BA (Hons) English and Media and Communications with Foundation Year

Course detail
Through a study of a range of texts, from classical to contemporary, you will:
learn critical thinking
develop methods of analysis and response
structure complex arguments
be able to communicate ideas with clarity and economy
grow high-order conceptual and communication skills.
Modules
Foundation year
Personalised Learning
Academic Performance
Contextual Studies in Media and Design
Creative Research in Media and Design
Creative Sectors
Foundation Major Project.
Year one
English Literature I: Histories, Forms and Genres
English Literature II: Critical Approaches
Media and Communications Theories and Debates
Digital Video Production
Film and Radio industries
Podcasting.
Year two
The Canon Reloaded or Literature and Modernity: 1900-1960
Critical Approaches to Digital and Social Media
Creative Practice Option: TV Studio Production, or Radio Event and Outside
Broadcast Management
Nineteenth Century Literature or British and Irish Drama since 1945
Industry Experience
Cultures of Consumption or Genres or Screenwriting
Year three
Contemporary Writers and the City or The Postcolonial Novel.
Media and Communications: Policy and Ethics
Dissertation
Crime and Fiction or Shakespeare on the Screen
Creative Practice: Directing Fiction (Film/Video) or Advertising and Brand Sound (Radio).
Module summaries

Foundation year

Personalised Learning
This module is linked to your personal tutor group and supported by your personal tutor. It has been carefully designed to equip you with the specific skills you need to progress successfully onto the next level of your course.

Academic Performance
This module is designed to help you develop skills in critical thinking and independent study that will. It will also give you a unique opportunity to get to know fellow students from other courses around the university. The module combines face to face class time and an online forum, where there will be structured activities for you to undertake at a time and pace that suits you.

The module has been designed to ensure you gain the skills you need to deal with the challenges of independent study and of learning in a digitalised world. You will be encouraged to use a wide variety of material to construct an argument. Through your studies you will learn to demonstrate a wide range of skills that are essential for university study.

Contextual Studies in Media and Design
This module will help you gain basic knowledge and an understanding of media and design in relation to cultural studies.

You will explore the specific cultural effects, and current on-going topical debates, and develop an understanding of the different roles, audiences and interest groups involved.

Topical major events in the 20th century through to current trends that reflect the creation, production and distribution of creative artefacts will be investigated.

Creative Research in Media and Design
This module will introduce a variety of research methods available to you when considering how to communicate and extract data. You will need to understand the principles of research and select the most appropriate tools to critically use and articulate your findings in an engaging way.

This module provides you with an opportunity to establish your understanding of research through exploration of research language, ethics and approaches. It introduces you to a range of appropriate research methods, quantitative and qualitative in nature, which you can draw on in conducting your own investigations in preparation for future projects.

Creative Sectors
This is a specialist module with a career led and practical focus that introduces you to the more ‘hands on’ side of the industry. You will be required to demonstrate an understanding of your chosen specialism and future career paths. This will inform a practical outcome which introduces the various basic techniques within the specialism.

Foundation Major Project
This is the final module and draws together all the elements of your Foundation experience allowing you to reflect on the skills, knowledge and experience you have gained over the year.

The module enable you to use the skills you have developed in your chosen specialism to produce a creative response through a comprehensive body of creative work including a final outcome.

