BA (Hons) English

Program Overview

Bournemouth University's BA (Hons) English program combines traditional literary analysis with contemporary media studies, preparing graduates for diverse careers in creative writing, journalism, marketing, and education. With an emphasis on practical experience, the program offers industry-focused projects and an optional placement year, ensuring students are career-ready upon graduation. The program is ranked among the top 50 English programs in the UK, providing students with a high-quality education.

Program Outline

Degree Overview:

This modern degree leads to a range of career paths.

Objectives:

• Develop a range of subject-specific and transferable skills which can open the door to an exciting range of career possibilities or further study.
• Be career-ready with 93% of graduates in employment or further study after 15 months.
• Gain valuable work experience and enhance your CV during a four-week or 30-week placement.
• Showcase your writing to industry professionals through BU's annual Fresher Writing Prize and New Media Writing Prize competitions.
• Tailor your degree including options to study both creative or traditional units and discover the latest developments in digital media and interactive storytelling.
• Core Units:
• Academic & Professional Practice: Building confidence in both academic and professional skills, covering academic skills required at degree level study and practicing them with support from university services.
• Collaborative Communication Project: Focusing on communication as a process and project, promoting principles and practices of team-based iterative project work.
• Understanding Contemporary Britain: Introducing key aspects of culture and society in Britain today, developing an understanding of the relationship between developments in culture, politics, and society in the making of modern Britain.
• Law & Government: Tracing a case study through the United Kingdom's political and legal system, developing an understanding of practical and theoretical underpinnings of politics and law.

Year 1:

• Core Units:
• The Creative Writer as Critic: Influence, Analysis, Transcendence: Acting as both reader and writer, analyzing modern short stories to develop an understanding of what makes a good work of fiction and putting that theory into practice by writing your own.
• Adventures in Popular Culture: Exploring debates about the value and place of cultural artefacts within contemporary popular culture, developing an understanding of the complexity of the term ‘culture’, modes of representation of different social divisions, and the ways in which forms of media and cultural consumption are embedded in everyday life.
• Placing Past & Present: Introducing the interdisciplinary study of literary texts and place, focused on Bournemouth and its environs via the work of authors who have lived and travelled in the region.
• Genres, Forms & Contexts: Introducing the main literary forms of fiction, drama, and poetry, and associated critical perspectives, understanding how literature is influenced by its historical, social, and cultural context.
• Approaches to Literature: Learning the different methods and critical approaches required for the study of literature at degree level, gaining a thorough underpinning of the skills and attributes required when studying a greater range of literary texts throughout the three years.

Year 2:

• Core Units:
• Experimental Literature from Modernism to Postmodernism: Exploring two major literary and artistic movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as their historical and cultural perspectives and influences.
• Children’s Literature: Examining the relationship between narrative form and content, and the literary, social, and cultural context in which children’s literature has been produced.
• Narrative Structures: Developing analysis and evaluations of a variety of contemporary narrative texts from sources such as film, television, journalism, magazines, the internet, and prose fiction.
• Intersectionality in Practice: Voice & Power: Bringing together critical analysis and creative practice to explore inequalities and diversity within society through the lens of literature and media, focusing on key issues relating to identity such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability.
• Remix Cultures: Building on the Level 4 unit Adventures in Popular Culture, aiming to further develop and enhance student learning with regards to the way in which media texts can be viewed as remix cultures.
• Option Units (choose one):
• The Changing Coastal Resort: Introducing the changing state of the coastal resort in history, culture, politics, and society from the eighteenth century to the present, taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines critical perspectives and methodologies from tourism and hospitality, historical and cultural studies.
• Fact & Fiction: Exploring the diverse panorama of creative nonfiction, including poetry, life-writing, and literary journalism, analyzing ethical issues such as objectivity/subjectivity, accuracy, and the social and historical context of the genre over the centuries.

Placement Year:

• You can choose either a four-week placement or optional 30-week placement (minimum), designed to develop your abilities and understanding of the workplace.

Final Year:

• Core Unit:
• Dissertation: Undertaking original and independent research to produce a 10,000-word dissertation on a topic or problem of your choice, using a discursive approach.
• Option Units (choose four):
• Celebrity Culture: Focusing on the concept of celebrity by tracing the historical development of fame and the emergence of celebrity culture as a distinct product of late modernity, assessing a range of significant debates within media and cultural studies, sociology, politics, and international development.
• Media & Trauma: Exploring critical and cultural responses to traumatic experience and death across a range of media or texts from print and broadcast journalism to filmic and literary representation, focusing on how trauma is interpreted, recorded, represented, constructed, and produced across a range of media.
• Interactive Digital Storytelling: Considering the evolution of narrative forms in relation to the development of digital media, especially exploring non-linear, participatory, and interactive narratives.
• Writing, Editing & Publishing: A practical unit which combines study of publishing processes and practices with creative writing.
• Unstable Pasts: Crime & Gothic Fictions: Considering the development of crime and gothic literary media over the last two hundred years in its cultural and historical context and with reference to a range of critical approaches.
• Space, Place & Environment: Focusing on critical representations of space, place, and environment in literature and culture from industrialisation to the present, exploring the significance of space and the environment in relation to diverse yet connected topics such as globalisation, personal, social, and national identity.
• World Literature Today: Examining a range of contemporary international writing in order to expand awareness of different cultures, engage with a variety of perspectives, and cultivate attributes of global citizenship appropriate for the twenty-first century.
• Literature, Law & Human Rights: Exploring the convergence of discourses that exist between the fields of literature, law, and human rights more generally, considering the advent of rights discourses and the representation of those discourses in selected literary texts.

Assessment:

• Details of the assessment methods and contact hours for each unit of the course can be found in the programme specification.

Teaching:

• You will usually be taught by a range of staff with relevant expertise and knowledge appropriate to the content of the unit.
• This will include senior academic staff, qualified professional practitioners, and research students.
• You will also benefit from regular guest lectures from industry.

Careers:

• There are a wide range of careers open to you once you graduate, including:
• Content editor
• Freelance writer and video producer
• Marketing and PR executive
• English teacher
• Underwriter
• Typical sectors you might choose to work in include marketing, digital media, education, and media publishing.
• The skills you’ll develop on the course will be valuable across a broad range of contexts – so you could find yourself working for businesses or organisations involved in a variety of industries.

Other:

• The course offers opportunities to study abroad for a semester in Germany or Denmark.
• The course is in the top 50 universities in the UK for English – Guardian University Guide 2024.
• BU has retained its Silver rating in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) 2023.
• The course is regularly reviewed to take advantage of new approaches to learning and teaching, as well as developments in industry.
• The course offers access to the BU Language Centre to help develop/improve foreign or English language skills.
• The course offers a Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) scheme.
• The course offers Disability and additional learning support, according to individual circumstances.
• The course offers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year security team.
• The course offers a range of scholarships and bursaries.

UK, ROI & CI: £9,250 Int'l: £17,800 per year Placement year: £1,850 Fee regions explained: UK: United Kingdom ROI: Republic of Ireland CI: Channel Islands & Isle of Man Int'l: International Understanding your tuition fee status.