BA (Hons) English, Media and Cultural Studies

Program Overview

Students develop critical thinking, communication, and professional writing skills while examining topics such as media institutions, journalism, literature, and cultural trends. The program incorporates case studies, work experience, and guest speakers from the media industry, preparing graduates for diverse careers in communication, media, and the arts.

Program Outline

Students develop critical appraisal, analysis of case studies, and independent study skills, learning to communicate effectively in various environments. The program explores media institutions, publishing, journalism, and applied communication in areas like public relations, social marketing, fiction, documentary, video games, magazines, and new media. It also delves into cultural trends and practices, including popular music, youth culture, world literature, neo-Victorianism, social media, travel, and fashion. The program features a diverse selection of texts, from classics to contemporary fiction, encompassing British, American, Irish, postcolonial, and world writing. It emphasizes the development of transferable skills like research, professional writing, communication, problem-solving, teamwork, and independent working. The program incorporates applied case studies and work-related learning, including work experience opportunities.

Outline:

Level 4

Introduces methods for studying media texts and their relevance to contemporary socio-cultural debates.

• Media Institutions and Audiences (20 credits): Explores the institutions that produce media and the audiences that consume them, considering broadcast media institutions, audience research, and theories like uses and gratifications, the encoding/decoding model, and ethnographic studies.
• Professional Writing (20 credits): Develops professional writing skills to produce a portfolio of writing, including a feature, review, news story, and podcast.
Covers attribution, referencing, editing, proofreading, writing to a brief, and journalistic practices.
• Liverpool Legacies (20 credits): Introduces Liverpool's literary heritage, tracing the creativity and multiculturalism that have shaped the city.
Examines works authored by or about Liverpudlians and their historical, social, and geographical contexts.
• Critical Keywords for English (20 credits): Introduces the study of English literature at undergraduate level, covering key terms like form, narrative, character, and irony, and developing skills for English studies, including close reading, research, and essay writing.

Level 5

• Core Modules:
• Public Communication (20 credits):
Explores advertising as persuasive communication, examining theoretical and popular responses to advertising as a cultural form. Develops critical analytical skills to deconstruct advertising and design Public Information Campaigns (PICs).
• Optional Modules:
• Short Cuts: Writing in Brief (20 credits):
Analyzes a variety of short writing from the post-Second World War era, developing close reading and textual analysis skills. Explores the relationship between short writing and modernity/contemporary culture.
• Body, Mind and Soul: seventeenth-century literature and culture (20 credits): Introduces a range of seventeenth-century writings in their historical and cultural context, examining different forms and genres used in the period.
• Public Relations (20 credits): Examines public relations practices, critiquing their use and developing skills to effectively communicate and persuade.
• Popular Journalism: Research in Practice (20 credits): Critically evaluates journalistic practice in contemporary publications and produces professional-standard copy for real-world audiences.
Focuses on lifestyle and feature journalism, examining issues that influence the production and consumption of popular journalism.
• Modernism and Modernity (20 credits): Focuses on the modernist movement in Europe and America, exploring literature, culture, and politics of modernity through a variety of modernist texts.
• Poetry Matters (20 credits): Develops a critical vocabulary for understanding poetry, introducing a range of poetry from different periods, forms, and cultural locations.
• Postcolonial Writing: Power, Art and Protest (20 credits): Introduces postcolonial studies through literary and critical works, examining the relationship between art, politics, and culture in postcolonial literary criticism.
• Romanticism: Revolution, Reaction and Representation (20 credits): Examines Romanticism in nineteenth-century literature, assessing its cultural afterlife and importance.
Explores connections between politics, social history, and literary culture in Britain during a period of social instability.
• The Victorians: Realism and Sensation (20 credits): Explores Victorian texts, including novels, poetry, and essays, examining the influence of scientific discourses and popular interest in them on Victorian culture.
• English Independent Study (20 credits): Promotes independent learning activities, allowing students to pursue research-informed projects.
• Study Year Abroad - EMCS (120 credits): Provides an additional year of study at an approved overseas partner university.
• Study Semester Abroad English and Media and Cultural Studies (60 credits): Provides a semester of study at an approved overseas partner university, replacing one semester of level 5 study at LJMU.
• Life Stories: Telling Tales and Keeping Secrets in Auto/Biographical Writing (20 credits): Introduces the diversity of auto/biographical writing, equipping students with critical vocabulary and analytical tools to explore and analyze modern life-writing.
• Forms of Slavery (20 credits): Examines slavery from a long historical, interdisciplinary, and transnational perspective, analyzing slave texts and contemporary debates around slavery's history.
• Gender Trouble (20 credits): Develops understanding of the relationships between gender, sexuality, and literature, exploring literature's role in the development of sexual politics and gender norms.
• Writing Race in Britain (20 credits): Focuses on post-1948 literature about ethnic diversity in Britain, exploring writing by and about post-colonial migrants and their British-born children.
• Words and Music (20 credits): Examines the relationship between poetic and musical form, exploring how politics and poetics inform lyrics and how gender, race, intertextuality, and acculturation influence musical production.
• Working Class Writing (20 credits): Covers working-class literary traditions and genres, examining the relationship between literary form and social class and exploring the intersections between class and other markers of identity.
• Theories 2.0 (20 credits): Explores contemporary theoretical concepts and ideas, including postmodernism, posthumanism, gender and queer theory, and critical race theory.

