BA (Hons) English and Creative Writing

Course detail
We will help you gain an advanced understanding of how web and mobile technologies have shaped patterns of consumption, spurring the evolution of multimedia forms. We will also help you develop work that functions alongside visual, aural, and interactive components. These are critical skills in an increasingly media-saturated world.
Year one modules:
English Literature I: Histories, Forms and Genres
English Literature II: Critical Approaches
Media Communications Theories and Debates
Foundations of Creative Writing
Writing for Radio
Digital Video Production.
Year two modules:
The Canon Reloaded or Literature and Modernity: 1900-1960
Nineteenth Century Literature or British and Irish Drama since 1945
Critical Approaches to New and Social Media
Screenwriting
Creative Writing Workshop
Industry Experience.
Year three modules:
Contemporary Writers and the City or The Postcolonial Novel
Writing for Live Performance
Creative Writing: The Short Story
Crime and Fiction or Shakespeare on the Screen
Dissertation.
Module summaries
Year one
English Literature I: Histories, Forms and Genres
This module takes the form of an introduction to the degree-level study of English Literature by looking at two key literary genres. The first half of the module (Weeks 1-6) focusses on the novel and traces the development of the genre through the close examination of several important examples from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Concentrating on works (or extracts from works) by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Brontë, Herman Melville, James Joyce and Toni Morrison, the lectures and seminars will explore that which is unique about the novel form, and ask why it became the dominant mode of literary expression over the course of these three centuries.
We will pay attention to the specific period contexts of each work, and introduce a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to reading novels. In Weeks 7-11, the sessions examine at a range of poems in English from different historical periods. The focus will be on the ways in which language and form work in poetry and the kinds of readings we can employ in looking at poems. As with the lectures on the novel, we are concerned with how texts produce meaning and how we read those meanings.
English Literature II: Critical Approaches
This module introduces students to a range of critical approaches to understanding literature. It covers formalist, biographical, historicist, gender, psychological, sociological (including Marxist), reader-response, structuralist, postcolonial and deconstructionist models of engagement with literary texts.
Analysing primary texts that include novels, short stories, poetry and drama, Critical Approaches provides students with an interpretive toolbox to examine writing, writers, and our engagement with their works.
Media and Communications: Theories and Debates
This module introduces students to the key theories, concepts and debates about the relationships between media forms, institutions and audiences. Some of the key themes covered in the module include representation, institutions, audiences and effects. Among topics to be addressed are representation in photography and film, semiotics and ideology, gender politics, audiences and audience reception. The media forms studied will be drawn from film, broadcasting, photography, advertising, the internet and the printed press.
Methods and approaches will include content and discourse analysis, textual analysis, and empirical approaches to the mass media. The module will encourage a lively response (through lectures, workshops and seminars) to all types of media, and will facilitate an understanding of the role of media in a rapidly changing society.
Foundations of Creative Writing
This module introduces the practice of creative writing. It will provide an overview that includes the practical challenges confronting the writer, approaches to plot and narrative, consider composition and process, and their contexts context by briefly looking at various forms of creative writing from conventional fiction to creative nonfiction, writing poetry and performing writing.
The key aim of this module is to introduce the aspiring writer to the core elements of successful practice, and through structured exercises to help to embed a positive, and disciplined approach to writing in context in its initial stages.
Writing for Radio
The key aim of this module is that your creative output can be expressed clearly, fluently and in professional format written form, with a view to your successful progression in your radio career.
You will be introduced to cutting edge research in audience engagement, the cognitive processing of audio and learn to apply the theory to your own writing practice. You will develop an authentic, creative radio voice while understanding how to engage listener attention by writing in the style most suited to the audience.
Digital Video Production
This course, designed as a practical foundation, aims to provide you with a working knowledge of established industry conventions, the nature of digital workflows, the basic concepts and fundamental disciplines necessary in production; techniques in pre-production planning; team-building; camera; lighting; sound and editing techniques in order that you are able to understand the basic aspects of the craft critically, and create visually strong and coherent work.
Year two
The Canon Reloaded
This module examines a range of canonical literary texts and their screen renderings, spanning respectful adaptations and radical re-versionings. Following a broadly historical range of source texts, from the oldest surviving long poem in Old English through to 21st century literary fiction, the module also includes a significant temporal span of film and television texts (1949 – 2016).
Nineteenth Century Literature
This module introduces to students to a range of themes explored in nineteenth century literature in English. The module examines a broad range of texts produced in the nineteenth century and examines the development of literature in the period in relation to competing nineteenth century ideologies.
The module examines fiction and poetry and considers a range of critical approaches to the texts. Typically the module will cover 6 authors, selected from a range including Mary Shelley, John Keats, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Maria Edgeworth, Alfred Tennyson, Herman Melville, Sheridan Le Fanu, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Henry James and Oscar Wilde.
