English BA (Hons)

Module description:
Have you ever wondered why some accents are perceived as being ‘cooler’, ‘friendlier’ or ‘uglier’ than others? Or whether there is any truth in statements such as “they speak really bad English in…” or “young people cannot write properly any more”? If so, ENGL106 Attitudes to English is the right module for you!
In this module, we will explore the concept of ‘attitude’ and how attitudinal judgements towards different aspects of language use (e.g. accents and dialects of English within the UK and overseas, gendered language, internet language, etc) come about in the history of English. We will also learn about the methods that social scientists use to explore language attitudes and how to put both theory and practice to the test by designing a mini-attitude project exercise. This mini-attitude exercise will be part of the final module assessment (40% of the final mark) and will be complemented by a take-home exam (60% of the final mark) at the end of the semester.
By taking this module, you will be exposed to different teaching styles (small and large-group teaching) and activities (e.g. critical reading and discussion of selected research articles, hands-on computer activities, out-of-university visits, in-class group-work and debate, exposure to both in-house and expert guest speakers) which will help you to not only develop an adequate understanding of key concepts and processes but also seek to enhance your:
Digital fluency: The ‘methodology block’ of the module will teach you how to navigate and use effectively on-line databases (e.g. newspaper repositories, corpora and corpus-specific software) and compile and analyse datasets both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Global citizenship: The topics explored in the module lend themselves to cross-cultural and cross-national comparisons. In fact, comparisons with other countries and/or cultures will be at the centre of the materials that we cover. You will also be encouraged to carry out comparative exercises across (inter)national contexts for your Attitudes assessed exercise.

This module introduces students to a key skill in literary study, that of precise and informed analysis of text (close reading).

This module will be compulsory for any student taking the BA in English with World Literature. It will be optional for students on English and English Literature, and for students taking Single Honours French (R120), German (R220), Italian (R300) and Hispanic Studies (RR45).

The module will introduce students to key concepts, theories, critics, and texts in the study of world literature through the lens of national literature(s) and translation, in order to provide a foundation for further study.

Students will gain awareness of basic concepts of world literature from different national literary traditions and will learn how to apply them to a range of short literary works from a range of genres both within and beyond the module.

This module serves as an introduction to the major periods of English literature from the Middle Ages onwards. One literary period will be covered each week by means of one lecture on a literary text from the period and one lecture on its context. These periods correspond to the ‘period’ literature modules that are available to students at Level 2, and thereby provide a sample of those modules, enabling students to make informed choices with regard to the modules they choose to take at Level 2. To this end, the texts have been chosen and the lectures are given by teaching staff from the relevant Level 2 modules.

This module will cover a range or dramatic texts from different culture and eras, exploring the processes of reading them whilst thinking about genre and context. Students will develop close-reading skills as well as an awareness of drama as a genre, its history and development. Assessment is coursework based and involves close reading, discursive response, and a short creative-critical exercise.

This course will offer students a solid background in basic linguistic analysis for English while also exploring the various contexts in which language is used. For example, students will be learning about the sounds of English while looking at how children learn their first language, or the structures of English from the perspective of a second language learner. Students will explore the breadth of English Language studies looking at how language is learnt/processed in our minds and how it is used in both micro-interactions (e.g. looking at how the police may be trying to frame a suspect) and macro-interactions at the level of society (e.g. looking at media representation of migrants). Students will learn basic qualitative and quantitative research methods and will meet a range of lecturers teaching in years 2/3, each with their own distinctive teaching style.

Stylistics is concerned with the language of literature in the broadest sense of the word: ranging from poems and novels to advertisements and political slogans. In this module students will seek linguistic answers for some of the most essential questions in the study of texts, such as: Why do some kinds of language use grab readers’ attention more than others? What tools do writers employ to mediate the speech and thought of other people? How do metaphors shape our understanding of the world? The concepts covered on this module form a solid foundation for further language study at levels 2 and 3.

This module will be compulsory for any student taking the BA in English with World Literature. It will be optional for students on English and English Literature, and for students taking Single Honours French, German, Hispanic Studies and Italian.

This module will follow on from Introduction to World Literature 1: From the National to the Global (Semester 1) by deepening students’ understanding of concepts and theories of world literature, and applying these to a range of longer literary texts across all major genres including the novel, poetry, drama, short story both originally in English and in English translation.

It will be delivered via a lecture and tutorial each week and assessed via 80% assessed summative coursework essay of 2500-3000 words and 20% creative-critical project (1000-1500 words).
Formative work will support the assessments.

