Critical Approaches 1

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

How do we go about reading and interpreting a literary text? What are we trying to do when we analyse a work of literature: are we trying to establish one correct interpretation? How do we decide that some interpretations are more valuable than others? Do we need to understand the original intentions of the author to understand what something means? Is it necessary to understand the historical or political situation from which a work emerged? Do readers interpret texts differently at different historical moments? Could our interpretations of texts be affected by forces beyond our control, forces such as the workings of language, unconscious desires, class, race, gender, sexuality or nationality? How is it that some texts, Shakespeare's plays, for instance, are highly valued by our culture, while others have been lost or devalued? Who or what decides which literature will survive to be read and studied on English modules?

This module will suggest some ways of answering these large and difficult questions about interpretation, and aims to make you think in new ways about the work you do for your English degree at Sussex. The module is divided up into five parts: two five-week lecture blocks in the autumn, and three four-week blocks in the spring. In the autumn you will study two themes: "The Author/Authority" and "The Word"; in the spring you will study "Class and Culture," "Desire and Pleasure," and "Difference." Throughout the module you will read critical and theoretical essays and literary works that contribute to your understanding of these themes. The module will examine many different aspects of literary theory including new criticism, Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis and queer theory. We will also ask you to reflect on the relationship between the theoretical reading and literature through simultaneously reading several literary texts.

Critical Approaches 2

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

How do we go about reading and interpreting a literary text? What are we trying to do when we analyse a work of literature: are we trying to establish one correct interpretation? How do we decide that some interpretations are more valuable than others? Do we need to understand the original intentions of the author to understand what something means? Is it necessary to understand the historical or political situation from which a work emerged? Do readers interpret texts differently at different historical moments? Could our interpretations of texts be affected by forces beyond our control, forces such as the workings of language, unconscious desires, class, race, gender, sexuality or nationality? How is it that some texts, Shakespeare's plays, for instance, are highly valued by our culture, while others have been lost or devalued? Who or what decides which literature will survive to be read and studied on English modules?

Critical Approaches will suggest some ways of answering these large and difficult questions about interpretation, and aims to make you think in new ways about the work you do for your English degree at Sussex. The module is divided up into two parts, composed of two lecture blocks (5 weeks apiece) in teaching block 1 (TB1), and 3 lecture blocks (4 weeks apiece) in teaching block 2 (TB2). In TB1 you will study two themes: "The Author/Authority" and "The Word"; in TB2 you will study "Class and Culture," "Desire and Pleasure," and "Difference." Throughout the module you will read critical and theoretical essays and literary works that contribute to your understanding of these themes. The module will examine many different aspects of literary theory including new criticism, Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis and queer theory. We will also ask you to reflect on the relationship between the theoretical reading and literature through simultaneously reading several literary texts.

Texts in Time 1

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

What is literature? How has it changed over time? What is the relationship between writing and the historical moment in which it was produced? How can we read texts to understand the ways in which they comment on and intervene in their particular cultural contexts? How do literary and other kinds of cultural artefacts enable us to reinterpret history and culture? How does the study of texts from other historical periods better enable us to understand our own? These are some of the questions which we will be exploring during the module.

Texts in Time 1 will introduce you to the study of many different kinds of texts - poetry, plays, letters, prose fiction, a novel, as well as visual texts - in their historical and cultural contexts. Following an introductory week, the module is divided into two blocks: the first focusing on the early modern period, and the second on the eighteenth century and Romantic period, from 1700-1820. Each week brings a new text or texts into consideration, but all are connected to the overarching theme of the module: 'Citizens and Strangers'.

Texts in Time 2

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

What is literature? How has it changed over time? What is the relationship between writing and the historical moment in which it was produced? How can we read texts to understand the ways in which they comment on and intervene in their particular cultural contexts? How do literary and other kinds of cultural artefacts enable us to reinterpret history and culture? How does the study of texts from other historical periods better enable us to understand our own? These are some of the questions which we will be exploring during the module.

Texts in Time 2 explores many different kinds of writing (poetry, autobiography, essays, novels) as well as visual texts (film, photography, the graphic novel) in their historical and cultural contexts. For those of you who have already taken Texts in Time 1, this module continues the chronological movement already begun on that module, but it can also be taken as a stand-alone module. Texts in Time 2 is divided into three blocks. The first block addresses texts from the nineteenth century, the second block focuses on 1922, a key moment in Modernism. The final block looks at contemporary writing and culture. Each week brings a new text or texts into consideration, but all are connected within each block to an overarching theme.

Reading Genre 1

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

How do texts locate themselves in literary conventions to develop their own expression and meaning? How do other media such as film transform literary genre? How does genre act to shape a text and a reader's understanding of it? How do we identify and understand genre?

These are some of the questions that we shall approach in these two interlinked modules by focusing on five genres: epic, comedy (in teaching block 1) lyric, tragedy, horror (in teaching block 2). In each instance we shall concentrate on either one or a small number of representative examples, allowing us to widen our understanding of genre while we deepen our acquaintance with key illustrations from it. These two modules may be taken in consort or independently of one another.

A crucial aspect of the module is to develop close reading skills, so seminars and lectures will combine larger ideas about genre (e.g. ideas of imitation; politics of genre; tragic theory) with detailed explorations of examples.

Reading Genre 2

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

How do texts locate themselves in literary conventions to develop their own expression and meaning? How do other media such as film transform literary genre? How does genre act to shape a text and a reader's understanding of it? How do we identify and understand genre?

These are some of the questions that we shall approach in this module by focussing on three genres: lyric, tragedy and horror. In each instance we shall concentrate on either one or a small number of representative examples, allowing us to widen our understanding of genre while we deepen our acquaintance with key illustrations from it.

A crucial aspect of the module is to develop close reading skills, so seminars and lectures will combine larger ideas about genre (eg ideas of imitation; politics of genre; tragic theory) with detailed explorations of examples.

The Novel

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the complex history of the novel as a form, from the 17th century to the modern period. The aim of the module is to describe the development of different traditions of novel writing, examine innovations to the novel as a form made since the 17th century, place the English novel in the context of the European novel, and introduce you to a range of important discussions about the novel as a genre, its audiences, its cultural functions and its relation to the social world. Novelists discussed will include Aphra Behn, Madame de Lafayette, Daniel Defoe, Johann Goethe, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. At the end of the module, you will be able to  understand and apply the concept of genre in literary analysis; think creatively and critically about the ways in which specific generic conventions have been used in the novels you are reading; and synthesise formal, cultural and historical levels of analysis.

American Literature Since 1890: Part I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module will introduce significant and canonical texts by American writers produced since 1890 and throughout the first part of the twentieth century. By analysing the working of class, gender and race in these texts we will explore many of the social and cultural issues associated with the evolution of American modernity and American modernist aesthetics. We will observe the different ways in which writers tackle or avoid important economic and social questions of the period. We will examine how important socio-economic developments such as the rise of industrialisation and urbanisation, war, consumer culture, the question of women's rights and ideas of national identity shape the stylistic and thematic fabric of these works.

American Literature Since 1890: Part II

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module will introduce significant and canonical texts by American writers produced since 1945. By analysing the working of class, gender and race in these texts we will explore many of the social and cultural issues associated with the American modernity and American post-modernist aesthetics. We will observe the different ways in which writers tackle or avoid important economic and social questions of the period.

Avant-Garde Cinema: Theory, Practice, Criticism

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module offers an alternative account of the history of cinema, focussing on work conceived in opposition to mainstream filmmaking. It concerns itself with how the radical, the marginal, the transgressive, the underground, and the contingent are materialised in film practice, theory, and criticism. We will study the cinema of the avant-gardes of Europe and America, focussing especially on the latter. The module will briefly consider the context of advanced filmmaking practices in Europe of the 1920s, particularly that of Soviet Russia and France, as well as the theorisation of these practices by filmmakers and commentators of the period. Of particular interest will be the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Jean Epstein, and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The module will then focus in greater detail on the avant-garde film movements of post-WW II America and the filmmakers who inherited the ambitions and preoccupations of the earlier European avant-gardes. We will study in detail the work of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Hollis Frampton, tracing carefully the relation between these artists' theoretical writings and their filmmaking practices. Film-theoretical texts will be read as literary artefacts, in and of themselves, and will also be studied in connection to the avant-garde literary practices (Gertrude Stein, T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson) to which they self-consciously respond. The last section of the module will study underground and experimental works by Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Yvonne Rainer, and contemporary filmmakers and video artists, including Peggy Ahwesh and Sadie Benning. In this part of the module we will consider the relation of these practices to the changing status of the work of art, as well as the theorisation of mass culture, gender, and performance.

