English Language and Literature BA (Hons)

This module introduces you in some detail to a broad range of authors, texts, periods and genres from Medieval mystery plays, to later poems and plays, that both influenced and were influenced in turn by William Shakespeare. The module will explore and evaluate the reasons both for seeing Shakespeare as being at the heart of the English Renaissance, and for not seeing him as such.

Compulsory

The aim of this module is to introduce you to the fundamental concepts in the study of language as a social phenomenon. Topics include: language variation in regional and social dialects; identity construction, incorporating gender, ethnicity, and age; social functions of languages and varieties; and the ways in which ideologies, cultural ways, speaking and social attitudes affect patterns of language use and their evaluation within institutions.

Compulsory

This module will introduce you to the most important ideas and debates in gender and sexuality. Covering a wide range of texts, including fiction, poetry, essay, film, and philosophy, you will have the opportunity to engage with key concepts of gender and sexuality, and learn to apply them to other forms of writing.

Compulsory

This module introduces key issues relevant to the study of language used in digital contexts. Indicative topics include: language attitudes and ideologies towards new media practices; online identities and communities; digital narratives; the language of blogs and wikis; micro-blogging practices and the meaning of hashtags; impoliteness and conflict in digital settings.

Compulsory

This module will consider a range of literature that emerged in the twentieth century from across the Anglophone world. You will gain an understanding and knowledge of both traditional critical conceptions of a modernist period and modernist aesthetic, and alternative modernisms, as well as ideas of ‘late’ modernist work, and modernist inheritance.

Compulsory

In its broadest sense, stylistics is a field of study in which linguistic theories are used to identify and describe the distinguishing features (or style) of a text. The aim of this module is to equip you with an understanding of the linguistic models and analytic techniques that can be used to describe, analyse and interpret a range of literary, as well as non-literary, texts.

Compulsory

This module² provides you with an opportunity to reflect upon and gain experience for an approved placement undertaken during your programme. A placement should usually be at least 26 weeks or equivalent; however, each placement will be considered on its own merits, having regard to the ability to achieve the learning outcomes.

Optional

This module² provides you with an opportunity to reflect upon and gain experience for an approved international study/work placement undertaken during your programme. A work/study placement should usually be at least 26 weeks or equivalent; however, each placement will be considered on its own merits, having regard to the ability to achieve the learning outcomes.

Optional

This module aims to explore the modern phenomenon of graphic novels and narrative with the rise of new twenty-first century genres within the comics medium while fostering new genres and ways to communicate. Modern comic creators are winning awards and acclaim in the worlds of art and literature as they communicate unique stories and interpretations of the modern world.

Optional

The aim of this module is to develop your awareness of the psycholinguistic processes of language storage and retrieval. It will also look at how artificial intelligence in machines simulates human linguistic behaviour and will question whether this linguistic behaviour in machines constitutes true intelligence.

Optional

This module surveys Gothic literature and cultural production, from its eighteenth-century origins to the film, television and video games of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You will look to gain a lively appreciation of the Gothic’s enduring relevance in times of climate crisis, geopolitical unrest, and rapid technological change.

Optional

This module takes a sociolinguistic approach to the study of language and globalisation. Topics include: language attitudes and ideologies, bilingualism and multilingualism, identities in a globalised world, the politics of English as a lingua franca, language globalisation and social media, tourism discourse, food and lifestyle discourses, linguistic landscapes and workplace communication.

Optional

This module provides an opportunity for you to exercise independent learning and research skills in the final semester of your degree. You will be able to conceive, plan and carry out an individual programme of discipline-specific research under the supervision of a member of staff, leading to the ultimate submission of a final project in the form of a dissertation, portfolio, or artefact, as appropriate.

Optional

This module aims to introduce you to the literature, philosophy, and theory of the Enlightenment exploring both eighteenth-century debates about progress and modernity (and their relationship with conceptions of culture, gender, status, race and nationality) as well as the contemporary significance of ideas about Enlightenment.

Optional

This module embraces the great diversity of works of fantasy, gothic and science fiction and will explore their relationship to each other, place them within literary traditions and examine the ways in which such popular writing is essentially intertextual and cross-generic.

Optional

The aim of the module is to enable you to take a critical perspective with regard to language, and to recognise how language is instrumental in constructing an ideologically framed view of reality – cultural, social and political. You will, through your examination and deconstruction of texts, acquire the tools to unravel the complexities inherent in language as it is used as a medium of communication and as a means of giving definition to experience.

Optional