📖Program Curriculum
Year 1
Core modules (students are required to take):
English Skills and Employability
Read and analyse stories and poems, and then reflect on how academic skills are applied to employability, for example preparation, attention to detail, clear and precise communication.
Writing and Expression
Based on writing in prose and poetry, and reading different types of writing, you will develop into skilled manipulators of style, voice, structure, editing and presentation.
Writing, Performance and Persuasion
Students will acquire skills in how to create a character’s voice; in speaking; articulating argument; making a case; and the importance of language and style in persuasion.
Understanding Literary Genres
Develop awareness of genre (e.g. detective fiction, fantasy, vampire novels, school stories) and analyse contemporary fiction in terms of particular genres and their historical development.
Year 2
Core modules (students are required to take):
Literature, Empowerment and Employment
Study a range of literary theories that address issues of empowerment, e.g. feminist theory, masculinities, postcolonial theory, intersectionality, and encourages you to apply these to a range of texts and to how this prepares you for graduate employment.
Life Writing
Explore ‘writing the self’ with a portfolio of original autobiographical writing, learn about writing the lives of others. All students, including BAME students, international students, students of different sexualities, students with disabilities, and students from different class backgrounds, will bring your experiences to autobiography and perspectives to biography.
Writing and Theme
Students will study, discuss and respond by writing creatively to a range of poetry and prose dealing with myth, childhood, love and loss.
Students are required to choose up to two option modules from:
Language: Gender and Sexuality
Study language, gender and sexuality, key theories and approaches, applying this to e.g. education and the media, taking an informed and critical stance towards current issues.
Medieval and Victorian Literature
Examine Chaucer, Beowulf, Jane Eyre and Sherlock Holmes, in relation to socio-cultural and political debates, and the continuity and appropriation of specific narratives.
Postcolonial Literature
Develop an understanding of postcolonialism as a political, critical, theoretical and literary concept, with literature from postcolonial countries after WW2 in relation to cultural identity and nationhood, political resistance, hybridity, liminality, diaspora, migration and exile, intertextuality.
America: Voices from the Counterculture
Explore the beatniks, hippies, and the influence of the civil rights movement, thinking about diversity in American writing in the treatment of big social themes, literature as a means of countercultural, social protest.
Year 3
Core modules (students are required to take):
Writing Project
Drawing on your learning in other modules, work with tutor and peers on your own writing project, prose fiction, poetry, drama, a short film, a serious article or a blog post.
Writing: Breaking the Rules
Experiment with innovations in prose and poetry and explores such techniques as chance, substitution, and fractured narrative and time structures, drawing on diverse writers outside the cultural mainstream.
Experiments: Modernism and Postmodernism
Explore the modernist preoccupation with ‘newness’ and the development of literary forms that ‘break’ with earlier artistic conventions. Find out about experimentation and innovation found in postmodern literature, in relation to social, political and cultural upheavals of the twentieth century.
Students are required to choose one or two option modules from:
Austen, the Brontës and Woolf
Develop your research skills by studying a substantial body and range of writings by Austen, the Brontës and Woolf, putting these into historical and biographical contexts, engaging with critical responses and theoretical approaches, and international reception.
Literature of Enchantment
Read fairy tales from around the globe, and then study contemporary novels drawing on the fairy tale.
Multilingualism and Identity
Explore bilingualism and multilingualism as an individual and a social phenomenon by examining different situations around the world and related social and political issues, using key theoretical and methodological approaches.
Sexuality Studies
Using an interdisciplinary approach, the course conducts a critical inquiry into the historical precedents and theoretical frameworks necessary to understand the role of sexuality in shaping personal, social, economic, and political life.
Fantasy and Gender
This interdisciplinary module uses texts, films and graphic novels to explore the genres of medieval fantasy and utopian/dystopian literature. Analysing fantasy texts alongside psychoanalytic and cultural theories will enable you to engage with questions in relation to ideological, cultural, and historical contexts.
