The Scottish Universities'
International Summer School

Text and Context Course

  1. Modernism
    British and Irish literature 1900-1950
    8th-20th July 2013
  2. Scottish Literature
    Scottish literature 1900-present
    22nd July-3rd August 2013
  3. Contemporary Literature
    British and Irish literature 1960-present
    5th-17th August 2013

To find out more about the content of these courses, please check out our reading list and the tentative lecture programme for 2013.

View the 2012 programme here.
Patricia Waugh gives a lecture on Postmodernism
Patricia Waugh gives a lecture on Postmodernism

 

PLEASE NOTE: we are still accepting applications for the Text and Context course!

To download the 2013 Application Form for the Text and Context course, please click here.

Our programme provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary course covering the period 1900 to the Present that examines literature in Britain and Ireland in the context of the major changes and developments in British society and culture during the twentieth and twenty-first century. The dynamic and varied character of more than a century of British and Irish literature is examined via Scottish, English, and Irish texts, alongside theoretical developments in aesthetic, gender, literary, and postcolonial studies. Guest speakers who have established scholarly reputations give daily lectures on the texts, authors, and critical contexts.

Teaching

The course consists of a carefully planned programme of lectures and seminars. Speakers in the past have included such distinguished figures as David Daiches, Cairns Craig, Arthur Marwick, Toril Moi, Christopher Harvie, Catherine Belsey, Randall Stevenson, Angela Smith and Brian McHale. Recent lecturers have included Elaine Showalter (distinguished feminist scholar), the Laura Marcus (renouned Modernist critic), Lawrence Rainey (preeminent T.S. Eliot scholar). Martin Stannard (biographer of Muriel Spark). Terry Eagleton (one of the most influential critics at work in Britain today), and Patricia Waugh (one of the leading experts in post-modernist literary theory).

Terry Eagleton chats to SUISS students
Terry Eagleton chats to SUISS students

In addition to the lecture, students are encouraged to approach the lecturers to discuss the course material and ideas for their own work.

The central component of the School's teaching programme is the seminar, where students discuss literary and critical texts with their assigned tutor. Students attend a 2-hour seminar and explore the literature through group discussion. Seminars are led by SUISS tutors who not only have postgraduate expertise in the field, but also have university teaching experience.

The SUISS programme provides a total of 42 hours of lectures and 56 hours of seminar time. If needed, additional consultancy periods with tutors can be arranged. Because SUISS offers an intensive programme, students are encouraged to have completed the reading material prior to the beginning of the course.

International Symposium

Postgraduate students who would like to give a short paper on aspects of their own research should inform the Directors prior to their arrival in Edinburgh. Please email: suissdir@ed.ac.uk.

For sample presentations, please click here to see presentations from SUISS 2009 students.

SUISS Scholars Around the World

In 2010, Edinburgh University Press has published The Correspondence Between Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean: An Annotated Edition by Susan Wilson from Canada, who was a student at SUISS in 2005.