This first-semester module offers an introduction to the study of English at university level. It offers a foundation for students interested in the historical and critical analysis of literary texts and for those who want to write creatively for themselves. It's the first module in the English and the English and Creative Writing degrees.

You'll have an opportunity to understand how particular historical and social contexts shape literature and to discuss ways in which historical literature continues to live and have relevance to the contemporary reader.

You'll also study in detail how literary texts are constructed. In understanding the mechanisms that make literary texts work – the choices made by an author about genre, form, and language – you'll become a subtler, more attentive reader and a better-informed and better-equipped writer.  

Reading list

Primary texts

• Baldwin, Notes of A Native Son (Penguin Modern Classics, 2017)
• Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (Bloomsbury, 2002)
• Moore, Lorrie, ‘Which is More Than Say About Some People’ from Birds of America (Faber & Faber, 2010)
• Peele, Jordan, Get Out: the complete annotated screenplay (Inventory Press, 2019)
• Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (1818 edition)

Secondary texts

• King, S (2000) On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft. London: Hodder & Stoughton
• Saunders, G (2021) A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. London: Bloomsbury
• Wood, J (2010) How Fiction Works. London: Vintage

Web links

The Literary Essay: Sophie

• She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body
• The Wayward Essay

The aim of this module is to introduce students to the institutions, actors, processes and concepts that make up the UK constitution including its particular application to Scotland. It is designed to introduce students to methods of critical engagement with constitutional law in both theory and practice.

The aim of this module is to provide students with an introduction to the concepts, structures and processes that make up a legal system. It is designed to equip all students studying law with the knowledge and understanding that they will utilise in all other law modules: the “tools of the trade”.

These will situate texts in context, from genre to historical period and theory. The texts include poetry, drama, novels,  short stories, life writing, and screenplays and you'll have the chance to choose between critical and creative writing responses for one assessment on each class.

This class explores how Scottish fiction and drama of the 20th and 21st centuries creates the idea of Scotland.

This class looks at a range of literary texts and how they interpret and create the idea of ‘human’ at different points in history.

Following on from Public Law 1, Public Law 2 aims to consolidate knowledge and understanding of constitutional and administrative law. Students taking this class will be required to have taken Public Law 1 in the first year. It'll build upon knowledge of the key concepts and institutions of the UK constitution.

As a second year class, its rationale is to give you the opportunity to progress from an understanding of the constitution to an understanding of the role of the law in the constitutional control of public power. This course encourages you to adopt an evaluative and critical stance towards ongoing constitutional developments. The course will focus on control of administrative action, both by the judiciary and by ombudsmen. The protection of individual rights will be a key feature, focusing on judicial protection but also encompassing the role of human rights institutions in the UK and Scotland. The future control of public power will be discussed, including topical debates concerning constitutional reform in this area.

Family law concerns the control which the law exerts over domestic relationships and families; it affects everyone to a greater or lesser degree.

Topics include:

• the legal status of children, parental responsibilities and rights and the upbringing of children - including issues in adoption and fostering, local authority care and the Children's Hearing system
• legal consequences of marriage/civil partnership
• divorce - including what happens to the family and its financial consequences
• unmarried domestic relations, opposite-sex and same-sex

Commercial law is a second year compulsory subject on the LLB (and LML) degree. The class provides you with an understanding of commercial law in a Scottish context. It partially meets the commercial law subject requirements and related skills outcomes of the Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates (albeit that some of the commercial professional topics, for example sale of goods and insurance law, are dealt with by other courses).

Building on the knowledge you acquire in first year, the general academic objective of the course is to examine the basic principles and rules concerning core aspects of commercial law, including the main principles of agency, partnership and company law, the law relating to various methods of payment (including consumer credit and bills of exchange) the rules governing the ways in which creditors can ‘secure’ repayment of a debt (for example, through taking personal guarantees from third parties for repayment of the debt, or by establishing rights in security over debtor property); the basic principles of diligence; the consequences of both corporate and individual debtor inability to repay debts (corporate insolvency and personal bankruptcy respectively).

