BA English and American Literature

Key details

BA ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Start Year

2021

Attendance

Full Time

Award

Degree of Bachelor of Arts

UCAS course code

TQ7B

Entry Requirements

BBB or ABC

The Atlantic Ocean does not mark a barrier when it comes to literary traffic. In fact, it is impossible to understand British Literature in the modern period, or American Literature in any period, without knowing something of the other nation’s culture.

At UEA, you’ll be able to focus on Anglo-American interchanges. You’ll also explore the many aspects of English and American literature which lie beyond that interchange, such as English Literature prior to the 19th century, and Native American and multi-ethnic writing.

Under the tuition of our world-leading scholars of English and American literature, culture and history, you will study the wealth of both countries’ literatures. Your studies will reach back to Chaucer, Julian of Norwich and beyond, and forwards to the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Ali Smith. You’ll study writers as different from one another as Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath, Brett Easton Ellis and Edith Wharton. After a firm grounding in your first year, you’ll launch yourself into more specialist areas of study, like contemporary fiction, journalism or comics.

You’ll even have a chance to cross the Atlantic yourself and study abroad in North America. All of those experiences will enrich your final year, during which you will take a series of advanced classes and write a dissertation on a topic of your choice.

About

At UEA you’ll be able to focus on Anglo-American interchanges. You’ll also explore the many aspects of English and American literature which lie beyond that interchange, such as English Literature prior to the 19th century, and Native American and multi-ethnic writing.

Our BA English and American Literature is ranked 2nd for American Studies by 'The Guardian 2021', and 6th by 'The Complete University Guide 2022'.

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Important Information

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the courses listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the regular review of course programmes. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes, there will normally be prior consultation of students and others. Changes may for example consist of variations to the content and method of delivery of programmes, courses and other services, to discontinue programmes, courses and other services and to merge or combine programmes or courses. The University will endeavour to keep such changes to a minimum, and will inform students.

Assessment for Year 1

You will be assessed by a variety of forms of coursework. In your final year, you’ll write a dissertation on a topic of your choice with the support of your tutors. Your final degree result is determined by the marks you receive in your second and fourth years.

For every piece of assessment that you submit you’ll receive written and verbal feedback from tutors. These comments and reflections will help you identify the methods and strategies that will improve your work and help you get the most out of your studies.

Structure

In your first year you’ll gain a clear sense of both English and American literary traditions. In your American Literature modules you’ll discover major authors and themes in literature from the United States, while America Now, America Then will help you connect these literary movements to contemporary United States culture. Writing Across Borders will enable you to explore the history of English as a global language, and the literatures it has inspired around the world. And in the Reading Now and Slow Reading modules you’ll work on the intensive development of your reading skills, in small, tutor-led discussion groups. Check out the 'Learning and Teaching' section for more information.

Teaching and Learning

You’ll be taught through a combination of lectures and seminars. We pride ourselves on our small group seminar teaching, which allows a greater level of discussion between academic staff and students. In seminars, you’ll learn how to listen to and critique the ideas of others, as well as how to present and defend your own arguments effectively.

You’ll acquire vital skills needed for independent learning throughout your course and have access to dedicated sessions designed to help you make the most of UEA’s state of the art library facilities. Through these sessions and your academic modules, you’ll gain crucial research skills of uncovering resources and critically assessing sources. As you progress through your degree you’ll develop as a self-motivated researcher and independent, creative thinker.

In addition to timetabled lecture and seminar slots, each member of staff at UEA holds dedicated office hours where students can come and seek additional advice and guidance on a one-to-one basis. You’ll also be assigned an adviser who can support you through your studies by providing academic and career guidance.

During your time at UEA, you’ll be taught by academics working at the forefront of their fields. Our academics have been published widely on key issues that have shaped the development of American and English literature.

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Assessment for Year 2

Structure

Your Transatlantic literatures module has been especially designed for this course. On this module you’ll study Transatlantic literary encounters, from the colonial era and the slave trade, right up to modern postcolonial writers. You'll encounter modules on all periods of English literature from the medieval to the contemporary. You can study contemporary American fiction and multi-ethnic American literatures, or perhaps you’ll choose specialist options such as creative writing, publishing, journalism, European literature, environmental writing, American music, film and many more.

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Assessment for Year 3

Structure

You’ll spend the third year of your degree abroad, gaining an invaluable academic and cultural experience, one that most students consider to be the highlight of their time at university.

For further details, visit our Study Abroad section of our website.

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Assessment for Year 4

Structure

In your final year you’ll choose from a huge array of specialist options. You might study Native American fiction or children’s literature, focus on a particular genre of writing such as lyric or tragedy, or home in on a singular topic from the very contemporary—the fiction of climate-change and environmental crisis, comics and graphic novels, queer culture—back through time to Romanticism, the Renaissance, or Medieval literary cultures. You can also opt to write a dissertation, benefiting from one-to-one expert supervision, and – if you wish – bringing together English and American literature in a comparative study.

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Assessment for Year 1

Compulsory Modules

AMERICAN LITERATURE I: IMAGINING AMERICA

Code AMAL4033A

Credits 20

How did American literature become American? How did literature help to shape the idea of America? This module will provide you with some answers to those questions with a thorough introduction to early American Literature. From the earliest moments of European colonization of the New World through to the bloody Civil War that Americans fought over slavery in the middle of the 19th century, you will explore the ways that a diverse group of writers helped shaped a literary culture that was distinctively American. You will encounter a rich variety of American writers and texts – travellers, novelists, poets, biographers, philosophers – and think about the role that literature played in the creation of a new nation. From puritans to politicians, from revolutionaries to romantics, from slavery to emancipation, you will explore the work of the men and women who shaped our ideas of what American Literature was, is, and might be. Each week, through lectures and seminar discussion, you will also consider the other forces that shaped these texts, and develop your ability to analyse a range of literary styles. As America was colonised, achieved independence, expanded westwards and fought a Civil War, how did American writers respond to the extraordinary tensions running through a newly born nation?

