English Language and Literature BA

Program Overview

This unique honors course delves into the intersection of language and literature, exploring how they influence, inform, and inspire each other. Students will study dedicated modules that explicitly explore their relationship, drawing from core modules in both language and literature. The program culminates in a final year where students specialize in areas closely related to the research interests of the teaching staff, fostering a thriving research culture and preparing graduates for careers in various fields requiring strong communication and critical thinking skills.

Program Outline

Degree Overview:

This unique single honours course focuses specifically on the intersection of language and literature. This integrated degree brings together core modules from both language and literature. In your final year, you take at least two specialist modules, working with staff on an area that is closely related to their own research and that continues to bring language and literature together.

• Thriving research culture - our School of English has one of the largest groups of researchers in the UK working in the area of language and literature, and their research informs the content of the modules you will study.
• Become an independent researcher - become highly skilled in research, critical thinking, written and verbal communication, presentation, and digital media creation.
• Enhance your learning with work placements - share your knowledge and develop the confidence and skills for graduate employment.

Outline:

First Year:

• Core Language Modules:
• The Sounds of English (10 credits):
An introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, focusing on the sounds of the English language.
• The Structures of English (10 credits): An introduction to the syntax of natural languages, focusing on the syntactic structure of contemporary English.
• Exploring Literary Language (20 credits): Explores the language of literary texts, examining how different literary styles create particular effects.
• Optional Modules:
• Varieties of English (20 credits):
Explores the diversity of the English language today, focusing on contemporary varieties of English in Britain and around the world.
• Early Englishes (20 credits): Works backward over a millennium of English, 1600 to 600, examining texts representative of each century.
• Foundations in Literary Study: Biblical and Classical Sources in English Literature (20 credits): Provides foundational knowledge about the treatment of Biblical and Classical sources in English Literature.
• Contemporary Literature (20 credits): Introduces students to a diverse range of texts in English (prose, poetry, and film) with a focus on texts published since 2000.
• Studying Theatre: A History of Dramatic Texts in Performance (20 credits): Aims to turn an interest in theatre and theatre-going into a more thorough appreciation of the ways in which playwriting, acting, design and performance have shaped theatre's development.
• History of English (20 credits): Traces the history of the English language from the Fifth century AD through to the present day.
• Linguistic Theory (20 credits): Explores how language is structured by examining central issues in linguistic theory.
• Introduction to Creative Writing (20 credits): Helps students to develop their expressive and technical skills in writing poetry and prose.
• Introduction to Cinema (20 credits): Aims to study a cross-section of the most important American films up to the present day.

Second Year:

• Core Modules:
• The History of Persuasion (20 credits):
Focuses on why some written texts seem more persuasive (or authoritative) than others.
• Writing the Real (20 credits): Examines how realist and non-realist styles work linguistically.
• Optional Modules:
• Literature and Critical Thought (b) (20 credits):
Introduces writers, concepts and approaches fundamental to contemporary literary theory.
• Romanticism to Modernism (b) (20 credits): Focuses on a diverse range of texts (including poetry, prose, drama and film) produced between the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century.
• Literature, Ecology, Capital (20 credits): Explores how literature represents the relationships between ecological crisis and the crises of capitalism.
• Victorian Women Poets: Stressing Sex (20 credits): Introduces you to a range of Victorian women poets and the critical and ideological debates that surround their work.
• Syntax (20 credits): Builds on what students have learnt in ELL113 Structure of English at Level 1, providing a more in-depth look at the structure and organising principles of sentences.
• Exiles and Monsters: An Introduction to Old English (20 credits): Explores the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon England, enabling you to read and understand the earliest English literature.
• Language and Cognition (20 credits): Introduces students to the key theories and frameworks at the core of cognitive linguistics.
• Representing the Holocaust (20 credits): Examines fictional and non-fictional, literary and filmic, representations of the Holocaust.
• The Novella and the Uncanny (20 credits): Explores novellas from across the last 150 years which represent uncanny experiences of haunting, madness, obsession, and psychological and political disorientation.
• John Donne Worlds of Desire (20 credits): Focuses on the work of John Donne, examining his erotic and religious poetry, political satires, letters, and sermons.
• Good Books: Intertextual Approaches to Literature and the Bible (20 credits): Explores a range of intertextual relationships, from medieval dream poetry through to contemporary writing and cultural representation.
• Creative Writing Prose Fiction 2 (20 credits): Helps students to develop their expressive and technical skills in writing prose fiction at Level 2.
• Hollywood Cinema (20 credits): Introduces you to the study of Hollywood's films, methods, meanings and creative figures.
• Crime Writing: from the fin de siècle to the Golden Age (20 credits): Examines the cultural history of crime writing from 1890-1950.
• Sex and Decadence in Restoration Theatre (20 credits): Considers how the emergence of the rake and the courtesan in Restoration theatre reflects changing attitudes towards sex.
• Queer and Now: Contemporary Queer Texts (20 credits): Introduces students to a range of contemporary queer texts and considers how they respond to key debates and conversations regarding gender, sexuality, identity and community.
• Sociolinguistics (20 credits): Explores the workings of language in its rich social setting.
• First Language Acquisition (20 credits): Focuses specifically on the first language acquisition of syntactic (and semantic) knowledge.
• Phonology (20 credits): Aims to examine phonological theories and the data on which they are constructed.
• A Sense of Place: Local and Regional Identity (20 credits): Takes an interdisciplinary approach to issues of regional and local identity in contemporary Britain.
• Satire and Print in the Eighteenth Century (20 credits): Examines the prose and poetry of eighteenth-century satirists, exploring the relationship between the individual and the state.
• Creative Writing Poetry 2 (20 credits): Explores poetic form and techniques for creating new poems.
• Road Journeys in American Culture: 1930-2000 (20 credits): Analyses the development of road narratives from the 1930s to the present, looking at the ways in which this narrative trope tells the story of American culture and society throughout the twentieth-century.