While the focus of the class is on ‘a black letter’ analysis of relevant statutory and common law in the broad commercial area, in order to aid understanding of relevant principles, the class also examines the policy rationales underlying the current law and recent and projected reforms in this area.

Clinical LLB students may opt to replace the regular essay in this module with an essay topic based on a clinic-related case relevant to this module.

The design of this class is primarily aimed at enhancing your ability to read cases, deal with case law and apply the techniques of case-analysis and common law development.

You'll acquire an in-depth and up-to-date knowledge and understanding, from both a legal and a social perspective, of the rules of law governing involuntary obligations, that is to say the law of delict and the law of unjustified enrichment.

You'll acquire the ability to apply the rules of law to particular fact situations in order to provide definitive answers to the problems exposed in these situations.

You'll develop critical and reasoning skills, giving you the ability to make and present personal and informed judgments on the rules of law and their application within the domestic legal system.

The general rationale of this class is to provide you with a contemporary understanding of the law of property, trusts and succession in Scotland, and to meet Law Society of Scotland requirements in this subject-area.

The EU law class focuses on the constitutional and institutional order of the EU as well as one the internal market. To this end, the class looks at the European integration process, the EU institutions, EU competences, the decision-making process within the EU, the principles underpinning the EU legal order and the principles governing the internal market.

This class aims to introduce you to some of the major forms and themes in the 20th century American novel with some more contemporary content. The module investigates how major social and historical issues have shaped some of the most important American novels and how the novel, as a form, has developed and adapted to describe new and different realities. Some of the historical and social issues covered in the class include:

• the suburbs and the city
• the legacy of slavery
• queer life in the US
• stories of migration and travel

This module is designed to equip students who wish to pursue studies in American literature or culture in more depth with an overview of the period. It's also designed to expand the knowledge of students with a general interest in the novel.

This class will study the literature of the Victorian period (1837-1901) and will focus on fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose. It aims to situate this writing both in its contemporary political, social and cultural contexts and in the light of recent critical and theoretical debates. Themes to be covered may include:

• the 'crisis of faith'
• science and evolutionary theory
• realism and the Victorian novel
• medievalism and Victorianism
• literature and the visual arts
• key poetic genres, including elegy and dramatic monologue
• popular fiction
• the 'Woman Question'
• Empire and travel writing
• the new journalism and Victorian reading publics
• representations of the city and technology
• issues of canon and periodisation

This class explores twentieth-century English literature with a focus on fiction, poetry, and drama. The survey examines major literary figures from the first half of the century, such as Woolf and Stein, along with their contemporaries and successors. Particular attention will be paid to the literary culture of Modernism before exploring the texts, culture and politics of the later 20th century through writers such as Spark, McGrath and Smith. Emphasis will be placed on understanding a diverse range of literature in historical, critical and theoretical contexts as a means of engaging with the rich literary heritage of the twentieth century, and what the twenty-first century might bring.

This module will focus on drama, a key genre in the period from the 1580s to the closure of the playhouses in 1642. Reading work by major dramatists, we'll engage with a form that addressed a highly literate audience as well as a popular one, and is thus a particularly interesting place to trace ways of thinking in the period. The common thread that ties this selection of plays together is their interest in transgression: what happens when humans cross the limits set by tradition, religion and the state?

In the process of this theatrical interrogation, the plays pose questions about violence, identity, gender, desire, citizenship and the role of the theatre itself. We'll read tragedies and comedies; alongside these, you'll also be asked to think about the moral and theological debates that were taking place at the time these works were produced and consumed. Thus, for example, we'll read plays by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton alongside writing by Robert Burton, Sir Francis Bacon and Niccolo Machiavelli. This will enable us to explore how ideas about sex, revenge and corruption in the period are developed and contested between the stage and the work of some of the most influential thinkers at the time; it will also allow us to consider how some of these early modern limit cases still ask questions of us today.

Lectures will provide context for tutorials, which will be organised around worksheets that will be circulated in advance, and so will give you the chance to prepare for each class, and will allow everyone the chance to contribute to discussions.