This module will examine the ways in which English literature has represented the concept of place in a variety of genres across time (1350 to the present day). Students who successfully complete the module will have encountered at least ten substantial, representative literary texts which draw significantly on places of different types. These may include: cities; villages and ‘the country’; islands; built environments; wildernesses; oceans; imaginary worlds; and so on. Examples will be drawn from a diverse range of English, British, Irish and American literature and other Anglophone cultures. The types of text will include prose fiction, poetry, and drama. There will be two workshops each week, introducing and discussing a text or texts; and one weekly tutorial, in groups of no more than nine for smaller-scale analysis and tasks relating to the same weekly text(s) or theme(s).

This module introduces students to a range of theoretical approaches for analysing diverse forms of dramatic text and performance. Students will learn about how historical and contemporary contexts have shaped the development of theatre and performance theory. They will be invited to think critically about what makes analysing theatre and performance different from other types of text, and how theory might inform their interpretive practice. The module will cover a variety of theoretical approaches and contextualise them against specific performances in order to give students the expertise for thorough critical engagement and interpretation.

This module will allow students to develop critical methods of reading and contextual analysis of literary texts. Lectures and tutorials will explore a range of critical methodologies (for example psychoanalysis and postcolonialism) as well as topics focused on the modes, attitudes and concerns that underlie the production of literature in relation to politics, society and culture. In doing so students will be introduced to key debates within literary study, as well as addressing topics important to different periods including issues of race, gender, sexuality, literary form, environment and economy.

This module aims to develop and challenge accepted modes of reading in order to expand and strengthen original critical enquiry while also improving students’ written, oral and digital communication skills.

Learn how to read an image, images from advertising (commercial and public service), company logotypes, Asterix and satirical political cartoons (Charlie Hebdo)

The aims of the British Writing since 1945 are broadly to introduce students to a range of post-war British writing, and to promote the study of literary expression in contemporary British literature in its political and social contexts. The module aims to consider the literature of this period in a broad cultural and political context, and ask how forms of modern and contemporary identity are represented and contested within the literature and culture of the period, as well as exploring the relations between literary genres, particularly fiction and drama.

​This module covers a range of Renaissance drama, the contemporaries to Shakespeare, focussing on the relationship between page and stage and considering how an understanding of original performance conditions can influence our readings of the plays. 

This course examines the interactive relationship between language and society. It explores language variation and the influence of social factors, such as social class, social networks and gender on the way we speak. Within the prism of interactional sociolinguistics, it examines speakers’ construction of social identities and the importance of context in identity construction. The module also aims to address sociolinguistic phenomena, such as diglossia, bilingualism and language shift that emerge from language contact. Relevant theories will be applied to naturally occurring data and methodological issues of data collection and analysis will be examined. The module is taught via synchronous or asynchronous whole cohort sessions, synchronous small group sessions, independent study and your own small scale sociolinguistic study in an area of language in society.

This module will look at the history, context and content of some of the late 19th and early 20th century’s most important ‘little magazines’. Using the library Special Collections and Brown University’s Modernist Journals Project this module seeks to understand the role that literary magazines play within a culture and the historical background to their production. It will examine their material and print cultures, history and content in order to gain understanding of the role magazines played in their exploration of, or engagement with, various literary and historical movements. Topics covered will include sexuality, censorship, Modernism, the manifesto, State interference, and literary content, amongst others. Some of the magazines examined may include: The Savoy, To-Day, Blast, The Criterion, Ireland To-Day and Weird Tales. This module will suit students interested in journalism, magazine material and print cultures, censorship, and historical contexts. The module aims to engage students with primary historical research through classes in special collections and through digital resources.

This module explores the works of the Roman poet Ovid which span a wide range of genres and themes. We will focus on a core set text (or set texts) within its sociocultural contexts, wider literary traditions, and the rest of the Ovidian corpus.

The module aims to prepare students for a smooth transition into a work placement year and, more broadly, to develop lifelong skills, attitudes and behaviours and support students in their continuing professional development. This will help students lead flexible, fulfilling careers working as a professional in their field, and enable them to contribute meaningfully to society.

This module explores questions concerning the relationship of language to consciousness. This entails addressing questions concerning the nature of language in its evolutionary, acquisitional, developmental and degenerative stages. Through examining a range of communication systems, such as those used by computers, apes, and other animals, students will achieve an understanding of the unique nature of language in its relation to the human mind.