Third Year:

• Core Language and Literature Modules (Group 2):
• Narrative Style in the Contemporary Novel (20 credits):
Considers how the contemporary novel experiments with narrative style and technique.
• Experiments in Interactive Digital Narrative (20 credits): Offers the chance to learn about and experiment with the possibilities of interactive digital narratives.
• Dissertation (20 credits): Provides third year students with an opportunity to develop work done in Approved Modules and Core units, or study a relevant topic not included in these courses.
• Optional Modules:
• Research Practice (20 credits):
Focuses on the planning of the larger project.
• Psychology of Language (20 credits): Examines the relationship between the human mind and language.
• Life After Death?
• Romantic Poets and Writing the Afterlife (20 credits): Explores the versions of eternity written by Romantic poets.
• Exiles and Monsters: Reading Old English (20 credits): Explores the language and literature of early medieval England (500-1066).
• Researching Readers (20 credits): Encourages you to engage with the responses of readers outside of University too, in the wider reading public.
• Narrative Style in the Contemporary Novel (20 credits): Considers how the contemporary novel experiments with narrative style and technique.
• Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (20 credits): Introduces and reviews the principles that underlie, and the methodology employed in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages.
• Language and Gender (20 credits): Will explore the relationship between language use and gender identity.
• Approaches to Discourse (20 credits): Aims to introduce students to the critical analysis of spoken and written discourse in contemporary social contexts.
• Advanced Syntax (20 credits): Builds on the material covered in ELL 221 Syntax, focusing on both the universal and language-specific rules that govern syntactic structure in human language.
• Afro-American Literature 1: Beginnings to the Harlem Renaissance (20 credits): Examines Afro-American Literature from early slave narratives and poems to the explosion of creativity after the first world war in the Harlem Renaissance.
• No Animals were Harmed in the Making of this Module: Animals in Film (20 credits): Considers the role of animals in film as an artistic medium.
• Fin de siècle Gothic (20 credits): Examines a range of Gothic texts and their fin de siècle contexts.
• Creative Writing Poetry 3 (20 credits): Helps students to develop their expressive and technical skills in writing poetry at Level 3.
• Dissertation (20 credits): Provides third year students with an opportunity to develop work done in Approved Modules and Core units, or study a relevant topic not included in these courses.
• Conversation Analysis (20 credits): We will work with recordings of real conversation, analysing aspects of spoken interaction.
• Language attitudes, perceptions and regard (20 credits): Examines the ways in which non-specialists react to language variation.
• Middlemarch (20 credits): Focuses on Middlemarch's eight books, exploring a range of historical and thematic issues.
• The Idea of America (20 credits): Explores how foundational ideas of America are reimagined by its poets, playwrights and prose writers.
• Theolinguistics (20 credits): Examines the ways in which people talk about what they hold sacred.
• Experiments in Interactive Digital Narrative (20 credits): Offers the chance to learn about and experiment with the possibilities of interactive digital narratives.
• The Man Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock's Films (20 credits): Examines a selection of Hitchcock's British and Hollywood films in the context of a variety of critical approaches.
• Advanced Phonetics (20 credits): Students will use specialist computer software to provide robust analysis of a range of different phonetic parameters.
• Historical Pragmatics (20 credits): Takes a holistic approach to studying how language users communicated and constructed meaning in earlier periods.
• America and the Avant-Garde, 1950's-1990's (20 credits): We will be looking at a range of avant-garde experiments in poetry, prose and performance that have been carried out by contemporary American writers and artists.
• Writing Fiction 3 (20 credits): Explores techniques and strategies for creating fiction.
• Dissertation (20 credits): Provides third year students with an opportunity to develop work done in Approved Modules and Core units, or study a relevant topic not included in these courses.
• The Invention of Romanticism (40 credits): Is about the birth and legacy of romantic-era writing.
• Renaissance Literature, Modern Crisis (40 credits): Considers early modern and Renaissance literature in relation to some of the pressing concerns of the modern world.
• Research Topics in Theatre and Film (40 credits): Introduces you to significant research topics that cut across theatre and film studies.
• Mod Cons: Exploring the Long 20th Century (40 credits): Introduces you to current research in the study of literary and related forms of cultural text and practice.
• Dissertation (40 credits): Provides final year undergraduate students with an opportunity to build on work done in previous modules, or study a topic that has not been included in the degree.

Assessment:

• A range of innovative assessments that can include designing websites, writing blog posts, delivering presentations and working with publishing software, in addition to writing essays and more traditional exams.

Teaching:

• You'll learn through a mix of lectures and smaller group seminars.

• We keep seminar groups small because we believe that's the best way to stimulate discussion and debate.

They're also passionate, dedicated teachers who work tirelessly to ensure their students are inspired.

Careers:

• The academic aptitude and personal skills that you develop on your degree will make you highly prized by employers, whatever your chosen career path after university:
• Excellent oral and written communication
• Independent working
• Time management and organisation
• Planning and researching written work
• Articulating knowledge and understanding of texts, concepts and theories
• Leading and participating in discussions
• Negotiation and teamwork
• Effectively conveying arguments and opinions and thinking creatively
• Critical reasoning and analysis
• Our graduates are confident and articulate.

Other:

• We're a research-intensive school with an international perspective on English studies.

Please use 2024-25 information as a guide. £9,250Home students 2024 annual tuition fee £22,680Overseas students 2024 annual tuition fee