This class explores the ways in which language is used in businesses and other organisations. The class assumes no prior knowledge of linguistics, and teaches technical skills in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and the analysis of other types of verbal interaction, in speech, writing and electronic communications. The analytical skills learned in this class, and the theoretical ideas, will be useful also in the analysis of literature or any other aspect of language in use. Seminars give you practice in the analytical skills. The class assumes that you have no prior knowledge or experience in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, pragmatics, etc.

What does it mean to ‘write the body’? How has the world of sensory experience been rendered in theory, literature, and film? What metaphors do we summon to understand physical experiences of joy, sickness, health, desire, exhaustion, and intoxication?

This class will approach these questions (and more) by studying literary, visual, and theoretical engagements with the body in late 20th and 21st -century culture. Over the course of the semester, you'll encounter some key debates about the body and its representation in literature and film. You'll engage with the fields of gender theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and disability theory. You'll also learn some strategies for analysing contemporary culture through the ‘lens’ of theory, developing skills you can take into other areas of your study.

This placement module offers you the opportunity to gain practical, work-based experience (minimum 60 hours) in an area that is professionally related to or relevant to your BA. For your degree this might be working with a publisher, or literary agency, or in an office environment where you are using your skills in reading, interpretation and writing. Or you might use this as an opportunity to look towards a future career: so, if you plan to go into teaching, for example, you could look to get a placement working in a subject-related environment with young people.

Writing Short Fiction and Poetry is a module studying contemporary short stories and lyric poetry. Generally speaking, the aim of this class is to get you writing as soon as possible – each week is aimed at teaching some of the basics of Creative Writing alongside a case study of a writer and their particular approach to elements of the craft.

We'll be reading screenplays, talking about them, and writing our own. What is the difference between writing for the page and writing for the screen? Screenplays are, in practice, a series of instructions: for actors, for crew members, for potential financiers. A screenplay is a dual-purpose document. It exists as proof of concept (i.e., proof of narrative); and it is there to communicate the spirit and tone of the finished film. More than anything, our first job as writers for the screen is to make the reader hear and see. Primarily it is to make the reader see. There are many ways in to a life in writing for the screen. But, as with any good work of fiction, it begins with engaging characters. Do they appear to us fully formed? Or does it take development? How can we get them onto the page? What are the decisions we make at the start of a project? What is visible and the invisible writing? This class encourages you to consider the shape of your story in order to point yourself—and your narrative—in the right direction.

The main aim of this class is to introduce you to the major theoretical ideas and values of law, and to debates about those ideas and values, thereby enhancing their understanding of law in general.

The class explores relationships between law and morality, law and society and between law and power. In doing so, the course also explores what we mean by law, morality and power. The course requires you to work on your own and make an oral presentation and trains you in concise thinking.

The aim of the class is to introduce you to the law of landlord and tenant, and to concepts of housing need and market allocation of housing resources and the different ways in which such concepts are interpreted and operated in modern Britain.  The method of teaching and assessing the class is designed to enhance learning, academic and transferable skills.

This class aims to provide you with an understanding of the problems inherent in situations involving a foreign element and the basic concepts and principles of Scots international private law. More particularly, attention will be given to the rules which establish when the Scottish court has jurisdiction in any case involving a foreign element. The class will also determine the applicable law in cases involving international elements heard before a Scottish court and the rules on recognition and enforcement of judgments in certain contexts.

The International private law rules in relation to:

• contract
• delict
• marriage
• divorce & nullity
• parent & child
• property
• insolvency & succession

Tutorials for this class take place on Saturday mornings.

This class is not recommended for Erasmus exchange students.

Most industrialised countries, and the European Union now have elaborate laws, rules and procedures for ensuring the maintenance of a competitive economy. This course looks at how the competition laws of the United Kingdom and the European Union affect how business operates in Britain.

If you're contemplating a career in business, or are simply a consumer, some knowledge of competition is useful. If you're a student of industrial economics, or of marketing, some knowledge of competition law is a wise precaution. Moreover there are considerably more job opportunities in this area, whether as an economic adviser, legal practitioner or in-house lawyer advising on effective compliance.