The Trojan War is one of the ‘great stories’ of Western culture. The Iliad most famously replays a crucial episode: the anger of Achilles following insult from the Achaean (Greek) leader Agamemnon and its deadly consequences. But alongside other contemporary epic poems, events from the ten-year struggle between the Achaeans and Trojans have been rewritten, restaged, and represented in literature and art across antiquity and down the centuries into modern times. This module examines some of these various attempts to ‘rebuild Troy’, tracing the myth through a range of source material, including epic poetry, Greek sculpture and painted pottery, Athenian tragedy, Hellenistic inscriptions, Roman poetry, nineteenth-century European art and film. By putting each ‘reception’ of the myth into its social, political and historical contexts, the module traces the fluidity and malleability of Troy in the cultural imagination, and asks what Trojan stories reveal about the societies that tell them, ancient and modern.

The module looks at literature from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries. This is the period when the novel-form emerged; when poetry was sometimes epic (or mock-epic) and also began to cultivate a focus on the self and subjectivity; when drama turned theatrical conventions inside-out; when fantasies in the satiric mode sought to vex the world and when female authors entered the marketplace. Students taking this module will gain in-depth knowledge of some of the ‘classics’ of world literature (such as Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Paradise Lost). They will also study the ways in which the literature of the period reflects and imagines such issues as: freedom and slavery; authorship and the culture of print; politics; religion and reason; realism and romance; urban expansion; the body, mind and spirit; sexual, racial and cultural identity; science, technology and new forms of knowledge.

In this module, students will learn about the processes, mechanisms, events and ideologies that have contributed to the change of the English language across time. Students will experience different types of teaching environments, including general group sessions and practical small-group teaching sessions. The general-group sessions will be used to survey general themes, approaches or methodologies to historical linguistic analysis. The small-group sessions will be based around different types of exercises (eg discussion of research articles, text-analysis) and provide group discussion of relevant language issues and their implications in a wider context.

The aim of the Victorian Literature module is to expose students to a wide variety of texts written and published between 1837 and 1901, an extremely diverse period of literary history. The module will also provide opportunities for close analysis, application of literary theory and consideration of contextual issues in relation to the texts studied as a means of helping students to develop skills that will be useful in other literature modules.

Situated between the end of World War One and the Nazi takeover of power, the Weimar Republic witnessed a ‘crisis of classical modernity’; the period retains a reputation for modernity and decadence. Against a background of political and economic experimentation and uncertainty, it saw a growth in advertising, shopping, urban life and transport, fashion and film. Taught in a mixture of lectures and seminars, this module focuses on cultural representations of the period, through the study of two films: Berlin: Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of the Metropolis, 1927) and Marlene Dietrich’s first major feature, Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1931); and two literary texts: Erich Kästner, Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives, 1928), and Irmgard Keun, Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932). Through close reading and thematic analysis, we will consider how they depict and define the modern metropolis; changing ideas about class and gender; and new forms of working life, entertainment and leisure.

This module seeks to consider the history of literary censorship from France of the 1850s to postwar Britain and Ireland. It will examine issues such as ‘bad language’, decency, morality and ‘cancel culture’ in writers ranging from Gustave Flaubert to Edna O’Brien.

This module deals with one of the most fascinating subfields of (psycho)linguistics: child language acquisition. It is intended to serve as an introduction to the field, including a discussion of the major theoretical and methodological issues. Taking into account a bi/multilingual perspective throughout, the module covers lexical, morphological, syntactic and pragmatic development. Based on the critical discussion of research articles in class, students will conduct their own small-scale analysis as part of their assessment. Furthermore, there will be 4 screenings of documentaries throughout the semester in order to allow for a critical discussion of the representation of scientific research in the popular media (a mini-essay on one of the screened films is also part of the assessment).

This module introduces students to a variety of theoretical and practical contexts for thinking about creativity and the writing process. Students are given practical writing exercises and are encouraged to reflect upon their own practice. Students will also be encouraged to find innovative platforms and means of presenting their own creative work, and may choose to engage fully with the potential for creative thinking in the context of digital technologies and the new media.

This is a level 2 module, designed to introduce students to a range of medieval literature in the original Middle English language. No previous experience of Middle English is required. Authors considered include Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Thomas Malory, Marie de France, and the Gawain-Poet.

This module introduces you to aspects of life in Britain and Europe between about 1740 and 1815. This period is often seen as the beginning of the modern world, when the ideas about human nature and society that still shape our own lives came into circulation and when the global entanglements generated by trade and colonisation began to have a lasting impact on everyday life in Europe. The module is taught by tutors from French, German and English Studies, and History, as well as staff from the National Museums Liverpool. It gives you an insight into the range of materials and methods that are used in research in eighteenth-century studies. Interactive lectures, seminars and fieldwork encourage a hands-on approach to learning. You start by inventing an 18th-century character and you follow that character through various experiences typical of the period: shopping, reading, travelling, thinking about political issues of the day. Images, artefacts and contemporary texts in English and other languages are made available to support your research. The aim is for you to develop your capacity for asking questions (curiosity) as well as for answering them (research skills).