AMERICAN LITERATURE II: MAKING IT 'NEW'

Code AMAL4031B

Credits 20

On this module you will learn the central currents of American Literature, from after the American Civil War, through the turn of the century and into modernism and the early 20th century, finishing at the close of World War II. You will follow the – often fiercely contested – development of a national literature, tracing the way this multitude of voices differs from place to place, from decade to decade, and from writer to writer. Writers studied on this module in past years have included: Henry James, Mark Twain, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner. You will be introduced to these vibrant voices through reading and discussing short stories, novels, poetry, non-fiction and critical work. You will attend lectures, and take part in follow-up discussion-based seminars. Each week you will consider the context of the texts you read, as well as working to analyse and explain how they work on the reader and in society at large. You will encounter debates about the meaning of freedom in life and in art, what it might mean to be modern (or to refuse that modernity), about the responsibilities of citizenship to other people and to the environment, and about what it might mean to write and be read in the modern United States of America. By the end of this module you will be familiar with a wide range of late 19th century and early 20th century American texts and writers. You will learn the major movements in American literature from the fin de siècle through to the Second World War, and will be able to talk about the issues surrounding the development of a national and literary culture. Through doing this, you will improve your ability to read and analyse literary texts, to describe how language works in history and on the reader, and to identify and present new and exciting patterns in what you read.

WRITING ACROSS BORDERS

Code LDCL4021B

Credits 20

How has English crossed geographical, linguistic and social borders? What are the legacies of these movements for the literature we read and the ways we speak? In Writing Across Borders, you’ll study the emergence of modern English from a multilingual medieval society and its colonial expansion to Ireland, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. You’ll investigate the histories of translation, religious mission, education, violence, exploitation and political control that have given rise to the global reach of English as a means of cultural exchange. The module will focus on examples of writers who have responded critically and creatively to these histories, asking how they have used distinctive forms of English to articulate their experience and understanding of their world. It will provide you with a conceptual vocabulary to describe different forms of language such as register, dialect and creole, which you’ll apply to analysis of a range of literary texts that may include songs, religious works, translations, travel writing, plays, novels and poems. You’ll engage with a variety of perspectives on established debates about speech communities, the status of ‘standard’ English and the relation between language and broader narratives of identity. You’ll be encouraged to think about the hybridity of English and the ways that the language you use, read and hear expresses histories and social differences.

AMERICA NOW, AMERICA THEN.

Code AMAS4036A

Credits 20

From COVID19 to Confederate flags, from Black Lives Matter to Donald Trump’s MAGA - how do we navigate the turbulence of contemporary American life? It is impossible to understand America now without understanding America then - the deep social, cultural and political histories which underpin contemporary events and which are still very palpable in the present. In this module, therefore, we will seek to understand some of the most pressing issues in today’s America by unpacking the rich and revealing interdisciplinary contexts that help to explain them. We will do this by using a variety of scholarly approaches and disciplinary lenses, and range widely across the American past. On completion of this module, students will also have the skills required to research, write and edit at university level.

READING NOW

Code LDCL4009A

Credits 20

Reading is at the heart of our experience of literature. It is central to the ways in which we think and write about literary texts, and to some of the claims made on their behalf. This module is concerned with what we do when we read literature, at university and elsewhere, and why. We will concentrate in particular on four elements: on the practice of what is commonly known as close reading, one of the building blocks of literary study; on some of the ways in which reading has been represented in literary texts themselves; on the kinds of significance, both moral and political, claimed on behalf of reading; and on reading as we do and think about it today, in a world ever more virtual and networked.

SLOW READING

Code LDCL4011B

Credits 20

This module seeks to build on and develop the work of the Autumn semester, in particular that of modules concerned with close reading. In small tutorial classes of two hours per week you will engage with a long text in a deep and sustained way across the semester, opening up a multi-layered and multi-faceted reading. The first half of the course will focus on the literary text itself, its forms and its stylistic innovations, alongside some short supplementary readings. As the module goes on, you will encounter the diverse ways in which others have read the text from different critical perspectives. You will reflect on, especially, the ways critics have brought the literary text into dialogue with theoretical texts to mutually illuminating effect, looking closely at some of the theoretical texts they are drawing on too. In the end, you too will bring the literary text into dialogue with some of the theoretical writing you encounter in the second half of the course. The real focus of this course is, of course, less the text you are reading than the very practice of reading itself.

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Important Information

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. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes and their constituent modules, the University will endeavour to consult with 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. In some cases optional modules can have limited places available and so you may be asked to make additional module choices in the event you do not gain a place on your first choice. Where this is the case, the University will inform students.

In Year 2 students take 120 credits in total.

Assessment for Year 2

Compulsory Modules

TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES

Code AMAL5081A

Credits 20

This module will explore the diversity and histories of literatures emerging from transatlantic crossings and exchange. Taught through a lecture circus format, it will draw on the research expertise of colleagues in both AMA and LDC, in order to demonstrate the breadth of the Transatlantic as both a geography and an imaginary. Materials will include literary responses to the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, writing from the Caribbean, the work of writers whose careers took them from America to Paris—or from London to New York—and transatlantic literary networks. Each lecture will be given by a different academic, based on their own areas of research, and include Q&A's on how they conceive of the Transatlantic as a critical concept and constellation, and as a crucial site for understanding decolonisation.

Optional A Modules

(40 credits)

LIVING ON THE HYPHEN: Multi-ethnic American Literatures

Code AMAL5077A

Credits 20

America has long been interpreted as the location of social possibility founded upon a desire to assimilate and negate ethnic 'others'. In this module, you’ll trace and explore the literary responses of distinct 'American' cultures: including Native American; African American; Asian American; and Latin American. Through studying each distinct group of texts, you’ll engage with the specific historical, cultural and political relationships between the US and each author's country of origin or national/cultural history, across the 20th and 21st centuries. You’ll also make connections between these distinct groups of writers, to consider topics such as race and racism, exile, return, family, belonging, identity, language and memory, colonisation, imperialism, slavery, segregation, immigration, and illegality/invisibility, with an emphasis upon contemporary experiences. Via important multi-ethnic writers and texts, you’ll explore what constitutes American literature aesthetically, temporally, geographically, and culturally, evaluate the value of the term ‘multi-ethnic’ and its place within American literary studies, and engage critically with questions of American literature as ‘World literature’. Through seminar based discussions, you’ll develop your ability to evaluate literary texts as contributions to historical revisions and debates, and also as representations of identity, belonging, the nation state, politics, and culture. You will be assessed through coursework, while gaining experience of communicating your ideas via seminar discussion and group presentation, and you’ll have the opportunity to engage in peer to peer assessment practices. On successful completion of the module, you’ll have the knowledge and skills to consider the diversity of American literature and the complexities of American cultural and national identity.

