English Literature with Foundation year

This module is designed to support students with the transition to university, the development of the academic skills and attributes necessary for successful future study and the foundations of a developing sense of vocation.  Through a carefully structured and scaffolded series of seminars and workshops, students will be supported in building their self-awareness of, and confidence in, themselves as active learners.  Delivered in the context of their subject area and aligned with the development of academic skills and attributes required across all Foundation Year modules, workshops will focus on academic skills such as referencing, selecting and using valid academic resources, reading/researching for academic purposes, using feedback constructively and gaining confidence in contributing to discussions and debates.  Coordinated assessment points across the Foundation Year experience enables this module to provide students with ongoing support and opportunities to practice and develop their skills and confidence with a range of written and oral assessment types relevant to their subject area as they progress through the year.

This module introduces students to invaluable meanings and understandings that are gained from being at university and participating in wider intellectual discussions and debates. Within the context of each Discipline foundation year, students are introduced to a range of thinkers and questions that have important in various ways across the discipline. Designed to further encourage the foundations of intellectual curiosity and critical thinking within and beyond their own subject, students will come to understand that inter and cross disciplinarity has an essential role to play in the academy and to their own intellectual progression.

The past can be studied from numerous perspectives and in a variety of ways. This module introduces students to how historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and classicists have studied past societies and cultures across the globe. This is achieved by looking at the specific themes of conflict, culture, social relations and beliefs in various parts of the world from prehistoric times until the late twentieth century. We will also consider how current societies remember and examine the past and what it says about the contemporary world.

In 1827, Goethe popularised the concept of Weltliteratur, ‘world literature’, as a means to challenge Eurocentric and nationalist cultural norms. In Term one, this module examines such ideas against the diasporic literatures produced by the forced migration and enslavement of Africans to ‘America,’ known as ‘The Black Atlantic.’ It will examine these texts within the frame of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Among the key figures studied might be Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatly, Frederick Douglas and Alex Haley. In Term two, we will turn to the 21st century to focus on how the study of ‘English’ as a discipline has been affected by globalisation and ‘identity politics.’ Here, contemporary (i.e., C21) texts will be used to explore a variety of concepts and critical issues, including nationalism and multiculturalism, non-British English and reading in translation, as well as the effect of globalisation on contemporary politics.

In Term one, this module is designed to introduce students to a range of literary texts and genres from the medieval period up to the eighteenth century, opening consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of understanding these texts in relation to their historical contexts. This will include consideration of the following: the changing practices of publication and composition of audience; the historical, political and cultural contexts; contemporary conceptualisations of genre, gender roles and sexual identity; treatment of issues of colonialism, national identity, ethnic difference and religious affiliation. Comparisons and contrasts in relation to historical change will be highlighted by tracing these topics across texts from different periods. In Term two, the module will examine a range of ways that texts have been analysed in and through their relationship with other texts. It will begin with the well-established concepts of source, genre, and allusion, examining specific texts and tracing these relationships. It will then look at theoretical expansions of the concept of intertextuality and consider these in relation to an extended study of a pair of related literary texts. 

The purpose of Studying English Literature is to prepare students in as comprehensive a way as possible to engage with their degree studies and to act as an overview of correct practise in their transition from A-Level to undergraduate study. Students get the chance to explore a range of canonical and non-canonical texts across different periods and genres alongside instructive skills-based classes. The module teaches students to research and reference to an academic standard and introduces some of the central debates that have informed the development of English Literature as an academic subject. These include questions about the importance of authorship, the role of the reader in determining the meaning of a text, the nature of criticism and interpretation, different ways of reading texts by using approaches that focus on contextual, political and identity-based methodologies.

Critical Theory has unarguably transformed the discipline of English Literature, but its significance in the 21st century has been increasingly subject to debate. This module responds to proclamations of the ‘Death of Theory’ and the rush to declare us ‘post-Theory’ (post-gender, post-race, post-truth, etc.) It examines the development of capital ‘T’ Theory through the 20th century, as well as foundational texts from philosophy, to confront its historical and intellectual impact on the discipline. The module will explore works by difficult thinkers (from Derrida to Žižek), as well as the philosophers who influenced them (Freud, Hegel, etc.) to experience theory first-hand. Drawing on novels by Jane Austen, students will learn to tackle the more difficult critical material in the discipline to both assess its usefulness and its application for different texts, contexts and periods.

The dissertation is an extended treatment of between 8,000 and 10,000 words on a subject of the student’s choice (subject to approval). Study is primarily student-directed, with supervision supplied by tutors teaching/researching in the subject area. Students will draw on a small number of general lectures to further provide guidance through the process, but this is primarily a self-directed, independent study.

Society from 1800 to the present might be argued to have been marked by fantastic advances in concepts about what technology can do and concomitantly, writers might be argued to have created fantasies that explored other worlds that were both more fantastic and more technological, or less technical and sometimes barbaric, to explain current developments to readers who were confused or alienated by the social changes they encountered. What these stories have in common is that though the other worlds are apparently beyond experience, the philosophies that underlie them explore (among many other things) real world debates about the religious and the scientific, the nature of conflict, and aspects of health and wellbeing. Fantasy fiction also spawned other media forms like comics, art, film, games and graphic fictions. This module will also question and discuss how literary these “new media” versions of other world fantasies might be.