This module provides an introduction to sociolinguistic and ethnographic approaches to the study of multilingualism. We will look at what language is, what multilingualism is, how individuals use multiple languages in everyday interaction, and how multiple languages are managed in society.

The module addresses both the intrinsic and explicitly theorised moral frameworks of Greco-Roman antiquity, by looking at select sources ranging from the Homeric epic to Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. The issues examined during the module include: reciprocity as ethical model (revenge, justice, solidarity), the goods of the self vs the "external" goods, happiness and morality, valuing other people as part of one’s own moral well-being.

Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context, of how the situation surrounding a sentence/utterance, (who said it, where, when and why?) influences how we understand its meaning. This 30 credit Level 2 module examines several relevant theories and looks at some of the ways that these theories are being applied to other areas of study (e.g. to how children learn language). It is delivered through weekly teaching sessions, and assessed by an assignment and a take-home paper.

Romanticism is a cultural movement dominant in Europe from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. The poetic focus of this course is the Romantic lyric. As a genre, it is autobiographical, emotional, confessional; it says: to know your self, narrate your self. It is often painful: that self may have been tried in the fires of political revolution, domestic violence, warfare, disinheritance, alienation, slavery, poverty, and incarceration of the ‘mad’: these are the stories of the writers on the module, the poetry of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare; and also the autobiographical and fictional narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, and Mary Prince. Yet the self here is never the sum of its suffering: these writers reach for truths that exceed any human legislation, not least in the awe-inspiring mystery, power, and delicacy of the natural world. They testify to a human psyche that is cosmic in its comprehension, and which can not only reach to the infinite, but can bring that insight to fellow humans through the experience of literature itself.

This module examines Shakespeare’s plays in relation to the early modern socio-cultural contexts in which they were written and first performed. It will introduce you to a range of comedies, histories and tragedies and encourage you to analyse and discuss how they engage with key issues of sixteenth and seventeenth century English life. By the end of the module you should be able to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of a number of Shakespeare’s works and an informed sense of the plays’ relationship to their historical contexts. Topics covered will typically include, Sex & Gender; Power & Performance; Belief & Superstition; Race & Culture; Travel & Trade. Workshops will give critical context provide models of interpretation and encourage reading the plays alongside other early modern texts, while the tutorials provide space for more detailed student-led discussion of the plays.

This module will introduce students to a range of literary and cultural forms which give prominence to women’s roles in cultural and social change. Students will engage with a number of key texts and gender related concepts and will consider the ways in which representations of women, whether produced by women or, indeed, by men, have both influenced and been influenced by important social and cultural movements in Spain, Portugal and Latin America from the early modern to the modern eras.

This module explores the diversity of theatre and performance forms across the world, considering how they can be understood in dialogue with each other and their particular social and political contexts. The module will encourage you to think about theatre and performance as a global set of artistic practices. The work we explore will challenge Western and European conceptions of history and culture, as well as conventional understandings of the nature and purpose of theatre. You will discuss writers and theatre makers from a range of global majority communities and, where possible, consider them in performance. The course will encourage you to explore specific productions, both contemporary and historical, in their political and cultural settings. By the end of the module you will have developed the tools required to critically analyse and understand the performance cultures of different countries.

In the period 1900–45 writers challenged all assumptions about what narrative does, about how we read, and how we represent and interpret the world. This module entails detailed study of some of the most radical modernist writers, such as T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy and Virginia Woolf. It also explores the contexts that shaped them and their innovations, from the city and visual art to empire and psychoanalysis. Together we’ll think about new understandings of time and the mind, new ideas about human relationships, and new dynamics between the silent and the stated, private and public, men and women, local and global, art and life.

The module intends to familiarise students with central themes of aesthetics and art theory, especially questions about aesthetic judgement, aesthetic experience and aesthetic value. They will be able to strengthen their understanding of the history of philosophy, as well as the connection between theory and artistic practice. The module is taught by lecture (1 hour per week) and seminar (1 hour per week). Assessment is via a 3,000 word essay (85% of the module mark) and one 10-15 minute presentation (delivered during seminars, or recorded if on-line only teaching) that provides the remaining 15% of the module mark.

This module will give students an opportunity to write a short story, and reflect critically on the writing and editing process in a workshop situation. Students should be prepared to write and read independently, to share their work in progress with their peers and to critically evaluate their own work and that of their peers.