Creative Writing in the Renaissance

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module introduces you to education and writing in early modern England. Not only will you explore the ways in which students were taught at school and university in this period, but we will attempt to recreate life in the early modern classroom, with its emphasis on oral and written argument and the need for students to be able to learn the principles of imitation so that they could then reproduce the style and methods of the works they studied.

You will explore why early modern writers wrote as they did, and what we can learn from understanding how they produced their works. We will also consider how early modern students learned about the law, philosophy, oratory, and history alongside what we think of as literature.

The module will be assessed through a series of short written pieces which will include imitations of letters, speeches and poems, as well as an essay and an oral assessment in the last seminar in which we will attempt to reproduce a Renaissance oral examination.

Lyric Poetry

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines the development of lyric poetry in English over several centuries and studies its articulation of certain kinds of personal experience which might include such topics as love, friendship, war, travel and death. The module will enable you to: read widely in the anglophone poetic tradition; to recognise and to become familiar with a number of poetic forms, such as sonnet, ode, and sestina; to develop some understanding of poetic rhythm; to situate the development of lyric poetry within geographical and historical parameters; and to produce clear and concise critical and appreciative essays. 

Period of Literature: 1500-1625

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

In this module you will examine literature from the reigns of Henry VIII to James I. The volume, variety and quality of writing produced in this period are astonishing. The 16th century saw the impact of an unprecedented expansion of England's capital city, which produced a thriving environment for professional writing, prompting the birth of commercial theatre in London and a flourishing book trade.

You will consider how literature came to be produced historically, looking at writing in its cultural setting with the help of visual texts such as paintings and architecture. You will address questions of literary history and theory, form and rhetoric within the network of institutions, practices and beliefs that constitute a culture as a whole. The module does not confine itself to major authors, but involves the consideration of appropriate themes and material drawn from various literary genres - drama, poetry and prose.

Topics explored include the rise of the commercial stage; sexualities and the transvestite stage; writing history; popular pamphlet culture; representations of the body; exploration and early colonialism; the sonnet; erotic writing; devotional writing; the city of London and money; religion; gender; death; representations of monarchy; the political stage; revenge tragedy; witchcraft and the birth of science.

Period of Literature: 1625-1750

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module examines the literary production of the period from the autocratic reign of the Stuart king Charles I to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. At its centre lies the regicide of Charles I in January 1649 - an event T. S. Eliot argued still divided British political society 300 years later. Even now it is a matter of some controversy to refer to the period between 1642 and 1649 as a rebellion or as the English Revolution, and between 1649 and 1660 as the Commonwealth or else as the Interregnum. However it is described, the extraordinary 125 years covered by this module have some claim to be the decisive period in the creation of what we think of as modern politics.

It is also a period of astonishing literary creativity. This is true both in terms of the volume, variety and quality of writing produced, and in terms of radical innovations in styles, in readerships, and in media. This module will include the study of a wide range of poetry, prose and play-texts. At the same time, it will involve trying to understand how this writing came to be produced historically. In particular, it will be concerned with the social life of texts, placing literary artifacts within the network of institutions, practices and beliefs that constitute a culture as a whole.

Period of Literature: 1750-1880

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

The module, taught in seminars supported by a weekly lecture series, will address a selection of authors and themes prominent between 1750 and 1880. The actual content will vary from year to year depending on the expertise of those available to teach it in any given year.

Authors to be studied will be selected from but not necessarily confined to: Johnson, Gray, Sterne, Goldsmith, Blake, Lewis, Austen, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, De Quincey, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Ruskin, Dickens, Gaskell, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, W.M. Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

Themes to be considered may includ sentimentalism and sensibility; slavery and empire; Romantic aesthetics and Romantic poetry; theories of the sublime and the imagination; the Gothic; responses to the French Revolution and the oppression of women; images of women; the condition of England question; progress and evolution; art and society; mind and spirit: the inner life; and culture in crisis

Period of Literature: 1860-1945

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

On this module you will study one of the truly momentous and troubling periods of British and world history. Imperialist conflict, the growth of nationalism, war, migration, feminism and the struggle for women's suffrage, the development of consumerism and of new forms of economic organisation, the emergence of anarchism, socialism, communism and fascism, the creation of the mass press, the radio and cinema: these are some of the contextual forces out of which emerged some of the most challenging, demanding, fascinating, rich and bewildering works of literature in English.

You will examine the links between modernity and modern/modernist literature in a range of texts, genres and authors. You will investigate notions of the avant-garde and the experimental in writing, and explore the ways in which literary texts participated in and responded to the revolutionary intellectual changes that marked this period, from Darwinism to psychoanalysis. Some of the topics we will investigate include: the consequences of science and technology (modernisation, urbanisation, sub-urbanisation); definitions and re-definitions of Englishness; the invention of traditions; the critique of modernity; the fate of liberalism; the impact of photography, the mass media and new forms of communication from the telephone to the motor car.

Pulp Culture: American Popular Literature

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Popular literature is often overlooked in favour of what is considered more highbrow literary culture, yet an understanding of the cultural history of a nation necessitates an examination of what was popular as well as what became canonical.

This module enables an examination of a variety of mass-produced popular American literatures from the 18th and 19th centuries through to the 20th, from early magazines and comics, dime novels, Westerns and juvenile or sentimental literature, to 'hardboiled' crime fiction, self-help books and 'middlebrow' bestsellers of the 20th century. You will look at the relationship between 'high' and 'low' fiction, as well as examining how the mode of production affected the literature produced at the time. You will also explore both the writing styles that developed as well as the reception and cultural circulation of texts. Included in this will be a consideration of the way that issues of gender, class and race in America affected the discourses of the popular narratives that we will be looking at and how we can understand the society that they emerged from more fully as a result of looking at them.

Reading Post-Colonial Texts

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module will introduce you to postcolonial studies and, in particular, to some of the ways in which the legacy of colonialism has affected writing and other forms of culture. By the end of the module, you will be familiar with most of the key issues raised in postcolonial discourse, and be able to summarize some of the key critical concepts involved in the field. You will also gain an understanding of the significance of postcolonial discourse as a way of thinking about cultural production, and be able to apply this understanding to the interpretation of some of the texts discussed on the module.

Representation and the Body

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module will explore representations of the body in painting, photography and - in particular - in poetry, from the Renaissance to the modern period. It will focus on the interrelationships between the body and the poetic-text-as-body, the body and the political body, the body and power, the body and violence, the western and the non-western body, the body and disease, the body and gender, the body and the unconscious, the body and social and urban space, and the body and desire.

Topics covered include: the Renaissance body; body and science; the body and the foreign; the migrant body; Victorian poetry and photography; the body and the city; the body and modernism; the body and gender; the body, war, death and remembrance; and the body and fascism. While the focus of the module will be on English and American poetic texts, and European painting, film and photography, the module will have an interdisciplinary range, encouraging discussions about the relationship of the written word to the culture of images, icons and iconography. 

Scenes of Learning: Education in the Novel of Development

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The Bildungsroman (novel of development) often includes scenes of learning and instruction, both formal and informal. You will begin by reading two 19th-century examples in which the theme of education is central, Charlotte Bronte's The Professor (1857) and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1896). You will then assess the ways in which education contributes to the central character's development and consider how it is related to other dimensions of experience, including family relationships, changes in class and social status, sexual and erotic life, and the search for personal, intellectual and creative autonomy. Pursuing these themes into the 20th century, and attending especially to how education forms the writerly sensibility, we then read two related Irish novels, James Joyce's A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and John McGahern's The Dark (1966).

