BA English Literature and Philosophy

Key details

BA ENGLISH LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY

Start Year

2021

Attendance

Full Time

Award

Degree of Bachelor of Arts

UCAS course code

VQ53

Entry Requirements

BBB

How are we to live? What is justice? How can our minds know the world? What is truth? Can we prove anything about God? How do we tell good reasoning from bad?

The study of philosophy considers these questions in a systematic attempt to make sense of human life and the world in which we live. And literature is another, equally important way that we try to make sense of human life and the questions it raises.

In this course you will discover how these two disciplines spark off each other to deepen your understanding of both. You’ll discover how philosophers and writers explore existential aspects of the human condition in diverse ways. You’ll examine the literary artistry of thinkers such as Plato and Nietzsche, who invite us into philosophy in exciting and unexpected ways. And you’ll discuss how novels, poems and dramatic works uncover special kinds of truth about the world.

To study literature and philosophy together is to understand the influence one has on the other – and the way different minds work. Approached together in a single degree they’re incredibly stimulating, with the study of one enriching your study of the other.

You’ll especially love this course if you’re interested in existential and intellectual themes in literature. You’ll choose from the full range of modules in both Philosophy and English Literature, developing skills in both fields. Interdisciplinary links are emphasised, and in your second year you will take a dedicated module that brings the two subjects together.

About

Writers and philosophers consider the same universal questions using different approaches. By studying English Literature and Philosophy together, you get to read and discuss the literature you love with staff and students in our world-famous School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, while also exploring the deep philosophical questions with philosophy students and staff, who will make you think twice and read again.

Our degree course provides roughly equal proportions of both subjects, but there’s scope to adjust the balance towards more literature or more philosophy if you wish, as your interests deepen. In fact, there are staff in both departments whose research and teaching interests cross between the two disciplines. And in your second year you’ll have a co-taught module that combines the two together in an exciting way. All of which makes for a university experience you’ll never forget.

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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

Each module has its own designated assessment method. For most modules this means the coursework that you will have prepared during the semester with advice from your tutors. In some spring philosophy modules in your first and second years it will also include an examination.

In the final year most modules are assessed by a larger piece of your own work or a number of more in-depth essays.

Your final degree result is based on the marks for all your modules in the last two years, weighted 40:60 so that more importance is attached to the fully mature work of your third year.

Structure

Your first year of study will provide you with a well-balanced mix of literature and philosophy modules. In both, you’ll be invited to look at the past to see how we came to where we are now, for instance in Literature in History I and II, Classic Readings in Philosophy and Modern Readings in Philosophy.

In our Reading Texts: Tutorial Class compulsory module you’ll undertake close literary criticism with an assigned tutor. Your tutor’s specialism will define the texts your class studies, and you’ll discover and practise a range of reading techniques and methods for approaching texts.

In your second semester you can choose one further philosophy module. You can study Foundational Texts of the Great Civilizations, Radical Philosophy, or Reasoning and Logic.

Teaching and Learning

We place great emphasis on working ideas through together. We encourage everyone to contribute, listen and respond appropriately both in large and small group settings. We seek out positive criticism, and polite and fruitful exchanges of views.

Each of your lecturers will also hold open hours, through which you’ll be able to gain one-to-one guidance. You will also be assigned an academic adviser who will support you throughout your studies, providing academic and career guidance.

Reading – and really thinking about what you are reading – will be an important part of your studies. You will have dedicated sessions to help you master UEA’s state-of-the-art library facilities, and you’ll learn how to read and think actively and to produce your own written work in dialogue with the ideas of those you are reading. And as you progress you’ll develop into a self-motivated researcher and an independent creative thinker.

Your own writing – and improving your written work in response to advice – will also be central to your degree. In Philosophy our system of returning draft work with constructive feedback and individual guidance ensures that you receive the attention you need in advance of your final submission. Our aim is to help you learn from your mistakes and to take on board the advice, so you can achieve the best possible final mark.

During your time at UEA, you will be taught by academics working at the forefront of their academic fields, who are widely published in the key issues that have shaped the development of philosophy and literary study across the world. You can find out more about their research and teaching specialisms.

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Assessment for Year 2

In the final year most modules are assessed by a larger piece of your own work or a number of more in-depth essays.

Your final degree result is based on the marks for all your modules in the last two years, weighted 40:60 so that more importance is attached to the fully mature work of your third year.

Structure

By the time you enter your second year, you will have discovered where your best talents lie and you’ll be equipped to choose from the wide range of philosophy and literature modules on offer. You will choose six modules, not less than two and not more than four from each of literature and philosophy. This allows you to shift the balance a little towards one subject or the other.

Your one compulsory module will be our keystone module Literature and Philosophy, in which you will be taught by lecturers and tutors from both Philosophy and from the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. In it, you’ll study topics such as the literary style of Plato, historicism and folktale and deconstruction.

In addition to the usual areas of philosophy that we offer in second year – such as ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, and various thinkers and texts from ancient or modern philosophy – there are also some particular UEA specialisms such as environmental philosophy, explorations in the connections between philosophy and film, and modules that make links with political theory.

In Literature there’s an immense choice of modules, many of which will allow you to step beyond the literature that you have met before, or to approach the familiar with unfamiliar questions.

Many of your optional modules, covering topics such as philosophy meets the arts, and critical theory and practice, will allow you to explore the connections between philosophy and literary studies. You may also find the chance to study Nietzsche, or the existential philosophers such as Sartre, particularly stimulating.

You can also take a placement module in which you apply the skills you are developing through your degree to the working world and to explore a career path that interests you.

Teaching and Learning

Admissions Live Chat

Virtual Open Day

Assessment for Year 3

In the final year most modules are assessed by a larger piece of your own work or a number of more in-depth essays.

Your final degree result is based on the marks for all your modules in the last two years, weighted 40:60 so that more importance is attached to the fully mature work of your third year.

Structure

In your final year you’ll choose two advanced modules from literature and two from philosophy. The modules will involve a higher degree of independent study, allowing you to take the subject to a greater depth. You can choose to progress some of the areas that you explored in your second year, explore new areas and issues, or take a mixture of the two.

In addition to the main modules we offer across the spectrum of philosophy and literature, your final year will give you the option to undertake either a dissertation with one-to-one supervision, or a special subject, in which you and a few fellow students will work with a tutor on an area of mutual interest. If you choose the dissertation route, your subject matter can be philosophical or a literary topic, or a question that combines the two.

Teaching and Learning

Admissions Live Chat

Virtual Open Day

Assessment for Year 1

In the final year most modules are assessed by a larger piece of your own work or a number of more in-depth essays.

Your final degree result is based on the marks for all your modules in the last two years, weighted 40:60 so that more importance is attached to the fully mature work of your third year.

Compulsory Modules

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 it is 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.