This module gives you the option to write a 10,000-word dissertation. You will be expected to formulate a dissertation proposal in advance, and if this is accepted, you will be allocated an academic supervisor. This module gives you a chance to focus on a specific topic or area that interests you within the study of either English language or literature, and allows you to demonstrate your capacity in undertaking a piece of serious, independent research.

This module places language among other meaning-making systems or “codes”, such as gestures, colours and sound. All these are examined by the discipline called Semiotics – that is “the science of signs” which asks the question of how meanings are organised and how reality is conceptualised. This course discusses the scope of Semiotics, its core concepts, main figures and methodological tools. The theoretical approaches presented range from structuralist theories to post-structuralism/social semiotics/multimodality. The module also offers an analysis of a variety of cultural products/processes through the application of semiotic concepts and methods, drawing examples from e.g. storytelling, comics, marketing/advertising, art/design, the media, the body, fashion, food and music, thus reflecting the broad interdisciplinary nature of the discipline. Emphasis will be placed on language as one of the meaning-making modes available to humans, capturing the interplay between verbal and non-verbal semiotic resources. There are no pre-requisites for this module, but some knowledge of pragmatics, (critical) discourse analysis, gender studies and sociolinguistics can be advantageous.

​This module invites students to read a variety of medieval (and some pre-medieval) texts and consider how they reflect various types of encounter between human and other worlds, such as animal, monster, ghostly, spiritual, dream and other such non-human worlds. The module requires close reading of texts in original Middle English and includes a translation exercise.

We, as a society, confront narratives of migrant experience daily. The rhetoric of crisis, disaster and emergency often defines the stories of those who have fled or been forced out of their homelands as powerfully as it pervades related debates around conflict, climate change and the Coronavirus pandemic. In recent years, as the UK’s relationship with the rest of Europe and the rest of the world has been radically reconceived, our islands are imagined, by some, as places of refuge and, by others, as bastions vulnerable to invasion. But the complex ways in which migrants themselves experience, interpret and represent their settlement histories in Britain rarely feature within public accounts of the making of contemporary British society. This new interdisciplinary module takes a long view of the migrant experience in postwar Britain, guiding students through relevant aspects of social theory, moments in modern history, and literary texts. We will encounter the migrant experience through literature, film, performance, journalism, critical writing, and first-hand accounts. The module also features an alternative assessment: students will be guided by experts in creating oral history and verbatim theatre practitioners to generate new analyses and narratives of migration.

The module aims to provide students with an introduction to the principles and practice of teaching English to speakers of other languages, and to help prepare students with little or no teaching experience to teach English to speakers of other languages in the private or voluntary sectors or while travelling abroad.

This module aims to introduce students to the new trends in contemporary Italian cinema and to the main relevant theoretical and critical approaches in the field.

This module is concerned with some of the ways in which different frameworks for linguistic analysis can be applied to the study of literary texts. A variety of different linguistic methods will be introduced, and a range of literary texts will be explored in relation, for instance, to foregrounding, point of view, thought and speech presentation and literary inference. Issues discussed will include how narrators communicate with readers, how characters within fictional texts communicate with each other, and what determines the nature of ‘literary’ texts. In the assessment, students are encouraged to explore further linguistic frameworks which are of particular interest to them and to apply these to the analysis of one or more literary texts of their own choosing in an imaginative and original way.

The module covers a series of strategies adopted by millennial writers to engage with the literary, cultural and international discourses of the late 20th and early 21st century. Topics covered will include the following: Generations X and Y and “Millennials”; irony and the cultural relationship between the 1960s/70s and the 1990s; digital/internet culture and the tech corporation (Apple/Google); developments in life-writing and journalism; the novel after theory; neoliberalism, austerity and debt; the globalised postcolonial city; discourses of waste, climate change and ecocriticism; terminologies of contemporary race relations; writing after/against postmodernism; 9/11, the war on terror and apocalyptic writing; the role of genre in contemporary writing.

This module examines the range of writing, film and art within the genre of Noir. In particular, it engages with the relationships between literary and non-literary, particularly visual, media as well as examining Noir’s social, political, intellectual and historical contexts.

​This module aims to introduce students to the field of postcolonial literature and theory through the close study of a range of fiction written by writers from British ex-colonies in South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. The focus of analysis will be an exploration of this literature through the lenses of British colonisation, the process of decolonisation and independence as well as the complexities of the postcolonial condition. As part of this module, students will be required to read theoretical texts and engage with a range of theoretical concepts within the field of postcolonial studies. They will also be encouraged to apply these theories to the literature they read. Film and music may be used to enhance the learning experience. 