These texts delineate collective as well as individual meanings of education. They raise questions about its intrinsic ends and values, its role in the reproduction of economic and social relations, and its uses - and abuses - in the transmission or subversion of dominant ideas and ideologies. Centrally important in Jude the Obscure, these larger questions are also to the fore in the two most recent novels we study, both set in late 19th-century Britain: Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man (1975) and Ali Smith's Like (1997).

Seminar work will centre on close reading and analysis of these novels, but the module will also stimulate general reflection on the institutions and meanings of education in diverse historical and social contexts. You will be expected to reflect on your own engagement in cultural and literary education. Recommended readings will include additional novels as well as critical works on education, social mobility and the novel of development. Individual guidance will be given in preparing for the assessed essay with which the module concludes, which may focus in depth on the work of one or two of the writers studied or may pursue broader thematic questions.

Sense and Sexuality: Women and Writing in the Eighteenth Century

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the representation of women and the construction of female sexuality and feeling in a wide range of 18th-century writing. Addressing fictional and non-fictional writing by both women and men in novels, medical works, advice books for women and erotic literature, the module explores contemporary debates about the place of women in society, (including personal conduct), and the place of sexuality (both socially-sanctioned and otherwise). A central concern will be attitudes to female feeling, from sexual passion to sensibility, and the ways in which feeling of various kinds enables conformity to, or critical interrogation of, a larger social and cultural order. Attention will also be paid to the relationship between bodies and passion, the social disciplining of feeling, and the relationship between emotion and gender. Your focus on literary works will be supplemented with a range of additional sources that will enable you to contextualise the novels and poems and link them into contemporary debates and attitudes.

 

Senses of the Self

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The module takes as its starting point a common assumption that one of the roots of modern identity lies in a reconfiguration of ideas concerning subjectivity and the self in the 16th and 17th centuries. This assumption has aroused a great deal of debate in recent years. The whole area of study has been renewed and transformed by the application of new theoretical approaches (from feminism, psychoanalysis, or textuality) to the study of the past and the interpenetration of the past in the present.

During the module you will study a broad range of texts (from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the 14th century to Swift's Gulliver's Travels in the 18th), in order to investigate changes in the construction of personal and sexual identity through history. The module contains both canonical and non-canonical texts, including some European authors studied in translation. Issues covered will range from philosophy to pornography, mythology to autobiography, and medicine to travel literature.

Staging the Renaissance: Shakespeare

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module considers a range of Shakespeare's plays (comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies and romances) from different stages of his career, analysing the playwright's stagecraft, his use of language, and his reworking of traditional forms for the
commercial stage. Although you will explore some recent adaptations for stage and screen, you wil focus particularly on the plays as produced in their original historical and cultural contexts.

The module will familiarise you with Renaissance drama's negotiation of contested social and political issues at the turn of the 17th century. You will investigate the social processes of the theatre - notably the playhouses used by Shakespeare's company (the Theatre, the Globe and Blackfriars) - and focus on the interplay of Shakespearean texts and their performance in the production of meaning.

The Art of Short Fiction

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

On this module you will explore how 'short fiction' has developed historically, and how it is now manifested and defined. You will analyse a wide range of forms that may include fable, folk tale, the graphic novel, sudden fiction, and of module the short story. Though the module is concentrated on the analysis and production of works of short fiction, it also introduces you to a more complicated and nuanced understanding of fiction and theory.

The module also contains a creative writing component. You will be encouraged to respond to texts each week by writing your own fictions and reflecting on them in a logbook. Up to half of the module will be given over to creative writing workshops run by the tutor, with materials and creative writing exercises provided by the tutor and discussions of writing practice. An anthology of students' creative writing is published each year as an outcome of this module.

The Arts and Literature of Satire

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module takes you through some of the major developments from the birth of literary satire in the works of Horace and Juvenal, to the survival of satire in literature and the visual arts. You will become familiar with some of the basic concepts central to the workings of satire: including parody, burlesque, mimicry, travesty, comedy and humour, and laughter. The module will also maintain a focus upon the interaction of visual and verbal satire. Some of the later seminars are consequently devoted to a consideration of the operations of semiotics, symbolism and visual narrative. The major figures of 18th- and 19th-century literary satire (Dryden, Pope, Swift, Hone, Byron) will consequently be studied alongside the giants of print satire (Hogarth, Gillray and Cruikshank). The emphasis throughout is interdisciplinary and will enable you to develop basic skills in the areas of aesthetics and cultural history, as well as strategies for discussing the operations of genre and narrative in the context of satire.

The Languages of Racisms in Literature and Art

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The module is interdisciplinary and essentially vocational, in that you should emerge believing that you are called upon to continue the work of thinking about the cultural operations of racism. A wide variety of texts is studied ranging from classical history and drama, through Renaissance travel literature, to 19th and 20th century novels, poems, pamphlets and trial literature. There is also a strong emphasis on the examination of visual materials, whether satiric prints, academic oil paintings, book illustrations, or graphic novels and film. You are consequently trained in the arts of close reading not only printed texts but the semiotics of racism within high and low art.

You will study works by the following authors and artists: Juvenal, Daniel Defoe, Bartholomeo de las Casas; Edmund Burke; Alfred Tennyson; Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin; Adolf Hitler; Primo Levi; Art Spiegelman; Francisco Goya, James Gillray; Rudyard Kipling, Les Murray, Tony Harrison, Luis Bunuel, Thomas Dixon Junior, W. D. Griffiths, bell hooks, Spike Lee, Gillo Pontecorvo.

The Twentieth Century Novel and the 'Supernatural'

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

On this module you will explore a selection of novels written in the 20th century that engage with the supernatural as a device of the imagination. You will explore the different metaphysical outlooks and diverging genres adopted by a variety of authors with diverse world views. You will begin by looking at the Christian orthodoxy of Chesterton and Williams and move through the more 'psychic' ambiguities of Powys and Ackroyd. On the way you will take in the Jungian framework of LeGuinn and consider the work of Waugh, James and Golding.

Tragedy

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The Oxford English Dictionary defines tragedy as: 'A play or other literary work of a serious or sorrowful character, with a fatal or disastrous conclusion'. This module explores the nature of dramatic tragedy from the Greeks to the present. Rather than taking a chronological approach, you will consider tragedy from perspectives of convention, themes and theoretical preoccupations, as well as address the relation between tragic text and performance.

Probably the most contested of literary genres - with a philosophical tradition that has constantly sought to classify eactly what tragedy is - tragedy is also a form that playwrights constantly redefine. Exploring classic dramatists such as Sophocles, Ibsen, O'Neill and Beckett, and writers about tragedy such as Aristotle and Nietzsche, this module addresses some of the most recent contributions to tragedy by Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill and Marina Carr.

Translating Cultures

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module addresses literary and linguistic perspectives on translation, both between languages and between media. The module is organised into three 'clusters', each co-taught by a specialist in literature and a specialist in linguistics.

The first cluster has as its theme 'The Bible: what do we do with God's verbum?' and takes a historical-sociolinguistic perspective on the emergence of the first authorised and unauthorised versions of the Bible in English. More specifically, the discussion focuses on the ideologies of English language that were developing in the early modern period and their reflection in the secular discourse. This cluster addresses problems of translation and cultural difference by looking at some of the problems of translating Hebrew terms for 'God', 'world' and 'time' into the Greek, Latin, English, German, Chinese and Japanese, and also explores the difficulties encountered by the Victorian missionary Bishop Colenso in South Africa when he was involved in preparing a translation of the Bible.

The second cluster continues the African theme by exploring a range of texts in African Englishes, including creoles. Texts include the Bible in Cameroon Pidgin English (Book of John), Thomas Decker's (1964) Krio translation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and either Gabriel Okara's (1970) The Voice (a text written in English with Ijaw syntax) or Ken Saro-Wiwa's (1994) Sozaboy ('soldier-boy'), a Nigerian pidgin novel about the Biafran War. This cluster focuses on the cultural aspects of translation and explores the effects of African language syntax on 'English' texts.