AMERICAN VOICES

Code AMAL5078A

Credits 20

Addressing America as a nation and the experience of being American, Walt Whitman writes in ‘Song of Myself’: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself, I am large and contain multitudes.’ This module explores Whitman’s comments in a selection of 20th-century American writers, and considers the literary and historical contexts of their creative literary practices. You are also encouraged to reflect on your own creative writing. What can you learn from these American writers and how might their innovations enhance your own writing practices? You will encounter a broad range of American writing from Walt Whitman to Conceptual writing. You will focus on how and why American writers have addressed notions of national and individual identity through their creative practices. You will also learn about the formal innovations of American writers in order to understand the concept of ‘voice’ in terms of, for example, expression, representation, protest, and subjectivity. You will learn through seminars and creative writing workshops where you will develop your skills as a writer, reader and editor of your own and other’s work. You will develop as a writer and enhance your understanding of American literature, as critical reader and as creative writer. You will adopt, adapt and appropriate the stylistic and contextual concerns of pioneering American writers covered and articulate the significance of these concerns for your own creative work.

Optional B Modules

(40 credits)

ROMANTICISM 1780-1840

Code LDCL5034B

Credits 20

1780-1840 was the Age of Revolution and Romanticism, often regarded as a revolutionary style of writing. It was the age of the American and French Revolution and the Wars they entailed, the age of slavery and rebellion, of empire and conquest. You may think of Romantic writing as mainly nature poetry, primarily work by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. But the signs of a ‘Romantic’ sensibility can also be found in a much broader constituency of writing: the novel, letter writing, the essay, political and aesthetic theory, and social commentary. In this module you’ll be introduced to some of the most exciting Romantic period writing, including poetry, fiction and non-fictional prose from the Age of Revolution. You’ll also explore key period artistic and literary concepts such as the sublime, beautiful, picturesque, the Hellenic, and pastoral, and you’ll analyse the many ways in which the writers of the period exploited concepts of landscape. You’ll look at issues such as the Supernatural and Dreaming. Your understanding of Romantic writing will be enhanced by an analysis of aesthetics, politics, and of the work of women writers. During the course you’ll explore poetry by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, as well as Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1816) and Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818; 1831). You may also consider writings by less familiar poets, such as John Clare, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, as well as prose works by Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft and others. You’ll look at how writing is gendered in the period and the implications of this for both male and female writers. You’ll be taught through a mixture of one-hour weekly lectures and two-hour weekly seminars, as well as self-directed study. You’ll gain experience in communicating your ideas in tutorials, as well as through written work and presentations. You’ll be assessed through two formative pieces (a close reading and a project bibliography) and one summative piece on a project chosen by yourself in discussion with your seminar tutors.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5041A

Credits 20

In this module you will explore how words open out onto worlds in eighteenth-century literature. The first half of the module focuses on texts in which people, real or imagined, move out into the world. The writers in the first half will include authors such as Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and Olaudah Equiano. We will see how new ideas about what it meant to be human emerged from these travels and examine the intertwinement of eighteenth-century literature with exploration, empire, and enslavement. While the first half of the module focuses on the wider world, the second half of the module focuses on the inner world of the mind and moves our focus from prose to poetry. Writers in the second half of the module include writers such as Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Ann Yearsley, and Phillis Wheatley. In this part of the module, we will see how writers represent the workings of the mind using the resources of literary form, trace connections between the mind and its immediate environment, and move back and forth between the mind and the world as a whole. By taking this module, you’ll gain an awareness of the experimental and exploratory energies behind so much of the literature the eighteenth-century produced. You’ll also gain sharpened analytical and research skills that will help you see significant textual patterns in texts and trace connections between literary texts and the larger world in which they move. This module will help sharpen your skills using especially resonant words as ways of understanding texts and exploring their entanglements in the wider eighteenth-century world. Assessment will be by summative portfolio with a 1,000 word essay on a particular word in a text which you submit first as a formative, get feedback on, and revise and submit as a component of a final summative portfolio. You will also write a 2,000 word essay in response to a conceptual question that will be submitted as part of the final summative portfolio.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING: RENAISSANCE AND REVOLUTION (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5042A

Credits 20

In this module, you’ll discover a huge variety of writing from one of Britain's most exciting and turbulent periods of cultural, political and intellectual transformation: the seventeenth century. We begin by exploring how English literature was formed out of its encounters with classical texts and how women established a place for their writing within English literary culture for the first time. In the centre of the module, we discover how seventeenth-century people wrote about their encounters with other cultures, whether as travellers to the Ottoman Empire (which stretched across the Middle East), or as colonists meeting Native Americans in Massachusetts. In the module's latter section, we ask how literature was transformed by the tumultuous upheavals of the English civil war and the execution of the monarch, events which have sent shockwaves through the centuries which still resonate today. The modules’ themes come together in the study of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, one of the first novels and a pioneering work of women’s writing, which tells the terrible story of an African prince who was enslaved in Surinam. Authors we study include famous figures such as Ben Jonson and John Milton (including a look at his masterpiece, Paradise Lost), as well as many lesser-known writers, including women such as Lucy Hutchinson and Hester Pulter, or the astonishing Turkish travel writer, Evliya Çelebi. The module works through lectures, which establish larger questions we might ask of the week's material, and seminars, in which we read passages of texts together closely.

MODERNISM

Code LDCL5045A

Credits 20

The modernist movement transformed literature and the arts worldwide in the early part of the 20th century, peaking in the period between 1918 and 1939. Although the term modernism was rarely used by authors in this period, in the period after World War II it became the usual term to describe a group of writers, responding to one another, whose work is characterised by radical experiments with language and form, which aimed to do justice to a range of many subjects such as the mysteries of consciousness and the unconscious, gender, sexuality, and desire, violence and democracy, the primitive and the mechanical. We will be reading a range of authors, including such long-canonised figures as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, HD, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, but expanding the modernist canon in the light of recent scholarship to other more recently revived authors such as Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, and Jean Rhys. We will trace some of the origins of modernism in earlier literary movements such as Symbolism, Imagism, Aestheticism, and Impressionism, and explore its kinship with foreign literary movements such as Dada and Surrealism. Modernism invented modern methods of criticism and we will be placing a particular emphasis on the close reading of poetry and poetic prose. A study of modernism is essential for understanding all 20th century literature and this module is highly recommended for any students wishing to take any modules in 20th-century literature.