Literature and Modernity: 1900-1960
This module investigates shifting conceptions of modernism and modernity in literature written in English between the turn of the twentieth century and 1960. It will feature the detailed study of important exemplars of modernism and its legacy, considered within the larger context of twentieth century art, culture and politics. Some attention will be paid to developments in the nineteenth century and how these paved the way for many of the stylistic and formal experiments of modernist authors.
In addition the module will on a regular basis, via ‘spotlight’ seminars, cover extracts from modernist authors in translation. The core texts covered will differ from year to year but a typical selection would feature at least 5 major works from among the oeuvres of the following authors: Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, John Dos Passos, Djuna Barnes and Samuel Beckett.
British and Irish Drama since 1945
This module offers an overview of drama in Britain and Ireland in the post-war period. It covers a range of authors and styles including the social realism associated with Osborne, the contrasting domestic dramas of Pinter and Ayckbourn, Beckett’s minimalist theatre, the ludic drama of Stoppard and such political and gender centred work as found in Griffith, Churchill, Friel, and Kane.
Creative Writing Workshop
This module builds on creative writing at Level 4, and gives the student an opportunity to actively work on writing projects and take them through the three stages of production. Getting started: deciding on form, taking notes, collating useful research, and applying observation and memory. Drafting: finding structure, using forms of address, point-of-view, and characterisation. Completion: revision and critique, and delivery.
The practice writing sessions will be supplemented by a series of keynote talks during the module given by experienced and published creative writers that should provide further constructive insights into successful composition.
Screenwriting
This module offers a close study of screenwriting techniques. You will be introduced to the terms, ideas and craft which surround the creation of scripts. You will explore the screenwriting process to gain a thorough understanding of narrative and its building blocks. Through workshop exercises, you will learn and self-reflect on how to access creativity and improve your craft. You will present work to colleagues in workshops, and be expected to give analytical peer feedback and a critical script report in the role of a script editor.
Critical Approaches to Digital and Social Media
This module will examine the changes that have been effected social and culturally by the transition from analogue to digital media technologies and the accompanying globalisation of media connectivity in political, financial and cultural networks. It will be investigating both intensively encrypted formats and extensive social media platforms as aspects of future projection as they affect work, play and control in human societies.
Year three
Crime and Fiction
This module addresses the representation of crime across a range of media forms including novels, short stories, films, television, radio and graphic novels. There will also be a particular emphasis on the process of adaptation in which crime stories are re-shaped in their transition from one medium to another, principally – though not exclusively – from page to screen.
Crime fiction will be examined in terms of key historical and geographical determinants as well as its relationship to ‘real life’ crime. There will be a close attention to crime fiction texts and associated theory & criticism, but the module will also examine how crime fiction is received and engaged with by consumers.
Shakespeare on Screen
This module examines Shakespeare on screen, considering a variety of his texts as adapted for film and television. Students will be required to engage with the original plays, screen adaptations and a corpus of theoretical, critical and historical works.
Contemporary Writers and the City
This module examines literature by contemporary authors focussing on urban and architectural settings, themes and predicaments. It explores these focal points in the context of contemporary debates concerning the status of the metropolis in a globalised world.
The Postcolonial novel
Ngugi wa Thiong’o has called the novel a decisive form in the act of ‘decolonising the mind’. This module explores the terrain of the postcolonial novel in English as a space where voices of resistance, rewriting and reconstruction at the level of individual, people and nation are articulated.
The module studies key postcolonial novels (typically six) in English and explores the ways in which they engage with questions of language, form, colonial histories and the development of strategies and practices of decolonisation. It is underpinned by theoretical debates concerning gender, race and class and a consideration of their relevance for reading selected postcolonial novels. Literatures from, inter alia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian sub-continent, as well as authors identified with their correlative diasporas (considered as historical and contemporary) can be described as postcolonial. Postcoloniality as understood on this module also refers to the work of theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. Novels selected for study in a given year may include works by, among others, J.M. Coetzee, Maryse Conde, Ngugi wa Thiong’ó, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali, Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzu.
Creative Writing: the Short Story
This module seeks to develop students’ abilities in storytelling, using the short story format to allow participants to engage with such components as narrative, characterization, setting, and style. A key aim of this module (and the means by which the creative dimensions are made concrete) is the building of students’ existing abilities in writing to produce prose that is marked by a high degree of competence in terms of grammar, spelling and punctuation.
Writing for Live Performance
This module facilitates students’ development of original writing for live performance. Typically, such work will centre on stage drama - e.g. the one act play, the dramatic monologue etc. However, the module is also amenable to students developing other forms, including those that may encompass music and song, providing those forms enable the central requirement of creating original writing for live performance.
An important feature of the module is that it culminates in the performance of students’ work. Performers will be drawn from relevant courses in the London College of Music (B.A. Acting, and B.A. Musical Theatre) and will join the module for a three week block at the end. Working with the actors/performers and a London College of Music director will enable students to develop their writing through an iterative process of readings, rehearsals, and feedback.