The module will typically provide an introduction to the history of slavery in the Francophone and Hispanic Worlds, situating the phenomenon of modern slavery within an understanding of historical slavery. Students will then study a range of representations of slavery that have arisen in response to historical slavery. These will typically range from first person slave accounts from the early modern period which provide an individual perspective on the history of slavery; literary and filmic representations of slavery and cultural responses to slavery, particularly in the heritage industries through the practice of Dark Tourism. The module will typically include a visit to the International Slavery Museum in the Albert Dock, Liverpool.

This module develops research and critical skills when examining digital cultures with a particular focus on the Americas. It takes examples that encompass North, Central, and South America as well as the Caribbean. Building confidence in handling theoretical tools in the analysis of digital cultures it examines a range of professional and amateur content creators from social, institutional and personal perspectives and considers issues of curatorship, archival approaches, the ethics of (re)appropriation and remediation, and the relationship between the self and the public and private spheres.

This module is about how Shakespeare is made, and re-made: on the page, stage, and screen. Focusing on six of Shakespeare’s plays, it examines how they’ve been transformed, through theatrical production and cinematic adaptation, by actors and directors who bring them to life in performance but also change and challenge, sometimes quite radically, their meaning and interpretation as encountered on the page. Debating where ‘Shakespeare’ really ‘lives’ – on the page, stage, or screen – you’ll be reading and interpreting his plays in relation to specific editorial and production issues, assessing how the texts appeared in Shakespeare’s own time (in Quarto and Folio), and reviewing how modern editors and directors treat them today, dealing with the problems and possibilities they continue to present. Encountering original printed texts, the sources that Shakespeare himself adapted to create his plays, and subsequent adaptations of them for stage and screen, this module offers a more advanced, dynamic, and complex understanding of Shakespearean drama as it is put to work: on the page, stage, and screen.

This module will introduce students to approaches to memory and to a body of textual, visual, material representation of terror that has become a key focus for critical analysis in recent cultural studies. It will provide a context in which students can engage in systematic comparisons between European, Latin American and East Asian experiences and representations of social and political trauma. It will also encourage students to reflect systematically on the political and ethical implications of literary, material, digital and cinematic representations of traumatic histories. You will have the opportunity to study in depth and compare examples of representation through different media and across different national and linguistic boundaries. Lectures provide background both to the main theoretical approaches, and to specific representations. In weekly seminars, you will work on the case studies covered in class, and on related materials. Assessment is on the basis of a poster and an essay.

War Writing addresses the ways that wartime and peacetime are imagined by writers in the 20th and 21st centuries. We consider the topic by looking at a diverse range of texts that address war directly or indirectly. We ask our students to ask exactly what it is that war means and the ways in which writers have attempted to answer that question. We actively look to expand our definition of war writing and to include a wide spectrum of writers and writing.

This module engages with twentieth-century and contemporary feminisms and their relation to literature of the period. We consider key debates and concepts in feminist thought, and explore how they have been represented and reimagined in writing across a range of forms, including poetry, prose (fiction and non-fiction) and theatre. Students will examine feminist literary criticism, critical understandings of gender, and how feminisms relate to other questions of identity and justice, from sexuality and socialism to the postcolonial and the ecological. They will understand feminisms on their own terms, but also think closely about how literature takes up, questions – and perhaps even attempts to transform – the problem of sexism and intersecting inequalities.

This module examines twentieth-century ‘offshoots’ that re-think and reinvent some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, as well as his life and ‘character’ as an author. We’ll consider ‘offshoots’ across a variety of media, from drama and film, to short stories, novels, and graphic literature: texts that re-work and ‘answer’ plays such as Hamlet, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The relationship between an offshoot and the original, and how that relationship illuminates our understanding of both, is what this module seeks to explore, by addressing questions of originality and intertextuality, adaptation and appropriation, gender and sexuality, power and authority.

This module will equip students with a knowledge of how discourse works at linguistic, metalinguistic, and paralinguistic levels. You will be exposed to a wide range of discourse types and will learn methodologies (and their theoretical bases) available for analysing them, especially with a view to exposing meanings which would otherwise remain hidden.

This module focuses on British poetry from c.1930s – the present. Attention will be given to individual poems as well as their social, historical and political contexts and modes of production. Students will develop skills in close reading, buttressed by an increased understanding of the literary, theoretical, aesthetic and historical contexts for poetry writing. The module pursues an enquiry informed by (and critical of) ideas of nation, theory and poetics into the developments of poetry in this period with a view to questions of race, class, language and gender.