MEDIEVAL WRITING (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5063A

Credits 20

To read medieval writing is to encounter otherness, to engage with a culture (really a variety of cultures) that at times seems familiar, recognizable, yet which repeatedly reminds us of its difference and distance from us. When a huge and intimidating green knight enters King Arthur’s court at Camelot and issues his challenge, he is disturbing not because he is entirely alien, but because he is alike enough to unsettle the court’s sense of identity. The fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most complex and challenging works of literature ever written, might serve as a metaphor for our experience of medieval writing, and of the language in which it is written: Middle English. It is strangely familiar. Yet through the experience of otherness we find our multiple identities, and in studying Medieval Writing you will (re)discover the genres and modes that have shaped our literary histories: lyric, comedy, tragedy, romance, allegory, satire, historiography, autobiography and fantasy, to name but a few. The module is configured along the themes of ‘pilgrimage, travellers and exiles’, which allows us to understand the diverse forms of interaction — real and imagined — between European and non-European cultures: military, religious, and mercantile exchanges, for example. You will discover a culture of dazzling intellectual richness and variety that will dispel any lazily pejorative modern clichés about the term ‘medieval’. And you will be given the tools to make those discoveries – in addition to learning how to read Middle English, you will learn about the materiality of medieval texts (e.g. how to understand manuscripts), and of the historical coordinates of those texts: the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, religious persecution, the feudal system and its decline. Whether it’s the cosmopolitan intellectual brilliance of Chaucer, the fantastic realities of Arthurian romance, the autobiography of Margery Kempe, the travel writing of Sir John Mandeville, or the ethical dilemmas posed by the Gawain-poet, Medieval Writing has something for you.

VICTORIAN WRITING

Code LDCL5067B

Credits 20

This module aims to equip you with a knowledge of writing from across the Victorian period, in a variety of modes (fiction, poetry, science, journalism, criticism, nonsense). We will examine authors such as George Eliot, Tennyson, Dickens, Darwin, Charlotte Bronte, and the Brownings. You will thus develop an awareness of how different kinds of writing in the period draw on, influence, and contest with each other. Likewise, you will acquire a sense for the cultural, political and socio-economic contexts of 19th-century writing, and some of the material contexts in which that writing took place (serial publication, popular readership, periodical writing, public controversy).

CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Code LDCL5069B

Credits 20

What is the state of the art of the novel at present? And what are some of the distinguishing preoccupations and characteristics of the contemporary novel? This module seeks to consider these questions with a view to developing an understanding of the condition of the novel today. The module focuses on fiction published in the UK and Ireland in the last ten years, with a particular focus on more inventive writing. We’ll read a small set of contemporary novels, the content and form of each of which will exemplify some of the possibilities for fiction in the present day. We’ll consider the relation between the contemporary novel and the contemporary moment – for example, our concerns regarding the environment, identity, nationhood, and history – and think also about what it might mean to be or to call oneself contemporary: to be together with one’s own time. The list of authors chosen for the module changes regularly, as you would expect. Recently, it has included the likes of Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Deborah Levy and Kamila Shamsie. You’ll consider a range of ways of conceiving and interpreting the contemporary novel, and discuss these ways with your peers. There is no consensus about what does or should constitute a canon of contemporary fiction, although there is a growing critical literature on the subject, some of which we’ll read. It will be our job, in lectures and in seminars, to think carefully about what novels published in the last ten years offer the best argument for the continued viability of the novel itself as a contemporary art form.

SHAKESPEARE (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5070B

Credits 20

The aim of this lecture-seminar module is to help you become a better reader of Shakespearean drama. Shakespeare is now so universally known and read that it is easy to forget that he wrote at a specific historical moment for specific audiences, actors and theatrical spaces. What happens to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays when we read them within the context of theatrical performance? This is what our module enables you to do -- and in doing so, it aims to give you fresh, new ways to interpret Shakespearean language and theatricality. Lectures equip you with methods and contexts for reading Shakespeare's plays; seminars give you the chance to put these into practice through close, attentive readings of his plays. Each week we study a different play in detail. The summative assessment asks you to put what you've been learning into practice by writing a critical analysis of more than one play using some of the module's methods.

EMPIRE AND AFTER: GLOBALIZING ENGLISH

Code LDCL5079A

Credits 20

Today, literature in English is produced in many countries across the world and English increasingly enjoys a status as a ‘global’ language. In this module you will explore how this situation came about by placing the development of English literary traditions both in the British Isles and elsewhere into the long historical context of the rise and fall of the British Empire. Beginning with canonical works by British writers from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, you will then consider literary and political responses to the experience of empire and colonization by writers from areas such as South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Australasia, and the Americas. You will explore how ‘English Literature’ has been shaped on a global scale by global historical forces, and how different the history of the English literary tradition looks when placed alongside and in counterpoint to these ‘other’ writings in English. You will then discuss the writings of authors such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, Amitav Ghosh, Kate Grenville and J.M Coetzee amongst others. The module will introduce you to the theoretical and conceptual apparatus of postcolonial literary studies and to some of the key frameworks for understanding the formation of the modern world, such as race and racism, nations and nationalism, colonial discourse and postcolonial theory, and how gender and sexuality were pivotal in the formation of colonial and post-colonial identities.

Optional C Modules

(20 credits)

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION

Code AMAL5079B

Credits 20

Writers who want to address the contemporary scene confront a dilemma: as soon as you try to capture it on the page, you’ve already fallen behind the present moment. You’ll explore how contemporary American writers nonetheless respond to this challenge. You’ll consider the issues they identify as pressing in American culture, as well as the literary strategies used to explore those issues. As you progress in the module, you’ll acquire understanding of a number of important concepts associated with contemporary American fiction, such as postmodernism, metafiction, identity, globalisation, and memory. When you’ve completed the module, you’ll be familiar with a number of literary and cultural debates relating to contemporary American culture, and have detailed knowledge of some of the most exciting writers working today. You’ll be able to explain why it is difficult to define, and write about, the ‘contemporary.’ And in the course of your assessed work and seminar discussions, you will develop your communication, writing, and research skills.

FILMS THAT MADE US AMERICAN: THE 1980S THROUGH THE MOVIES

Code AMAS5019B

Credits 20

The module will examine America in the 1980s. It will look at youth culture, post-Vietnam revisionism and the ‘remasculinization of America’, yuppie culture, and the impact of AIDS. Core factors of study in this module are the effects of both New Right morality upon the American socio-cultural landscape, and Ronald Reagan as postmodern president administrating to a ‘celluloid America’ of his own fantastic imagining. Overall, the module will offer the chance to analyse the tensions and contradictions of the decade as they were played out in both the content and structure of contemporary American film.