Level 6

• C21: British Fiction Now (20 credits): Explores the diversity and range of British writing in the twenty-first century, examining key events that shape literary culture in Britain today.
• Shakespeare (20 credits): Examines a range of Shakespeare's plays in the context of their original cultural production.
• Vamps and Villains: Exploring Gothic Fiction (20 credits): Examines the genre of Gothic fiction, exploring its cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts.
• World Literature: Writing from the Periphery (20 credits): Introduces the concept of 'world literature' through texts from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, examining critical debates around global modernity, translation, and the periphery.
• Transitions: Identities in the Interwar Years (20 credits): Examines shifting identities and the intersections of class, sexuality, gender, and regionality in British literature of the interwar years.
• Green Victorians (20 credits): Explores how Victorian writers responded to environmental changes, examining key historical and intellectual developments shaping debates about the natural world in the Victorian period.
• Mind Readings (20 credits): Explores the representation of the mind and mental states in literary texts, focusing on madness and unconventional states of mind.
• Space and place: travel writing at home and abroad (20 credits): Enhances understanding of non-fiction travel literature, exploring travel narratives' reflection of encounters with otherness, reassessment of the familiar, and their link to human identity.
• Developments in Contemporary Writing and Publishing (20 credits): Delves into contemporary literature, covering fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and exploring current debates in the English-speaking publishing world.
• Modern Fiction and Environment Crisis (20 credits): Focuses on modern fiction that addresses environmental crises, engaging with issues like climate, the environment as a concept, the non-human, and alternative approaches to nature.
• Black Lives in American Literature (20 credits): Explores writing by and about African Americans from the mid-twentieth century to the present, considering how Black writers and artists have contested racial injustices and articulated new identities.
• Migrants to the Screen (20 credits): Examines novels about migrants alongside their film adaptations, drawing on literary studies, film studies, adaptation studies, and postcolonial studies.
• Feminist Fictions: Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Politics of Feminism (20 credits): Extends understanding of contemporary women's fiction and its relationship to feminist theory, politics, and practice.
• Digital Writing (20 credits): Focuses on becoming an excellent writer who can produce content suited to the digital environment, exploring notions of voice, originality, community, and the desire to share.
• Race in America (20 credits): Explores critical and theoretical views relating to racial formations, racial identities, and racism in American history.
• English and Media and Cultural Studies Dissertation (40 credits): Requires students to undertake a sustained piece of academic analysis from Media and Cultural Studies and/or English and present it in a proper academic form.
• Terrorism and Modern Literature (20 credits): Examines terrorism as a literary, political, and cultural preoccupation in modern literature, exploring key instances where the language and concept of terror are at issue.
• Mediating Diversity (20 credits): Explores representations of diversity and diverse identities in the media, examining themes and topics alongside case studies of media and cultural texts.
• Social and Digital Media (20 credits): Explores social and digital media theory and practice, examining the rise of new platforms and forms of storytelling and analyzing the stories they frame and narrate.
• Screen Media (20 credits): Develops critical, analytical, and evaluative skills for the textual study of screen media, identifying and evaluating the discursive roots of screen media narratives and their historical contexts.
• Britain, Brexit, Europe and the Media (20 credits): Highlights the relationships between politicians and the media and the role of the media in political agenda setting, examining political structures in Britain and the political economy of the news media.
• Media and Cultural Industries (40 credits): Enables students to identify and develop transferable skills relevant to employability, fostering initiative through an evaluative approach to work experience or career planning.
• Violence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (20 credits): Examines violence as a literary, political, and cultural preoccupation in nineteenth-century literature, exploring key works where issues of class, empire, and gender are explored in relation to conflict and crisis.
• Popular Fiction and Publishing (20 credits): Analyzes storytelling across a variety of commercial narrative media forms, examining the genres of detective fiction and the thriller and considering how they adapt to changing cultural climates.

Assessment:

Assessment methods vary depending on the modules chosen but typically include a combination of exams and coursework. Assessment methods include exams (seen and unseen), essays, log books and diaries, group and individual presentations, research projects, response papers, blogs, organized debates, and seminars. Regular constructive feedback is provided throughout the course, with opportunities to discuss feedback with personal tutors and course lecturers.

Teaching:

The program adopts an active blended learning approach, combining face-to-face and online learning. Teaching is delivered through lectures, seminars, workshops, online activities, peer presentations, film screenings, fieldwork trips, and online discussion boards. Students are expected to engage in private study using the virtual learning environment, archives, and special collections.

Careers:

Graduates pursue diverse career paths, including roles in advertising, marketing, public relations, museums, arts administration, media production, the publishing industry, retail, leisure and charitable organization management, educational administration, accountancy, social services, teaching, and the Civil Service.

Other:

The School of Humanities and Social Science offers a stimulating environment with a lively program of cross-disciplinary research seminars, conferences, visits from international scholars, and public events. Research from the School is recognized nationally and worldwide. These organizations include Sky Sports, Liverpool Echo, Juice FM, Odeon Cinema, Everyman Theatre, The Royal Court, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, TATE Liverpool, and the BBC. The program encourages students to develop transferable skills and provides support through personal tutors, study skills support, and regular feedback. LJMU's Student Futures - Careers, Employability and Enterprise Service offers a wide range of opportunities and support to students, including Future Focus, Careers Zone, Unitemps, Discovery Internships, one-to-one careers advice, events, and the Start-Up Hub.

Tuition fees Home full-time per year £9,250 International full-time per year £17,750 All figures are subject to yearly increases. Tuition fees are subject to parliamentary approval.