And what about Ireland? Would you take a seminar in Irish literature in the English Department (ala US)?
In the UK Universities and whatnot do have English departments. I’m curious as to why you think they wouldn’t?
Yes for the UK, though sometimes they are termed English Literature departments.
Does the OP mean “under which department do courses such as ‘Irish literature’ and ‘American literature’ fall”?
Here’s the webpage for the English department at Oxford:
Click on “current students and staff” and in the menu that appears click on “lecture list”. A pdf file will appear that gives a list of all current courses. It looks pretty much like a list of English courses at an American university, with just a little more emphasis on British literature and less on American literature.
American colleges generally feature a lot more modern literature, though. There’s hardly anything listed there from the 20th Century.
That’s probably more an Oxford thing than a British thing. Oxford has a huge tendancy to be very traditional. In contrast, click on the course content tab on this link to see the courses for Sheffield University - there’s a much bigger range available:
The content of undergraduate courses very much reflects the research interests of the staff of that department. Salford have one which gives a very different picture, for instance. Prospective students (should) look closely not only at the institution they’re applying, but the details of the course content and of the staff.
Edit: dammit, beaten to it, need more coffee.
If it was Irish Literature, then it would probably be in the Irish language. It’s English Literature because its in the English Language, not the British Language.
It’s true that places such as the University of Ulster differentiate between Irish Literature and Irish Studies, the latter encompasing Irish literature in the English language, but Glasgow’s Department of Scottish Literature don’t fit with your theory.
There are plenty of very well know Irish writers who wrote in English, though - AFAIK, many more than there are who wrote in Irish Gaelic (though that may be a function of the fact that I can’t read anything written in Gaelic) - Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Beckett, Joyce, etc.
I would assume that “Irish Literature” as a course or series of courses would be taught by the foreign languages department.
I’ve just checked UCAS, and it would appear there’s no course at any British university solely devoted to ‘Irish Literature’.
To confuse things further, the Irish Language & Literature element of joint honours courses at Aberystwyth are taught by the Department of Welsh…
Not so. Perhaps the definitions used don’t conform to what you see as logical but there certainly is a body of work referred to as Irish literature written in English.
For the record I checked University College Cork’s website and Irish Literature in the English language is under the purview of the English department and not the Irish department. I would expect that other Irish universities would use a similar model.
When Americans refer to a university “course” we mean a particular class or lecture that’s only one part of a degree program/major.
Ahh. ‘Course’ here means the entire undergraduate degree programme. What you’re describing could be a module, course element, option, all sorts of things. Every university has differences, both in their internal structure (‘school’, ‘department’ and ‘faculty’ are all fairly fluid terms), and with course structure and nomenclature (I got a MusB, rather than a BMus, for no apparent reason other than accident of history).
To further muddy the waters, “course” = a class, but “course of study” = a major (ie. degree programme).
Yeah, I was using the American usage; I attended prep and secondary school in Britain, but not university.
There’s another difference between the US and the UK. In the US a “prep school” refers to a selective secondary school that’s focused on sending all of it’s students on to a four-year college/university.
You do have American lit classes, though, right? I have an English Education degree, and while a student took both American and British literature classes; we had to do one early and one modern lit class for each. I’ve always assumed you had the same classes across the pond.
At my university (Glasgow) there were not separate departments teaching American and English literature: the English Lit department taught any literature written in (or translated into) English. The exception, mentioned by GorillaMan above was Scottish Literature. That had its own department.
At the lower levels of study, we’d read a mixture of British and American writers, with some foreign lit in translation. I didn’t take English Lit to honours level, but once it gets more advanced students select a number of more specialised papers, which no doubt included, as options, things like “20th Century American Authors”, “The Early Works of Hiram G. Studdebakker III” and so on.
English Language was another separate department, covering phonetics, linguistics and so on. Some of the foreign language departments did courses in the literature of their countries/cultures which were taught in English, so you could study Russian literature (for example) without having to be a Russian language student.
Scots Gaelic was treated in the same way as other foreign languages, since only something like 1% of Scots are meaningfully fluent in Gaelic.
Miss Marcus started studying for an English Studies degree at Nottingham this September. A quick check of their website shows that while they cover the range of literature in English there are two options those that want to look at American literature in more depth, either taking an individual module or two (American Poetry, the American Novel, 20th Century American Women Writers, etc) or do a whole joint honours degree course on English & American Studies, run jointly with the School of American & Canadian Studies.
**rekkah’s **point about Oxford also applies to Cambridge. When she was deciding where to go this time last year, Miss Marcus was put off by the absolute emphasis on the traditional teaching of Literature at Cambridge - as opposed to the wider scope of the Nottingham degree.