BA English Literature with Creative Writing (Q3W8)

Course Code UNU1Q3W8301
Duration 3 Years
Attendance Full Time
Award Degree of Bachelor of Arts

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Overview

Stack Books The University of East Anglia has a long tradition of providing courses in the writing of fiction, poetry and drama and has close and active links with the world of contemporary writing. As an introduction to the demands and challenges of creative practice, we offer Creative Writing as a subsidiary subject taken in conjunction with the study of English Literature.

This programme combines the study of English literature with the chance to develop your creative writing skills in classes usually taught by practising and published writers. There are classes in writing poetry, prose and drama, and in each case the aim is to complement the critical study of literature with insights gained from the practice of writing itself. Literature modules form about 75 per cent of the programme, creative writing about 25 per cent. If you are to be considered for this programme, you must be able to produce samples of your creative writing on request. Please note: creative writing modules are also available as options to students registered on other degree programmes.

The degree course is studied in an interdisciplinary atmosphere. Alongside specialists in English Literature, you will also work with teachers and students who are involved with Creative Writing, Drama, Philosophy, Modern Languages, American Studies, Film Studies, History and History of Art. The options system also allows you to explore one or other of these subjects yourself: in each of the three years, besides your options within the English syllabus, you can choose one module from another discipline, according to your own interests and aptitude.

The whole programme is based on the awareness that literature is not an abstract or unworldly pursuit, but something which happens in the real world. That is why we teach historically, so that literature is seen in larger contexts; and it is why we host regular extra-curricular visits by contemporary writers who read and discuss their work. We also emphasise making literature as well as studying it: there is the opportunity to extend your awareness of literature through your own writing. To facilitate all this we employ a variety of teaching strategies (small group seminars, larger-scale lectures, writing workshops, individual projects and dissertations). Assessment is carried out in each teaching module (either by coursework, assessed practical project or by occasional short exams) so that there are no ‘finals’.

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Creative Writing is taught in seminar-workshops designed to help you develop your skills as a writer under the guidance of experienced practising writers. The workshops are designed to increase your ability to initiate and develop new creative material through technical exercises, group discussion and the exploration of strategies for drafting and re-drafting new work. You will be encouraged to initiate new ideas, develop appropriate formal strategies, address technical problems and tackle the demands of different literary genres, with a view to shaping and completing new creative work. The practical problems of creating character, writing dialogue, determining and maintaining mood and atmosphere, establishing visual and aural dynamics, and structuring the work will all be addressed, and the challenges of reading and researching as a writer will be explored.

For the Creative Writing minor part of the course, students take between 90 and 120 credits in Creative Writing within the total 360 credits that make up the whole degree programme.

Course Structure

Year 1

In addition to the literature courses (outlined in the entry for English Literature), a first-year creative writing module is made up of structured exercises using objects, handouts and visualisations to introduce you to the craft and discipline of writing prose and poetry. You will begin with writing ‘what you know’, using memories, family stories and your own notebooks. Later, you will encounter the works of other authors as stimuli for your own writing, learning among other things, to read as a writer.

Year 2

Second-year specialist work takes the form of practical modules taught by practising writers, the aims of which are to help you develop your expressive and technical skills and improve your abilities as an editor and critic of your own and other people’s writing. The emphasis throughout is on reading as a writer and writing as a reader. The first half of the semester is normally spent in the production of an exploratory series of exercises and analyses of examples of writing, leading to the submission of two short pieces of fiction, together with a critical self-commentary. There is the opportunity for constructive group discussion of your work as an aid to the editing and redrafting process. There are similar second-year modules for scriptwriting, poetry and journalism.

Year 3
In the third year, there are the options of an advanced course (which operates as a foretaste of the renowned MA in Creative Writing), and/or a creative writing dissertation which takes the form of a longer piece in any genre agreed with your supervisor (eg a 45-60 minute script, a collection of poems or a 6,000-8,000 word short story) accompanied by a critical self-commentary on your work.

Teaching and Assessment:
Key skills, issues and ideas are introduced in lectures given by all members of faculty, including literary critics, literary historians and writers. More specialist study is undertaken in small group seminars. These are chosen from a range offered within the School and across the University. You will also spend time studying and researching in the library or carrying out practical work or projects. In most subject areas, you are assessed at the end of each year on the basis of coursework and, in some cases, project and examination results. In your final year, you will write a dissertation on a topic of your choice and with the advice of tutors. There is no final examination. Your final degree result is determined by the marks you receive in years two and three.

Course Organiser

Dr Jake Huntley

Course Brochure

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Related Courses

Entry Requirements

We do not include General Studies in our offers. The combined English Language and Literature A-level is acceptable instead of English Literature. A second Arts or Humanities subject at A-Level is required alongside English Literature. Students studying the IB programme must offer a second Arts or Humanities subject at Higher Level.

A Level AAA including English Literature
International Baccalaureate 34 points overall including 6 in HL English
Scottish Advanced Highers AAA including English Literature
Irish Leaving Certificate AAAAAA
Access Course Please contact the University for further information
HND Please contact the University for further information
European Baccalaureate 85% overall, including 80% in English Literature

Students for whom English is a foreign language

If English is not your first language you must have a recognised English Language qualification: Minimum IELTS 6.5 with a 6 in each sub-section, or TOEFL 585 (238 CBT / 93 IBT). Please contact us for more information about other qualifications that we may consider.

Interviews

The majority of candidates will not be called for an interview. However, for some students an interview will be requested. These are normally quite informal and generally cover topics such as your current studies, reasons for choosing the course and your personal interests and extra-curricular activities.

Gap Year

We welcome applications from students who have already taken or intend to take a gap year, believing that a year between school and university can be of substantial benefit. You are advised to indicate your reason for wishing to defer entry and may wish to contact the appropriate Admissions Office directly to discuss this further.

Special Entry Requirements

Shortlisted applicants will be asked to send a sample of their creative writing.

Intakes

The School's annual intake is in September of each year.

Alternative Qualifications

We encourage you to apply if you have alternative qualifications equivalent to our stated entry requirement. Please contact our Admissions team for details.

GCSE Offer

Students are required to have Mathematics and English at Grade C or above at GCSE Level.

Assessment

For the majority of candidates the most important factors in assessing the application will be past and future achievement in examinations, academic interest in the subject being applied for, personal interest and extra-curricular activities and the confidential reference. We consider applicants as individuals and accept students from a very wide range of educational backgrounds and spend time considering your application in order to reach an informed decision relating to your application. Typical offers are indicated above. Please note, there may be additional subject entry requirements specific to individual degree courses. For applicants to the English Literature with Creative Writing course, a crucial part of the admissions process is the submission of their creative writing portfolio.