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.
TV and Radio Industries
Students spend the first six weeks of the module exploring key aspects of the broadcasting industries with a particular emphasis on television output. In the second half of the module the focus is on the radio industry, where students will be introduced to basic radio techniques. The module culminates in the completion of a small-scale radio project to demonstrate the knowledge and understanding obtained.
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.
Podcasting
This module looks at the emergence of Online Radio and Podcasting, highlighting current techniques and practices, and examines the Internet as a platform for Audio Production. You will have the opportunity to learn the basic principles of Audio Production and elementary web design, combining the two within a portfolio.
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 TV 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 a synthetic 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.
In the Media and Communications theory strand you will take Critical Approaches to New and Social Media and Media and Communications Policy and Ethics or Visual Media Cultures: Production and Consumption; in the practice and production strand they will take the Industry Experience module and select an approved creative practice/production option.
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.
TV Studio Production
You will acquire a working knowledge of television studio production techniques, from script to screen covering technical production and creative skills to produce multi-camera programmes including current affairs, music, debate shows and drama production. You will work collaboratively on short exercises and a major production. You will be encouraged to innovate rather than emulate. This module has a practical approach designed to foster understanding and critical awareness through creative practice.
Radio Event and Outside Broadcast Management
Producing events is an exciting and fast growing industry, spanning many sectors: financial, education, broadcast, music, performance, sport and more. Learning how to both produce events in a multitude of business arenas but then share those events through broadcast streams (OBs) is one which is generally kept behind closed industry doors.
This exciting module will open up opportunities to our students to learn how to manage events alongside those who do it best, the professionals, and then how to broadcast this content to the hungry masses. This module spans two thriving industries: event production and broadcasting. You will be equipped with insights into cutting-edge technologies, production planning, website management and location-based production skillsets.
Taught by industry insiders, you will become well equipped at utilising the new state of the art broadcast facilities at UWL, enabling you to document exciting student-led events from the heart of the campus, to the outside world; constantly broadening the audience reach.
Genres
This module will study the concept of genre in film, with a particular focus on selected genres. Students will be introduced to a variety of theories and debates relating to genre and will examine the history and development of a selection of genres. The module is organised around the juxtaposition of classic genre exemplars and later re-workings, subversions and recycling of genre conventions.
Recording Reality
An examination of film and television documentaries, this module will consider the relationship between this group of moving image texts and the ‘reality’ which they claim to represent. Issues of objectivity, representation and ethics will be explored in detail. Based around weekly screenings, lectures, seminars and readings, this module will develop your critical awareness of documentary texts and the documentary tradition.
Documentary Production
In this module you will build on the basic skills acquired at Level 4 and learn specific new documentary production techniques. You will work from original concept and pitch, through research, scheduling, pre-production, directing, camera, lighting, sound, editing, location permissions, managing crews and post-production. You will work collaboratively on 3 short 3 minute films and on a longer 6-8 minute film assignment.
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 and 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. You 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.
Media and Communications: Policy and Ethics
This module aims to provide students with opportunities to research, discuss, analyse and evaluate a range of historical and topical debates in the areas of policy and ethics in the field of media and communications. These will include questions about regulation, ownership, funding, censorship, the role and impact of new technologies, media effects, representation and cultural identity, as well as considering notions of ‘taste and decency’ and the themes of localism and globalisation.
Students will be encouraged to participate in a series of key debates – on issues such as ‘community’, ‘the role of the state’, ‘the public sphere’, ‘civil society’ and ‘digital citizenship’– in order to acquire insight into and understanding of the ways in which these inform the development and implementation of media and communications policy and ethics, both nationally and internationally.
Media Project
In this module you will develop a project over a single semester. The project outcome will be an artefact (for example, a short film, podcast or piece of creative writing) that takes an issue relevant to English as its theme. A choice of appropriate technology will be guided both by the module tutor and by the previous modules you have studied. The module is an opportunity to synthesise creative skills and critically-informed knowledge of the field of English.
Creative Practice Options:
Directing Fiction
This module builds on the skills developed in Digital Video Production and TV Studio Production at levels 4 and 5, and offers the opportunity to really understand the craft and technique of becoming a fiction director. Rather than focusing on technology, it takes creativity as a starting point and helps students begin to develop a visual voice of their own.
During the module, students will be introduced to the process of development, moving on to creative preparation methods such as storyboarding, script analysis and casting. We will look at how to work effectively and creatively with both camera and actors and how to approach the post-production phase as a highly creative time in terms of both picture and sound.
Advertising and Brand Sound (Radio)
Building on the skills developed at L4 Podcasting, and L5 Radio...