Although we are all equal in the law, some are treated more equally than others. This module examines the nature of discrimination and some of the reasons for it, and the history of the law which tries to prohibit it and promote equality. The class looks in depth at the Equality Act 2010 and relevant case law. It covers the protected characteristics, direct and indirect discrimination, harassment, victimisation and disability discrimination, including the duty to make reasonable adjustments. As well as individual anti-discrimination law in employment and goods and services, the class examines preventive and pro-active measures, including positive action and the public equality duty and the arguments around their nature.

Assessment consists of a group presentation on an approved topic of your choice and a piece of coursework requiring problem solving skills and analysis of law and policy.

Ethics & Justice will introduce you to the world of work by bridging the gap between theory and practice, and by providing you with the intellectual and practical tools to deal with the personal and practical dimensions of law in a competent, ethical and socially responsible manner.

The module will help to develop your legal, intellectual and practical skills, and provide you with an opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness and ethics of what you do and how this fits in with problems of access to justice. It will also enhance your understanding of the social and economic context in which legal rules operate.

This module is only open to Law Clinic students with case experience.

The extensive uptake of new digital information technologies and particularly, the internet, has resulted in expanding our legal universe, with new laws being created, the application of older laws being challenged and reconfigured and, unavoidably, new legal challenges arising due to conflicts of regulatory decisions with technological advances.

The aim of the class is to address the basic issues arising from the advent of the internet and related digital technologies and familiarise you with important legal developments that have taken place in the last 20 years.

This class encourages you to think constructively and critically about contemporary issues in the field of criminology. It also focuses on contemporary responses to crime in the fields of punishment, imprisonment and penal policy, with reference to developments in Scotland and beyond.

This class deals with the questions, what are those 'basic' or 'fundamental' rights and freedoms to which every individual is entitled in a democratic society, and how to protect them against possible violations.

The class focuses on a selection of the most prominent human rights which have resulted in considerable amounts of litigation.  You'll consider the right to life, right not to be tortured, freedom of expression, children’s rights and issues regarding terrorism.

This class aims to provide you with an understanding of employment law in a UK and EU-wide context and to introduce you to the sources, principles and main features of employment law.

You'll learn about key employment protection provisions and the major collective provisions of employment law in the UK, including the legal position of the contract of employment, the status of employee, the law and practice of unfair dismissal, discrimination law and working time regulations.

The class will focus on practical employment law involving practitioners, an Employment Judge and an Employment Tribunal visit.

This course is concerned with the legal relationship of banker and customer and the services offered by bankers in the community. It examines the financial instruments employed in financing trading and other transactions and is especially concerned with the law and practice of lending, both secured and unsecured.

Intellectual property is integral to all our daily lives, whether it is the music we listen to, the news we read, or chair we sit on, as well as providing the resources necessary to produce new medicines, and the superabundance of brand marketing to which we are routinely subjected.

The class will study the law of patents, trademarks (registered and unregistered), copyright, and moral rights, and the law of confidence (which includes trade secrets). Both the substantive law, and the underlying policy behind providing exclusive rights for this type of property will be examined.

Interested in what is going on in Syria? Concerned about what may or may not be going on in North Korea? Pondering why troops are still in Afghanistan? Then public international law might be the class for you.

The class explores the relationships between states as among themselves and with international institutions. As well as giving an overall view of the area, we'll also look at specific incidents which have arisen and which have been dominated by international law, and which in turn have made huge contributions to the area.

The syllabus looks at sources including treaties and customary law, statehood, the collective use of force, state responsibility and terrorism, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

This class is evening teaching only.

In Scotland, local government employs around 250,000 people. Every council has its own legal department and nearly 10% of practising solicitors in Scotland are employed by local authorities. It is essential that lawyers in private practice have knowledge of how local government works.

