Innervate: 2013-14 Archive

Dissertation Titles (and link)

Student

English Dissertation

English Dissertation

Viking Studies Dissertation

Dissertation

Samuel Roach
BA (Hons) Viking Studies

Project-Based Dissertation

The Child Audience: Analysing the process and performance of Roundabout's production of Rapunzel

Eve Wersocki-Morris
BA (Hons) English

Creative Writing Dissertation

Module and Essay Titles (and link)

Student

Ask several children (at least 3) of different ages to define a set of words. Include both concrete and abstract words, and include the word ‘word’ in your set. Also ask the children ‘what is your favourite word?’, ‘your least favourite word’; ‘what would happen if we started calling a dog a cat?’ Ask an adult the same questions, and use their results as a ‘control’. Do you see a developmental progression in the children’s ability to define words? Discuss
the development of the metalinguistic skill of defining words, and how it relates to the development of adult-like meanings. Discuss how children progress from seeing words as ‘iconic’ to ‘arbitrary’.

Is originality crucial to creativity or is all creation in some sense recreation?

Patterns, functions, and descriptions of English: Mid-term exercise.

‘Is this for me?’ A critical multimodal discourse analysis of online direct-to-consumer advertising (eDTCA) in the promotion of prescription-only pharmaceuticals for the treatment of bipolar disorder.

Do bilingual children have an advantage in the development of literacy skills over monolingual children?

A Close Reading Analysis of Gower’s Tale of Tereus, Confessio Amantis, V, ll. 5655-570

Examine the value of place-names as evidence for the history, landscape and language(s) of your chosen area.

Examine the vocabulary for the mind and emotions and the way in which they function.

Women: Mischief and ‘Materiality’ in Laxdæla Saga and Njáls Saga

Discuss the importance of ‘Buildings’ in the dream-visions you have read on this module.

“Now you want to be an artist, so you’ve got to use the artist’s faculty of making the sub-conscious conscious” - Explore Lawrence’s attempts to make the subconscious conscious.

To what extent do modern urban fictions illustrate, or qualify, Ben Highmore’s contention that it is ‘the mingling of imaginings and experience that constitute the urban?

In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak suggests that a British colonial view of the relationship between colonizer and colonized might be summarized in the sentence ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’. How far does this sentence reflect the representations of British dealings with India in the texts you have studied? Is there an alternative sentence that might, in your view, provide a more accurate account of these texts.

It is commonly accepted that one of the characteristics of Post-modernism is to highlight the ways in which language conceals truth. Without necessarily limiting yourself to the post-1969 novels on the reading list, consider how any one novel that you have studied deals with the idea of ‘concealing truth’.

Writing on the English novel since 1950, Steven Connor sets out to view it “not just as passively marked with the imprint of history, but also as one of the ways in which history is made and remade.” With reference to Black Dogs by Ian McEwan, Troubles by J. G. Farrell and What a Carve Up! by Jonathon Coe, what evidence can you find to support Connor’s view?

The Aftermath of Famine: Food and Identity in Ulysses.

Egotism and Immorality: The reception of the Romantic confessional.

The research of Angela Kingston (in Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction (2009)) suggests that one reason for Wilde's enduring popularity may be that both his life and works provided rich materials for other writers. Write an essay exploring an aspect of Wilde's influence; you may focus your answer on the inspiration he has provided for just one work by another author.

How does Blake's use of space affect self-annihilation in 'Milton'?

How are the connections between social change and sexuality explored in texts studied on the module?

Orchestrating the ‘many-tongued chorus’: Using music to analyse polyphony in Fred D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory and Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River.

The Artifice of Women in Evelina and ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room'.

Amy Cook
BA (Hons) English

According to Jiří Veltruský, ‘All that is on stage is a sign’. Using appropriate semiotic terms and critical support, discuss this assertion, making reference to elements of performance you have been involved in or observed.

What does W.B. Yeats mean when he talks about a ‘National Theatre’? Compare his ideas with at least one other play by another writer.

‘Then what a rough and riotous charge have you/to lead those that the Devil cannot rule’. If according to the Oxford English Dictionary to run riot is ‘to act without restraint or control’, can riots ever be led by a particular person or small group? Discuss at least two performances of ‘rough and riotous’ behaviour, either onstage or off, in constructing your answer.

Reflective portfolio consisting of four critical reflections on four of the individual sessions with practitioners and one extended critical reflection on a specific theme.

This student's work consists of:

• An evaluation of the inherent challenges for audience, promoter and company in rural touring.
• The work of Geese Theatre Company and Augusto Boal
• The University of Nottingham's 'Haunting' of Lakeside Arts Centre and its Marketing
• 2Magpies and 'site-responsive' theatre
• Nick Wood's A Girl With a Book and the ideas of Howard Barker

Reflective portfolio consisting of four critical reflections on four of the individual sessions with practitioners and one extended critical reflection on a specific theme.

This student's work consists of:

• Serenade by 2Magpies Theatre and Richard Schechner's 'Approaches' to Performance
• How does Lakeside Arts Centre respond to not existing within an 'entertainment district'?
• Theatre as Social Action: Andrew Breakwell and Augusto Boal
• Bridging the Gap between Amateur and Professional Theatre-making: The Nottingham Playhouse Young Company
• Social Contracts: New Perspectives and Rural Touring

Marvin Carlson notes that ‘physical locations, like individual human beings, can by the operations of fame be so deeply implanted in the consciousness of a culture that individuals in that culture, actually encountering them for the first time, inevitably find that experience already haunted by the cultural construction of these persons and places.’
Examine the influence of celebrity and site of performance upon at least two West End productions, in response to this quotation.

An exploration of the tension between illusion and reality in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, utilising speech act theory and conversational implicature to examine its manifestation in the conflict between ‘Blanche Dubois’ and ‘Stanley Kowalski'.

‘He had a Horse Called Bill’ (Yellow Sky): The Appropriation of Shakespeare in the Western.