English BA Honours

Course content

What will you study on the BA English degree?

You will develop an understanding of English as a global language and of the broad range of work in English by exploring linguistic, literary and creative approaches. You will engage with key concepts, theoretical approaches and practices in English by focusing on media, popular and professional texts alongside core literary and creative ones. You will study how language and communication work in different situations and will interrogate the role of literariness in the world of communication.

You will take four modules a year (if studied full time) over three years. Each module is designed to be flexible, allowing you to bring your own interests to the assignments and develop key skills and knowledge that will benefit not only your final independent project but also your ambitions and career goals beyond this course.

What skills will you gain?

You will learn how to write in different forms and for different purposes and to give a range of types of presentations. You will gain competence in penetrating communication, and the ability to engage in close reading and rapid analysis. You will develop the ability to draw creatively on your specialist knowledge and skills in English to work in diverse environments such as education, publishing, media and marketing. You will develop distinctive creative, investigative, theoretical and critical skills.

Modules

This module introduces key topics and methods for work in English. It develops your ability to reflect on your own practice and personal development within and beyond this programme, and on your career plans. You also develop your ability to produce, interpret and evaluate texts in a range of media and genres, your understanding of methods and approaches used to explore texts and practices, and your understanding of the cultural and other contexts in which texts are produced and circulated.

This module will familiarise you with key terminology and concepts used in describing and investigating language variation. It explores how English varies between regions, different groups and individuals and how to recognise and describe phonological and grammatical variation in examples of language in use. You will use terms and concepts studied during the module in developing your own investigations of local and international varieties of English.

This module explores different ways in which we make sense of the world and communicate with others through creative or professional writing. On this module, you will develop your reading and writing skills through exploration of a wide range of literary or journalistic forms and through writing practice in these forms. It introduces you to the importance and practice of reflective evaluation of your own and other’s creative work through self and peer review.

This module introduces you to the interpretation of literature and helps you to develop a capacity to enjoy, understand, and individually analyse the variant and complex meanings of literary texts. It develops skills for personal critical analysis of prose, poetry and drama, and the knowledge of what a textual reading of each of the different forms requires. The module examines one chosen sub-genre to explore how the format expands in relation to readers’ expectations and social anxieties, helping you to develop an understanding of how cultural contexts affect the interpretation of literature.

In this module, you will develop your understanding of the role of research and practice in English and connect this to professional contexts. You will create texts using particular techniques and critically appraise them for literary, creative and academic purposes. You will also develop your practical and collaborative research skills, reflect on this development in relation to professional plans, and prepare for independent work in your final year.

This module explores how human language is acquired and how this differs from communication by other species. It introduces a range of methods used to explore this question and key theoretical approaches. You will explore work on the stages involved in language acquisition, and on how language and language acquisition interact with other aspects of cognition, with other kinds of communicative and non-communicative behaviour, and with environmental factors.

This module helps you to understand the dynamic relationship between language and identities. You will explore how language shapes and is shaped by aspects of social identity, such as gender, sexuality, age, social class, culture, ethnicity, and institutional identities and roles. The module will enable you to research identities in spoken, written, and electronic texts, applying key notions from interactional and critical approaches to linguistics.

This module will help you to understand the particular demands, constraints and potentials of the short film form. It will help you to understand the significance of story structure, visual storytelling and characterisation in conveying meaning and affect and how screenplays are written on the page. You will conceive, research and develop a short screen story, write and rewrite a short dramatic script, taking account of and evaluating feedback, including peer group feedback, and evaluate the completed work critically and analytically, formatting your screenplay to industry standards.

In this module you will develop your fiction-writing skills in the context of the distinctive aesthetics of the short story, with group study of seminal texts in the history of the modern short story forming a context for work-shopped exercises. You will explore such techniques of fiction as voice, setting and atmosphere, narrative tension, character and dialogue, as foregrounded by the short form, and will also learn about the distinctive publishing environment for short fiction.

This module explores the literary modes of realism, the anti-real and the fantastic in contemporary literature, to help you analyse what the different literary tropes and forms can encompass and critique. It considers how social criticism, philosophic exploration, representations of the literary real and fabulation of alternative others have excited writers’ imaginations. You will continue the development of your critical expertise through critical readings and comparative analysis of mimesis, surrealism and magical realism to develop an appreciation of their diverse impacts and confrontations.

In this module you will design and carry out an independent project, which can take the form of an investigative project and report; a critical and theoretical discussion; or a creative project with reflection. Workshops will help you to develop a proposal and you will then work independently with advice from supervisors to complete your project.

This module explores issues around the teaching of varieties of English in first and second language contexts. You will consider pedagogical, practical and policy issues, explore theories of language teaching and learning, and develop aspects of your own teaching philosophy which you will put into practice in preparing lesson plans and delivering parts of lessons to other students.

This module helps you to develop an understanding of contemporary multimodal communication. Focusing on media texts, you will explore the relationships between verbal and nonverbal modes and between different genres and different media. You will explore the variety of social and cultural forms and contexts of textual production, interpretation and communication. You will develop skills in textual analysis focusing on the roles of language, structure, form and reader in communication and interpretation. You will also explore the concept of mediation and a number of theories of media communication.

In this module, you will develop your understanding of how close reading of nonfiction, including forms such as travel and history writing, biography and memoir, can help you to develop your own creative writing abilities within these genres. It explores the nature of the self, its presentation in text, and the depiction of other lives, helping you to adopt different narrative structures and styles in your own work. It explores the notion of place and voice in nonfiction writing and helps you to understand how research informs writing while developing an understanding of styles found within the various forms and your own practice.

This module explores the tropes and subjects of popular fiction, including such genres as romance, historical fiction, horror, crime, fantasy, and science fiction. It explores the contextualisation of new creative work within the market and traditions of popular genres, the development of sub genres, features of genre plots, the marketing of genres and the emergence of genre marketing code, the generation of "reading protocols" for genres, the emergence of reading "communities", as well as self-conscious "writer communities". You will develop understanding of characteristics and requirements of a range of genres to inform your own creative writing practice.

This module examines representations of identity in relation to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, while exploring global literature written in English. It considers issues of identity, in relation ideas about gender and sexuality through literary gender theory. You will engage with a variety of literary texts, analysing representations of femininity, masculinity, and how gender impacts on other aspects of identity such as race and sexuality. It also considers the impact of globalisation on literature in English, examining how contemporary novels challenge binary categories of national states and identities and how they represent the transnational movement of characters experiencing hybridity and multi-rootedness.

This module helps you to develop your skills and practices at an appropriate professional level in the workplace, in industries relevant to the rest of your work on the programme. It enables you to locate and reflect on your academic learning in the day-to-day operation of industries and institutions and to prepare for carrying forward the outcomes of your studies into professional life.

You can find more information about this course in the programme specification. Optional modules are usually available at levels 5 and 6, although optional modules are not offered on every course. Where optional modules are available, you will be asked to make your choice during the previous academic year. If we have insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, or there are staffing changes which affect the teaching, it may not be offered. If an optional module will not run, we will advise you after the module selection period when numbers are confirmed, or at the earliest time that the programme team make the decision not to run the module, and help you choose an alternative module.