Curricular modules are designed to enhance critical understanding by exploring texts in their historical and cultural context, in their interaction with other literatures, and from a variety of relevant perspectives, including historical scholarship and aesthetics, close textual analysis, and contemporary literary and cultural theories and poetics. Literary texts are studied as works of art, and as configurations of historical and media-specific fields of transformation. Literature is seen as a productive agent in the formation of the cultural knowledge of a society and of the individual self-conceptions of its members.

The programme is designed to prepare and qualify for employment in the cultural professions and the media, academic posts as well as for a broad range of jobs requiring sophisticated competences in the writing of texts, in organisation, and communication. The degree is granted on acceptance of a Master's thesis.

There are interdisciplinary links to the MA programmes of European Literatures and Gender Studies.