Film Studies and English Literature BA(Hons)

This module introduces you to a diverse range of literary texts, representing the principal genres on which the Western literary tradition is built. It also explores how these genres have been adapted, modified, and reformed in response to historical and cultural change. It helps you situate this knowledge in relation to overarching questions about the key concepts, skills and terms used throughout the study of literature at university level.

This module introduces you to different forms of analysis of media texts, ranging from industry-produced, professional media to user-generated content. It explores forms of textuality and their importance in the interplay of culture and communication across different textual formats including written, spoken, and audio-visual. It explores both mass media, such as film, television, radio and print, and digital platforms. The module equips you with the analytical skills to understand the construction and processes of meaning-making in media content and introduces key concepts in the study of media texts such as of genre, history, and structure.

The module introduces you to a range of video formats and technologies: mobile, online, television and video. You will be provided with the essential recording and editing skills necessary to produce a video output, and to understand the language and concepts required to critically evaluate video content.

This module introduces you to a range of types and styles of journalistic writing. You will also be guided to develop transferable skills to write for a broad range of media formats. You will engage with key concepts related to the practice of writing and analyse material online, in magazines and newspapers and in broadcasts. Through regular writing activities you will develop and hone your writing skills.

You will be expected either to complete a graduate or professional level work placement – or, as an alternative an enterprise or citizenship project with a tangible end product (e.g. feasibility study for turning hobby/idea into a personal business or setting up campaign group/developing volunteering/charity initiative) plus associated documentation – plus a self-reflective evaluation of the process. In preparation for this you will undertake career planning and placement research, supported by workshops and tutorial meetings.

No English degree would be complete without the opportunity to study the greatest writer in the language – Shakespeare. This module is your chance to do just that, both by situating Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their historical and cultural backgrounds, and by considering their rejuvenation in recent film and stage productions. For a greater understanding of Renaissance drama, the module will also compare Shakespeare’s work to some of his contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Jonson, or Webster.

When did the Victorians become Victorian? What does 'Victorian' mean to us in the twenty-first century? This module explores some of the literature and culture of 1837 to discuss Victorianism as a period and an idea. We’ll encounter some of the greats of early Victorian literature (Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thackeray) and look at themes such as colonialism, childhood, travel, neo-Victorianism, and legacies of Romantic literature. We’ll use creative techniques to understand our relationship with early Victorian literature today.

This module gives you the chance to study some of the most exciting and experimental novels ever written. Beginning at the start of the twentieth century, with ground breaking works of modernist fiction by the likes of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, you will study innovative new developments in form, style, and technique, as well as the historical context behind these transformative texts. The module then introduces you to the postmodernist experimentation of the later twentieth century. Together, we will explore new departures in narrative, style and language; the relationship between fiction, history and text; and the breakthrough novels that shaped the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century was the period in which the novel was the dominant literary form, in the wake of the heyday of Romantic poetry and before the advent of cinema. In this module we will study and analyse a selection of novels that represent some of the most significant developments in the genre during the Victorian age. We will explore the ways in which the Victorian novel reflected the most important issues of the day, from industrialisation and political reform to women’s rights and class conflict. The module will also investigate the significance of novelistic subgenres such as Sensation fiction and the late gothic novel during the second half of the nineteenth century, mapping these onto shifting attitudes towards the politics of gender, race and empire.

This module will give you a deep understanding of reporting and writing for journalism in a digital age. You will continue to develop key journalism and storytelling skills throughout the module, including newsgathering, interviewing and writing in a range of styles and for different platforms. There is a particular focus on covering matters of public interest, especially reporting the courts. The module includes a series of industry-like newsdays, allowing you to work to deadlines in a live environment.

This module provides a practical orientation in some of the main genres of film and television, and a training in how to write for them. You will analyse and discuss the narrative structures, character types, and other conventions of a range of genres, and try your hand at writing them yourself. These genres could range from documentary to sitcom, from horror to romantic comedy, or from action movie to period costume drama. Finally, you will become proficient at writing in a particular genre, which you will select from those you have studied. You will produce a script according to a genre-specific brief, and then reflect on the process of writing to the constraints of the familiar generic conventions of the film/television industry.

Exploring the key genres of fantasy and horror, this module allows you to consider how cult status has been incited, sustained and marketed. You will analyse cult film through a blend of film-makers’ and audiences’ agency versus structural (film industry/technological) forces. The module explores whether there are textual attributes through which ‘cult movies’ can be defined, and introduces you to how fantasy and horror film have been theorised in the academy (via cultural-historical, formal, and psychoanalytic approaches, along with others). You will consider a range of horror subgenres, as well as creatively assessing the possibilities for subgeneric innovation; you will also analyse the cultifying processes which have surrounded specific fantasy/horror films.

The Research Dissertation module facilitates your journey to acquiring expertise and specialism in a project allowing you to showcase summative learning across your course. You will be supported in undertaking guided independent research aimed at the generation of original knowledge in the study of media content, industries, practitioners, technologies or users and/or their cultural, social, political and economic premises and consequences. You will synthesise primary and secondary data and sources in your systematic, methodological analysis of a chosen topic in a field reflecting your course such as communication, journalism, film, digital media, entertainment, acting and performance, cultural production, sports media, music or promotional culture. This involves reviewing appropriate literature, identifying and executing a suitable methodology and research design and carrying out appropriate forms of analysis.

This module explores British poetry produced in the twentieth century. We may study poets from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. There will be a consideration of political events and their impact on poetry. This may include The Troubles in Ireland and the Thatcher government in Britain. There will also be an exploration of sociopolitical and minority identities which may include gender, race, sexuality, and disability. We will go on a journey, exploring different poetic movements and the development of poetry from the early to late twentieth century.

This module takes us on a journey with South Asian writers, looking at texts from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, set in India, Pakistan, and sites of diaspora including Britain and North America. Our individual approaches to the set texts will differ depending on our family histories, faith, gender, and other factors. Student voices are particularly important to seminar discussions here. We'll be considering the relationships between history, politics, literature, and identity. Topics include Empire, Independence, Partition, and Migration.

The twentieth century saw a golden age of experimental playwriting, to rival any since ancient Greece. From the pathos of Arthur Miller’s resurrection of tragedy to the hilarity of Dario Fo’s farces; from the politically motivated criticism of Bertolt Brecht’s plays to the bafflingly enigmatic absurdities of Samuel Beckett’s; from the witty repartee of Tom Stoppard’s dialogue to the grotesque brutality of Sarah Kane’s in-yer-face theatre – this is a unit in which no two weeks are even remotely the same. Besides embarking on an odyssey of innovation and controversy in modern drama, this module will also take you far beyond the English-speaking world, giving you a chance to study playwrights from a range of countries who changed the face of the western tradition of dramatic literature.