Year 1
Year 2
Year 3

Year 1

Compulsory Study (120 credits)

Students will select 120 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
Creative Writing: First Year For 1st yr Q3W8 students only. This module uses structured exercises based on objects, handouts, discussion and visualisation to stimulate the production of prose fiction and poetry. Initially students will write about 'what they know', drawing on notebooks, memories and family stories. Focus will shift to the work of established authors, using sample texts as a stimulus to students' own writing. The aim of this module is to get students writing prose fiction and poetry. Along the way they will develop the craft elements of writing and acquire some of the disciplines necessary to being a writer: observation, keeping notebooks, writing in drafts, reading as a writer, submitting to deadlines, etc. more...	LDCC1W01	20	Semester 1
Literature in History 1 This is the main introductory module to the study of literature. It aims to help new students to read historically, by offering a range of models of the relationship between literature and history, explored through the study of selected historical and literary moments. The module is taught by a weekly lecture, with an accompanying seminar. more...	LDCE1F01	20	Semester 1
Literature in History II This module follows on from Literature in History I, taking in more recent history, and including discussion of how writers of the present make use of the past. The module is taught by lectures, with an accompanying seminar. Attendance at both lectures and seminars is compulsory. more...	LDCE1F10	20	Semester 2
Reading Texts II This module seeks to build on and develop the work of the Autumn semester, in particular that of Reading Texts and Reading Translations. The focus will fall again on small-group discussion and on the reading of a small number of texts - one creative, and one critical - chosen by the tutor from a set list. With this close attention to reading at its core, the module will also look at a number of the terms and ideas central to the study of literature and to the practice of interpretation. Not available to Visiting Students. more...	LDCE1F08	20	Semester 2
Reading Texts: Tutorial Class This module provides the opportunity to work closely on selected texts within the contexts of a small group. It aims to develop and explore modes of textual analysis. By the end of the module the students will have highly developed reading skills, a sense of the implications of interpreting texts and the individual research skills essential for a university degree. Not available to Visiting Students. more...	LDCE1F03	20	Semester 1
Writing Texts This module explores the culture and anthropology of writing, and addresses issues such as the differences between writing and speaking, between literary and non-literary texts, and the writer's relationship with readers. In weekly lectures and seminar groups, we will look at the writing process itself - drafting, revising, editing, translating - and will explore how and why texts come into being, and how they work to position the reader or to generate readerly interaction. The module is taught by a lecture, with an accompanying seminar. more...	LDCE1F14	20	Semester 2

Year 2

Option A Study (40 credits)

Students will select 40 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
17th-Century Writing: Renaissance, Revolution, Restoration This module explores 17th-Century writing in diverse forms, familiar and unfamiliar: the masque, poetry, prose fiction, political prose and the antecedents of what we now call 'journalism'. We will consider the place of these works in society and in their intellectual and cultural contexts, and examine the traffic between literary writing and broader (popular?) print culture. more...	LDCE2Y13	20	Semester 1
Critical Theory and Practice Through a combination of lectures and seminars, this module will explore changing responses to the central questions of poetics, from Plato and Aristotle in the classical period to contemporary theory. What kinds of truth, if any, do poetry and fictional writing tell? What is the nature of the imagination or the role of invention? How does fictional writing relate to philosophy, religion, rhetoric or science? This module will approach these questions through a combination of historical, theoretical and practical approaches. This module enables students to identify, assess and employ a range of critical methods in their study of literature. more...	LDCE2X15	20	Semester 1
Eighteenth-Century Writing This module reads major British fiction and some poetry of the eighteenth century in terms of its relation to the development of society which is recognisably modern. We will examine such writers as Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, and exploring the `rise of the novel', the coming dominance of prose representation in journalism and fiction, the rise of the middle class, the move to an urban cash-nexus society governed by reason and contractual economic exchange, and the construction of new kinds of subjectivities for men and women according to the needs of middle-class patriarchy. In many ways, this module studies the development of the `modern mind'. more...	LDCE2Y11	20	Semester 1
European Literature: Encounters With 'Otherness' This module explores critical and aesthetic issues raised by general and comparative literature, issues of 'influence', reception, intertextuality, translation, formal and generic comparabilities, national identity and cultural borrowing. Theoretical questions will be examined through specific examples and case studies, ranging across different periods and geographies; however the focus is likely to be on the twentieth-century. Works studies may include texts by e.g. Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Sebald, Calvino, Celan. more...	LDCE2X24	20	Semester 2
Goodbye to Berlin? Literature & Visual Culture in Weimar Germany This module aims to explore some of the exciting developments in verbal and visual culture of the Weimar Republic between the First and Second World Wars, e.g. experimental theatre, Weimar cinema, cabaret, visual arts, the Bauhaus, etc. Texts considered will include writings by Brecht et al. Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and less familiar authors as well as key films by e.g. Pabst (Threepenny Opera), Lang (Metropolis), von Sternberg (Blue Angel) and others. A particular focus is likely to be representations of gender on page, stage and screen. Active seminar participation is expected. NB: A knowledge of German, while useful, is not a prerequisite; translations are available. more...	LDCE2Z40	20	Semester 2
Medieval Writing This module is designed to provide an introduction to the study of medieval English language and literature. In a series of lectures and seminars students will work through a small but representative selection of medieval texts, including lyrics, romance, and poetry, in order to develop a working knowledge of the language - Middle English - and an appreciation of different forms and genres found in medieval writing. Medieval texts and contexts will be used as a means of familiarising students with medieval language, and form the basis for further modules in medieval writing that may be taken within the School. more...	LDCE2Y15	20	Semester 1
Modernism The purpose of this module is to study the literature of the early decades of the twentieth century - very roughly 1900-1930 - in particular the work of those authors who attempted to break with received norms of literary style and content. The module is organised as a series of thematic explorations - poetic experiment, memory and desire, myth and innovation, and so on - and thus does not follow a chronological structure. The sequence of guiding lectures focuses its deliberations on a set of specific texts, with their contexts, and these are taken up for discussion in the accompanying seminars. 'Modernism' is this constructed gradually over the semester as a mosaic of closely related issues, each one reflecting on the others. As well as providing an overview of defining textual features, in prose and poetry, the module is concerned also with the interrelation of text and context, offering a range of ways of conceiving of modernist literature as both of, and self-consciously ahead of, its historical moment. more...	LDCE2Z15	20	Semester 1
Nineteenth-Century Writing This module introduces students to classics of nineteenth-century fiction, primarily British but also including two famous French novels to provide comparative foil. The lectures will direct attention to such formal and ideological matters as the free indirect style, literary realism, authorial omniscience and moral didacticism, the representation of history, comic and gothic elements, and the shift towards aestheticism and impressionism in the second half of the century. These features will be related to larger patterns of social change, notably changing relations between social classes, the role of the novel in bourgeois ideology, moral urgency and complacency, the repression of women, the retreat from progressive models of history and the development of a commodifying cultural sphere. more...	LDCE2Z30	20	Semester 2
Romanticism 1780-1840 Romantic Literature is often thought of as poetry, primarily work by Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Bryon. But the signs and forms of Romantic sensibility can also be found in a much broader constituency of writing practice: the novel, letter writing, the essay, political and aesthetic theory, and writing of all kinds taken as social commentary. This module is taught through a combination of lectures and seminars. more...	LDCE2X26	20	Semester 2
Shakespeare The aim of this lecture-seminar module is to help you become a better reader of Shakespearean drama. He was writing between about 1590 and about 1610; obviously his plays speak to us over a great cultural distance, and we can find fresh ways of reading them by exploring the theatrical, generic and historical frameworks in which they were written and staged. The lectures, then, will introduce a range of contexts, and the seminars will seek to turn them to account in the reading of the dramatic texts themselves. more...	LDCE2Y04	20	Semester 2