This module explores Children’s Literature from its ‘Golden Age’ in the late C19th through to the present day, considering its development and innovations through this period, alongside the traditional and sustained features of the genre. Time is also spent at the beginning of the course giving the module texts an historical and literary context by looking at early educational texts and chapbooks, for example. Topics covered include: children’s literature and the pastoral; the moral tale; fairy tales; the role of illustrations; coming-of-age literature; metafiction in children’s lit; fantasy; adult authors, narrators and readers, and talking bears. Critical approaches to children’s literature are introduced and discussed during the course, and specific use is made of the Special Collections and Archives collection of children’s books.

This module explores the relationship between comics, memory and history. Some of the most engaging comics of our times represent marginalised histories of individuals and communities, and whole genres of comics today are committed to drawing attention and striving against historical and contemporary systems of oppression. Over the last decades, comics have started documenting forgotten histories, conveying testimonies and enabling forms of self representation and transcultural belonging. Yet this medium has a long and complex history of depicting race and ethnicity, reinforcing discrimination and marginalisation and popularising colonial stereotypes. This module engages with such history, and with authors who are redrawing it.
This module develops a language-sensitive approach to comics and graphic novels beyond the Anglosphere; the syllabus introduces the students to a series of linguistic and cultural contexts in which comics have been developed and translated since the 20th century.

This is a 15-credit Level 6 module. The module is designed to encourage students to write original poetry, using class workshops, the study of high-quality examples, and weekly assignments with written feedback. Assessment is delivered by means of a portfolio, which is composed of original work (50%) and a self-assessment (40%). There will also be a performance of the students’ own work (10%).

This module gives you the option to write a 10,000-word dissertation. You will be expected to formulate a dissertation proposal in advance, and if this is accepted, you will be allocated an academic supervisor. This module gives you a chance to focus on a specific topic or area that interests you within the study of either English language or literature, and allows you to demonstrate your capacity in undertaking a piece of serious, independent research.

Fiction is a place where unreal things can happen…

This module looks at the genre of the fantastic, the cross-over between real and unreal, and marvellous in some of the best known works of German-language literature: the Grimms’ fairytales; ‘Blond Eckbert’, a ‘fairytale’ invented by Ludwig Tieck; and ETA Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (The Sandman), a text dealing with madness and magic. We will also look at some modern versions of classic fairytales.

Close reading of the set texts will be paired with a range of critical analysis including contemporary approaches including disability studies and queer readings, as well as established frameworks by theorists such as Propp, Bettelheim, Bottigheimer and feminist critics (Warner, Tatar). The module will also introduce key theories with a particular emphasis on Todorov’s theory of the fantastic and Freud’s theory of Das Unheimliche (‘the Uncanny’).

Games are ubiquitous today; even if you don’t think you play them, you do, via schemes like loyalty cards. This module examines the role of games in contemporary society, and the ways in which this has been reflected within contemporary literature. Throughout this module, we will consider the relationship between games and literature in relation to three key areas—“Ludic Literature”, “Gaming Cultures”, and “Games of the Future”—with each area involving the analysis of particular literary texts to consider what they reveal about contemporary society and its interests in games and gaming. Illustrative authors include: Raymond Queneau and members of the OuLiPo, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Daniel Suarez, and Ernest Cline.

This module examines the history of Gothic fiction from the 18th century to the present day and explores relationships between literature and film in the evolution of the genre. It considers both the influence of cinematic and pre-cinematic visual technologies on Gothic literature and aesthetics and the reciprocal influence of Gothic literature upon the emergence and development of cinema and television.

This module examines the life and work of Ireland’s greatest and most influential fiction writer, James Joyce, from his 1914 collection of short stories, Dubliners, through his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and onward to his later masterpieces, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
Historical and biographical context will form a key part of our studies.

The relationship between language and gender has been broadly studied within a range of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology and sociology. Issues relating to the differences between men’s and women’s linguistic behaviour have been addressed since early 20th century and are still a recurrent topic in contemporary societies. This module examines the role of language in constructing gender and reviews past and recent theoretical approaches to language and gender, particularly relating to the fields of sociolinguistics, (critical) discourse analysis and conversation analysis. Focusing on empirical work, relevant theories are applied to a range of data including conversational talk and written texts. In particular, we will explore gender ideologies in society, how gender identities intersect with other social identities, and the importance of context in gender identity construction. The relationship of language and gender will be addressed in a variety of contexts such as media discourse, conversational talk, politics and the workplace, educational settings and (children’s) fiction. Students are expected to conduct an empirical study in an area of language and gender which will require the collection and analysis of original data.