THEY CAME FROM OUTER-THE-CLOSET: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND PANIC IN AMERICAN FILM

Code AMAS5020B

Credits 20

With a main focus on the 20th century, we will explore key moments of change or crisis in the century and consider the ways the panic caused by such changes is distinctly gendered and/or sexualised. We will concurrently examine gender and sexual resistance to dominant ideas of American identity and the subsequent creation and/or promotion of liberationist discourses and alternative communities. Film will provide the focus for this cultural study, and the module will range widely over a number of different genres including the western, sci-fi, detective and LGBT themed works.

AMERICAN MUSIC

Code AMAS5023A

Credits 20

The first book published in the New World was a hymn book. Music, sacred and profane, has been at the centre of American lives ever since. Distinctive American musical styles still dominate the globe, as they have done for decades. But how did American music develop into the genres that we recognise today? How did uniquely American sounds catch the ear of listeners all over the world? You will gain a thorough understanding of the development of American music. You will focus on a number of distinctive musical traditions - from minstrelsy to blues, jazz, and country; from rock and roll to hip hop - and consider the way that they have shaped popular music today. Throughout the course, you will encounter a rich variety of music and an extraordinary range of characters, from the most famous entertainers in modern culture, to the obscure, the forgotten and the neglected. Whilst exploring the development of American music, you will also examine the ways in which its growth tells a larger story about the history of America and its people. In particular, it will give you a different perspective on the issue of race in American life. Through seminar discussion, written coursework, and group presentations, you will develop your analytical and critical abilities - whether that means your ability to think about the significance of a song and its meaning for a particular historical moment, or the way that the shifting meaning of a genre of music can tell us many things about its wider social and cultural context.

BREAKING NEWS! AMERICAN JOURNALISM: HISTORY AND PRACTICE

Code AMAS5049B

Credits 20

How do we know what is real and what is fake? Previous generations, we are told, could reliably turn to “the news”—but is that really true? From the very beginning, American news was always synonymous with low scandal, scurrilous rumour, and fakery. And yet, there is no doubt that there have been crucial moments when journalists and journalism have gone beyond merely reporting events, to shape the public imagination. “The news” has always manipulated as much as informed its audiences, and in this module you will learn about how this in turn has shaped American life. In learning about the history of journalism and its cultural impact in America in the wider global context, you will have the opportunity to gain an understanding of the art of journalism, both critically and in practice. You will engage with questions surrounding print, broadcast and digital media—looking back to the past, reflecting on the present, and looking forward into the future of journalism. You will consider the ways in which marginalised peoples have sought to assert their voices through news media, by seizing the means by which our public understanding of reality is produced. The work will involve critical readings, engagement with primary source materials, seminar discussions, presentations, and critical writing with creative practice. You will have the opportunity to refine your communication skills, and especially the art of writing in different modes for different audiences.

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Important Information

Students spending a year in the USA/Canada must select AMAY5028Y. Students spending a semester in the USA/Canada and a semester in Australia must select AMAY5026B and AMAY5027A.

Assessment for Year 3

Compulsory Modules

AMERICAN STUDIES SEMESTER ABROAD: AUSTRALIA

Code AMAY5026B

Credits 60

A semester spent at a university in Australia or New Zealand taking an approved course of study.

AMERICAN STUDIES SEMESTER ABROAD: AMERICA

Code AMAY5027A

Credits 60

A semester spent at a North American (United States or Canada) university taking an approved course of study.

AMERICAN STUDIES YEAR ABROAD

Code AMAY5028Y

Credits 120

A year spent at an American university taking an approved course of study.

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In Year 3 students take 120 credits. NB: Students can only choose one dissertation module (either AMAS6056B, LDCL6061A, LDCL6062B)

Assessment for Year 4

Compulsory Modules

Optional A Modules

(30-90 credits)

AMERICAN APOCALYPSE: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CLIMATE CHANGE FICTION

Code AMAL6012B

Credits 30

In the 21st century, the threat of global warming and climate change is quite literally ‘game-changing.’ Engaging with Naomi Klein’s contention that “this changes everything,” you will consider how the apocalyptic dangers of climate change are being addressed by 21st century American fiction. Climate change fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, has recently emerged as a distinct genre, directly responding to the dangers that global warming poses to human and non-human societies. You will consider how fiction offers us ways to assess, understand, and address the phenomenon of global warming, and the impact of humans on their environments. You will evaluate ongoing debates about the ‘facts’ of climate change and global warming, including the evidence being produced by scientists, and the emergence of ‘climate change denial’ as a feature both of popular culture and at the highest levels of government in the United States. Exploring American novels published since 2010, you will develop a broad understanding of how American climate change fiction represents the profound dangers of climate change, through its depiction of drought, flood, deforestation, species extinction, intelligent biotech, and the impact of global capitalism. Through seminar based discussion, you will gain insights into the ways that writers are engaging with the fact of climate change to shape both popular awareness and popular debates, and consider how cli-fi is imagining possible futures for human and all other life on Earth. You will be assessed through coursework, reflective reports, and student-led workshops, and gain expertise in communicating your ideas via student-led group work and seminar discussion. On successful completion of the module, you will have the knowledge and skills to assess the complexities of climate change fiction as a new literary genre, discuss the emotive reach and influence of fiction in this context, and evaluate the strategies of contemporary cli-fi writers.

LITTLE WOMEN AND BAREFOOT BOYS: INVENTING AMERICAN CHILDHOODS

Code AMAL6052B

Credits 30

American children’s literature in the nineteenth century invented the idea of modern childhood. It was also responsible for some of the most iconic characters in American literary history – from the March sisters to Tom Sawyer. Yet while contemporary audiences are as familiar with these texts as their historic counterparts, the story of the development of writing for children in America in this period is itself much less understood. This module, then, will explore the ways in which American writers addressed young audiences across a century of social and cultural change. Taking in iconic texts like Little Women and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it will also explore a diverse range of books written for children across this period. It will analyse their engagement with events like the Civil War, issues of national and social identity, and broader social and cultural issues relating to the shifting idea of childhood in America. More broadly, it will think about the development of children’s writing in America in relation to the wider issues of American literary history, and open up debates about what it meant to write for a young audience, then and now.

EXPLODED FORMS: 1960s AMERICAN FICTION

Code AMAL6054A

Credits 30

America in the 1960s is marked by great optimism and conversely an extreme sense of foreboding over the absurd conditions of life. Picking up the threads of the transatlantic discussions between continental philosophy and American fiction making, we will explore the connection between American society, literature and experimentation in the 1960s leaning back into the time immediately following World War II to provide context. Authors studied may include Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Ishmael Reed, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Hunter S Thompson, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Robert Coover and more.