Option B Study (20 credits)

Students will select 20 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
Adaptation: Shakespeare On Stage and Screen This module explores the rich dramatic and cinematic traditions of Shakespearean adaptation. It considers a range of adaptations, from the seventeenth-century restoration versions of Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest to more recent film versions of Shakespeare's plays, examining the light that adaptive transformations may cast on both the original plays and on the different social and cultural circumstances of the new productions. Through exploration of specific adaptations of Macbeth, King Lear and Henry V, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet, the module explores the place of Shakespeare's plays on the Caribbean stage, in Japanese film, in Germany and Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, and in more contemporary twentieth and twenty-first-century culture. more...	LDCD2X45	20	Semester 1
Austen and the Brontes: Reading the Romance This module will consider three texts by Austen and the Brontes. A wide variety of literary and historical contexts will be discussed: feminisms, colonialism, impact of war, the social status of the woman writer, representations of governesses, madness and mad women, rakes, foreigners and strangers, minds and bodies, heroes and heroines. We investigate the ways that the lives of the authors of these novels have been told and read as romances. Opportunities will be available to work on film versions. Work on any text by these authors is welcomed in class, coursework and in the examination. more...	LDCE2X28	20	Semester 2
Contemporary Writing This module aims to take an open snapshot of different modes of writing in the recent British scene, not a post-war history of the novel. Together with the question of exactly what it means to be contemporary, we shall concentrate on a small number of thematic and/or formal features, looking in particular at more adventurous examples of recent literature. more...	LDCE2Z34	20	Semester 2
Cultural Theory and Analysis This seminar module introduces a range of critical approaches to ideas of culture and encourages their assessment and application, paying particular attention to the role of literature and visual culture (art, film, advertising). Organised broadly historically and focussing on the twentieth century, it considers different appraoches to 'culture', including key debates around the concept of 'high' and 'low' culture and power, the impact of mass culture, culture industries, gender and culture, modernism and postmodernism. Theorists to be studied include Matthew Arnold, Raymond Williams, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Dick Hebdige, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler and Fredric Jameson. Assessment is by means of joint or individual seminar presentation which is then written up and a longer essay. more...	LDCE2X17	20	Semester 1
From Pushkin to Chekhov: Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction This module offers students the opportunity to study some of the great works of nineteenth-century Russian fiction by authors such as Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Russian writers were convinced that their country's literature had been too dependent on European models and they set out consciously to create a distinctly 'Russian' tradition. What did this involve and why subsequently were the works of the authors like Dostoevsky and Chekhov received so rapturously when they became available in English translations at the beginning of the twentieth century? We will also examine this writing in its social, historical and political context, which raises questions regarding the significance of gender, censorship and empire. more...	LDCE2Z33	20	Semester 1
From Tragic to Epic Performance Through readings of classical and neo-classical generic criticism, as well as through an investigation of performance and staging demands, the module examines classical, post-classical and early modern forms of tragedy, and contrasts them with the complex emergent forms of tragicomedy and (later) epic, which, in different ways, re-model or resist the central experience of tragic reception. The course will look at plays selected from different genres, countries and periods, e.g. classical Greek (Sophocles) and Roman (Seneca) French Neoclassical (Racine), Spanish golden age (Lope de Vega Calderon), English Jacobean (Middleton and Rowley, Ford), Japanese Kabuki, post-revolutionary German (from Schiller to Brecht). By positing strategies for reading and performing such plays, it will thus develop a deeper knowledge of stage history and of complex theatrical styles. It will also engage with critical discourse, especially in aesthetics and genre criticism (Zeami, Aristotle, Castelvetro, Dryden, Lessing, Brecht). more...	LDCD2X47	20	Semester 1
Goodbye to Berlin? Literature & Visual Culture in Weimar Germany This module aims to explore some of the exciting developments in verbal and visual culture of the Weimar Republic between the First and Second World Wars, e.g. experimental theatre, Weimar cinema, cabaret, visual arts, the Bauhaus, etc. Texts considered will include writings by Brecht et al. Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and less familiar authors as well as key films by e.g. Pabst (Threepenny Opera), Lang (Metropolis), von Sternberg (Blue Angel) and others. A particular focus is likely to be representations of gender on page, stage and screen. Active seminar participation is expected. NB: A knowledge of German, while useful, is not a prerequisite; translations are available. more...	LDCE2Z40	20	Semester 2
Literature and Visual Culture Ii: At the Fin De Siecle This interdisciplinary module investigates the interweaving of literature, painting and photography in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on France. It looks at the characteristic thematic preoccupations, styles and perceptual psychologies which drive Naturalism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Aestheticism and Decadence as modernist modes. We will be examining developments in the handling of narrative and poetry as well as experiments in theatre against the background of photography's emulation of painting, and painting's struggle to free itself from the academic. Writers to be studied include Baudelaire, Zola, Moore, Maupassant, Wilde, Yeats, Maeterlinck and Mirbeau alongside a selection of poets, painters and photographers of the period. Assessment is by means of a written image analysis and a longer individually designed project, both of which are supported by individual tutorials. more...	LDCE2Z24	20	Semester 2
Publishing (Aut) The module will be theoretical as well as practical including discussions around the design and editing of a text and what constitutes an editorial policy. Students will be taught how to set up, run and market their own publications (a magazine/book/fanzine) as well as to justify their editorial, marketing and business strategies. This course will be assessed by a portfolio and a piece of coursework. Training on Desktop publishing packages PageMaker and Photoshop will be provided as part of the course. more...	LDCE2X05	20	Semester 1
