselves. By pointing out that theater should follow the example of the naturalist novel, Émile Zola also opened a door that would prove crucial to the rise of modernist fiction. His challenge to the traditional novel reinvents, in a way, the performativity of the stage on the page, offering us a more complex view of what happens when we read: what we see and what we hear when we encounter a literary text.
Literatures of Violence, Crisis, and Disruption
This course offers an introduction to narratives of violence and crisis in English, with a special focus on those that address these issues from a disruptive or formally experimental perspective, whether through fiction or testimony. Different genres will be covered, including novels, short stories, poetry, and graphic narratives, with an emphasis on contemporary works emerging from specific or multiple geographical contexts. The approach to crisis and violence is not based on a pessimistic or fatalistic perspective, but rather on an exploration of how literature and culture reflect, give meaning to, or question contemporary evils such as the climate crisis, humanitarian and political crises, systemic, racial, and sexual violence, the prosecution of minorities, the housing crisis, and precariousness, among others.
Contemporary Avant-Gardes in Literature and the Arts
Contemporary Avant-Gardes in Literature and the Arts is a graduate seminar that examines experimental writing and artistic practices in the English-speaking world from the late 20th century to the present, tracing their roots in early 20th-century modernism and subsequent postmodern experiments. Emphasis is placed on the dialogue between literature and visual culture, and on how the contemporary avant-garde addresses identity, technology, globalization, and the archive. Students will analyze primary texts and works of art alongside theoretical frameworks from modernism, postmodernism, and avant-garde studies, considering how formal experimentation functions as cultural and political intervention.
The Female Bildungsroman
This course explores the female Bildungsroman in English-language literature and film from the 19th to the 21st century. We will examine how women's coming-of-age narratives confront, affirm, or subvert traditional expectations of female maturity, as well as the Bildungsroman model, traditionally centered on the path to adulthood from a male perspective. The idea of becoming-a-woman will be analyzed, taking into account how the intersection of gender, race, social class, and sexuality defines and generates the possibilities of what it means to become an adult woman.
Topics in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Queer Archive, Memory, and Representation
This course offers a genealogical journey through the literary and cultural construction of archives of desire and sexual and gender dissidence in English-speaking countries. Through the analysis of texts produced under censorship and conceived as survival strategies, we will study how certain narratives, initially inscribed in the space of intimacy, help sustain and transform the collective archive, which later comes into tension with the literary canon and dominant social norms. The course also examines the progressive politicization of memory and representation, leading to contemporary reappropriations of the term queer and the living archives that circulate today.