ST PETER’S COLLEGE
Tel: 01865 278900
Fax: 01865 278855
www.spc.ox.ac.uk
New Inn Hall Street
Oxford
OX1 2DL
13 August 2015
Dear Visiting Student,
Congratulations on being admitted to St Peter’s for the forthcoming academic year –
we are all looking forward to seeing you soon!
I am one of the Tutorial Fellows in English at St Peter’s, and I’m writing with
preliminary information about your studies in English literature. You will now want
to start thinking about which areas of English you would like to concentrate on during
your time at Oxford. As you may know, Oxford students have a lot of freedom to
follow their own interests within a given literary period, and you will have the
opportunity to design your own courses in consultation with your tutor (usually during
an initial meeting at the beginning of each term).
In order to get the most from studying English at Oxford, you might consider aligning
your choices with the periods being studied by the first and second year ‘home’
students. This is so that you can take advantage of the unusually rich programme of
lecture series offered by the English Faculty each term; attendance at lectures is not
compulsory at Oxford, but students often identify one or two particular ‘series’ of
lectures that speak especially to their interests. So, for example, in Michaelmas term,
there will be many lecture series on Victorian literature, Anglo-Saxon and Medieval
Literature, English Language, and Shakespeare (because that is what the home
students are studying in their Michaelmas tutorials). Then in the spring, there will be
lectures on, for example, Modern and Contemporary Literature, on Seventeenth and
Eighteenth-Century Literature, and on Romanticism.
Unlike the home students, who have wide-ranging final exams on each period, you
don’t have to cover a huge range within each period. So, for example, Visiting
Students I have taught in Modern Literature have devised ‘courses’ on topics within
that broad field such as ‘First World War Writing’. Likewise, if you wished to study
Shakespeare, you and your tutor in that area would have the opportunity to devise a
course that focused on particular aspects of his work rather than following a
conventional syllabus. Because you don’t take the final exam required of the home
students, you are more likely to be taught on your own or with another Visiting
Student than with undergraduates already at St Peter’s, but there are many
opportunities for academic integration through the English Faculty’s lectures and, of
course, Oxford’s vast number of extra seminars, talks, readings, workshops,
discussion groups, theatrical events and so forth, all of which will be open to you.
Formal teaching consists of one or two tutorials each week: each tutorial lasts one
hour, and will usually consist of a discussion of the essay (these are usually 15002000 words in length) you have produced that week, and of the reading you have been
doing that week. You will be taught either on your own or with another student.
In the course of each eight-week term, we expect you to take 12 tutorials. The normal
division is to take 8 tutorials on one topic and 4 on another. We will need to organise
your Michaelmas tuition before you arrive, so you should make decisions now about
what you want to study in your first term. To this end I have attached a form listing
possible options, which you should fill in and return to me by email as soon as you
have decided.
We try to be as flexible as possible for the 8 tutorials (within the constraints of tutor
availability), so if this list does not include a topic or author you particularly want to
study, please let me know, and we will see if we can find a tutor. (Do bear in mind,
though, that at Oxford ‘English’ usually means ‘literature in English’, so we will
usually not be able to find tutors for literature in translation.) It’s also good to think
about how your year as a whole will work out – it should be possible to study
anything on this list in each of the three terms, so you could sketch out the ideal
content of your year ahead, although we only need to know your choices for the first
term just now.
Please feel free to contact me with any queries about studying English at Oxford or
about your choices. It’s quite common to be a bit confused and to need to ask more,
so do get in touch if you need to!
I look forward to hearing from you soon, and to meeting you in October. We will be
in touch nearer the time about us all meeting in Freshers week.
With all best wishes,
Dr Marina MacKay
Associate Professor of English
Tutorial Fellow of St Peter’s College
University of Oxford
marina.mackay@ell.ox.ac.uk
COURSE OPTIONS FOR MICHAELMAS TERM
Student name:
Home Institution:
Email address:
-
Please place course choices in rank order 1-3 in each column. We will try to
provide you with your first choice wherever possible.
The first courses listed are general survey courses. You may specify particular
authors/genres/themes you would wish to study within each period (list these
below under ‘additional comments’), but note that the actual content of each
course will be determined on arrival in Oxford.
Additional comments on your course options:
COURSE SUBJECT
8 TUTORIALS
Anglo-Saxon Literature
Medieval Literature
Literature in English
1660-1760
Literature in English
1760-1830
Romantic Literature/
(1780-1830)
Victorian literature
Literature in English 1910
– the present
Shakespeare
John Milton
Alexander Pope
Jonathan Swift
Jane Austen
The Brontës
Charles Dickens
Virginia Woolf
Modernist Fiction
Modern British Poetry
Literature and War
Literature and Empire
Contemporary British
Novel
4 TUTORIALS