The course will cover a selection of the following topics:

• what local government is and what does it do
• the constitutional position of local government
• the structure of Scottish local government and its statutory framework
• elections to and membership of a local authority
• rights, duties, liabilities and restrictions of councillors
• the councillors’ Code of Conduct and registration of interests
• the powers of local government; the ultra vires rule; community planning; the power of wellbeing; publicity powers
• byelaws, management rules and private Acts of Parliament
• how councils work; the political dimension
• external controls on local government; the courts; the ombudsman, the Standards Commission, the Accounts Commission
• a brief guide to local government finance

This class examines how contemporary authors make sense of gendered experience. We'll investigate cultural practices of writing (and rewriting) gender in the twenty-first century, paying particular attention to the relationships between gender and literary genre, from transgender memoirs to autofictional masculinities, twenty-first-century romance novels, and the queer graphic novel. We'll also investigate the impact of feminist political activism on the publishing industry, from the indie press to the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The class will introduce you to key theories of gender and equip you with strategies for reading literature through the lens of feminist theory. Over the course of the semester, you'll encounter some of our most exciting contemporary writers and deepen your understanding of literary gender politics in the present day.

This class introduces you to twenty-first-century science fiction from across the globe. Contemporary science fiction creates alternative technological bodies and worlds, allowing us to address questions around what it means to be human, what our relationship is to technology and how we might build worlds that are less destructive. With these major themes in mind, this class will focus on four key critical lenses:

• race
• colonialism
• disability
• sexuality and gender

Questions to be explored include:

• how are worlds reconfigured through queer sexualities and genders
• what futures are brought into being for previously marginalised peoples
• what is science fiction’s relation to the past
• how does contemporary science fiction challenge tropes of colonialism
• what bodies emerge in these future worlds and why?

Each week you'll read, watch or listen to a contemporary, global science fiction text exploring how histories, worlds, bodies and relations are represented and reimagined.

Neo-Victorian cultural products have been recognised as a crucial site for the critical rediscovery and reinterpretation of Victorian literature and culture (in particular the themes of class, race, gender and sexuality). Evoking the genres of crime and mystery fiction, themes of science, technology and alternative futures, the figure of the Victorian author and the voices of marginal characters from Mrs Rochester to the ghosts of the séance circle, neo-Victorian writing seeks to understand the continuing impact of the nineteenth century on the present day. This class will consider how and why these texts have problematised Victorian discourses (e.g. imperialism, madness, sexual deviance, technology, the cultural roles of reading and writing). We'll draw on a range of interpretative strategies from post-colonial, feminist, queer, adaptation, appropriation, heritage and film studies.

This class looks at the relation between language and music in songs, treating songs as literature adapted to music. We'll look at the ways in which the forms and meanings of songs can be studied, in ways similar to the study of poetry, but also in ways specific to song. The class considers technical aspects, including technical aspects of music, but you're not expected to have prior knowledge of music. We look at ways in which songs relate to identity and how they produce emotion. We consider the ways in which songs tell stories, or relate to stories.

This class traces the development of the Gothic across the nineteenth century, from its origins in the Romantic period to its heights in works like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The class is organized around key concepts of the Gothic genre, including the sublime, the unseen, textual hybridity, un narrative unreliability.

We'll also look at subgenres like the Female Gothic and Eco-Gothic, examining how the Gothic allows authors to explore cultural anxieties including women’s rights, deviant sexualities, urbanisation, migration, and environmental devastation. Iconic monsters like Frankenstein’s monster, Mr Hyde, and Dracula will thus be situated within their specific cultural milieu, helping us to understand both their origins and their continued popularity.

The concept of 'the wild' is one that emerges in many different ways in the writings of the Renaissance; in relation to self-cultivation (holding back the wildness within), the control of one's world (taming the ever-present wilderness); and in relations with fellow humans in a changing world (in savage domination). These ideas get played out in numerous ways in the period - from poetic use of the symbolic resonance of gardens and gardening; the religious underpinnings of the 'missionary endeavour' in the New World and what that says about the concept of human nature; to the anxious self-examination of humanity's inevitable sinfulness.

This class will thus introduce you to key canonical texts from the period – plays, poetry, and court masques – by writers including Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton, and will also engage with a critical and theoretical debates about the relationships between humans and the natural world from the new fields of animal studies and ecocriticism.