Publishing (Spr) The module will be theoretical as well as practical including discussions around the design and editing of a text and what constitutes an editorial policy. Students will be taught how to set up, run and market their own publications (a magazine/book/fanzine) as well as to justify their editorial, marketing and business strategies. This course will be assessed by a portfolio and a piece of coursework. Training on Desktop publishing packages PageMaker and Photoshop will be provided as part of the course. more...	LDCE2X06	20	Semester 2
The Writing of Journalism (Aut) The Writing of Journalism is concerned with journalism as a practice, and a genre. By examining different types of writing involved in a range of journalism, including short news stories, running stories, online journalism, reviews, and feature writing (including interviewing), we will identify and develop the skills needed to produce these. In addition to writing journalism themselves, students will examine journalistic writing and critical work about issues in the writing of journalism to probe and challenge their own ideas and assumptions about the practice and production of journalism. Rather than see the practice of journalism and the critical study of journalism as distinct activities, this course aims to engage students as critical readers and writers whose work is informed by both contexts. In so doing, students will gain a greater understanding of the demands and conventions of journalistic writing, develop and sharpen their own work, and gain the discursive flexibility to navigate the writing of journalism today. The module demands a high level of participation, as it is based on discussion, peer-workshops, and practical experience of reading and writing news and feature articles. Regular writing and participation in workshops count towards assessment. Due to the nature of this module, students who work in English as a second or foreign language should meet LDC's EFL score of 6.5. All prospective students are advised that the module involves weekly work to develop effective - and professional - journalism practices. more...	LDCC2W27	20	Semester 1
The Writing of Journalism (Spr) The Writing of Journalism is concerned with journalism as a practice, and a genre. By examining different types of writing involved in a range of journalism, including short news stories, running stories, online journalism, reviews, and feature writing (including interviewing), we will identify and develop the skills needed to produce these. In addition to writing journalism themselves, students will examine journalistic writing and critical work about issues in the writing of journalism to probe and challenge their own ideas and assumptions about the practice and production of journalism. Rather than see the practice of journalism and the critical study of journalism as distinct activities, this course aims to engage students as critical readers and writers whose work is informed by both contexts. In so doing, students will gain a greater understanding of the demands and conventions of journalistic writing, develop and sharpen their own work, and gain the discursive flexibility to navigate the writing of journalism today. The module demands a high level of participation, as it is based on discussion, peer-workshops, and practical experience of reading and writing news and feature articles. Regular writing and participation in workshops count towards assessment. Due to the nature of this module, students who work in English as a second or foreign language should meet LDC's EFL score of 6.5. All prospective students are advised that the module involves weekly work to develop effective - and professional - journalism practices. more...	LDCC2W28	20	Semester 2
Theatres of Revolt: Nineteenth-Century European Drama Beginning with Ibsen and Strindberg, this module examines the development of modern forms of drama during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, addressing modern concerns - self and society, gender, sexuality, social and class conflicts, creation and destruction, the unconscious - and deploying experimental types of theatre by Chekhov, Maeterlinck, Wilde, Hauptmann, Buchner and Wedekind, as well as the two seminal Scandinavians. We will be looking at versions of Naturalism, Symbolism and Expressionism as modernist modes in drama and suggesting ways in which these shape and anticipate later developments. There will be opportunities to view some of the plays on film. Assessment is by means of seminar participation, one piece of textual analysis and one longer essay. Drama students may include a performance element as part of the assessment. more...	LDCE2X07	20	Semester 1
Three Women Writers The writings of Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf intersect with discourses of 'new women' and gender as well as feminism, and social and cultural history. This second level seminar develops historicist and generic understanding as well as exploring women's identity through these authors' writings, which move between realism and modernism. Special attention to just one writer is possible in the final essay. Particular attention will be given to some of Virginia Woolf's lesser known writing. more...	LDCE2Z38	20	Semester 2
War Lives: Writing Britain in World War II World War II brought the horror of war home to the British. War invaded the country in new ways: it reshaped Britain's landscapes, radically altered the social practices of everyday life, and shattered people's very sense of what it meant to live. As one writer remarked, the war "worked at a thinning of the membrane between the 'this' and the 'that'. War life, for many, was hallucinatory, and the struggle to write the war, and its peculiar relation to Britain's home-front, invades the writing of the 1940s in strange and unpredictable ways. This module examines both fiction (short stories and novels) and non-fiction (essays and letters) by writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, A. L. Barker, Angus Wilson, Henry Green and Patrick Hamilton, as well as critical work on the literature of the period, to examine how writing in and about Britain during the Second World War struggled to account for the uncertainties and instabilities of war lives. more...	LDCE2X34	20	Semester 2
World Literature: Reading Globally The term 'world literature', coined by Goethe as a means for promoting universal understanding, and then taken up by Marx and Engels as a symbol of modernity, has today become not only a booming area of academic research, but also a publishing phenomenon. This module introduces literature from around the globe, specifically texts that have had and continue to have an impact on an international readership and that frequently demand a self-consciously different mode of reading, one that recognises otherness while simultaneously finding points of commonality. Primary texts will include the ancient Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, the classical Japanese Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, The 1001 Nights, the King James Version of the Bible, as well as more contemporary works by authors such as Bei Dao, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Tayeb Salih and Yoko Tawada. To contextualise our diverse readings, a range of critical and theoretical explorations of what it means to read (or to write) beyond the borders of a national literature will also be studied. The vital role of translation, understood in both the linguistic and cultural sense, in creating the world literature text will further ground much of the discussion. more...	LDCE2X29	20	Semester 1
You may also pick any of the modules that begin with: LDCD2X48 LDCE2Z07

Option C Study (20 credits)

