Who we are and what we do is all tangled up in our identity. This subject considers how identities are constructed and maintained through mediated processes of self and other. The subject investigates the myriad demands and devices that figure in constructing our senses of self and other (including language, leisure, beliefs and embodied practices). By exploring identity in diverse contexts, across time and place, the subject maps varying conceptions of self and other and how these conceptions are constructed and maintained. A key focus is on how these mediated conceptions of self and other are translated into material practices of inclusion, exclusion, discrimination, violence and criminalisation.

Language plays a central role in the central disciplinary areas in the humanities and social sciences. This subject gives students tools for thinking about language in a range of disciplines, including linguistics, history, sociology, politics, literary studies, anthropology, language studies, psychology and psychoanalytic theory. It shows how language can be analysed as a system, but also how language features centrally in politcal and social contexts: for example, in the processing of the claims of asylum seekers, in developing views of ethnicity, race and nation, and in colonialism; and in the construction of gendered and sexual identity. The role of language in the psyche, and the process of acquisition of languages in children and in adults, are also important topics. Knowing how to think about language, and familiarity with the main thinkers who have discussed language in a range of humanities and social science disciplines, provide an indispensable basis for study in any area of the Arts degree.

The idea of power is a way to grasp the character of social relations. Investigating power can tell us about who is in control and who may benefit from such arrangements. Power can be a zero-sum game of domination. It can also be about people acting together to enact freedom. This subject examines the diverse and subtle ways power may be exercised. It considers how power operates in different domains such as markets, political systems and other social contexts. It also examines how power may be moderated by such things as regulation and human rights. A key aim is to explore how differing perspectives portray power relations and how issues of power distribution may be characterised and addressed.

Reason, many believe, is what makes us human. Until recently, most scientists and philosophers agreed that the ability to use the mind to analyse and interpret the world is something intrinsic to the nature of our species. Reason has a long and extraordinary history. We will explore a number of inter-related themes: the nature of reason from Ancient Greece to our contemporary world; the ever shifting relationship between reason and faith; reason's place in the development of scientific experimentation and thinking; shifting perspectives about the uses of Reason and, finally, how reason relates to theories of the mind, exploring the tensions between reason, the passions and the will.

Reason will take you on a journey from Plato's cave to the neuro-scientists' lab. We will visit revolutions in science, thinking and politics. We will explore the impact of some of the great philosophers of history, including Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Bentham, Coleridge, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault and many more besides. By the end of this subject you will have a deep understanding of the importance of the idea of reason to human history and philosophy. You might, even, be able to answer the question: 'does reason exist?'

Reason is an Arts Foundation Subject and we will argue that understanding the history and philosophy of reason provides great insights into many aspects of the humanities from political philosophy to understanding history. We will, of course, be paying particular attention to the foundational skills that will help you successfully complete your Arts major: particularly critical thinking and argument development.

This subject will provide students with an introduction to the complexity, challenges and richness of Australian Indigenous life and cultures. Drawing on a wide range of diverse and dynamic guest lecturers, this subject gives students an opportunity to encounter Australian Indigenous knowledges, histories and experiences through interdisciplinary perspectives. Across three thematic blocks - Indigenous Knowledges, Social and Political Contexts and Representation/Self-Representation - this subject engages contemporary cultural and intellectual debate. Social and political contexts will be considered through engagement with specific issues and a focus on Indigenous cultural forms, which may include literature, music, fine arts, museum exhibitions and performance, will allow students to consider self-representation as a means by which to disrupt and expand perceptions of Aboriginality.

Humans grapple with representations of themselves and their contexts. They also like to imagine other possible worlds. We use words, language, images, sounds and movement to construct narratives and stories, large and small, about the trivial and the profound, the past and the future. These representations can help us to understand worlds but they can also create worlds for us. This subject explores how different genres such as speech, writing, translation, film, theatre and art generate representations of social life, imagination and the human condition. A key aim of the subject is to develop a critical appreciation of how language, images and embodied gestures are used to construct empowering and disempowering discourses.

This subject explores the thematic and formal innovations of modern and contemporary literature in English. Beginning with Anglophone modernism, it introduces students to key texts from the twentieth and twenty-first century across a number of genres: poetry, drama, the novel, the short story, memoir. Modern writers struggle with representation, aesthetics and experience in an era of rapid social change. They think about cultural identity and cultural value, social norms and expectations, freedom and the law; and they work through the question of what it means to be modern in relation both to events in the past and the promises of the future. Students will be encouraged to read these texts closely and situate them in relation to their cultural, political and historical contexts. The subject will also introduce students to influential developments in literary criticism and critical theory.

Between the early modern period and the end of the nineteenth century, literature and performance developed in a dynamic, innovative relationship. The inventiveness of Renaissance drama went hand in hand with an explosion in print culture. Later periods saw the emergence of the novel and radical changes in poetic and theatrical form as writers and performers participated in far-reaching social, political and technological transformations. Drawing on printed texts, archival materials and performance documentation, this subject introduces students to the range of critical skills required for the study of literature and theatre: close reading and an understanding of literary form; the analysis of narrative, theme and character; the interpretation of performance. It does so with reference to some of the most significant global developments of the period: colonialism, revolution, and changing conceptions of the self. The result is a significant insight into how and why literature and performance in English look and sound the way they do today.

In this subject, students learn how colonisation, decolonisation and large-scale migration have shaped literary traditions from the late nineteenth century to the present, including the canon of English Literature, and how writers from different parts of world have responded to the challenges wrought by globalisation and new forms of imperialism. They also learn why some works become global in terms of their readerships and their circulation and why others remain tied to nations and/or regions, and what is gained and lost when literary works go out into the wider world, or are read in translation.

This subject examines decadence as a textual, historical, sexual and cultural formation, across a range of literary texts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. A predominantly masculine mode of radical aestheticism, manifesting symptoms of cultural crisis and informed by anxieties about class, gender and sexuality, decadence elaborated such key figures of modernity as the dandy, femme fatale, fetishist and aesthete. Students will be introduced to European and British varieties of literary decadence and aestheticism; art for art's sake theories of aesthetic production; relations between lifestyle, aestheticism and commodity culture; and emergent discourses of degeneration and sexology. The subject asks students to consider how decadent aestheticism was shaped by regulatory categories of taste and vulgarity, and by cultural practices of tastemaking, lifestyling and the aestheticisation of sexuality. Students will also consider the relationship between sexual dissidence and social and cultural distinction as produced in the representative examples of decadent literature studied.

This subject is a study of performance in its many modalities around the world. It brings together the areas of theatrical performance in traditional theatre venues, avant-garde and experimental performance in non-traditional spaces, dance both traditional and contemporary, and a range of comparative cultural performances that may include global activism and protest, sporting events, festivals and spectacles. Students will examine the impact of globalisation on performance practice and the effects of digital access to performances from around the world. They will also consider the role of the audience and spectatorship in performance reception and interpretation and develop an understanding of how meaning is negotiated and contested. Examples will be drawn from published texts, audio-visual material, and, where appropriate, live performance events.

This subject studies Aboriginal fiction, poetry and drama, as well as life stories and criticism, focusing on questions of reading positions (particularly for non-Aboriginal students) and representation. It pays particular attention to the diversity of Aboriginal writing in terms of form, content, voice and place and examines the manner in which the reception of Aboriginal texts has been conditioned by political and economic factors. On completion of this subject students should understand the problematics of Aboriginal writing in the context of postcolonial Australia, and its relation to everyday life.

This subject takes popular fiction as a specific field of cultural production. Students will analyse various definitive features of that field: popular fiction's relations to "literature", genre and identity, gender and sexuality, the role of the author profile, cinematic and TV adaptations, readerships and fan interests, and processing venues. The subject is built around a number of genres: sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, pornography, the thriller, and fan fiction. On completion of the subject students should be familiar with some important genres of popular fiction, and some representative examples of each genre and have a developed sense of the role of popular fiction in the broader field of cultural production.

This subject offers an introduction to the contexts, form, and enduring cultural power of Gothic fiction in modernity. It examines the formal conventions of Gothic Fictions in relation to the social, cultural and political contexts in which it first appeared in the late 18th century, while also mapping the ways in which the genre is reworked in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The subject connects changing historical structures of patriarchal and paternal authority to the aesthetics of horror and terror; investigates links between modern notions of individuality and conceptions of monstrosity; and explores the power of literary fiction to evoke virtual worlds more expansive than the everyday.

This subject develops two main threads. It introduces students to one of the main genres of medieval literature, the romance, with a special focus on the representation of love, sex, and desire in the Middle Ages, and especially the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Malory and the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It also examines the phenomenon of ‘romancing’ medieval culture in the various traditions and genres of modern medievalism; especially in medievalist fiction and film (both historical and fantasy). Some of the medieval texts will be read in Middle English; others in modern translation. No prior experience in medieval literature is assumed.

The Humanities have always been interested in Nature and the non-human or ‘other’, and this has gathered momentum with our increasing awareness of the planet’s vulnerability and our responsibility for averting environmental disaster. The term ‘ecocriticism’ was applied in the mid-1990s to the study of literature and the environment; since then, ecological approaches to critique have rapidly expanded into other areas, encompassing ‘dark ecology’, ‘ecological materialism’, ecofeminist and queer ecological perspectives. This subject covers Romantic conceptions of Nature, evolution, science and species, the ‘wilderness’, human-animal relations, new environmentalisms, utopias, Indigeneity, and narratives about extinction, apocalypse and the posthuman.

For a small country, Ireland has a remarkable literary tradition. Students will examine some of the most distinguished and innovative Irish literature in English since the eighteenth century. They will attend to how literary texts respond to key social, political, and historical issues: including the Act of Union and the struggle for independence, colonialism and postcolonialism, gender, class and religious relations, the cultural revival and counter-revival, and the Irish ‘Troubles’, the Catholic Church. Authors may include Jonathan Swift, Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill (Evelyn O’Connell), Maria Edgeworth, James Clarence Mangan, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney and others. While Irish, these writers are also responsive to British and European political and intellectual developments. This subject will bring together the national and international dimensions of their work, asking what it means to conceptualise and debate a national literature. The subject examines a range of genres, including fiction, autobiography, drama, poetry and the essay. It will produce an understanding of the Irish literary tradition in an international context and develop capacity to reflect on the relationship between literature, politics and culture.

Global theatre history represents a rich source of ideas about performance, cultural difference and historical change. This subject aims to engage with the material culture of theatre history by examining theatre objects that produce the effects of illusion and dramatic excitement. With a focus on trans-historical and transcultural exchange, key examples might include Greek masks and costumes, Renaissance stage machinery, Japanese theatre, Indonesian shadow puppetry, or indigenous body markings. It will require students to engage in original research with cultural collections, theatre companies and online materials while developing a critical narrative about what constitutes a global theatre history.

This subject will proceed through close examinations of a series of debates that continue to influence literary studies today. The debates have been chosen for both their centrality and their diversity, for their historical force as for their abiding contemporary significance, for their dense particularities as for their global import. The situations, conditions, agents, arguments, concepts and consequences of the debates will be examined in detail. Key figures examined may include Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancire, among others. The particular case-studies will also serve to illuminate such general headings as Literature and Science, Literature and History, Literature and Politics, Literature and Philosophy, Literature and Society, Literature and Sexuality, Literature and Postcolonialism etc.