This is an interdisciplinary module which aims to get students to think critically about imaginative literature and philosophical approaches to literature. It familiarises students with some of the main issues, theories and arguments relating to the ontology, value and structure of literature, as well as concept critical theory.
The module discusses key themes at the intersection of philosophy and literature; there is usually a focus on the genre of tragedy. The module is taught by lecture 1 hour per week and seminar 1 hour per week. Assessment is via class presentation (10%) and two coursework essays (40%, 50%).

The module explores how popular culture can be political by examining a range of popular cultural commodities discursively. The module surveys a range of views on how to examine popular culture in order to contextualise discourse analysis. This is examined and then used to critically consider the political potential of popular culture. Successful students will be able to critically analyse a range of popular cultural commodities such as film, television programmes, digital popular culture, popular music and the tabloid press. The module is delivered in the forms of lectures and more hands-on analysis during seminars. Students are assessed by an essay, which is an analysis of a popular culture commodity.

A large proportion of films are based on written texts and this module will introduce you to a range of cinematic adaptations of literary works from across Modern Languages. Using adaptation theory to inform your analysis, you will have the opportunity to study excerpts from texts and consider the issues that arise from their adaptation as films. How does cinema convey a sense of the past or modify literary works from a different time period? How does it represent the gender roles which can be a central preoccupation of literature? How does film transcend language boundaries to bring modern-language texts to new audiences? On this module you will have the opportunity to explore these areas whilst also developing skills in film analysis, journalistic writing and academic writing.

This is a course for anyone interested in the early novel, and focusses on prose fictions from the period 1740-1830, which is to say the development of the novel from its early appearances through into the Romantic period. If you have taken Victorian Literature, this is the story of how the novel developed prior to the appearance of writers such as Dickens and the Brontës. We look at the kinds of literature that fed into the early novel (such as journalism and travel writing), and the material conditions that were necessary to its development (print technologies and so on). We consider a wide range of related topics such as sensibility, the physiology of emotion, realism, and editing, and—in the context of the ongoing history of misogyny—we pay particular attention to the astonishingly courageous, radical, inventive, psychologically insightful, and funny writing of the women authors of the period. Writers on the course typically include Mary Davys, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Henry Mackenzie, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and James Hogg.

This module focuses specifically on varieties of English spoken in Northern England and aims to address the perception and conceptualisation of these varieties relative to Modern Standard English, Received Pronunciation, and other non-standard varieties of English. The module will address what it means to be Northern, to speak a Northern dialect, to represent that dialect in writing. Students will discuss the phonetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic features of several different Northern varieties. The relationship between geographical background and identity is also addressed as well as linguistic changes currently in progress in UK Englishes. Students are expected to conduct their own research project where they collect and analyse their own original data, present their findings, and address the implications of their work as part of the assessment.

This module will explore the art of writing for radio. At the same time, it will introduce students to the history of literature on the radio in Britain and Ireland. With a focus on the early and mid-twentieth century, we will survey essays, documentaries, lectures, radio plays, adaptations, poems and sound experiments. We will contextualise these works by discussing major events in the development of radio as a medium across the period: from the founding of national broadcast networks such as the BBC and RTÉ to the launch of the World Service; from the establishment and decline of the hugely influential BBC Third Programme to the histories of radio guides and magazines such as The Listener. The course will be underpinned by significant studies of media history produced by scholars including Chris Morash, Emily Bloom, Jürg R. Schwyter and Kate Murphy. Certain questions will preoccupy us throughout: is there something special, in an aesthetic sense, about writing for the radio? Do familiar writers have a ‘radio voice’? How have political and social changes shaped the programming of literature on the radio? And what role has literature on the radio played in forging national cultural identities in Britain, Ireland, and across the world? Writers and broadcasters to feature on the course might include: Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Sayers, E.M. Forster, Dylan Thomas, Laura Riding, J.B. Priestley, Philip Larkin and Ewan MacColl.

This module gives you the option to write a 10,000-word dissertation. You will be expected to formulate a dissertation proposal in advance, and if this is accepted, you will be allocated an academic supervisor. This module gives you a chance to focus on a specific topic or area that interests you within the study of either English language or literature, and allows you to demonstrate your capacity in undertaking a piece of serious, independent research.

This module is an opportunity for you to undertake a placement in a setting which matches your academic and possible career/industry interests, develop materials and/or undertake tasks within a practical or vocational context, apply academic knowledge from your degree, and develop your personal and employability skills within a working environment. SOTA300 is not open to students who have taken SOTA600.