Students will select 20 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
Creative Writing: Scriptwriting (Aut) WW84 STUDENTS TAKE THIS MODULE AND THE SPRING MODULE (LDCC2W24) AS COMPULSORY MODULES. STUDENTS ON OTHER PROGRAMMES MAY TAKE EITHER THE AUTUMN MODULE OR THE SPRING MODULE, BUT NOT BOTH. This module develops students' abilities to invent and understand dramatic texts. Methods include structured exercises in writing drama and the exploration and analysis of a range of plays. Students may specialise in writing for stage/radio or film/television. more...	LDCC2W05	20	Semester 1
Creative Writing: Scriptwriting (Spr) WW84 STUDENTS TAKE THIS MODULE AND THE AUTUMN MODULE (LDCC2W05) AS COMPULSORY MODULES. STUDENTS ON OTHER PROGRAMMES MAY TAKE EITHER THE AUTUMN MODULE OR THE SPRING MODULE, BUT NOT BOTH. This module develops students' abilities to invent and understand dramatic texts. Methods include structured exercises in writing drama and the exploration and analysis of a range of plays. Students may specialise in writing for stage/radio or film/TV. more...	LDCC2W24	20	Semester 2
Creative Writing: Poetry (Aut) This module enables students to test the range of their abilities as writers of poetry. The first half of the course will be exploratory and practical, using structured exercises and handouts to consider such issues as voice, persona, sound, imagery, metaphor, structure and form. In the second half the emphasis will shift to constructive group discussion of students' own work. Aims: The aim of this module is to develop students' expressive and technical skills in writing poetry and to improve students' abilities as editors and critics of their own and other people's work. more...	LDCC2W07	20	Semester 1
Creative Writing: Poetry (Spr) This module enables students to test the range of their abilities as writers of poetry. The first half of the seminar will be exploratory and practical, using structured exercises and handouts to consider such issues as voice, persona, sound, imagery, metaphor, structure and form. In the second half the emphasis will shift to constructive group discussion of students' own work. Aims: The aim of this module is to develop students' expressive and technical skills in writing poetry and to improve students' abilities as editors and critics of their own and other people's work. more...	LDCC2W20	20	Semester 2
Creative Writing: Prose Fiction (Aut) This module enables students to test their abilities and potential as writers of prose fiction. It is not intended for beginners, or those with no experience of a formal creative writing environment. The first half of the course will be exploratory and practical, using structured exercises and handouts to consider such issues as character, genre voice, dialogue and point of view. In the second half the emphasis will shift to constructive group discussion of students' own work. Aim: The aim of this module is to develop students' expressive and technical skills in writing prose fiction and to improve students' abilities as editors and critics of their own and other people's work. THIS MODULE IS EXCLUSIVE TO CREATIVE WRITING MINORS, VISITING STUDENTS FROM EQUIVALENT COURSES AND LIT STUDENTS WITH SOME PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE OF CREATIVE WRITING. ALL OTHER STUDENTS SHOULD ENROL ON LDCC2W08/11 CREATIVE WRITING: INTRODUCTION. more...	LDCC2W01	20	Semester 1
Creative Writing: Prose Fiction (Spr) This module enables students to test their abilities and potential as writers of prose fiction. The first half of the seminar will be exploratory and practical, using structured exercises and handouts to consider such issues as character, genre, voice, dialogue and point of view. In the second half the emphasis will shift to constructive group discussion of students' own work. The aim of this module is to develop students' expressive and technical skills in writing prose fiction and to improve students' abilities as editors and critics of their own and other people's work. THIS MODULE IS EXCLUSIVE TO CREATIVE WRITING MINORS, VISITING STUDENTS FROM EQUIVALENT COURSES AND LIT STUDENTS WITH SOME PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE OF CREATIVE WRITING. ALL OTHER STUDENTS SHOULD ENROL ON LDCC2W08/11 CREATIVE WRITING: INTRODUCTION. more...	LDCC2W14	20	Semester 2

Free Choice Study (40 credits)

Students can select modules worth 40 credits from the course catalogue with the approval of their School.

Year 3

Compulsory Study (30 credits)

Students will select 30 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
Creative Writing This is an advanced module for final year Creative Writing minors. Students on other LDC degree courses may be considered but only if they have previously achieved a grade of at least 68% in a level 2 Creative Writing module. Under the guidance of an experienced practising writer, the seminar will take the form of workshops designed to promote group discussion both of students' own work and the work of established authors. Consideration will be given to the technical and expressive aspects of drafting and re-drafting in any genre with a view to shaping and completing a substantial piece of work. Reserved for students on courses: Q3W8U1, QT37U1, QV31U1, VQ53U1, Q300U1, Q300U2, Q200U1, Q201U1. more...	LDCC3W18	30	Semester 2

Option A Study (90 credits)

Students will select 90 credits from the following module(s).