NATIVE AMERICAN WRITING AND FILM

Code AMAS6027A

Credits 30

Contemporary Native America is often visible only as a cultural stereotype, making the complexities of contemporary tribal experiences invisible within the American national narrative. In this module you will consider contemporary Native American self-representation, exploring recent Native writing and film as sites of cultural and political resistance, and analysing the ways in which a diverse range of Native authors, screenwriters and directors respond to contemporary tribal socio-economic and political conditions within the US. Taking popular ideas of 'the Indian', you’ll consider the ways in which stereotypes and audience expectations are subverted and challenged. You’ll make connections between these distinct groups of writers, to consider topics such as race and racism, indigeneity, identity, culture, gender, genre, land and 'home', community, and political issues such as human rights and environmental racism. You’ll assess how complex Federal-Indian histories are related to diverse contemporary political events such as the indigenous Idle No More movement, and the NDAPL oil pipeline controversies. You will also explore how Native writers engage with the political paradox of remaining colonised within the ‘Land of the Free’. Through seminar based discussion, you will develop a broad understanding of the contemporary issues faced by Native peoples, a familiarity with the ways in which stereotypes and audience expectations are subverted and challenged by Native authors, screenwriters, and directors, and insights into the ways in which Native peoples are shaping the debates around contemporary tribal socio-economic and political conditions. You will be assessed through coursework, reflective reports, and student-led workshops, and gain expertise in communicating your ideas via student-led groupwork and seminar discussion. On successful completion of the module, you will have the knowledge and skills to assess the complexities and diversities of Native American cultural and national identity, and the literary and cinematic strategies of Native writers and filmmakers.

AMERICAN STUDIES DISSERTATION

Code AMAS6056B

Credits 30

You will complete an independent research project leading to a dissertation of 8,000 words to be submitted at the end of the semester. A member of American Studies faculty will supervise the dissertation.

COMICS GET REAL: GRAPHIC NARRATIVES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TRAUMA, AND WAR

Code AMAS6059B

Credits 30

Why do people draw their life stories in comics form? How can trauma be represented in words and pictures? What does it mean to bear witness to horrific events graphically? Throughout this module, you’ll study the recent phenomenon of reality-based American comics, which stand in sharp contrast to the form’s common association with superheroes and the fantastic. In addition to discovering comics’ powerful potential for representing real-life events in engaging and disturbing ways, you’ll learn to analyse both form and content, and will develop a critical vocabulary for reading, thinking, and writing about comics. You’ll read comics that tell a wide variety of stories anchored in real life, and from many different genres, such as autobiography, memoir, investigative journalism, and war reportage. Throughout, you’ll learn to pay special attention to issues of representation, spectatorship, and the position of the artist in relation to the events depicted. You’ll also study a variety of critical and theoretical material that puts these comics-specific issues in conversation with more general concerns about the ethics of representing the real world in diverse written or visual forms. You’ll learn through seminars and independent study, and will be assessed through coursework including a final essay. At the end of the module, you’ll be able to read reality-based as well as other comics in a transformative way, and will have gained a deep understanding of how this vibrant and upcoming cultural form creates new opportunities for representing the increasingly complex personal and geopolitical realities of the world in the twenty-first century.

Optional B Modules

(30-90 credits)

CONTEMPORARY DRAMA AND FILM

Code LDCD6103B

Credits 30

In this module you will examine emergent voices and trends in recent theatre, film and television (mainly British but with some American or European contributions). Topics 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). In this course you will also examine recent works related to representations of (for example) religious controversy, sexual identity, politics and the social impact of scientific discovery.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (AUT)

Code LDCL6018A

Credits 30

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words. The topic of your dissertation is largely up to you, though does depend on the availability of a supervisor who can work with you on it. You do not need to have a specific topic already decided before enrolling on the dissertation: you can develop the topic in conversation with your supervisor. All you need in the first instance is a preferred subject area for the dissertation, so that supervisory arrangements can be put in place.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (SPR)

Code LDCL6019B

Credits 30

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words (6000 words for 20 credit). The topic of your dissertation is largely up to you, though does depend on the availability of a supervisor who can work with you on it. You do not need to have a specific topic already decided before enrolling on the dissertation: you can develop the topic in conversation with your supervisor. All you need in the first instance is a preferred subject area for the dissertation, so that supervisory arrangements can be put in place.

WRITING LIFE: BIOGRAPHY AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Code LDCL6026B

Credits 30

‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ and it’s often more moving, powerful, inspiring and funnier too. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to discover some extraordinary ‘true’ stories on this module as well as the possibility to write one of your own. You’ll think about the ever-shifting boundaries between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ as well as the ethical questions that arise when you’re writing about real people and situations. This is a module that enables you to do something very different in your final semester at UEA. During this module you’ll consider if and how non-fiction writing differs from fictional literature. You’ll learn about research, how to read and interrogate personal documents and the challenges presented by memory and anecdote. How do you assemble facts so that the resulting story is as compelling as fiction? What clothes can the non-fiction writer steal from the novelist’s wardrobe? Throughout the module you’ll read different types of non-fiction and think about how individual authors weave their research material into narrative form. You will have the opportunity to write your own piece of non-fiction for your summative assessment if you wish. This is a 5,000 word creative or critical piece which everyone will workshop during the semester. There will also be tutorials in which you can discuss your summative work. By the end of the module you’ll have gained an understanding of the craft of non-fiction and you’ll have developed your ability to ask pertinent questions of any non-fiction you read, be it a newspaper story or a highly researched account of a life or situation. You’ll have honed your research abilities and perhaps your interview skills too if you decide to write something that involves interviews. You’ll also have thought about the ethical implications that may arise when writing about ‘real life’ - all qualities that are highly valued by employers.

NERVOUS NARRATIVES

Code LDCL6046A

Credits 30

‘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 - the discursive formation - 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, neurasthenia, 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 Siri Hustvedt’s analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010). The module equips you to work within an interdisciplinary frame and across historical periods from the late 17th century to the present.