In the second Term, students will engage with utopian and dystopian texts – the line between which is often blurry – across a range of cultural forms. Focusing primarily on literary responses to these ‘grand’ themes, we will also consider other forms such as film, television, and videogames, challenging students to develop an interdisciplinary approach to their work. Students will engage with key utopian theorists such as Plato, Jameson, Moylan, Baccolini, Sargent, Sontag, and Dyer as a means to help guide their interrogation of the spaces between utopia, dystopia, and anti-utopia. Students will learn to debate how key frameworks such as gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and ideology function in utopian and dystopian fiction. They will also use their knowledge of these approaches, built up during their studies, in order to deconstruct the operations of utopia and dystopia and to find patterns in the construction of these ‘other’ types of world.

Literature and Film - 30 credits
This module uses the relationship between American literature and film as fertile ground to consider two central ideas about the scope and function of American culture. Firstly, the idea that American culture promises to provide access to some extra-social realm, often called 'authentic,' visionary, or transformative but that this often sits in tension with its commodified nature and secondly that: American culture plays an important role in struggles over identity - as potentially liberating and transformative, or as constraining and reinforcing hierarchies of power.

The module also uses extensive examples from the movies of Alfred Hitchcock to illustrate the processes involved in adapting literature into film while applying these lessons to readings of key American texts through the 20th and 21st centuries. These texts allow for a period driven examination of American ideas about identity against relevant cultural and socio-political events to encourage students to pay particularly close attention to both modes and moments of production.

Consuming Pleasures - 30 credits
This work addresses the development in tandem of consumer culture and an erotics of literature through amorous fiction. Historically, it takes up with the eclipse of shopping arcades with the rise of department stores, notably in Paris (‘capital’, in Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘of the nineteenth century’). But if the early French department stores are in fact modelled on London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, it is worth cross-referencing the spread at roughly the same time of serial fiction, earlier trailblazed by Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and, later, the Victorian penny dreadfuls. This is to note a critical inter- twining of consumer culture and amorous fiction in modernity’s signature blurring of phantasy and reality – in, that is, the ‘pornography of representation’ (Susanne Kappeler’s phrase). Here, consumer culture texts and forms of amorous fiction are interleaved, correspondingly, to analyse the symbolic reciprocal action of each on the other, a key exchange. Among the references, therefore, are Émile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames – The Ladies’ Paradise – as the first ever department store novel and Sophie Kinsella’s later contribution to chick lit, Confessions of a Shopaholic, as well as selections from Mariella Frostrup and Jamie Maclean’s 2016 Desire anthology, featuring amorous fiction from the Marquis de Sade to Anaïs Nin to Angela Carter. Please note: there is frequent explicit material in the amorous fiction in this study, necessarily to locate this work at the sharp end of research into a crossover world of commodity poetics and consuming pleasures.

Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century - 15 credits
The module will explore women’s writing of the long eighteenth century following the two current trends in this most exciting area of critical study: women as political commentators, and women as philosophers of the emotions. Both of these ways of understanding women’s writing required that a writer had a wide ranging knowledge of classical techniques, an indication which has now led to serious study of the huge outpouring of texts by women, that has replaced former methodologies of reading that were based on the idea that women were uneducated (Ian Watt), and had a short attention span (John Richetti), so produced texts that were merely entertainment. But nor will this be an unreconstructed feminist approach to these writers. Women writers in the eighteenth century were not merely opposing patriarchy, they were writing about everything and anything they though interesting – just as women do today

Tales from the Inside - 15 credits
This module examines writing and cultural texts classifiable as ‘prison literature’ or ‘carceral texts’. Students will examine cultural representations of ‘carceral institutions’ and the issues raised by them utilising critical and literary theory. Study frameworks will include: historical context (from BCE to the present); global contexts (the U.S., the U.K., China, Russia, and elsewhere); political and legal contexts (national and international laws, treaties, and jurisprudence on prisoners’ rights); and institutional variation (potentially including, but not limited to, men’s and women’s prisons, the ‘prison industrial complex’ and ‘carceral state’, secure psychiatric facilities, and other examples). The module will explore debates around what constitutes ‘prison literature’ as a genre, including questions of authorship and authenticity, readerly appeal, and adaptability across a variety of literary forms. In addition to this, the module will also consider both the power and limitations of various kinds of prison literature to inform and inspire change in prisons.

Globalisation and Contemporary Fiction - 15 credits
This module surveys literary (and some filmic) texts that have globalisation as a theme and asks how far these fictional accounts offer us a coherent definition of globalisation. Throughout this module we will consider depictions of international migration, new communicative-technologies, global economics, environmentalism, transnational corporations, global labour, and terror. We will consider whether the fictional representations of these phenomena suggest particular ways of thinking about the global and ask whether this improves our understanding of globalisation as lived experience. During this module you will be asked to think about how the depictions of global phenomena within fictional texts compare with the presentation of globalisation in political discourse and to consider how far fictional accounts of globalisation clarify the diverse and contradictory meanings for the term globalisation in daily use.

Literature and Psychoanalysis - 15 credits
‘The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious,’ Freud once admitted. ‘What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.’ This dichotomy—between the literary and the scientific—is at the heart of this module. After all, Freud’s ‘scientific’ theories were supplemented by his own readings of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Hoffmann. Hence, this is a module as much about ‘reading psychoanalysis’ as much as it is about psychoanalysing reading. It proceeds from a deepening of the student’s understanding of psychoanalysis in Critical Theory by treating Freud alongside key influences (Charcot, Breuer) and followers (Jones, Rank); those who succeeded him (Klein, Anna Freud) and who broke from his influence (Jung). It will complement this with a consideration of Lacan’s infamous ‘return to Freud’ as the basis for several key feminist (Irigaray) and philosophical interventions in the late 20th century.