Name	Code	Credits	Period
Writing Life: Biography and Creative Non-Fiction How do writers attempt to capture 'life' in all its various forms? What, if any, are the different requirements in writing the life of a famous (or not so famous) person and that of a city or landscape? What about the 'life' of travel or food and how do you approach writing about the natural world? These are just some of the questions that this module sets out to address. We will be reading a wide variety of texts, from the 'traditional' biography to some of the more experimental examples of creative non-fiction. From Samuel Johnson to essays in The New Yorker, all human (and non-human) life will be there! Students may choose between writing their own piece of Biography or creative Non-Fiction as their final project or submitting a critical essay. more...	LDCE3X46	30	Semester 2
Chaucer This module explores Chaucer's major writings in their historical, cultural and literary contexts. The module will introduce Chaucer's writing in a range of genres and will examine his works' representation and exploration of society, identity, chivalry, politics, religion and gender, and will also consider the medieval reception of Chaucer's writing. Previous experience of medieval literature will be useful but is not required. more...	LDCE3Y05	30	Semester 1
Children's Literature This module offers students the chance to learn about children's literature and its development and also to try to write a piece of children's literature themselves. It starts with the history of children's literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through Aesop's fables, fairy tales, Mother Goose, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and examining other authors such as A.A. Milne, Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, Sherman Alexie and Nancy Garden, amongst others. The course looks at issues of genre and content as well as historical context. By studying the development of children's literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society. more...	LDCE3X67	30	Semester 1
Contemporary Drama and Film The module will examine emergent voices and trends in recent theatre, film and television (mainly British but with some American or European contributions). Issues covered include the (questioned) demise of explicitly political drama and the appearance of previously silenced voices (e.g. gay and lesbian themes, feminist playwrights and writing ethnicity, physical theatre practitioners). more...	LDCD3X34	30	Semester 2
Creative Writing Dissertation (Aut) This is an advanced level module which is for final year CW minors. The module allows students an opportunity to write a substantial short story (approximately 6000 words) or drama script (60 pages) or collection off poems (15-25 poems, totalling between 270 and 290 lines) and to develop an understanding of their own motivations, influences and processes through the production of a reflective self-commentary (2000 words). This module aims to encourage independent learning and the initiation and development of new creative material in a way that provides a grounding in the disciplines necessary both for postgraduate research and the professional practice of writing. more...	LDCC3X07	30	Semester 1
Creative Writing Dissertation (Spr) This is an advanced level module which is for final year CW minors. The module allows students an opportunity to write a substantial short story (approximately 6000 words) or drama script (60 pages) or collection of poems (15-25 poems, totalling between 270 and 290 lines) and to develop an understanding of their own motivations, influences and processes through the production of a reflective self-commentary (2000 words). This module aims to encourage independent learning and the initiation and development of new creative material in a way that provides a grounding in the disciplines necessary both for postgraduate research and the professional practice of writing. more...	LDCC3X08	30	Semester 2
Drama and Literature: the Question of Genre This seminar will explore the boundaries between drama and other genres (kinds, art-forms, media) in an attempt to investigate a number of interrelated theoretical questions. We shall explore these issues via various types of activity - practical criticism, critiques of literary theory, performance analysis, dramatising prose narrative. The set texts are works of literature which do not quite fit generically - particularly plays that seem to be in some sense 'epic', or novels in some sense 'theatrical', ranging from Shakespeare in the 17th century through to Gay and Fielding in the 18th and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov in the 19th. more...	LDCE3X06	30	Semester 2
Early English Drama This module focuses on the medieval and early sixteenth century period, exploring conceptions and deployments of drama. Comparative work of different forms of drama, the drama and other artistic media, and the drama and social attitudes will be encouraged. You will explore whether drama successfully produces civic unity; how audiences are addressed and constructed; the theatricality of how the Biblical past is imagined, the significance of staging, place, and gesture; the social and political functions of drama, the representation of women; and protests against the drama from various quarters. Our period ends just as the suburban professional theatre was establishing itself in London in a form that was fundamentally influenced by these much earlier dramatic activities. We shall explore how spectacle and ceremony enabled pre-Reformation communities to celebrate their existence and assert an often contested or otherwise problematic sense of their cultural identity. more...	LDCE3Y81	30	Semester 1
Fin De Siecle: Fantasies of Decadence and Degeneration Max Nordau's 1892 Degeneration, attacking fin de siecle decadence, draws together fears of cultural decline and corrupting artistic practice through pseudo-Darwinian thinking about devolution. Yet Nordau's urgent and apocalyptic claims about 'diseased' art draw an ambivalent response from contemporary writers, such as those associated with the aestheticism and decadence of The Yellow Book. It is within the fantastic, however, that Nordau is most directly confronted and social norms most explicitly deformed by art. Wilde's swift move from pedestal to pederast may remove a key figure, but texts such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; The Novel of the White Powder; Dracula; Wells' science fiction dystopias and, more recently, Moore and Campbell's From Hell, rehearse, react to, or reflect upon such concerns. These writings share a central tension: are the effects of decadence and degeneration offering pessimistic prophesy or optimistic alternatives? This module would complement nineteenth-century options and offer a perspective on the Modernist module. For students also taking the Gothic it would be related, although usefully focusing on the closing years of the nineteenth century with a different emphasis. more...	LDCE3X50	30	Semester 2
Henry James: Questions of Art, Life and Theory In this module students engage with the range of Henry James's writing and also the reproduction of his life and work in contemporary culture. This module aims not simply to add to understanding of James but also to explore the issues that his work raises in relation to the art and history of fiction, philosophy and cultural reproduction. It is suitable not only for literature students who want to study this writer who spans realism and modernism, and short stories, literary criticism and fiction, but also for creative writing students and literature and philosophy students. The final assignment will have a creative writing option that comprises a piece of creative writing with a critical reflection. It can be taken by students who have studied modules in nineteenth-century writing or modernism. more...	LDCE3Z42	30	Semester 2
John Milton's Paradise Lost Paradise Lost is perhaps the finest poem in the language. Its ambition is breathtaking: it begins before time, ends with time, spans the whole of the created universe, and yet focuses on a single, human relationship, on betrayal, recrimination and reconciliation. It is an attempt to explain the co-existence of evil and an omnipotent good God, a response to defeated political aspirations, and an attempt to create a republican poetics. In the module we will read the poem intensively, and seek to understand it in its historical context. Was there a republican aesthetic? How did writers respond to the collapse of radical political ideals and (comparative) religious toleration when 1660 brought the restoration of Charles II? How have literary historians participated in the occlusion of Britain's republican traditions? While there are no pre- or co-requisites, some knowledge of seventeenth-century literature or history, especially through LITE2Y13 Seventeenth-Century Writing, would be an advantage. more...	LDCE3Y70	30	Semester 2