SHAKESPEARE: SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6056B

Credits 30

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. We will consider Plato as a poetic philosopher and Shakespeare as a philosophical poet by asking what difference the ‘dramatic’ form of Plato's Socratic dialogues makes to their 'ideas', and, conversely, how in Shakespeare's plays, particularising plots unfold into generalising arguments. In both cases, the concern is with how dramatic form with its special mixture of what is seen, what is said, what is known and what is enacted, can clarify perennial philosophical questions. We'll also touch on several possible mediators between Plato and Shakespeare, including Castiglione, Erasmus and Sir Philip Sidney.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: (pre-1789) (AUT)

Code LDCL6061A

Credits 30

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words (6000 words for 20 credit). The topic of your dissertation is largely up to you, though does depend on the availability of a supervisor who can work with you on it. You do not need to have a specific topic already decided before enrolling on the dissertation: you can develop the topic in conversation with your supervisor. All you need in the first instance is a preferred subject area for the dissertation, so that supervisory arrangements can be put in place.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: (pre-1789) (SPR)

Code LDCL6062B

Credits 30

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words (6000 words for 20 credit). The topic of your dissertation is largely up to you, though does depend on the availability of a supervisor who can work with you on it. You do not need to have a specific topic already decided before enrolling on the dissertation: you can develop the topic in conversation with your supervisor. All you need in the first instance is a preferred subject area for the dissertation, so that supervisory arrangements can be put in place.

THE ART OF EMOTION: LITERATURE, WRITING AND FEELING

Code LDCL6118B

Credits 30

According to Roland Barthes, emotion is 'a disturbance, a bordering on collapse: something perverse, under respectable appearances; emotion is even, perhaps, the slyest of losses'. This module takes this 'perversity, under respectable appearance' as the starting point for asking how an attention to our emotions - our feeling, affects, and intimacies, as well as our aversions - can make us rethink what it means to be critical and creative readers and writers. Drawing on a range of theoretical and critical work from literary studies, cultural theory, art, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience, psychology, creativity and creative writing studies, cognitive science, history and anthropology, we will ask what it means to read, and write, 'with feeling'. What is the relationship between language and feeling? Between the body and emotion? How does literature touch and move us? Are our 'aesthetic' emotions real? How does technology - the digital, virtual, prosthetic and online - affect our ideas about emotion? Are emotions universal and timeless, or historically and culturally specific? Private and personal, or collective and public? How do emotions construct gender, class, race, nationality, and other kinds of identity? Why do some feelings attract more critical interest than others? How does an attention to emotion affect our work as readers and writers? We will begin by building a theoretical and critical literacy for thinking feeling, before focusing our inquiry around specific themes that might include: Animal Passions; Psyche, Pathology and Resistances to Psychoanalysis; Feeling Texts: Touch, Texture and Fictional Fabrications; Moving Fictions: Cinema, Virtuality, and E-motion; Zombies: Can Dead Subjects Feel?; Affective Economies; Queering Feeling; and Feeling Human: Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Clones. We will engage with a range of literary texts and other aesthetic forms (such as art, film, etc.) chosen to correspond with our critical concerns. Please note that this is an indicative description only, and the weekly themes and reading are revised each year to stay up to date with current work in the field. You will have the opportunity to engage both as critical and creative readers and writers, and there will be critical and creative assessment options. This module is open to all students. It will complement level 3 options such as 'Literature and Deconstruction', 'Nervous Narratives', 'Traumaturgies', ' Literature and Human Rights' and 'Queer Literature and Theory'.

THE ART OF MURDER

Code LDCL6130A

Credits 30

Crime, like death, has always been with us, yet it was only in the 19th century that de Quincey proposed considering murder as one of the fine arts and Poe established many of the central tenets of crime fiction with his 'tales of ratiocination'. Currently, crime fiction is the most bought, and read, literary genre and one diverse enough to include 'whodunits'; Baker Street's most notable resident; the genteel amateur detectives of the 'Golden Age'; hard-boiled thrillers; noir; psychological fiction and even the post-modern iterations of anti-detective fiction. Narratives about crime and criminals, detection and sleuths (not forgetting the violence and victims) can be both conservatively formulaic and radically diverse. It can articulate dangerous and disturbing transgressions against society (the crime) while also revealing the ideological forces of law (what constitutes a crime) order (the various detective figures) and the systems of justice and ill-justice (courts and punishment, state and government) with which a society protects and proscribes itself. Crime fiction is also concerned with interpreting clues, discovering secrets and solving enigmas, much in the way that critical theory investigates and analyses literary texts. In this module you will explore key texts and writers in the development of crime fiction as well as examining critical and theoretical responses to such texts. It will allow you to respond both creatively and critically to the concerns of, and thinking about this diverse genre.

FEMINIST WRITING

Code LDCL6132B

Credits 30

We are witnessing an upsurge in feminist activism which some claim is forming the fourth wave of feminism. It is timely then to reconsider how feminist writing (literary texts, literary theory, and literary criticism) has helped to shape, influence, and articulate debates about gender, sexuality, and society in the past and how contemporary feminist writing is continuing to be part of that conversation now. You'll have the opportunity to read and analyse some of the most influential feminist literary texts and literary theory. Writers studied on the course may include Margaret Atwood, Henrik Ibsen, Angela Carter, Jean Rhys, Jeanette Winterson, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ali Smith, Beyoncé, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. You'll study the ways in which feminist criticism and theory (including Kristeva, Cixous, bell hooks, Haraway, and Butler) has reshaped the canon, challenged the ways literature is taught as well as making us consider what literature can, might and ought to be. Feminism has also exacted different forms of writing and challenged dominant modes of representation. We will take a particularly close look at the relationship between feminism and the gothic, the short story, and experimental writing. Assessment will be by course work and project and you'll be assessed in both critical and creative modes. Students of all genders are equally welcome.

URBAN VISIONS: THE CITY IN LITERATURE AND VISUAL CULTURE

Code LDCL6138A

Credits 30

This interdisciplinary module explores how 'the city' has been thought about and represented through a selection of writings (fiction, poetry, theory), visual material (painting, photography, film, street art) and occasionally other sensory material (sound, smell), spanning around 1850 to the present day and focused on two particular cities and great capitals of modernity, Paris and London. In this period the growth of the great European cities has created a new and diverse set of environments and possibilities. Utopias, dystopias, sites of ruin and construction of all kinds; what different, contradictory or coherent versions of urban experience do these texts and images offer? We'll investigate what kinds of writing, art, discourses and attitudes cities seem to generate. Was modernism, for example, as Malcolm Bradbury asserts, an ‘art of cities'? How do textual and pictorial techniques intersect, for example, in the case of nineteenth-century Impressionist art and writing, twentieth-century Surrealism, Situationist provocations, or contemporary street art and photography? What is ‘psychogeography’? In the company of the flâneur/flâneuse, the detective and other urban wanderers, we'll consider aspects such as space, place, urban being and time, love and eroticism, hauntings, crime, memory and the presence of the past, the individual and the crowd, consumption, nature and the natural, urban Gothic, and the pressures, preoccupations and thrills peculiar to urban living and imagining. The main mode is seminar discussion, supported by short lectures, virtual gallery visits and film viewings. Assessment is by means of an individually designed project which is supported by individual tutorials and formative work of various kinds, including the opportunity to practise reading images and spaces, as well as literary texts. There is scope to produce creative-critical (including visual) work as part of your assessment.