The third cluster addresses the theme of adaptation from one medium and/or language to another, and explores the issues that arise in the process of transmigration from the written page to the screen. Following a discussion of the relation between the two different semiotic systems of film and language, this cluster consider the metamorphosis that language undergoes when a text reappears in another context and communicative situation. Issues of translation between different languages will also be part of the discussion with a consideration of cross-cultural pragmatic issues that they involve. Texts may include McEwan's Enduring Love and The Cement Garden, Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, Pasolini's Decameron, Visconti's The Earth Trembles, Lara Croft (from video game to the big screen), and Godard's La Mepris.

Travel and Transgression

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

On this module you will explore the ways in which travel is marked as a process of crossing and contesting boundaries - geographical, cultural, moral and textual - in literature from the 20th century to the present.

This reading of travel is broad and inclusive, covering texts that engage with the colonial encounter, postcolonial migration, internationalism, exoticism and exile. Fiction, memoir and travel writing constitute the core texts, and you will pay specific attention to narrative positioning and the construction of cultural difference in evaluating the ways in which cultural and moral boundaries are constructed and negotiated.

Writing and the Great War

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module explores a variety of creative responses to World War I, and examines the issues that emerge from a comparison of the different kinds of literary strategies that authors have used to explore, order and understand their experience of the War.

The module follows broadly historical lines, enabling you to survey the general development of writing about the War from 1914 to the present day. This approach also allows you to concentrate on those chronological periods when literary treatments of the experience of the War were at their most prevalent - in particular, the war years themselves and also the late 1920s, when the so-called 'War Books Controversy' was at its height. You will also consider the question of witness, memory, remembrance and (through the work of Pat Barker) the still-active presence of World War I in contemporary British culture and writing. Key authors - including Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves - are looked at in detail, enabling you to reflect on their developing responses to the War, and giving you the opportunity to examine individual artists' careers in detail. Throughout, the emphasis is on how authors sought - and still seek - to convey the actuality of the war experience, whether as combatants, civilians or those brought up with the legacy of "the War to end all Wars". You will give attention to those writing on the home front who were opposed to the War and its effects on civilian society.

English Research Colloquium

0 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 3

British Writing: 1945-1970

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module will examine the work of some of the major British novelists and poets of the interwar period as they responded after 1945 to the events of the Second World War from the mass bombing of European cities to the Holocaust - and to the wide-ranging cultural, political, theological and metaphysical questionings these events inevitability inspired. It will also examine the work of some of the major novelists and poets who began their careers in the period and whose body of work constitutes some of the most significant, rewarding and demanding achievements in the literature of the contemporary period. While exploring literary responses to the immense transformations of the period - from the establishment of the welfare state, increased social mobility, the birth of television and a new kind of consumer society to the ending of the British empire - the module will trace the relationships between writing and the visual arts and developments in architecture and in music in the period. We will read the following authors on the module: T.S.Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, W.H.Auden, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Anthony Powell, Muriel Spark, Philip Larkin, William Golding, Geoffrey Hill, Iris Murdoch, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Culture and Pornography - Literature, Art, Power and Sexual Politics

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

On this module you will consider the development of pornographic arts and literatures, from the time of their evolution in Egyptian and Roman cultures to their current manifestations in mainstream novels and films. Central themes include; the connections between pornographic modes of expression and the development of aesthetics; the relation of the pornographic to the erotic, processes of enslavement and imperial expansion from the 'middle passage' to Abu Ghraib, and the violent exploitation of the disempowered, be they women, children or animals; homosexuality; obscenity.

Authors and key texts studied include: Catullus, Pietro Aretino, the Earl of Rochester; Marquis de Sade (120 Days of Sodom); John Cleland (Fanny Hill); William Hogarth, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Felicien Rops, Alfred Kubin, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Octave Mirbeau; James Joyce (Ulysses); D. H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover); Pasolini (Salo); Vladimir Nabokov, (Lolita); Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dail; Robert Crumb; Guido Crepax; Michael Powell (Peeping Tom); and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

Documentary America: Non-Fiction Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

The study of American fiction often precludes an examination of some of the best writing and forms of self-representation that America has produced: political and photo-essays, social science publications, journalism, reportage, and documentary films. On this module you examine the development of iconic non-fictional literature and other forms of visual representation (such as film and photography) from the 19th and 20th centuries.

You will look at the style, content and circulation of non-fictional forms and examine their relationship within wider discourses of cultural, social and political representation in America. You will also consider the ways that these forms intersect with the development of modernist and postmodernist literature in the US more broadly. For this module you will have to read from a broad selection of materials that do not necessarily fit into conventional literary genres, and you will be watching a number of realist and neo-realist American documentaries. You will analyse why writers and artists have chosen to represent events in the way that they do and the wider cultural impact of those forms.

Islam, Literature and the 'West'

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

In both domestic and international contemporary politics, few issues are more urgent than the widely perceived clash between the ideologies of western European capitalism and Islamic radicalism. This module offers you the opportunity to examine in detail the shifting terms in which the encounter between a Christian west and an Islamic east has been conducted in predominantly English literatures, from the rhetoric of the early crusades to the present day. Covering a broad range of texts and genres, and including some journalism and film, emphasis will be placed upon: concepts of holy war; Islam on the early modern English stage; the emerging study of the ‘orient’ in the 17th century and the first English Qur’an; Enlightenment fantasies of the East and Muhammad; the romantics and the East; the Rushdie affair; and more recent developments of this encounter both before and after  11 September 2001.

 

 

Language, Truth and Literature

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Drawing on resources from analytical philosophy, continental philosophy and literary theory as well as engaging with particular fictional and poetic works, this module offers a critical investigation into some of the most important issues in the philosophical treatment of literature, narrative and fiction. You consider topics such as: metaphor and metaphorical meaning; the relation between fiction and truth; the logical status of fiction; and intentionality and interpretation. You explore questions such as: what does it tell us about language that something like literature is possible? Is there a type of understanding proper to the understanding of a poem? Why is philosophy troubled by fiction and fictionality?

Sexual Difference: Women and Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module gives you the opportunity to study in detail the many questions relating to women writers and literary history that emerge in other areas of the English literature degree. You will address the interrelation of sexuality and literature, pursuing issues raised at the end of the Approaches to English module. During the module you will read major works by women writers from the mid-19th century to the present day, though with a special emphasis on 20th century writing. Important theoretical works - including those by Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, and others - are studied alongside literary texts, and a special emphasis is placed on tracing the ways these different kinds of writings enter into dialogue with each other. Key themes include feminism and psychoanalysis, the body, sexual difference, and sexuality and representation.

Special Author: Alfred Hitchcock

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module will examine the work of one of the most prolific and certainly the most prolifically written-about director in the history of cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, a director whose career spans the history of cinema in the twentieth century, and whose influence can be traced not only in other filmmaking practices, but also in literature, the visual arts, and cultural theory. "Hitchcockian" is a designation that is invoked with as much frequency as "Shakespearean" or "Jamesian"; the term suggests not only the style of a specific body of work, but also of the work it has influenced, in many media. Hitchcock has proved to be not only the most durably engrossing of filmmakers, but also the one through whose work successive waves of critical and theoretical thinking have articulated themselves. Hitchcock and his work are central not only to how we understand the history of cinema, but also the (overlapping and intertwined) histories of authorship and genre, writing, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Hitchcock is, thus, one of the great organising figures for the intellectual and aesthetic production of the twentieth century: it would be hard to think about the century without him. The module will offer you not only the chance to study, broadly and deeply, the work of one of the twentieth century's central authorial figures, but it will also allow you to deepen and complicate your interests in various critical and theoretical paradigms and methods. The module will move chronologically across Hitchcock's career, but will also be organised conceptually around a sequence of theoretical problems. The module will conclude by looking beyond Hitchcock's work to the problem of the 'Hitchcockian'.

Special Author: Christopher Marlowe

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Variously demonised and celebrated as an atheist, sodomite, spy, poetic innovator and dramatic phenomenon, ­ and violently killed at the age of 29, ­ Christopher Marlowe and his work still have the power in the twenty first century to shock and surprise .

This module offers the opportunity to explore Marlowe's extraordinary poetry and drama, from his remarkable debut on the professional stage with Tamburlaine, through his invention of the English history play with Edward II, to his development of Ovidian narrative verse and the lyric in English (and their erotic possibilities).

You will explore the career of this poet and playwright - this "most enigmatic genius of the English literary Renaissance" - paying particular attention to the contexts, content and form of his work.

