English BA (Hons): XJTLU 2+2 programme

In this module you will be introduced to many of the important literary works produced in America before the twentieth century. The course spans a broad range of literary genres and contexts, from the aftermath of the Revolution to the Progressive Era. We will investigate the changing definitions of what it means to be an American from divergent literary voices, including European immigrants, proto-feminists, and enslaved African Americans. By the end of the module you will gain a greater understanding of nineteenth-century America’s literary history and its surrounding critical debates. The module utilises a broadly chronological structure, which enables you to trace key historical themes—such as citizenship, colonialism, gender inequality, and slavery—across 120 years of American literature and culture, while attending to how writers respond to social change through developing literary forms such as the romance, the short story, and the slave narrative.

The module is taught through a combination of whole cohort and small group sessions. In the whole cohort sessions you will learn important contextual information on American literature of the period, ask your lecturer questions and in the small group sessions you will develop your critical analysis through close reading and discussion. The module is assessed through an essay and take home exam; whole cohort sessions will support your essay writing and revision.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 module provides an opportunity to think in a systematic way about how language and communication are embedded in, and also contribute to, the current globalization process. We will discuss different understandings of globalization, and examine the effects global mobilities and increasing diversity have on language form, language use, and their functionality. We will look at cases from some of the driving forces of globalization, including the tourism industry, educational migration, transitional communities, and others.

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.

This module explores what it means to think and write about nature at a time of massive environmental change and technological advancement. . We will consider the ways in which different forms, modes and genres ̶ including poetry, science writing, film, visual art and, of course, science fiction ̶ have tackled questions surrounding biology, extinction, technology, climate change and what it means to be human.
Over the course of the module we will explore the relationship between fact, fiction and speculation; the past, future (and potentially the end) of humanity; questions of energy, ecology and sustainability; and the political and ethical dilemmas that emerge alongside new scientific discoveries and technologies that shape humans’(and other animals’) lives on micro and macro scales.

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. 

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.

In the 1920s a canny advertising executive coined the phrase, ‘One Look is Worth a Thousand Words’. But the idea that pictures can be read (and that writing creates pictures in the mind’s eye) has a long pedigree. According to Plutarch, it was Simonides of Keos – the Greek lyric poet of the 5th century BC – who first formulated the equation: ‘poems are talking pictures, pictures are silent poems’. This module examines the ways in which pictures have been used to tell stories from the beginnings of widespread print culture in the seventeenth century to contemporary digital comics.

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.

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 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.