GHOSTS, HAUNTING AND SPECTRALITY

Code LDCL6160A

Credits 30

From Defoe’s True Relation of Mrs Veal’s posthumous visit to her friend Mrs Bargrave through the classic English ghost stories of MR James to the ghosts in the machine of modern media, the ghost, shade, revenant or spectre continues to haunt human imagination. Subtle shadings of the spectre materialise at different times, in different contexts – materialised reminder of unquiet remains; manifestation of memory or the unconscious; physiological disturbance; psychical stain. These undecidable and ambivalent presences, or uncanny sensations of hauntedness, will be explored in this module. Writers studied on the module might include Daniel Defoe, M.R. James, Henry James, Margaret Oliphant, May Sinclair and Susan Hill. The module will draw on studies mapping the development of the belief in ghosts (Sasha Handley’s Visions of an Unseen World) and exploring the cultural history (Andrew Smith’s The Ghost Story 1840 – 1920). It will also consider critical engagements, such as Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis.

IMAGINARY ENDINGS: BRITISH FICTION AND THE APOCALYPSE

Code LDCL6176A

Credits 30

‘It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)’ —R.E.M. (1987) ‘The etymological root of the word apocalypse is the Greek apokalypsis, meaning “unveiling” or “uncovering”.’ —Rosen (2008) This module will explore the origins and development of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction by British writers from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular emphasis on late twentieth and twenty-first century writing. In this module you will consider how in apocalyptic fiction the moment of catastrophe is also a moment of truth-bearing revelation, an unveiling which brings with it the opportunity to make a fresh beginning. You will also examine the biblical narratives and other ancient stories that frequently underpin such fictions; reflect on what apocalypse means to us culturally; consider the way such fictions reflect the anxieties of the cultural moment in which they were written; and explore some of the major trends of apocalyptic fiction, such as eco-catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, pandemics, survivalism, apocalyptic visions, and technology gone wrong. You will also attend to the way such narratives frequently participate in the genres of dystopian and speculative fiction. The module will conclude by interrogating what apocalypse means to us today through the study of recent works of apocalyptic fiction. You will be encouraged to explore and discuss a range of associated literary criticism and theory. You will, in the second of the summative assessments, have the opportunity to write your own apocalyptic fiction with an accompanying critical reflection.

THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATING LOVE, DEATH AND ADVENTURE (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6188A

Credits 30

For something to be reborn it must first die. The Italian Renaissance (‘rebirth’) sought to disinter the past in order to reanimate the present, but in order to do so the present had to come to terms with its loss — as Petrarch asked, ‘who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?’. How can we best understand this process of loss and reanimation? How did Renaissance writers understand it, and how did they bridge the gulf between death and rebirth? And can we do the same? In order to answer these questions this module examines the twin practices of imitation and translation in English responses to some of the most exciting and influential texts of the Italian Renaissance. It does so in two ways: through a sustained analysis of those practices as they can be located in two of the most popular forms of the period (the sonnet and the epic), and by imitating the process of creative imitation ourselves. In other words, we step into the shoes of the Renaissance imitator. The module allows us to understand how Italian poets such as Dante, Petrarch and Ariosto responded to the classical past (and each other), and how English poets and playwrights such as Wyatt, Spenser, and Shakespeare responded to Italian models. It also illustrates the important and vocal interventions made by Italian women poets such as Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco. By imitating the imitators – for example by writing sonnets – we gain a deeper understanding of how imitation is both a creative practice and a critical process, both a reading and a rewriting. Students are not expected or required to know any Italian in advance. (Pre-1789)

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Entry Requirements

A Levels

BBB or ABC including English Literature or BBC including English Literature with an A in the Extended Project

BTEC

DDM, alongside grade B in English Literature A-level (or equivalent qualification). Excludes BTEC Public Services, BTEC Uniformed Services and BTEC Business Administration.

Scottish highers

AABBB including English Literature

Scottish highers advanced

CCC including English Literature

Irish leaving certificate

2 subjects at H2, 4 subjects at H3 including English Literature

Access course

Access to Humanities & Social Sciences pathway. Pass the Access to HE Diploma with Merit in 45 credits at Level 3 including 12 credits in English Literature

European Baccalaureate

70% including 70% in an English Literature related subject

International Baccalaureate

31 points including 5 in Higher Level English.

GCSE offer

You are required to have Mathematics and English Language at a minimum of Grade C or Grade 4 or above at GCSE.

Additional entry requirements

If you do not have an A-Level or equivalent qualification in English Literature (or English Language and Literature), once you have submitted your UCAS form we may then contact you to ask you to submit a short analysis of a passage of a literary text in support of your application.

If you do not meet the academic requirements for direct entry, you may be interested in one of our Foundation Year programmes.

Alternative Qualifications

UEA recognises that some students take a mixture of International Baccalaureate IB or International Baccalaureate Career-related Programme IBCP study rather than the full diploma, taking Higher levels in addition to A levels and/or BTEC qualifications. At UEA we do consider a combination of qualifications for entry, provided a minimum of three qualifications are taken at a higher Level. In addition some degree programmes require specific subjects at a higher level.

Students for whom english is a foreign language

Applications from students whose first language is not English are welcome. We require evidence of proficiency in English (including writing, speaking, listening and reading):

IELTS: 6.0 overall with a minimum of 5.5 in each component

We also accept a number of other English language tests. Please click here to see our full list.

INTO University of East Anglia

If you do not yet meet the English language requirements for this course, INTO UEA offer a variety of English language programmes which are designed to help you develop the English skills necessary for successful undergraduate study:

Pre-sessional English at INTO UEA

English for University Study at INTO UEA

Interviews

Most applicants will not be called for an interview and a decision will be made via UCAS Track. However, for some applicants an interview will be requested. Where an interview is required the Admissions Service will contact you directly to arrange a time.

Gap year

We welcome applications from students who have already taken or intend to take a gap year. We believe that a year between school and university can be of substantial benefit. You are advised to indicate your reason for wishing to defer entry on your UCAS application.

Intakes

This course is open to UK, EU and International applicants. The annual intake for this course is in September each year.

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Course Reference Number: 2925395

BA ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE