Strange Journeys
Leader
Ms Estella Gutulan (seminars by a range of teachers as indicated)
Cohort
TBC
Department
English
Timing
TBC
Course Overview
If you enjoy following concepts beyond the limits of a single text, subject or topic -and evaluating them from different perspectives- then this course is for you!
Our seminars are centred around questions to which there are as many possible answers as there are people in the room: how does the way in which we think about a figure, a place or a story change across time? What happens when places, stories, images or experiences are translated, adapted or reinterpreted?
You will be taken on literal and metaphorical journeys through a range of lively and challenging material, making connections across creative forms, artistic movements and historical periods. This course will sharpen your critical thinking and expand your cultural understanding: by the end, you should feel more confident pursuing complex questions independently, beyond exam-style thinking constrained to single subjects.
Key Benefits
- Encounter new ideas, concepts and questions beyond the taught curriculum by taking English into other subject areas.
- Become intellectually adventurous by following ideas beyond accepted or obvious answers in a supportive setting.
- Prepare for further study though developing critical vocabulary and intellectual flexibility valued at university.
- Gain confidence in reading closely but also within cultural and global contexts, through conceptual thinking, seminar participation and evaluating a range of perspectives.
Course Structure
- Earthrise: The Journey That Brought Humanity Home (Ms Estella Gutulan)
What changed when human beings travelled far enough from Earth to see it whole?
Beginning with the launch of Sputnik and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s response to humanity’s apparent desire to escape the Earth, this seminar explores the cultural consequences of space travel. The focus will be on the impact of the Apollo 8 Earthrise photograph on humanity’s understanding of its place in the universe, especially through the “overview effect” reported by astronauts seeing Earth from space.
We’ll examine how a scientific and technological journey produced an unexpected philosophical return: a new awareness of the Earth’s beauty, fragility and the unexpected reality of political borders. We’ll be considering considers photography, environmental consciousness, human identity and the power of changes in perspective.
The literary anchor for this seminar will be Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize success Orbital, a novel that spans the space realism, space pastoral and climate fiction genres.
- Travelling with Ovid, Homer and the Afterlives of Ancient Texts (with Miss Millie Purton)
How do foundational stories survive for thousands of years, and why do later writers continue to return to them?
Beginning with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Homer’s Odyssey, this seminar traces the journeys of ancient texts through Shakespeare, James Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith and contemporary poetry. We’ll consider how adaptation, translation and changes of genre allow writers to preserve, challenge or radically transform the authority of their sources. You will be introduced to the concept of intertextuality while asking who is permitted to retell inherited stories and whose perspectives are recovered by later versions.
Our session’s central premise is that ancient texts are not static monuments but living resources that are continually “taken up, challenged and reinvented over time”.
- From Eve to Ophelia: The Journey of the Doomed Female (with Ms Courtney Pettipas-Ayliffe)
Why has Western culture so often represented female suffering as beautiful, meaningful or deserved?
Beginning with Eve as the archetypal female transgressor, this seminar traces a cultural journey through scripture, epic poetry, Shakespeare, Victorian art, contemporary poetry and popular music. It culminates with the figure of Ophelia, whose madness and death have repeatedly been turned into objects of aesthetic fascination across different time periods and in very different ways.
You will be introduced to critical concepts such as the male gaze, the femme fragile, madness as social diagnosis and cultural recuperation, to ask whether contemporary retellings challenge this tradition of representing female suffering - or continue to reproduce it.
- The Journey of Language: Language Under Siege (with Miss Josie Cox)
Who owns a language, and who decides what counts as “correct” English?
This seminar traces the history, politics and power of English from the Norman Conquest to the present. Students examine how French became the language of law, government and status after 1066, while English was pushed into domestic and informal life. They then consider how English later became an instrument of colonial authority in Ireland and across the British Empire.
Brian Friel’s play Translations provides a literary case study in the anglicisation of Irish place names and the relationship between naming, memory and possession. You will learn about diglossia, linguistic purism, prescriptivism, descriptivism and the contemporary Anglish movement. You will be invited to recognise how apparently neutral judgements about grammar and vocabulary can encode assumptions about class, intelligence, identity and belonging.
- Dismantling Orientalism Part I: How the Far East became a Western story (with Ms Estella Gutulan)
What happens when one culture represents another without allowing it to speak for itself?
Through the critical and philosophical lens of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, this seminar examines how the “East” has been imagined, simplified and aestheticised in Western literature and art. Students consider how repeated images of exoticism, sensuality, danger and timelessness created an imaginary Orient against which the Western world defines itself, to this day, as more modern and rational.
Through a range of extracts and artefacts, we’ll learn to distinguish between cultural encounter and cultural possession, and how later writers and artists challenge inherited representations, reclaimed narrative authority and exposed concealed systems of power.
6.Dismantling Orientalism Part 2: The Journey of a Poem - The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter (with Ms Estella Gutulan)
Can a poem be read in the same way – or even have a single author- when it has travelled between languages, periods and cultures?
This seminar follows the unusual textual journey behind Ezra Pound’s modernist poem The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, from an ancient Chinese poem by Li Bai, through Ernest Fenollosa’s notes on a Japanese translation, to Pound’s influential modernist version in English. We’ll explore each stage of this journey and consider the uncertain boundaries between creation, interpretation and translation.
Through its journey across time and space, this poem has become a case study in cultural transmission, authorship, appropriation and the international roots of literary Modernism.
- Venice: A City, a Symbol, a Mirror (with Mr George Bilclough)
Does Venice still exist essentially continue to exist as city, or has it become an idea?
Using writing by Italo Calvino, Tiziano Scarpa, Jan Morris, Thomas Mann, William Shakespeare and John Ruskin, alongside visual representations of Venice, we’ll explore how one city has been repeatedly reinvented as a symbol of beauty, decay, illusion, performance and vulnerability.
The seminar moves from the physical and sensory experience of Venice to its larger cultural meanings. You are invited to see Venice as a microcosm, a liminal space between land and water, East and West, past and present, and a city through which writers tell stories about civilisation itself.