Literature and Deconstruction In an interview with Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida describes literature as `this strange institution which allows one to say everything'. This module explores the writings of Derrida and related thinkers alongside a range of literary texts, including works by Keats, Shakespeare and Joyce. Through a combination of lectures and seminars, we will think about the strangenesses of literature, look at the ways in which it is an `institution' and consider the kinds of freedom ' of speech, writing and thinking ' it permits. Our aim throughout will be to establish the possibilities for literary criticism opened up by deconstruction. The module is open to everyone, but may be of particular interest to those who studied critical theory in the second year. more...	LDCE3X87	30	Semester 1
Literature and Human Rights Reading key philosophical, political, legal and literary texts, this module will track the emergence of human rights as a cultural idea from their conception in the eighteenth century, through to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and beyond in the period after World War Two. The module will address the following questions: What type of human being was presupposed by the declarations of rights? How did the novel help form perceptions about rights and human sympathy? In what ways did the UDHR re-imagine concepts of human rights after the Holocaust? How were these changes reflected in new forms of post-war writing, such as post-colonial and late modernist writing? How can we think about the relation between rights and literature today? This module will suit students who have enjoyed the challenges of philosophy and literary theory. It should also appeal to those who are interested in thinking seriously about the relationship between literature and its `real world' applications and significance. more...	LDCE3X54	30	Semester 2
Literature and Philosophy This module explores the relations between literature and philosophy and differing understandings of the self, love and ethics through close reading of philosophical and literary texts. It is organised chronologically and moves from the classical writing of Plato to modern literature. The module designed for final year students who are studying Literature and Philosophy. It is also open only to students in Literature who have taken modules in Philosophy in years one and two; or by special concession at the discretion of the module organiser to other students who have substantial experience in both Honours level Literature and Honours level Philosophy. more...	LDCE3X45	30	Semester 1
Literature Dissertation: Post-1789 (Aut) This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1789 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3X15	30	Semester 1
Literature Dissertation: Post-1789 (Spr) This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1789 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3X18	30	Semester 2
Literature Dissertation: Pre-1789 (Aut) This module is an advanced-level unit, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3Y77	30	Semester 1
Literature Dissertation: Pre-1789 (Spr) This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. more...	LDCE3Y78	30	Semester 2
Madness, Medicine, Science and Women's Writing in the Regency This module will study late 18th-century and early 19th-century writings in the context of scientific and medical innovation. We consider whether it may be appropriate to view the work of novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley as a response to, and even a protest against these newly (or, more correctly, nearly) professionalised, male-dominated worlds. These women writers often concern themselves with the 'consumers' as well as the providers of the services offered by these professions; this module considers why that might be and how this kind of contextualisation might impact upon our readings of their work. more...	LDCE3X75	30	Semester 1
Medieval Arthurian Traditions From Welsh folklore to Monty Python, the tales of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have excited and intrigued generations. Why? To answer this question we explore the development of the legend from its twelfth-century Celtic roots through to a number of twentieth-century film adaptations. How the legend has been translated across form, genres, cultures and ages will be studied, including examples from Middle English Arthurian Texts, translations of the Welsh Mabinogion, of Monmouth's Latin chronicle and French romance texts. This module will enable students familiar with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to enhance their awareness of the wider Arthurian traditions within which this text belongs, but is also suitable for students who are encountering medieval literature for the first time. more...	LDCE3Y82	30	Semester 2
Mind, Body and Literature The sense of loss in a Hardy poem, the parallel universe of a science fiction story, the sombre world of a Scandinavian crime novel: all have in common that they make the reader think, feel and possibly act. Drawing on an understanding of literature as writing which both engages and affects us, we look at a variety of literary texts (e.g, by Blake, Hardy, Lawrence, Hughes) and consider what they have in common with the everyday (clocks, teddy-bears, congregation ceremonies) and the bizarre (zombies, unicorns, ghosts). We consider how we understand text worlds, how metaphor relates to the body, whether real emotions can arise from fictional texts. Participants should have an open mind, a desire to understand literary theories, and a readiness to think outside the box. more...	LDCE3X09	30	Semester 1
Nervous Narratives `We all say it's nerves, and none of us knows what it means', says a character in Wilkie Collins' 1860 novel, The Woman in White. Our aim is to think about how a discourse of the `nerves' ' the `nervous temperament' and nervous illness ' can be both so pervasive culturally and so slippery in its meaning. This interdisciplinary module takes you from the late 17th century, when the concept of `neurologie' first emerged, to the 21st century, linking literary, medical and philosophical writing to explore the representation of the `nerves'. The historical range of the module is not meant to imply a transhistorical understanding of nervous illness or temperament, but rather will enable us to analyse the historically specific nature of the nervous body and what it is made to mean, culturally, within different contexts. In this way, we will be working with issues as diverse as religious `enthusiasm', hysteria and hypochondria, sensibility, sensation, fear of modernity, manliness and effeminacy, shell-shock, PTSD and the concepts of the healthy or fragile body of the nation. Spanning time and genre, the literary texts studied will take us from the earliest, Jonathan Swift's satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704) up to the contemporary: Siri Hustvedt's novel, What I Loved (2003) and her analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010). more...	LDCE3X83	30	Semester 1
Poetry After Modernism This module will survey a wide range of post-war British poetry actively engaged with the Modernist tradition of Eliot, Pound and others. Reading critical texts alongside poems, it will introduce students to lesser-known writers, such as the Welsh poet Lynette Roberts and the Scottish poet W.S. Graham, as well as considering well-known English poets such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes from a Modernist perspective. Recognising the influence of contemporary American verse on experimental poets such as J.H. Prynne and Paul Muldoon will also be an important theme. A chronological syllabus will take students from 1945 up to the present day, and there will be a chance to write creatively as well as critically as part of the assessment. Students wishing to take this module must have taken LDCE2Z15 Modernism. more...	LDCE3Z60	30	Semester 2
Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century The poetry of the nineteenth century is often thought of as being caught between the two stools of Romanticism and Modernism. This module examines the development of poetry from Romanticism to Modernism, and asks in particular whether the poetry of the nineteenth century can claim our attention in its own right, rather than as a late avatar of Romanticism or as a foretaste of the excitements of Modernism. The focus of the module, then, is on close critical engagement with a large range of nineteenth century poetry and poetics, including the work of poet-critic Matthew Arnold, poet-priest Gerard M. Hopkins, and of other writers from Christina Rossetti to Algernon Charles Swinburne. Due notice will also be taken of nineteenth-century continental and American poetry. more...	LDCE3X71	30	Semester 1
Queer Literature and Theory This module offers students the chance to learn about LGBTQ literature and its development in English-speaking countries, as well as approaches to queer theory. This means analysing sexuality and gender and the representation of such identities in literature. Authors studied may include Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Gore Vidal, and Sarah Waters, as well as children's books and young adult novels by Alex Sanchez, Nancy Garden, Ellen Wittlinger, and Marcus Ewert. Authors of theoretical texts looked at may include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, and Teresa de Lauretis. Understanding how LGBTQ characters are featured in literature also helps us to see how queer people are understood in a given society in general. This course also aims to look at a variety of genres in order to see how these different text types work and how they approach similar material in different ways. more...	LDCE3X58	30	Semester 2