Special Author: Dickens

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module will explore a range of Dickens's work from his early writing to his final uncompleted novel, and will include discussion of his journalism and short stories as well as the well-known novels. We will look at the development of his career as the most successful and popular novelist of his generation, who used his writing to investigate and actively participate in a wide range of contemporary issues and debates about society and the self between the 1830s and 1870. These include the nature of modern society - particularly the city - and the relationships between social classes and between the underworld and dominant forms of power; the family as both a social institution and a psychological space; the representation of childhood and femininity; notions of identity, and the relationship between 'normal' and 'abnormal', conscious and unconscious mental states.

We will explore Dickens use and transformation of particular genres and conventions - fairly tales, ghost stories, gothic fiction, detective fiction and grotesque and documentary realism - discussing how his shifting narrative forms and methods relate to the social and psychological themes of his work.

Special Author: Hardy

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module explores the range of Hardy's work – novels, short fiction, poetry, plays and essays – in the light of late 19th-century culture and the emergence of modernism. You will explore topics such as Hardy's position as a writer and his shifting position in relation to forms of readership and literary production; his development of narrative and concepts of history and memory; his use of visual culture; the representation of social and economic change and the emergence of heritage; his representation of class, sexual difference and social mobility; his use of evolutionary theory and concepts of degeneration; and his position as a poet in the early 20th century.

Special Author: Jane Austen

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module approaches Austen's novels from three distinct perspectives. First, it contextualises them in terms of the 18th-century literature that Austen read, and frequently alludes to. (Likely authors include Cowper, Burney, Edgeworth and Radcliffe.) In addition, the module considers the impact of Austen's fiction on subsequent readers, evident most powerfully in the phenomenon of the Janeites. This module uses literary critical and popular cultural versions of Austen to reflect both on the evolution of Austen's canonical status, and on the part that fantasies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class have played in her reception. Finally, since Austen's novels have provided fodder for innumerable film versions, the module will examine the 'Austen' constructed for us by a selection of recent film and TV adaptations. Although Austen's fiction will be at the heart of the module, you will be expected to read a significant body of additional literature.

Special Author: John Ashbery

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Starting with American poet John Ashbery's first book 'Some Trees' and working our way through Ashbery's major experiments in form ('The Tennis Court Oath', collaborative books including 'The Vermont Notebook' and 'A Nest Of Ninnies', and his epic 'Flow Chart'), participants in this module will learn not just a great deal about Ashbery's poetry, but about the post-war American avant-garde more generally speaking. Our understanding of Ashbery's work will be informed by reading into his central role in Abstract Expressionism (as art critic for 'Art News', as collaborator with relevant artists, and as a writer who produced a number of important poetic ekphrases); his friendship and collaborations with Beat Generation figures; his exchanges with Pop Art and the Warhol scene; his engagement with experimental cinema practitioners; and, more recently, his emergence as an important voice in queer writing.

Along the way, module participants will delight in Ashbery's complex blend of dismodules that embrace the narrative, the "personal," the metaphysical, and even mystical. We will focus lovingly on individual lines and stanzas of Ashbery's poetry. We will make measured assessments of the poet's work as generally brilliant if at times problematic. We will refuse (for the most part) to adhere to any one of the 'party lines' we associate with Ashbery criticism, even as we learn from them. By the end of the module, we will understand the historical and literary contexts of Ashbery's work, as we will be motivated to return to his poetry anew, curious, and alert.

Special Author: Salman Rushdie

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Rushdie is a complex and challenging writer whose work not only intersects with, but actively influences and informs, a range of cultural and literary debates. Indeed, because his novels, stories and essays have consistently challenged the boundaries of culture, they have tended to generate polarised and often partisan critical responses. On this module, you will venture into the highly contested field of Rushdie criticism by evaluating his key literary texts using a variety of reading strategies and theoretical methodologies. For example, you will explore postmodernist debates on the construction of history and identity as well as postcolonial concerns with race, hybridity and political power. You will address core issues such as intertextuality, cinematic montage and narrative authority. And you will engage with wider cultural concerns relating to representation, performativity and documentation. These diverse critical perspectives will provide you with a sound knowledge of the social, cultural and political influences informing Rushdie’s work, and give you the analytical tools to develop your own lines of enquiry.

Special Author: Samuel Beckett

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Beckett's work lies in a bleak but utopian space between art and popular culture, at the heart of debates about modernist and postmodernist writing. The module reads Beckett's fictions and plays, and his work for theatre, radio, television and film in detail, and as a critique of approaches from Marx to the Marx Brothers.

Special Author: Virginia Woolf

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module concentrates on the work of one of the best-known and most widely-read women writers of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf. Most students will already have encountered Woolf's work in your Year 2 modules; it is also very likely that you will come to the module with some knowledge of Woolf's life and that of her friends and family. This module will deepen your knowledge and understanding of Woolf's work, both in its historical context and in terms of the kind of conceptual and theoretical questions that her work raises. The module is designed to challenge what you think you already know about Woolf, and the kinds of preconceptions that readers often bring to Woolf and her work, and whether those are positive or negative. You think you may know who Virginia Woolf was, or what she wrote, but what about Virginia Stephen? What would happen if you stopped reading Woolf as a modernist and a woman writer? What other conceptual or historical frames could illuminate her work in new ways? What does Woolf have to do with the development of cinema, or the history of photography and the visual arts?

These are some of the questions that the module will address and encourage you to pursue through independent study. At the end of the module, you will: have read most of Woolf's novels and sampled some of her writing in other genres; have familiarised yourself with the history of the reception of that work; have learnt to challenge your own preconceptions about her work and its historical and conceptual contexts; and have learnt how to devise, structure, pursue and realise an independent research project, following detailed advice from your module tutor.

The Literatures of Africa

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module will sample the literary and intellectual work of a range of African authors.  Current debates about African identity, postcolonialism, homosexuality, the 'Black Atlantic' and African cultural history are studied alongside the primary texts, and emphasis is placed on the different political and cultural contexts of the material. We look at the ways in which the selected authors construct a locale in their texts to explore geographical and cultural difference, as well as questions of sexual, economic and political power. Other topics to be studied include nationalism and cultural identity; writing the body; oral cultures and art forms; cultural flows; representations of migration, displacement and diaspora; and the literature of post-Apartheid South Africa. Canonical novels from Africa, such as Ngugi wa Thiongo's The River Between and Bessie Head's A Question of Power are studied alongside poems and novels by new African writers and black British writers. Taken together, the authors on this module reveal the multiple, dynamic languages and styles of modern African writers.

The Uncanny

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

The uncanny is difficult to define: it is mysterious, eerie, at once strange and familiar. It offers especially productive possibilities for exploring issues of identity and liminality, boundaries and interdisciplinarity. This module will engage with the uncanny across a wide range of texts and contexts, from literature (novels, short stories, drama and poetry) to film. Discussion focuses on a number of linked topics, including repetition, doubles, strange coincidences, animism, live burial, telepathy, death and laughter. The module aims to develop your engagement with the notion of the uncanny across a broad range of texts; to develop your reading and critical analysis skills; and to enhance your capacity for critical reflection on your experience of the familiar and the strange, the ordinary and the extra-ordinary.

Thinking with Images: Contemporary Film/Contemporary Theory

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Film has become a central topic of concern for much recent philosophy and theory. While this work is focused on and speaks through moving images, it has been taken up by and influenced work in other disciplines and contexts, beyond those of film studies and philosophy. This module will examine this rapidly growing field by pairing the close study of recent theoretical philosophical texts on film (and other media) with the close study of a range of contemporary filmmaking practices. You will have the opportunity, therefore, to engage work on the cutting edge of both contemporary thought and contemporary filmmaking. You do not need to have prior experience in studying cinema.

Twenty-First Century Literature

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module asks how far we are able to identify a new phase in the history of literary production, emerging in the new century. The module begins with an account of a range of literary and critical movements that mark the close of the twentieth century. This account suggests how the languages of late capitalism, globalisation, and postmodernism might collectively register a fin de millennial mood. From this account of late cultural forms, the module then goes on to ask how new political and cultural formations emerging over the last decade or so are reshaping our sense of literary possibility. With changes in the contexts offered by global culture, and with the apparent waning of postmodernism as a cultural dominant, the relationship between literature, politics and history is currently in a state of rapid transition. The module will follow the work of a number of emerging writers, film makers and visual artists, to ask if we can start to sketch the outlines of a twenty-first century literary culture. The module will draw both on literary and visual texts, and on cultural theory.

Utopias and Dystopias

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module explores the production of utopian and dystopian fictions from the sixteenth century (Thomas More's publication in 1516 of Utopia) to the present day. It examines the production of utopian images and thought in a number of specific cultural and historical contexts. These include the sixteenth century context in which More originally developed the concept of utopia; the production in the eighteenth century of utopian and dystopian responses to the enlightenment (particularly those of Swift and Voltaire); the nineteenth century utopian tradition in the US (Hawthorne, Thoreau); the explosion of utopian thinking at the end of the nineteenth century (with writers such as Bellamy, Wells and Morris); the relationship between modernism and utopia (particularly in relation to Woolf and Kafka); the growth of dystopian responses to modernity in the nineteen thirties and forties (Orwell, Huxley); the importance of utopian thinking in relation to feminism, from Sarah Scott to Wollstonecraft to Shelley to Atwood; and the shifting role of utopian and dystopian thinking in marshalling the political possibilities of literature from the sixties to the present day (from Beckett to Cormac McCarthy).

Throughout this wide ranging module, we will focus closely on a number of central questions. How far is it possible for literary works to imagine a better or a perfect world? How far is it possible for such imaginings to effect actual social change? Are utopian fantasies politically regressive, an opiate to distract us from material social inequality? What is the role of dystopian thinking? Does dystopian fiction contradict utopian thought forms, or can dystopian writing produce utopian possibilities? What is the relationship between utopian thinking and hope? Is there a theological dimension to utopian thought? What is the relation between science and utopia? In addressing these questions, the module will offer a means of thinking broadly but rigorously about the role of literature in transforming social conditions, and making the world a better place.

A Sociology of 21st Century Britain

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

A Sociology of 21st Century Britain will use Britain today as an empirical base for exploring wider sociological perspectives and the insights that social science can bring into key problems and debates about contemporary life. During the module you will explore the relationship between empirical research and theory using examples from recent sociological work, drawing from studies no older than 5 years, to look at a range of issues in 21st century Britain, including work and employment, family, sport, intimacy, life online, nationalism, death and wealth. The module is designed to demonstrate the capacity of sociology to explore the social world in interesting, challenging and critical ways, but will be relevant to anyone who wishes to learn more about contemporary Britain, from the perspective of insider or outsider.

Accounting and Finance for Non-Specialists

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module is designed as an introduction to Accounting and Finance for non-major students. The module introduces Accounting and Financial Management topics gradually, examining basic principles and underlying concepts before demonstrating how accounting statements and financial information can be used to improve business decision-making. This module is also designed for entrepreneurs without a qualification in Accounting and Finance.

Business and Management students are not eligible to take this module.

Advertising

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The module engages with the historical development of advertising and opens up a critical understanding of its contemporary place within the media (and its economies), culture and society. In the 21st century advertising has been transformed by the rise of branding, the maturing of the internet and the emergence of new media forms like social media. Traditional advertising forms and the funding model for media which advertising has provided are now under threat. This module will introduce students to current thinking about advertising and demonstrate various approaches to the analysis of its many forms.

Analysing Film

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module draws upon both 20th century and contemporary film texts to explore the diverse uses to which film-makers have put such key techniques of cinematic expression as narrative, cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, sound, and special effects. We consider not simply how such techniques are accomplished (i.e. the creative choices available to filmmakers) but also the potential they have for generating meaning and pleasure when combined together to produce filmic texts. The module also examines linkages between technological change and film aesthetics.

Applied Psychology

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module provides students with an insight into five areas of professional Applied Psychology. These are Clinical Psychology, Health Psychology, Educational Psychology, Forensic Psychology & Occupational Psychology. Students will learn some of the core psychological knowledge that underpins these applied areas, will cover some detailed examples of the issues that professional applied psychologists deal with, and will learn about some of the research and theories that support these applied areas.

Arabic Ab initio A

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This stage 1 module is an introduction to the foreign language for students with little or no prior knowledge of the target language (TL). The module aims to:
- enable you to understand basic information and to communicate effectively in the TL, in everyday situations at an elementary level
- provide opportunities across a variety of general topics for practice of understanding and communication in the TL using the four language skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing, at an elementary level
- introduce fundamental elements of the TL language structures, vocabulary, syntax and pronunciation, and provide a solid foundation for progression in the TL
- introduce the background culture of the TL through a variety of contextualised activities and materials, in a range of media, e.g. text; audio; audio-visual; digital.

Successful completion of the module is equivalent to level A1 (Basic User) of the Common European Framework of Reference for languages.

Arabic Ab initio B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This stage 2 module is a post-beginner module for students with basic prior knowledge of the target language (TL). Building on existing levels of proficiency at level A1 (Basic User) of the Common European Framework of Reference [CEFR] the course aims to:
- enable you to understand basic information and to communicate effectively in the TL in everyday situations, at a simple level
- provide opportunities across a variety of general topics for practice of understanding and communication in the TL using the four language skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing, at a basic level
- introduce fundamental elements of the TL language structures, vocabulary, syntax and pronunciation, and continue to provide a solid foundation for progression in the TL
- present the background culture of the TL through a variety of contextualised activities and materials, in a range of media, e.g. text; audio; audio-visual; digital.

Successful completion of the module is at least equivalent to level A2 (Basic User) of the CEFR for languages.

Art and Artists

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Art and Artists is a twelve-week level-one module taught in the Spring term. It deals with one of the central issues of the study of the subject: how did 'great artists' gain their reputation both during their lifetime and subsequently? Some artists' reputations have not been constant whilst others have been admired for very different reasons at different times. This lecture series looks at a variety of cases presenting different 'histories' of the artist across a time-span largely from the early-modern period to the present day, and considers particular sets of issues relating to the construction of the idea of the artist: the role of biography and autobiography; the creation of a canon of 'great artists'; the relation of artists' reputations to the rise of the academy; artists' reputations as created through text, film or other media; the role of self-promotion. The module may cover painters, printmakers, sculptors as well as artists whose achievements were in the applied arts. It follows on from Communicating Art I, but may be taken as a free-standing module.

British Political History

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module provides an overview of the major developments in British political history since 1900, focusing mainly (but not exclusively) on the post-war period. Thus, it focuses on the major challenges domestic and international which have confronted political elites and masses during the period. It provides a critical understanding of some of the major debates between and within the UK's major political parties, and introduces some of the academic arguments generated by them. Politicians, and indeed political scientists, often make use of particular versions of history in order to persuade people that what they are offering is either tried and trusted or, on the other hand, new and improved. Pundits are also fond of making casual allusions to political events of the past in order to illustrate or support their arguments about the present often based on little more than second-hand knowledge and outdated received wisdom. This module provides a firm foundation of knowledge on which to build the more advanced understanding promoted by more advanced modules. And, by subjecting to critical analysis what is often taken for granted, it encourages a degree of healthy scepticism towards any references to politics in the past made in both public and academic discourse.

Chinese Ab initio A

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This is a module for complete or near beginners, introducing you to basic skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening. A thorough grounding in grammatical functions will be undertaken. Elements of the culture and society of China will be introduced within the framework of the language module.

Chinese Ab initio B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module builds on the basic grammatical structures taught in Foundation Chinese 1A to improve grammatical accuracy, oral and written fluency, lexis, and listening and reading comprehension in a variety of everyday situations. You will gain an insight into the culture and society of China appropriate to the framework of your language studies and, wherever possible, through authentic materials.