Regency Women Writers This module situates the work of various women writers of the Regency period in literary and historical contexts. The main texts under discussion are by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Maria Edgeworth. The unit considers themes which - although not exclusive to women's writing at this time - occur strikingly frequently in the work of Regency women. These themes include sanity, madness and ideas about the mind, and literary devices such as the love-mad woman. Health, ill-health and the development of medicine are central to these fictions and the course, and we also discuss the figure of the doctor, the quack and the 'psychiatrist' in these texts. We look at writings by Regency women travellers whose destinations ranged from Italy to Bath, Sweden and Revolutionary France. more...	LDCE3X80	30	Semester 2
Revenge Tragedy: Ancient and Modern This seminar explores the different ways in which the concept of revenge has been conceived and represented in a range of dramatic texts. The module covers three distinct groups of primary materials: classical tragedy (in translation) including Aeschylus's Oresteia; early modern revenge tragedy including works by Shakespeare, Tourneur and Kyd; and modern cinematic explorations of the revenge formula including Get Carter, Old Boy and Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. Topics discussed include the relationship between classical and Christian attitudes to revenge, contemporary strictures upon private vengeance, the representation of justice through the ages, the limitations of the revenge tragedy formula. more...	LDCE3Y86	30	Semester 2
Satire `Satire is problematic, open ended, essayistic, ambiguous in relation to history, uncertain in its political effects, resistant to final closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, ambivalent about the pleasures it offers' (Dustin Griffin). The aim of this module is to investigate the problematic territory of satire. Using examples from modern and contemporary fiction and journalism alongside early modern and classical satire, we will formulate a critical and conceptual map, which will in turn allow us to discuss some of the problems of satire (those of genre, of gender, of politics, of morality, of history), and to explore some of the paradoxes of its strategies and functions (freedom versus limits; subversion versus conformity; transformation versus stasis). Writers under discussion will include Juvenal, Horace, Swift and Pope; John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague; Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, and Jonathan Coe. more...	LDCE3X62	30	Semester 2
Shakespeare: Shadow and Substance Platonist epistemology permeated Elizabethan culture: the aim of this module is to explore the relationship of Shakespeare's topic of the world as a stage to Neoplatonic conceptions of perception, politics, poetry and love. more...	LDCE3Y36	30	Semester 2
The Condition of England Novel 1818-2000 This module will examine the classic nineteenth-century 'Condition of 'England' novel alongside mid-to-late twentieth-century representations of England (and myths of national identity). Attention will be given to post-colonial writing as a significant part of the question: What is it to be English (or British)? more...	LDCE3Z09	30	Semester 1
The Gothic This module seeks to cover some 'canonical' texts of the Gothic Novel (1764-1820) in Walpole, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and to consider some later developments of the gothic mode in later 19th and 20th centuries: Poe, Le Fanu, Stevenson, MR James, Elizabeth Bowen, David Storey and Angela Carter. The course also seeks to introduce students to some of the theoretical and historical arguments around the contested nature of the term 'gothic', the Uncanny, the subversiveness or otherwise of this kind of writing, and its relation to the novel genre. more...	LDCE3X41	30	Semester 1
The Literature of World War One The module will examine representations of World War One. As a Level 3 module, the focus will be inter-disciplinary. Literary materials will be contextualised using historical and other sources. Use will also be made of memoirs, letters, diaries, and photographs. Students will be encouraged to conduct research using the internet and other facilities. more...	LDCE3Z10	30	Semester 2
Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense and Modern Writing It's widely recognised that modernist literature is characterised by a revolution of the word. Less widely recognised, and little explored, is the relationship between modernist linguistic experimentalism and literary nonsense, as practised by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and others. This course will begin with these well-known nonsense writers and explore their roots in earlier nonsense, including Shakespeare's, before going on to examine some of the adventures in language of major modernist and postmodernist writers. Authors studied are likely to include late Joyce, early Auden, Stein, Stevens, Cummings, Crane, Nabokov, Koch, Muldoon, Ashbery. The course will also set these avant-garde writers in the unfamiliar context of the mainstream fantasy writers who also come out of Carroll and the nonsense tradition, most likely Tolkien and Peake, whose imaginary worlds are based on their own invented languages. This is not a course on children's literature, but on some very challenging modern literature, though it should appeal to those who take a childish pleasure in wordplay and fantasy, and equally to those intrigued by philosophical issues around language. It would follow on very well from the second-year Modernism module. more...	LDCE3X01	30	Semester 1
Traumaturgies: Reading and Writing Trauma Across Contexts Trauma haunts the writing of the twentieth century. Slavery, war, patriarchy, terrorism, genocide, colonialism, modernity, technology and post-modernity: these legacies demand to be written and read, and engender a writing singular to their traumas. Yet the writing of these wounds, and the critical work that reads it, raises fundamental questions about whether trauma can ever be represented or understood. Spreading beyond their contexts, these questions effect their own traumas, cracking open our assumptions about what it is possible to read, to write, and indeed to think. Working roughly from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, this module reads a selection of theoretical, literary and critical texts that aim to write and read trauma across cultural, historical, personal and public contexts. more...	LDCE3X91	30	Semester 1
Ulysses This module will provide students with the opportunity to read one of the most famous, yet notoriously unread, novels of the twentieth century. The module has a number of aims. First, it will give students the time and opportunity to try to read and understand James Joyce's Ulysses. Secondly, the module will introduce students to some of the formal innovations typical of modernist writing through the close analysis of techniques such as interior monologue and mythic analogy. Thirdly, it will allow students to read a wide range of responses to Ulysses, both among Joyce's contemporaries, and in the history of twentieth century criticism. Fourthly, the module will situate the text historically, with a particular focus on the way that the text's obscenity affected its reception and circulation in the 1920s and 1930s. more...	LDCE3Z50	30	Semester 2
Virgil's Classic Epic This module will explore the centrality of Virgil's Aeneid to Medieval and Renaissance culture. It will examine developing attitudes to the Classical literary legacy and accommodation and reinvention of Virgil's epic poem within new religious, political and literary contexts. The course will begin with exploration of Virgil's poem on its own terms before turning to reworkings of the 'Aeneid' by Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Douglas and Marlowe, the Renaissance invention of a 13th Book to 'complete' Virgil's poem, and the recasting of classical epic within the very different conventions of medieval and Renaissance romance. Previous experience of classical or medieval literature is not required. more...	LDCE3Y18	30	Semester 2
You may also pick any of the modules that begin with: LDCE3X37 LDCE3Z64 LDCE3X94

Disclaimer

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the modules listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the annual monitoring, review and update of modules and regular (five-yearly) review of course programmes. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes and their constituent modules, there will normally be prior consultation of students and others. It is also possible that the University may not be able to offer a module for reasons outside of its control, such as the illness of a member of staff or sabbatical leave. Where this is the case, the University will endeavour to inform students.

UEA

Literature, Drama and Creative Writing Courses

Courses

BA English Literature with Creative Writing (Q3W8)

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3