 

Communicating Art I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Communicating Art I is a twelve-week level-one course taught in the Autumn term. It deals with one of the central issues of the study of the subject: how did 'great artists' gain their reputation both during their lifetime and subsequently? Some artists' reputations have not been constant whilst others have been admired for very different reasons at different times. This lecture series looks at a variety of cases presenting different 'histories' of the artist across a time-span from the ancient world to the Renaissance, and focussing on a particular set of issues surrounding the conceptualization of the artist and artistic creativity in the classical, Byzantine and/or mediaeval periods; the issue of anonymity; the artist versus the craftsman; and related issues of historiography. The course may cover painters, printmakers, sculptors as well as artists whose achievements were in the applied arts. It complements, but is not a pre-requisite for, Communicating Art II.

English for Academic Purposes (Intermediate)

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The English for Academic Purposes (Intermediate) course offers training in the four skills and in study skills which are needed for academic purposes at intermediate level (CEF B2). The skills of reading and writing cover extended reading and writing skills required in academic essays, reports and assignments, in conjunction with suitable study skills and academic conventions. These skills include:
Accuracy: grammar, spelling, punctuation and style
Planning and organisation of assignments: sections and sub-sections, paragraphs
Academic conventions: citing, quoting, bibliography
Writing functions: description, definition, exemplification, classification, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, generalisation and qualification, argument
Reading and note-taking strategies: skimming, scanning, dealing with reading lists, intensive reading, note-taking, summarising and paraphrasing
Plagiarism & critical thinking
Academic resources for research and the critical evaluation of sources

The skills of speaking and listening cover training in the listening and speaking skills required to understand lectures and to contribute to seminars and tutorials at intermediate level. The module covers:
The transactional exchange of information
Clarity of expression
Planning, structuring and delivering a presentation
The interactional nature of seminar communication
Functional language, such as expressing opinions, turn-taking, agreeing and disagreeing
How lectures are structured and accompanying signpost language/discourse markers
Note-taking practice
Prediction, summarising and filtering of spoken information
Supporting claims made in seminars/presentations with valid academic evidence.

English For Academic Purposes (Post Intermediate)

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The English for Academic Purposes (post-Intermediate) module offers training in the four skills and in study skills which are needed for academic purposes at post-intermediate level (CEF C1). The skills of reading and writing cover extended reading and writing skills required in academic essays, reports and assignments, in conjunction with suitable study skills and academic conventions. These skills include:
Accuracy: grammar, spelling, punctuation and style
Planning and organisation of assignments: sections and sub-sections, paragraphs
Academic conventions: citing, quoting, bibliography
Writing functions: description, definition, exemplification, classification, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, generalisation and qualification, argument
Reading and note-taking strategies: skimming, scanning, dealing with reading lists, intensive reading, note-taking, summarising and paraphrasing
Plagiarism & critical thinking
Academic resources for research and the critical evaluation of sources

The skills of speaking and listening cover training in the listening and speaking skills required to understand lectures and to contribute to seminars and tutorials at post intermediate level. The module covers:
The transactional exchange of information
Clarity of expression
Planning, structuring and delivering a presentation
The interactional nature of seminar communication
Functional language, such as expressing opinions, turn-taking, agreeing and disagreeing
How lectures are structured and accompanying signpost language/discourse markers
Note-taking practice
Prediction, summarising and filtering of spoken information
Supporting claims made in seminars/presentations with valid academic evidence.

English Language Teaching 1A

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module will provide students with an introduction to the social, political, linguistic and pedagogic issues involved in the teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages and the principles and practice of a range of methods and approaches.

English Language Teaching 1B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module will focus primarily on supervised lesson planning and teaching practice. A small number of plenary sessions will further address the evaluation and selection of teaching materials and the principles of lesson planning as well as generally exploring issues arising out of the teaching practice classes. You will be invited to reflect on and evaluate their own classroom practice and that of their peers.

Ethnographic Film

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This course introduces students to key themes in anthropology through ethnographic film. Central concerns of social and cultural anthropology are covered, including concepts of culture and society, sameness and difference, representation, fieldwork and ethnography. A selection of films is used to introduce students to different regional concerns as well as to central theoretical debates in the discipline. Issues of representation are addressed by comparing ethnographic writing with visual material.

Existentialism

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Is (human) existence necessarily finite? What does it mean to claim that existence precedes essence? Is there a tenable and irreducible conception of freedom? Is existentialism best thought of as a version of humanism? Although most philosophers commonly associated with "existentialism" would have neither acccepted nor recognised the term, it remains a useful way of gathering together a group of influential thinkers and themes. The module will critically engage with thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sarte, de Beauvoir, Camus, Arendt and Murdoch. It will examine themes such as human freedom, the relation between faith and reason and the absurd. It will trace the development of existential ideas in philosophical, religious, poetic and fictinal works, asking why this movement in particular seems to have led to such a rich intermingling of philosophy and literature. It will conclude by considering some of the political and ethical consequences of existentialism.

French Ab initio A

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This is a module for complete or near beginners, introducing you to basic skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening. A thorough grounding in grammatical functions will be undertaken. Elements of the culture and society of the France will be introduced within the framework of the language module.

French Ab initio B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module builds on the basic grammatical structures taught in Foundation French 1A  to improve grammatical accuracy, oral and written fluency, lexis, and listening and reading comprehension in a variety of everyday situations. You will gain an insight into the culture and society of France within the framework of your language studies and, wherever possible, through authentic materials.

 

French Intermediate A Year 1

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This stage 3 module is for students with some basic knowledge and experience of the target language (TL). Building on existing levels of proficiency at level A2 (Basic User) of the Common European Framework of Reference [CEFR] the module aims to:
- enable you to understand key information and to communicate effectively in the TL, sometimes spontaneously, in less routine situations, at a standard level
- provide opportunities, across a variety of topics, for practice of understanding and communication in the TL using the four language skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing, at a standard level
- consolidate and develop the range of key elements of TL language structures, vocabulary, syntax and pronunciation, to allow progression in the TL
- present the background culture and society of the TL through a variety of contextualised activities and materials, in a range of media, e.g. text; audio; audio-visual; digital.

Successful completion of the module is equivalent to level A2-B1 (Basic-Independent User) of the CEFR for languages.

French Intermediate B Year 1

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

From Quarks to the Cosmos

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This elective provides an overview of state-of-the-art research in fundamental physics for non-physicists, covering: 1. physics of the quantum world, 2. particle physics and the search for the fundamental constituents of matter, 3. cosmology and the large-scale structure of our world, 4. the quest for the fundamental forces of nature. The elective is non-mathematical and suitable for non-scientists as well as scientists from other disciplines.

Gender Across Cultures

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module focuses on the centrality of gender as a factor structuring, ultimately, all social relations.

The module will therefore explore:

1. Relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, as personal and sexual relations, within the household, the labour market, the state
2. How gender relations and practices are performed in different cultures
3. The role of gender in processes of social transformation
4. The impact of industrialisation and migration on gender relations

Gender and the Life Course

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Students taking this elective will learn to think critically about inequalities in our societies as they emerge across the life course, especially those relating to gender. Through engaging with key moments in the life course (including birth and the ascription of gender identity; childhood and education; sexual reproduction, parenting and families; paid and unpaid work; illness and health; old age) students will build on their own experiences and observations to develop new perspectives and insights on this key issue in contemporary society. Throughout the module, we will explore key theoretical frameworks as well as a series of concrete cases and problems in which researchers apply such theories to gender issues in social policy, health, education and psychology. By the end of the module you should have gained an understanding of gender and the concept of inequality and be able to provide critical accounts of the links between gendered social relations, cultural settings and individual behaviour and experiences.

German Ab initio A

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This is a module for complete or near beginners, introduce you to basic skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening. A thorough grounding in grammatical functions will be undertaken. Elements of the culture and society of Germany will be introduced within the framework of the language module.

German Ab initio B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

You build on the basic grammatical structures taught in part one to improve grammatical accuracy, oral and written fluency, lexis and listening and reading comprehension in a variety of everyday situations. You will gain an insight into the culture and society of Germany within the framework of your language studies and, wherever possible, through authentic materials.

Global Cinemas

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The module will introduce you to a range of film studies skills and methods, including ways of conducting and presenting historically based film research afforded by multimedia technology. You will analyse a specific film, and its possible connections with other films, and explore your ideas and research methods under the close supervision of a tutor, as well as present your work in progress.

Global Issues

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

The module aims to introduce you to the study of global politics and global political economy. To do so, we will examine problems, issues and dynamics that have come to shape contemporary political life at the international, transnational and global levels. This introduction will set the scene for later modules that offer an in-depth analysis of these issues, as well as a thorough examination of the theoretical and conceptual tools used by scholars.

Historical Controversy II

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This course introduces you to the study of history through the critical reading of a key historical text. In this way you will gain an understanding of the complexity of the historical record and an appreciation of a range of problems associated with the interpretation of evidence. You will also be made to think about the discipline of history and the nature of historical enquiry. Through a study of how historians have formulated and deployed their arguments, you will begin to learn to deploy ideas and to shape your own historical arguments.

Italian Ab initio A

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This is a course for complete or near beginners, introducing you to basic skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening. A thorough grounding in grammatical functions will be undertaken. Elements of the culture and society of Italy will be introduced within the framework of the language course.

Italian Ab initio B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This course builds on the basic grammatical structures taught in part one to improve your grammatical accuracy, oral and written fluency, lexis, and listening and reading comprehension in a variety of everyday situations. You will gain an insight into the culture and society of Italy appropriate to the framework of your language studies and, wherever possible, through authentic materials.

 

Japanese Ab initio A

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This is a module for complete or near beginners, introducing you to basic skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening. You will be introduced to Hiragana and Katakana. A thorough grounding in grammatical functions will be undertaken. Essential elements of cultural awareness in Japanese society will be introduced. An essential part of the module will be independent work carried out in the Language Learning Centre.

Japanese Ab initio B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The module builds on the basic grammatical structures taught in part one to improve grammatical accuracy, oral and written fluency, lexis, and listening and reading comprehension in a variety of everyday situations. You will work in Hiragana and Katakana and begin studying Kanji characters. You will gain an insight into the culture and society of Japan within the framework of your language studies, and, wherever possible, through authentic materials. An essential part of the module is independent work carried out in the Language Learning Centre.

Making Music

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This is a practice-based module that will engage you in the making of site-specific performance in public spaces. You will explore through lectures and practical workshops the relation of space, place and sound, and the social meanings of specific locations. The module will examine a range of contemporary artistic approaches and theoretical ideas, as well as introducing you to practical methods for making site-specific work with music.

Music and Society (E)

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Music does not exist in isolation from society. Many cultures in the world have no word for music conceived as an entity distinct from the contexts in which it takes place; contexts such as social or religious ritual, dance or performance. Only in modern western culture has the idea of art music as something autonomous and removed from the everyday world evolved. Why is music meaningful to us, and how can we understand how music has meaning at all? What is the function of art music in cultures dominated by commercial values? How can we grasp the relationships between the multiplicity of musical forms that are available in a modern globalised culture? How can we evaluate the impact of the different media and technologies by which music is disseminated and consumed? These are some of the questions that this module seeks to address. The module also aims to introduce you to different intellectual approaches to these questions, and to broaden your engagement with the issues through independent research. The module charts recent musical history both in terms of technical innovation and social and aesthetic concerns of the composers involved. The aim of the module is to stimulate awareness of recent musical thinking and also to use that awareness to re-examine more conventional musical views and habits.

News, Politics and Power

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module explores media and politics and, more broadly, the media and questions of power. It focuses on current affairs with an emphasis on news, although other forms of factual content (for instance TV docudrama, web blogs, and broadsheet lifestyle spin-offs) are also covered.

The module considers the role media can play in producing our understanding of the globalising world. It asks how media frame, organise, and contextualise events, both as they take place, and in relation to the collective memories that emerge after the event. It also asks how the media themselves are managed, manipulated, and influenced, by governments, media owners, professional newsroom codes, and/or by public pressure.

The module is centrally concerned with the role the media play in relation to the citizen and the state, and explores how a wide range of media contribute to the maintenance or erosion of a democratic society and an informed citizenship.

Our Place in the Universe(s)

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Astronomy, the study of space and its contents beyond the earth, is both the oldest science, and one in which new discoveries are being made on a daily basis. It is used to explain such familiar phenomena as the tides, eclipses and meteor showers, as well as much more exotic objects such as black holes and exoplanets. The observable Universe also provides a laboratory for testing physical theories at extreme energies that are unachievable on the Earth. This elective will provide non-science students with a broad, non-mathematical understanding of astronomy from our Solar System, via stars and galaxies, to the Universe as a whole, all to appreciate Our Place in the Universe(s).

Peace Processes

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The aim of this module is to analyse ongoing peace processes within the context of global and local political, economic and social change. Exploring cases from the Middle East, South Asia, Europe and elsewhere, it poses questions such as: what accounts for the relative success of some peace processes, and the failure of others? Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simply intractable? Do social and economic liberalisation, or globalisation, tend to promote peacemaking? What forms of third party intervention are most supportive of peacemaking? And why is the recent record of peace processes so poor? Through so doing, the module will provide an introduction to the study of peace processes, and fresh insights on contemporary international relations and the global political economy.

Spanish Ab initio A

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This is a module for complete or near beginners, introducing you to basic skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening. A thorough grounding in grammatical functions will be undertaken. Elements of the culture and society of Spain will be introduced within the framework of the language module.

 

Spanish Ab initio B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module builds on the basic grammatical structures taught in part one to improve grammatical accuracy, oral and written fluency, lexis, and listening and reading comprehension in a variety of everyday situations. You will gain an insight into the culture and society of Spain appropriate to the framework of your language studies and, wherever possible, through authentic materials.

Spanish Intermediate A Year 1

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This stage 3 course is for students with some basic knowledge and experience of the target language (TL). Building on existing levels of proficiency at level A2 (Basic User) of the Common European Framework of Reference [CEFR] the course aims to: - enable students to understand key information and to communicate effectively in the TL, sometimes spontaneously, in less routine situations, at a standard level - provide opportunities, across a variety of topics, for practice of understanding and communication in the TL using the four language skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing, at a standard level - consolidate and develop the range of key elements of TL language structures, vocabulary, syntax and pronunciation, to allow progression in the TL - present the background culture and society of the TL through a variety of contextualised activities and materials, in a range of media, e.g. text; audio; audio-visual; digital. Successful completion of the course is equivalent to level A2-B1 (Basic-Independent User) of the CEFR for languages.

Spanish Intermediate B Year 1

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The Making of Modern Europe I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This course provides students with an understanding of the historical development of the idea of Europe as it has evolved from the middle ages until the present day. In particular we shall trace the relationship between, on the one hand, ideas and ideals of European cooperation, integration and unity and, on the other, the realities of European economic, political and social development and conflict. The course explains the different dimensions of the idea of Europe and places them in their contemporary context, highlighting aspects of continuity and change. The course examines the inherent tension between unity and diversity in European history and explores how this tension has been manifest in the political struggles and the philosophical arguments which have characterised Europe over time. The first half of the course considers the development of Europe as idea and reality over the long run while the second half examines how these aspects have interacted in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

The Making of Modern Europe II

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module provides students with a understanding of some of the cornerstone ideas of modern Europe, such as human rights, identity and citizenship. Drawing on the insights of a number of disciplines (history, philosophy, sociology, politics and economics) it explores the way in which our understanding of these principles has evolved over time and how they have manifest themselves in European states and societies. In particular it considers how these principles have informed and shaped the development of modern Europe and of European co-operation and integration.

Truth and Morality: The Meaning of Life

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This course is concerned with central issues of morality - examining both the kinds of considerations which might be appealed to in moral arguments, and the status of moral arguments themselves. What should we bear in mind when deciding whether to eat meat, or whether to help someone, or whether to fight a war? In what sense are the decisions we make right? How can a moral argument be a good argument? Are some people wiser than others? Is there any truth in moral relativism? These and related issues will be tackled from a range of theoretical positions.

Understanding Business and Management

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module aims to introduce you to the study of business, organisations and management and equip you with the tools to understand the business landscape. We look at organisational environments, structures and managerial processes. We look at contemporary issues such as CSR and globalisation, what it takes to be an entrepreneur, why change is an ever-present, what it takes to be a CEO and what makes for an effective team?

The focus will be contemporary, critical and balance of the conceptual and the practical.