READING LITERATURE IN HISTORY

Code LDCL4008A

Credits 20

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.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Code PPLP4062A

Credits 20

What is the meaning of life? This burning question is at the heart of philosophy. We will explore the ways in which philosophy can help us tackle it. We will investigate a diverse range of philosophical perspectives from different areas of philosophy each of which interprets the question in a slightly different way. We will look at the work of philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Patricia Churchland, Leibniz, Christine Korsgaard, Daniel Dennett, Martha Nussbaum, Confucius, Elizabeth Barnes, Immanuel Kant, Christine Swanton, Epicurus. We'll grapple with ideas that inform our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. What, if anything, is ultimately of value in life? Is freedom to affect your future important, and do you have that freedom? Could you have a meaningful life in an artificial reality? Is there a reason you exist? Should you radically change the way you are living? What should be done about existential threats such as Climate Change? The module provides a firm foundation for your further studies, as these issues are at the heart of philosophy and also at the foundation of related disciplines, such as politics and economics.

Optional A Modules

(20-40 credits)

MODERN READINGS IN PHILOSOPHY

Code PPLP4063B

Credits 20

What am I? What kind of world am I in? How can I know about it? How should I live my life? In this module, you’ll grapple with fundamental philosophical questions that have great personal significance for each of us. You’ll focus on perspectives from the history of modern philosophy (ca. 1650 to 1950). You’ll get to debate the ideas of key thinkers, which might include Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, as well as other less well-known figures. This module will be suitable for you with or without prior experience of philosophy, and whether or not you are studying philosophy as part of your degree. It is a useful accompaniment to work in early modern history and English literature.

REASONING AND LOGIC

Code PPLP4064B

Credits 20

What do we mean when we say an argument is well-reasoned? What makes an argument either watertight, or unreliable? We can start to answer these questions by distinguishing between, on the one hand, the individual claims that occur in an argument and, on the other hand, the relationships between those claims (which is the argument’s logical structure). During this module you'll study philosophical reasoning, looking in close detail at the role played by logical structure such that we have an argument which has not only a true conclusion, but one which is firmly supported. As a result, you’ll arm yourself with indispensable tools for rigorous philosophical thought, for identifying problems in the arguments you encounter, and for defending your views effectively within and beyond academic philosophy. You’ll study what we call “validity in particular, gaining techniques for identifying valid arguments. As you discover how to break down the components of an argument, you’ll sharpen your skills in argument-analysis and deepen your understanding of some key logical concepts, central to philosophy. In addition you’ll master specific methods for examining validity in abstraction from natural language contexts. You’ll strengthen these skills via a combination of seminars, lectures, workshops, and independent study. We'll focus heavily on practice exercises. The study of logic and reasoning will make you a better philosopher, whatever your specialism or area of interest. It will enable you to judge your own arguments and those of others more easily and effectively, and help you to organise your thoughts and communicate your ideas more effectively.

RADICAL PHILOSOPHY

Code PPLP4065B

Credits 20

In this module, we study some of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, in order to reflect in unconventional ways on the ideas of human association and community as well as evaluate the loss of autonomy produced by cultural invasion and the institutionalisation of values. The basic goal of Radical Philosophy is to present you with a constellation of styles of thinking and forms of criticism that will stimulate you to examine in a rigorous way several thought-provoking perspectives on the idea of social transformation.

FOUNDATIONAL TEXTS OF THE GREAT CIVILISATIONS

Code PPLP4067B

Credits 20

In this module you’ll explore the ways in which human beings have, from time immemorial, used narratives and poetry to create their models of the universe, and to think about issues relating to mankind’s place within it. You’ll focus on ancient texts from a variety of major civilisations over the last four millennia, many of them still treated as living sources of wisdom and insight, spiritual guidance and moral vision. It has become customary in modern philosophy to privilege rational discourse, in prose, as the acceptable way of doing philosophy, and to imagine that to be human is to be rational. But is it irrational to explore our world and discover the deeper truths through narrative? Is that even non-rational enquiry? Might it actually be one of the key ways in which philosophy can reach and engage every human being? And might that be why all civilisations have stories and poetry as their foundational texts, not philosophical arguments? In this module you’ll acquire a basic knowledge of some key texts (including Homer, key parts of the King James Bible and the Quran) that any citizen of the world should know.

Optional B Modules

(20-40 credits)

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.

WRITING TEXTS

Code LDCL4020B

Credits 20

In this module theories of literature and experiments in writing will intersect. In weekly lectures and seminar discussions, and through the reading of a carefully curated dossier of essays, you’ll explore important questions about writing and literature. What is the difference between writing and speaking? What is a literary text and how does it differ from non-literary texts? What is the relationship between the act of reading and the act of writing? How is a literary text influenced by other texts? You’ll also become confident in carrying out your own textual experiments and trying out a range of creative rewriting exercises on existing texts. In this you might explore modes of adaptation and translation, try out different ways of writing to constraint, play literary-generative games such as cut-up technique, as well as undertake a variety of textual interventions and experiments. You’ll be encouraged to hack existing literary texts and rewrite them to your own purpose. You’ll take texts apart and put them back together differently. Through specially-designed writing exercises you will gain new insights into a variety of approaches to writing and literature. Your encounters with literary-theoretical texts will likewise cast new light on the writing process and the ways in which the text produced relates to textual theories. By the end of the module you’ll have gained a keen understanding of how texts work. This will make you a better reader and writer. You’ll also become confident in stepping back and thinking about your own writing critically.

WRITING ACROSS BORDERS

Code LDCL4021B

Credits 20

This module will study how literary texts move across borders of history, geography and culture and what happens to them when they do. It will focus on particular examples of textual travelling drawn from different historical periods and, in the process, raise critical questions about cultural exchange and the idea of literature as a form of translation and adaptation.

Optional C Modules

(0-20 credits)

THE ECONOMICS OF BUSINESS DECISION-MAKING

Code ECO-4002B

Credits 20

This module introduces key concepts and findings from behavioural economics and investigates how economics can be used to understand the behaviour of consumers, workers and managers. Providing you with a means to introduce key developments in economic analysis, from neuroeconomics to the economics of emotion, the focus is on how such economic insights can ultimately improve business and managerial decision-making.

SUSTAINABILITY, SOCIETY AND BIODIVERSITY

Code ENV-4006B

Credits 20

Striking a balance between societal development, economic growth and environmental conservation has proven challenging and contentious at many scales and over time. The concept of `sustainable development’ was coined to denote processes aiming to achieve this balance. This module introduces sustainable development, and examines the challenges and opportunities to achieving this, drawing together social and ecological dimensions. Drawing upon the social sciences, this module examines the theory and practice of sustainable development. From an ecological perspective, the module covers a range of concepts relevant to the structure and functioning of the biosphere, and topics ranging from landscape and population ecology to biodiversity conservation. This module is assessed by coursework and an examination.

THE AGE OF EXTREMES: EUROPE 1918 - 2001

Code HIS-4006B

Credits 20

This module conveys the rich complexity of twentieth-century Europe, encouraging you to look afresh at the period. In hindsight, the epithet ‘age of extremes’ best describes the contradictory characteristics of a century during which total war and genocide were accompanied by growing humanitarianism, state health care and the advance of human rights. Naturally, developments during the first decades of the twenty-first century have forced historians to reconsider and revise once-accepted narratives about European modernization. Just as the trend toward increasing integration, harmonization and homogenization seems questionable in light of the crisis of the European Union, Islamism and Islamophobia believe the idea that modernization resulted in secularization and tolerance. Similarly, the demonstrable power of international finance and supranational assemblies counters narratives of popular empowerment through the triumph of representative democracy. The lectures examine themes in their respective chronological contexts: the age of catastrophe; the age of the post-war ‘economic miracle’; and the making of contemporary Europe. Rather than dwelling on familiar aspects of the century that you may have previously studied, the module will also expose you to the history of Europe after 1945, Central and Eastern Europe, and developments in the US and colonies that shaped the continent. Instead of focusing narrowly on high politics, international relations and warfare, the module also aims to allow you to re-examine the century through the study of the history of population movements, land uses, urban planning and attitudes toward the past.

VISUAL(ISING) HISTORY

Code HIS-4007B

Credits 20

The importance of visual and material sources as historical evidence, as witnesses to history, has long been recognised by historians. Relics, buildings, maps, paintings, photographs, and films are all visual and material sources from which historians can elicit meaning. Paintings, photographs, and films in particular propose to give us unique access to the ideological, physical and emotional content of a specific historic moment. But visual evidence also challenges us to consider where we as historians draw the line between the mediated and unmediated ‘truth’ of the past. History is always an interpretation of the past that changes. Our aim is to introduce students to the analysis and interpretation of a wide range of visual and material evidence. Furthermore, students will examine the manifold ways in which audiovisual historical representations shape and reshape our collective memory and understanding of the past from the medieval to the contemporary.

HISTORY, CONTROVERSY AND DEBATE

Code HIS-4009B

Credits 20

This module challenges you to reflect on the nature of history: what it means for historians; what it means for the wider public and contemporary society; and what it has meant in the past. You’ll explore the key approaches to the study of history and the conduct of historical research. You’ll consider how historians have written history in the past and how they engage with it in the present, the relevance and challenges of sources and evidence, how historians present their interpretations, and the ways in which they debate amongst themselves. You’ll come away with an understanding that history is rarely about the ‘right’ answer, but rather a series of ways of understanding and interpreting the past. You’ll focus in particular on historical debate and how you can effectively analyse and interpret it. Through a mixture of both historical interpretation and historiography, you’ll develop key study and transferable skills.

GLOBALISATION AND FRENCH CULTURAL IDENTITIES (LEVEL 4)

Code PPLF4006B

Credits 20

Do you want to explore what makes the French so French? Is there any such thing as a French cultural exception? How has society and the relationship between the French and the French state or religion evolved over time and how has that shaped social behaviours, attitudes, laws, and values in France? These are some of the questions that will be the subjects of this module, which is available to students with or without some prior knowledge of the French language. By taking this module, taught and assessed in English, you will gain a deeper understanding of French society and important aspects of its institutions. You will understand France's attempts to retain its cultural identity, despite trends of homogenisation. You will look at themes such as education, arts, politics, literature, thought, and examine questions such as the role of the state, the support of the film industry, the history and legacy of Cartesian reasoning, and centralisation and universalism. Those themes will be discussed, sometimes challenged, through the exploration of a range of illustrations, documents and readings. By the end of this module, you'll have developed awareness of important and structuring features of French culture, and you'll have developed intercultural skills. If you are a student in international relations, you will have a better understanding of what influences social and political representations, constructions and decisions. As a student of languages, you will be able to support your comprehension and expression skills by a thorough understanding of the French culture.

AN INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR CULTURE IN LATIN AMERICA

Code PPLH4004B

Credits 20

From salsa to samba, fútbol to capoeira, telenovelas to Tex-Mex: Latin American popular cultures combine Indigenous, African and European elements in unique ways found nowhere else on earth. You will examine several Latin American popular cultural forms, and the historical, religious, social and political significance they have for Latin Americans.

GLOBAL POLITICS 2

Code PPLI4055B

Credits 20

Global Politics 2 explores the most important controversies and debates in contemporary international politics. Because international politics is constantly changing, we review this module every year, altering the precise mix of topics to reflect the world that you see around you. All of our topics involve questions of power, ethics, transnational cooperation and security. Recently we have explored terrorism, nuclear weapons, our moral obligations to foreigners, as well as migration, the fate of the environment, and emerging powers in the international system.

INTRODUCTION TO JAPAN

Code PPLJ4029B

Credits 20

Would you like to explore Japanese culture and society? Are you curious and would you like to travel to Japan? Your module is designed to offer a critical overview of changes occurring in contemporary Japanese culture and society. Taught in English, you will be introduced to major aspects of the history, society, cultures, and global position of Japan. You’ll take a fresh look at stereotypes associated with Japan. You will be provided with a good all-round basic knowledge of Japan that will be of value both to students intending to major in Japanese and those interested in Japan. No knowledge of Japanese language is required. Topics such as overview of Japanese history from ancient to modern times, geography, contemporary politics and economics, society, education, and traditional and contemporary culture will be considered. Exercises and discussions in class will enhance your understanding and motivation to studying Japan in its global and cultural context.

INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

Code PPLM4001B

Credits 20

Trump’s Tweets, Corbyn’s “fans”, and personalised campaign messages sent by algorithms…political communication has changed drastically in the last five years. Pundits and some scholars warn of serious dangers to democracy. What are the tricks of the trade in modern political communication and how different are they from those of the past? How does one now succeed to get across a message and gain support? Should we be worried about the implications for political discourse and decision-making? This module will enable you to critically assess the role of communication in national and international politics and help you understand the dynamics among political actors, media and citizens in opinion formation and decision-making. This is a professional practice module in which you will gain skills relevant to the conduct of political communications and to many other work environments, as well as experience working in a team on a task that requires critical thinking and collaborative strategizing. This module is ideal for anyone interested in working in politics, diplomacy, journalism, marketing, or for advocacy or activist civil society groups. Ideas about the power of communications and the ways that various political actors use that power are at the heart of this module. You’ll examine how these actors use the media in political communications. Lectures and readings will cover media effects, how political communication has changed with changes in media technology, branding and celebrity in politics, and soft power with political communication at the international level, as well as the tools used by various political actors, such as political parties or civic movements. Lectures are interactive, using an audience response system and open discussion. Seminar activities include practical tasks as well as ones to enhance understanding of the readings. The first assessed work is a group project in which you will play the role of junior analysts in a communications consultancy and you will work together to assess the political communications of a real political actor, your “client”, producing a report and presentation that includes recommendations for improvement. The second is an essay that gives you the chance to develop your ability to analyse and synthesise. By the end of this module you will be able to identify and describe the actors and their interests in a given political communications contexts, as well as formulate and articulate clear arguments about the relationships between political actors and the media in relation to power and agency. You will have gained experience in a simulated work scenario that will give you skills transferable across a number of professions as you will have delivered analysis and recommendations in a professional-style presentation and report. You will also be able evaluate political communications’ role in an international context, something increasingly necessary in the ever more globalized world both for political and corporate actors.

Admissions Live Chat

Virtual Open Day

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.

Assessment for Year 2

In the final year most modules are assessed by a larger piece of your own work or a number of more in-depth essays.

Your final degree result is based on the marks for all your modules in the last two years, weighted 40:60 so that more importance is attached to the fully mature work of your third year.

Compulsory Modules

LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY

Code LDCL5072A

Credits 20

This module will offer a series of different approaches to the question of how Literature and Philosophy can speak to each other as academic disciplines, demonstrating the breadth and diversity of the two fields, as well as acquainting students with the research in literary criticism and philosophy currently being pursued at UEA. As well as examining the ways in which literature can illuminate and trouble philosophical argument, it will explore literature and 'the literary' as a topic for philosophical analysis, and the kinds of thinking such a topic would demand. Setting literature and philosophy into dialogue in this way will engender a more capacious understanding of the particular philosophical issues, and literary techniques, under discussion. The course will allow students to develop an awareness of the limits and advantages of various modes of literary and philosophical expression, and to foster more sophisticated skills in both literary and philosophical criticism. The module will be made up of a lecture circus, with two weeks given to each lecturer on a particular topic related to their current research (there will be five in all, including a lecture from the module convener, plus two from Philosophy and two from Literature, Drama and Creative Writing). The seminars will discuss issues arising from these lectures, working with texts set by the lecturer.

Optional A Modules

(20-80 credits)

ADAPTATION: SHAKESPEARE ON STAGE AND SCREEN (PRE-1789)

Code LDCL5021A

Credits 20

This module explores the rich dramatic and cinematic traditions of Shakespearean adaptation. It considers a range of adaptations, from the seventeenth-century versions of Macbeth, King Lear and Henry V 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. The module focuses in particular upon cinematic adaptations of Richard III, Henry V, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and King Lear, though will also discuss many other examples from stage and screen. In seminars linked to weekly screenings this module offers an introduction to the theory and practice of adaptation as well as an outline view of how to read Shakespeare on film.

CRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE

Code LDCL5031A

Credits 20

This is a module you will find helpful throughout your degree, informing and perhaps changing the way you read and analyse literature, film and other cultural forms. Across the twelve weeks, you’ll not only engage with the rich, complex and provocative work of literary critics and theorists – including deconstructive, feminist, post-colonial and queer theorists – but also of some of the thinkers and writers who have influenced them: such as Marx, Freud and Saussure. You will therefore encounter some of the most important and exciting thinkers of the modern period, acquiring an understanding of developments in linguistics, economics, psychoanalysis and philosophy, and tracing the ways in which these overlap with, and inform, literary and cultural study.

EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Code LDCL5033B

Credits 20

In this module, you’ll examine examples of twentieth-century European writing (all read in translation). Rather than (merely) place writers in their national contexts, you’ll deal with topics, issues and formal experiments that complicate, sometimes transcend, national boundaries. In fact you’ll interrogate what 'European' might mean in relation to literature - where are the borders? Are continental Europeans fundamentally 'other'? And if so, how does this otherness manifest itself aesthetically, thematically, tonally and formally? You'll look at how writers from different countries frequently challenge the conventions of genre and the conventions of reading and interpreting. Among a range of important innovations (or continuities), you may explore varieties of 'European' modernism, postmodernism, the absurd, fantasy, noir, and other genres. You’ll also ask how European writers have responded to the challenges, upheavals and catastrophes of the twentieth century and how they deal with the ethnic, religious and cultural diversity within Europe. You’ll engage with these topics in weekly lectures, and you’ll be assessed by means of an individually chosen project (supported by a formative proposal followed by individual and group tutorials).

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.

AUSTEN AND THE BRONTES: READING THE ROMANCE

Code LDCL5035B

Credits 20

This module considers texts by Austen and the Brontes in relation to a wide variety of literary and historical contexts: feminisms, colonialism, impact of war, the social status of the woman writer, representations of governesses, madness, mad women and mad men, rakes, foreigners and strangers. We investigate the forms of communication which seem to be offered by and in the romance novel and the ways in which the lives of these authors have been told and read as romances. Opportunities will be available to work on film versions and students will also have, as part of the assessment, the opportunity to produce their own piece of creative writing in response to the primary texts.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5041A

Credits 20

The eighteenth century was a time of great literary experimentation in which many new genres emerged, including the periodical essay, the mock-epic, the ballad opera, and the novel. These genres took shape within a commercial revolution that transformed both what it meant to be an author and what it meant to be a reader. In this module you will see how writers such as Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope and John Gay created works that both participated in and criticized the culture of commerce. You will explore the fictions created by writers such as Daniel Defoe, Horace Walpole, and Elizabeth Inchbald, who developed very different versions of the novel. You will also examine how writers such as Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and Olaudah Equiano navigated the new possibilities for authorship that were opening up in the period. Ultimately you are invited to become an “eighteenth-centuryist” and to make imaginative connections between the exciting range of genres that emerged in this century and the culture that produced them.

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

Code LDCL5042A

Credits 20

This module introduces you to a huge variety of kinds of writing from one of Britain's most exciting and turbulent periods of cultural, political and intellectual transformation: the seventeenth century. 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. We begin in the early seventeenth century by exploring the ways English writing was transformed by its encounters with classical texts (giving you the opportunity to read classical authors such as Horace and Martial in translation), before turning to explore women writers’ complicated relationship to early-modern literary culture. We examine the emergence of new forms of life-writing, especially those written by women, and explore the ways in which seventeenth-century travellers wrote about their encounters with the Middle East. In the module's latter section, we ask how literary forms were transformed by the extraordinary upheavals of the English civil war and the execution of the monarch. Authors we study include famous figures such as Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, 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. To better understand the ways early-modern texts’ circumstances of publication shape their meaning, we offer the opportunity to sign up for an (entirely optional) visit to the Norfolk Heritage Centre (in the centre of Norwich) to handle their remarkable collection of seventeenth-century books.

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.

FROM PUSHKIN TO CHEKHOV: NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN FICTION

Code LDCL5048A

Credits 20

‘Russia is old; her literature is new. Russian history goes back to the ninth century; Russian literature, so far as it interests the world, begins in the nineteenth…. Russian literature is the voice of a giant, waking from a long sleep, and becoming articulate. … And what he has said has been well worth the thousand years of waiting.’ What has nineteenth century Russian literature said that the world has waited so long to hear? This is a question you will begin to answer as you read some of the age’s great authors, such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. You’ll gain insight into what makes this writing distinctive and an awareness of the political, social and cultural conditions that created it. You’ll discover why it was so important to other European writers and learn about the intriguing literary relationship between Russia and the West. You’ll start by familiarising yourself with some of the historical background, concentrating on the ‘westernisation’ of Russia, a process begun by Peter the Great and made visible in the construction of the city of St Petersburg. At the beginning of the module you’ll be given some key themes and questions to think about; these will help you to focus your reading during the coming weeks. You’ll learn through seminars and independent study and research. You’ll be assessed on one essay, which can be developed from a class presentation. By the end of the module you’ll have read some of the great nineteenth century Russian writers and gained an understanding of the political, historical and social background of their work. You’ll have discovered why these novels had such a profound impact in Western Europe and how they were instrumental in the development of the Modernist movement in Britain. You’ll have gained a wider literary perspective and reading in translation will have made you think in new ways about your own language too.

THREE WOMEN WRITERS

Code LDCL5050B

Credits 20

‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.’ Virginia Woolf wrote these words in A Room of One’s Own, her polemical essay about women and fiction. Woolf suggests that historically women have been reticent about openly declaring themselves as writers. Elsewhere in the piece she argues that literary language itself is unfit for women’s use and that women’s writing is distinct, undervalued and hampered by women’s social, economic and political history. This module puts Woolf’s assertions to the test. In this module you’ll read the work of Woolf and two of her contemporaries, for example, Katherine Mansfield and Edith Wharton. You’ll explore their writing in its historical and cultural context and you’ll think about how it may or may not have influenced later thinking about the position of women. You’ll consider whether or not you think their writing was innovative and what relevance it might have for us today. Each week you’ll read a work by one of the three writers on the module alongside a short piece of critical writing, either contemporary with the main text or an extract from a later time that in some way engages with the themes of the week’s central text. You’ll learn through close reading, class discussion and independent study. Each week there’ll be opportunities for members of the group to present their ideas and research on either the main or the critical text – work that can be developed in your summative assessment which will consist of one essay submitted towards the end of the semester. Your growing knowledge and understanding of the concerns and debates that were current at the time the texts were written will enable you to unlock some of the preoccupations that can lie hidden beneath the visible surface of these women’s writing. These books were written at the turn of the twentieth century, but by the end of the module you’ll not only be able to assess their impact in their own time but also discuss just how significant they are to society today.

GOODBYE TO BERLIN? LITERATURE & VISUAL CULTURE IN WEIMAR GERMANY

Code LDCL5051A

Credits 20

You will 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 may include writings by Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Joseph Roth and others 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. A knowledge of German, while useful, is not a prerequisite; translations are available.

I AM

Code LDCL5054A

Credits 20

How do our literary choices inform our sense of self? What do our critical and theoretical interests say about our values and concerns? How do we make connections between our academic studies and the outside world? 'I Am' explores ideas concerned with the self, being, consciousness, and identity through engaging with a range of texts, from literature and literary criticism through to personal essays and online blogs. The aim is to help you, through the practice of reading and writing, reflect on your own values and intentions and to discover a language in which to articulate, with greater confidence, who you are. You should commit to participating in a process of uncovering your reality. This process will include classroom discussion, peer review, learning new approaches to writing and engaging in exploratory practical exercises. You’ll also be expected to keep a journal in order to reflect on connections between your reading and yourself. 'I Am' is grounded in a commitment to help you consider your future beyond university. An increased level of self-awareness will undoubtedly support you as you approach the task of making decisions about jobs and careers in the future.

WRITING THE WILD

Code LDCL5059B

Credits 20

It is a popular conception that writing about the natural world and its fragility is a particular fixation of the late twentieth and early twenty first century. However, concern about the natural world and man's place in his environment became a major preoccupation in the eighteenth century. Writing the Wild asks to what extent nature writers in our period may be read as being in dialogue with their eighteenth century predecessors. Texts will be predominately non-fiction and will give students the opportunity to study the less familiar writings of such authors as Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen alongside contemporary nature writing by Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie and Tim Dee. Topics will include: nostalgia, the impact of war on writing about the countryside, the relationship between nature, writing and the mind and the notion of 'landscape'. This module offers students the opportunity to write 'creatively' as well as 'critically'.

READING AND WRITING TRANSLATIONS

Code LDCL5061A

Credits 20

How do we convey the experience of one language and culture in the words of another? What is at stake intellectually, artistically, and politically in translation? This module will provide you with a descriptive vocabulary for the analysis of literary translation and an introduction to key theoretical explanations of what happens when we translate. You’ll study translations from a range of historical periods, genres and languages. In the past, we have worked on authors such as Alexander Pushkin, Pablo Neruda, Adonis, Thomas Mann, and Knut Hamsun. Theories have included the classic controversies of St. Jerome and Vladimir Nabokov as well as debates about cultural equivalence and political issues such as the representation of the foreign. The module is taught by seminar where we engage with translation in a variety of ways, for example comparing different translations of a single text, translating the Bible from multiple languages into English, rewriting existing translations, and studying draft manuscript translations of a novel by Georges Perec. Assessment is by summative coursework for which you can either produce a comparative analysis of existing translations or an original translation with commentary. On successful completion of this module you’ll be able to describe the linguistic and stylistic features of a variety of texts as well as critically assess and apply different theories of translation. A thorough reading knowledge of another language besides English is advisable, but not essential.

READING AND WRITING IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5062B

Credits 20

In this module we will study some of the most important poetry and prose of the English Renaissance, including masterpieces by Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, as well as Shakespeare's early narrative poetry (not covered on the Shakespeare module). We will be studying these writers in a unique way. Behind this great outpouring of Elizabethan writing lay a vibrant literary culture which valued rhetoric, argument, elaborate and often playful self-presentation, and which insisted that good reading helped you to develop an individual style as a writer. In response to your reading of Renaissance literature, you will put the tenets of this culture into practice, building up over the course of the module a collection of short pieces of writing in prose (or sometimes, if you wish, poetry). When reading Sidney's ground breaking 'Defence of Poetry', for instance, you might draw on his rhetorical and argumentative techniques to write your own defence of any modern art form of your choice. Or when looking at the way Thomas Nashe plays with the form of his printed books you might have the opportunity to experiment with innovative ways of presenting your own writing to its readers. Revised versions of these short pieces of writing, built up across the module, constitute your summative assessment. This module allows you to think critically in genres other than conventional academic essays, and in doing so aims to foster connections between critical and creative writing. You will have the chance to develop more confidence and self-awareness as a writer and critic through studying some of the greatest English literature.

MEDIEVAL WRITING (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5063A

Credits 20

This module provides an introduction to the study of medieval literature. You will explore Chaucer’s poetry (through works such as 'The Clerk’s Tale', 'The Merchant's Tale', 'The Nun’s Priest’s Tale'), the wonderful Morall Fabillis of Robert Henryson, the work of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, and a number of important Middle English Romances, including the superb 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. You will work in three inter-related ways: by exploring a range of important medieval literary genres (the lyric, allegorical narrative, romance, ‘mystical writing’, ‘life writing’, moral fable, dream vision); by considering important aspects of the medieval world (social, political, religious) and their textual representation; and by addressing the material circumstances in and by which medieval texts were written and read, published and circulated (in manuscripts and in the very earliest printed books). The aim, then, is really two-fold: to introduce you to the remarkable riches of medieval literature (one of the pay-offs of the relative linguistic difficulty of Middle English is that it forces us to attend slowly and carefully to the textual details of our material in a way I suspect we don’t always find ourselves able to and in a way that the texts we will be reading wonderfully reward), and, at the same time, to allow you to try your hand as medievalists, exploring the distinctive possibilities and practices that come with working with this material.

PUBLISHING (SPR)

Code LDCL5065B

Credits 20

Have you ever wondered how books are chosen for publication, or do you want to set up a literary magazine? This module address conceptual as well as practical aspects of the publishing of texts, including discussions around readership the meaning of editorship and what constitutes an editorial policy. You will be taught how to set up, run and market your own publication (such as a magazine, a book, a fanzine), to consider the principles of good design, and will learn the rudiments of finance, scheduling and copyright law. You'll begin with an introduction to the concepts behind cover and page design, and an opportunity to put your new knowledge into practice by designing and writing copy for a book jacket. You go on to present and develop an idea for a short publication and, via discussion, class exercises and private research, learn to write or select, then edit, material for it. You will engage with the processes involved in its hypothetical production and learn to identify and address its readership. You'll also benefit from taught sessions on Adobe Indesign software in our Media Suite to enable you to design your publication at a simple, basic level. As you study you'll gain experience in communicating your ideas to a class and in tutorial, as well as through word and image in your formative work and portfolio.

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).

WORDS AND IMAGES

Code LDCL5068B

Credits 20

In this module, you will explore the relationship between words and images in contemporary literature. You will cover what is meant by reading images, examine the varying but related stories that words and pictures tell, and analyse the narrative techniques employed in illustrated texts. As well as developing a critical vocabulary with which to discuss how these two media can be combined, you will survey shifts in the generic conventions of such literature over the last few decades so you develop an awareness of the various narrative techniques utilised by the medium. Rather than assuming comics are simplistic, debased or ‘illiterary’, you will address the medium as a site of exciting and innovative literary and artistic experimentation. You will also have the chance to carry out your own creative work in the genre.

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, Anne Enright, Zadie Smith and Mohsin Hamid. 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.

READING AND WRITING CONTEMPORARY POETRY

Code LDCL5073B

Credits 20

Using the reading and study of poetry from the post-war context up to the present day, you'll consider some of the concerns of poetry including voice, form/structure and the 'poetry of witness'. You'll also look at contemporary visual art to consider correspondences between the arts. The poets studied will be drawn principally from an Anglo-American tradition and may include such writers as Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carol Ann Duffy, Carolyn Forché, Patience Agbabi and Emily Berry among others. Formative work includes creating a mini-anthology of contemporary poetry and there will be the chance to discuss poems you've written or read. You'll be able to write creatively and/or critically for assessment.

THE SHORT STORY (AUT)

Code LDCL5074A

Credits 20

What is a short story? What do short story writers have to say? What about short story critics and theorists? Is the short story a narrative in miniature? Or is there more to a short story than simply being 'short'? And why are critics so concerned with whether the short story is alive or dead? These are the kind of questions this module will investigate by asking you to think as a short story reader, theorist, critic and writer. Reading will be drawn from short story writers - and writing about the short story - roughly spanning the 19th century to the present, and from a range of cultural contexts. Our interest will not be to establish a history of the short story, but instead to explore the range of thematic preoccupations, changing definitions, and critical debates surrounding the form. You will have the opportunity to respond to these questions in critical and/or creative forms of assessment. Writers studied might include Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, Julio Cortazar, Anton Chekov, Ali Smith and Ryunosuke Aqutagawa. This list is suggestive only.

THE SHORT STORY (SPR)

Code LDCL5075B

Credits 20

What is a short story? What do short story writers have to say? What about short story critics and theorists? Is the short story a narrative in miniature? Or is there more to a short story than simply being 'short'? And why are critics so concerned with whether the short story is alive or dead? These are the kind of questions this module will investigate by asking you to think as a short story reader, theorist, critic and writer. Reading will be drawn from short story writers - and writing about the short story - roughly spanning the 19th century to the present, and from a range of cultural contexts. Our interest will not be to establish a history of the short story, but instead to explore the range of thematic preoccupations, changing definitions, and critical debates surrounding the form. You'll have the opportunity to respond to these questions in critical and/or creative forms of assessment. Writers studied might include Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, Julio Cortazar, Anton Chekov, Ali Smith and Ryunosuke Aqutagawa.

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.

FICTIONS OF HISTORY

Code LDCL5082B

Credits 20

'What is historical fiction and what do historical writers have to say? What are the pleasures and challenges of reading and writing in the genre, and how does a historical writer conduct and employ their research? What do critics and theorists think? In this module you will explore such questions and more. Your studies will stimulate and support your own critical and creative responses. You will learn about the development of the literary genre in its various forms, including the experimental, consider the differences between writing history and writing historical literature, study debates about authenticity, the relationship between historical subject and contemporary viewpoint and about appropriation and entitlement when writing about a culture’s history. You will have the opportunity to respond to these questions in critical and/or creative forms of assessment. Writers studied, are likely to be from the 19th to the 21st centuries, and might include Margaret Atwood, Emma Donaghue, Salman Rushdie, Andrew Miller, Andrea Levy, Sarah Waters and Virginia Woolf, as well as poets such as Robert Browning.

FAKES, FRAUDS AND HOAXES

Code LDCL5083A

Credits 20

Would you present your own poetry as if it were the translation of an ancient manuscript, or the writings of a medieval monk? Would you write a memoir documenting your addictions which mostly consisted of made-up people and events? What about writing an autobiography of your life as a former teenage prostitute (never having been a prostitute)? These crimes – and more – were perpetrated in the past: in 1760 James Macpherson ‘translated’ a text by the third century poet Ossian, the original of which never existed; later in the same decade Thomas Chatterton claimed to have ‘discovered’ the writings of the fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, but actually wrote the poems himself. More recently, too, with James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, and JT LeRoy’s Sarah, we witness similar attempts to con or defraud unsuspecting readers. On this module, you will concentrate on four questions: the difference between the fake and the real; the skills a faker needs to produce an inauthentic version of the real thing; the ways a fake might reflect on the value of the original; and the process of discovering and detecting fakery. You will examine a series of test cases, from a range of historical periods, which will sharpen your sense of literary property, literary propriety, and literary ethics, and also provide you with a sense of the debates that shape and inform literature as a discipline and an institution. Formative assessment will include the opportunity to produce your own fake!

WATCHING YOUR LANGUAGE

Code LDCL5084A

Credits 20

We all know our own language, but a great deal of that knowledge is automatic: we’re not aware of what we know. This module uses an assortment of concepts, exercises and texts to develop a more precise consciousness of the way language is used. It will exploit the resources of the Oxford English Dictionary to see how individual words grow and change their meanings. It will ask what ‘standard English’ is, and why some writers choose to deviate from it. It will explore the idea that language may be corrupted, with disastrous political effects. And it will look at some historical attempts to control words, including current debates about the language of prejudice and hatred. Literary texts will include George Orwell’s 1984 and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Critical materials will include extracts from M.M. Bakhtin, Victor Klemperer, Raymond Williams, Deborah Cameron. Written work will consist of short reports and analyses, some of them drawing on students’ own experience of language in use.

HE SAID, SHE SAID: GENDER AND PERSPECTIVE IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Code LDCL5085B

Credits 20

This module asks: - How does gender affect our perception of the world? - Why is it important to critique ideas of gender at this point in history? - How does the perceived gender of an author affect our interpretation of their work? - How does our own gender affect how we write and interpret fiction? - What about the intersection of gender and race? Gender and sexuality? - How does our position on the axis of oppression and privilege affect our personal experience and our ability to write from the perspective of those with intrinsically different experience? - How does our position on the axis of oppression and privilege affect our ideas of authenticity? - In a time of human social and political upheaval, is all art inherently political?

PHI SEMESTER ABROAD MODULE

Code PPLP5171B

Credits 60

Students often say that spending a semester abroad expands their horizons and improves their career prospects. You will be able to judge this claim for yourself by completing this module. You’ll experience a different educational culture and develop new perspectives on learning. Assessed formatively and summatively by the host university and on successful completion of the semester abroad, you’ll have developed the knowledge and skills to study in a foreign academic environment with more confidence. Assessment will be in the foreign institution and you might be assessed via different methods depending on the institution you attend. To check eligibility criteria it is important that you liaise with our Study Abroad Team.

Optional B Modules

(40-80 credits)

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND POLITICS FOR SECOND YEARS

Code PPLP5167A

Credits 20

History and politics are inseparable because human societies and communities develop and transform historically. Philosophical thinking about society and community requires us to question deep assumptions about the human good and how we form ideas about that good over time. Does history show that we have made political progress? What does ‘progress’ even mean? How should we think about our social understanding of the past? Does your historical situation limit your political horizons or your political culture limit your historical understanding? Is it in the person or the community that should not be divided, i.e. that is ‘in-dividual’? What kind of understanding, what kind of methods are involved in the disciplines of history and politics? Can philosophy ground a political system, and, if so, which political system(s) does philosophy ground? These are some of the question you’ll address in dialogue with key thinkers of history and politics, such as Hegel; Marx; Collingwood; Simone Weil; Arendt and Rawls.

RELIGION AND WORLD PHILOSOPHIES FOR SECOND YEARS

Code PPLP5168A

Credits 20

Religion is a phenomenon that is hard to define, and yet clearly integral to the entire history of human existence and across many cultures. Traditional philosophy of religion as practised in the modern Western philosophical tradition tends to focus on Christian belief and classical theism, yet there are also strong traditions of philosophy in other cultures with other religious traditions, such as the Islamic and Jewish thinkers who were at least as important as the Christian ones in the history of Medieval thought, and philosophy in Classical India and China has links with other non-Christian traditions such as Buddhism and Hindu thought.

PHI SEMESTER ABROAD MODULE

Code PPLP5171B

Credits 60

MIND AND LANGUAGE FOR SECOND YEARS

Code PPLP5173A

Credits 20

In this module you will be invited to engage with some of the key issues that figure in Philosophy of Mind and in Philosophy of Language, and to identify the interconnections between the two. Some major thinkers in the field, both recent and from earlier periods of the Western canon of philosophy, will be studied, and chosen set texts may be selected for close attention as relevant. Topics might include the mind-body problem, the nature of mind and its relation to the brain, issues connected with meaning and understanding, how (if at all) language governs, limits or facilitates thought, and the relation between language and the things about which we use it to talk. By taking this module in your second year you will explore a selection of these topics. A further selection of these topics is available in the complementary Level 6 Mind & Language module, which you can take in your third year.

ETHICS FOR SECOND YEARS

Code PPLP5174B

Credits 20

What is morality? And in what ways does it impinge on our lives, in deciding what to do? There are issues relating to ethics that are theoretical and meta-ethical, about what kind of judgements are being made and what is their basis in fact or in some realm of values; there are normative issues, about how, if at all, a theory can help to predict or decide what a person ought to do or which dispositions are commendable; and there are practical issues, about the real dilemmas of life and death, about fairness, love and compassion, as we face them in the world, and not just in imaginary trolley-problems . To complete a course in ethics you would want to explore all these aspects of the subject, and during this module you’ll engage with a selection of these, focusing either on the theoretical aspects, including attention to some major historical figures, or more on practical ethics. This module can be taken as a stand-alone module, but you are also encouraged to enrol for the complementary Level 6 module, which will be available in your third year, so as to compile a more complete study of the whole range of these topics.

KNOWLEDGE SCIENCE AND PROOF FOR SECOND YEARS

Code PPLP5175B

Credits 20

Epistemology examines what knowledge is. Science is concerned with the acquisition of secure knowledge, and philosophy of science considers what counts as science, what objects the scientist knows about, and what methods can be used to attain such knowledge; logic uses formal tools to investigate different forms of reasoning deployed to acquire knowledge. You will be given an opportunity to explore a selection of these areas of philosophy, through teaching informed by recent and ongoing research: which ones will be explored on this occasion will be selected in the light of the lecturers’ current research interests and their general appeal.

PHILOSOPHY MEETS THE ARTS (SECOND YEAR MODULE)

Code PPLP5176B

Credits 20

Philosophy has much to say about the arts, and much to learn from them. In this module you will have a chance to explore some aspects of this relationship. Some issues that arise fall into what we would call aesthetics and the philosophy of art: we can ask about the value of art, aesthetic experience and judgement, artistic creativity, interpretation and representation, and we can investigate the views of many past thinkers on these matters. On the other hand, we can also use art to illuminate philosophy, and for this purpose we have chosen to focus primarily on cinema (while “literature and philosophy” investigates similar questions in connection with literature”). This module will focus on one or other of these two aspects of the encounter with beauty and the arts, but you may also wish to take the complementary module at level 6, in your third year, in order to cover both aspects of the subject.

ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY FOR SECOND YEARS

Code PPLP5177B

Credits 20

How can we avoid environmental catastrophe? How can philosophy help? The relationship between human beings and the natural world is the basis of everything we are and yet we do not seem to have found a way to avoid destruction, degradation and potential catastrophe. In this module we will examine various ways in which philosophy can examine our relationship with the natural world and contribute to the fight to protect the planet. Topics may include the ethics of climate change; value theory and nature; human-animal relationships; the ways science, art and politics affect our relationships with the natural world. This module will cover a selection of these topics, and students may wish to continue the course by taking the complementary Level 6 module in their third year.

KEY THINKERS AND TEXTS FOR SECOND YEARS

Code PPLP5179A

Credits 20

The history of philosophy, from ancient times to our own, is richly studded with exciting and innovative thinkers, whose ideas still spawn a vast volume of research and reflective criticism. These great minds are our partners in many fascinating slow-motion dialogues that extend over decades, centuries and even millennia. We converse with them about some of the most significant issues in the field. In this module you’ll join in this discussion by taking part in seminars focused on reading and discussion of some more of the original texts (in English translation, if that is not the original language), under the guidance of a research expert in the field. Texts will be selected by the seminar leader, to complement your other second and third year modules, and will not include precisely the same texts as are included elsewhere in the philosophy Honours programme. Rather we’ll aim to focus on thinkers whose work is insufficiently addressed in the other modules. Examples of thinkers that will be most likely to appear in the seminars for this module include Plato, Aristotle, the Presocratic Philosophers, Ancient Sceptics, Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, George Berkeley, thinkers from early Analytic philosophy, early or late Wittgenstein, Simone Weil or Iris Murdoch. During this module you’ll be taught in a seminar/reading group style, with each group meeting on a weekly basis for twelve weeks. One or more such seminar groups may meet, depending on student enrolments and staff availability, and each group will be reading a different text or texts, from a different period or school of thought. You’ll be enrolled into whichever group interests you most (you’ll need to say which one you want to attend when you sign up for the module). Seminar groups will run with a minimum of ten students in the group: if you choose a group with less than 10 participants, you’ll be offered a choice of a different seminar group or a different module. This is a free-standing module that can be taken by itself. However, by taking this module in year 2, and the complementary Level 6 module in year 3, you can create a two semester course, exploring a selection of historical thinkers and adding a fitting supplement to the topical modules that you’ll be taking over these two years.

EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHIES (SECOND YEAR MODULE)

Code PPLP5180B

Credits 20

How can we make sense of the vast and complex world we are plunged into at birth? What happens when we become alienated from the world and its everyday meaning? If there is no absolute meaning assigned to human life by divine authority, does life have any meaning at all? Are we absolutely free to make sense of the world in any way we choose? Does death present an ultimate limit to human existence and freedom? Existential philosophers have grappled with these questions and in the process developed new ways of thinking about art, science, politics, divinity and every aspect of human life. Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the key founders of existential philosophy and his work began an important tradition that influenced thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. This module will focus either on the explosive work of Nietzsche himself or on the existential tradition he inspired, so you may also wish to take the complementary module at level 6, in your third year, in order to cover both aspects of the subject.

Optional C Modules

(0-40 credits)

THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE 1066 TO 1600

Code HIS-5003B

Credits 20

You’ll examine the development of the English countryside during the Middle Ages. You’ll discuss the nature of rural settlement, high status buildings and landscapes and 'semi-natural' environments.

LATIN FOR HISTORIANS

Code HIS-5004B

Credits 20

This module provides an introduction to the linguistic skills in medieval Latin which enable students to read administrative documents such as charters, accounts, court rolls, etc. It is particularly suited for those who intend on proceeding to postgraduate study in aspects of the past, such as medieval history, which require a reading knowledge of Latin. This course is not intended for students who have already studied Latin to A level or equivalent.

ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND, C. 400-1066

Code HIS-5005A

Credits 20

The Anglo-Saxon period spanned 600 years from the end of Roman Britain to the Norman Conquest. It was a period of turmoil, seeing waves of immigration, the clash of peoples and religions, and kingdoms jockeying for control. Out of this crucible England emerged. This is the story of how it came to be. Using contemporary sources, you will learn to handle evidence and reconstruct the worldview of people who lived over a thousand years ago. Anglo-Saxon history teaches you to go a long way with a little evidence; to use your imagination to fill in the gaps. Whether it's new to you or something you've studied before, you'll achieve a deeper and richer understanding of how the nation was formed. Via lectures, seminars and private study, you'll discover the Romans, Saxons and Vikings; the strange treasure they left behind; the cryptic and conflicting chronicles (learning to read between the lines), and debates we still haven't resolved today. Developing your powers of argumentation, you'll run into questions with no certain answer. Building with fragmentary evidence will boost your creativity, and you'll encounter ancient artefacts. (Trips have included West Stow Anglo-Saxon village and Norwich Castle Museum.) At the end of the module you'll command an overview of how England came into being. You'll also have built your ability to see other people's points of view, even if they lived a thousand years ago. This is a crucial ability whether in personal or professional relationships. Also learning to argue with evidence as fragmentary as the evidence we'll explore will hone your problem-solving skills to an unusual degree.

FROM HASTINGS TO THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR: NORMAN AND PLANTAGENET ENGLAND 1066-1307

Code HIS-5007B

Credits 20

This module examines a critical period in English History. We begin with the Conquest of England by the Normans and look at the ways in which as a consequence England was drawn into European affairs. The mid point is the loss of those continental lands in 1204 and the Magna Carta crisis of 1215. We then explore the domination of Britain by the English kingdom and end with the start of England’s next great European adventure, The Hundred Years War.

FROM AGINCOURT TO BOSWORTH: ENGLAND IN THE WARS OF THE ROSES

Code HIS-5009B

Credits 20

You will explore one of the most turbulent and dynamic periods in English history: c.1400-1485. In addition to exploring the narrative of events as it unfolded chronologically you will also learn about topics such as: theories of medieval kingship, the relationship between church and state, the relationship between England and Continental Europe, medieval warfare, chivalry and knighthood, the relationship between national and local concerns, and the opportunities for people of all genders to participate in political struggle. You will have the opportunity to read a wide range of primary sources as well as considering key historiographical debates. Upon completion of your module, you should have a more nuanced understanding of the exercise of power in the 15th century and how the deeds and decisions of those in charge impacted the lives of people further down the social spectrum. You should also have honed your skills in primary source analysis and historiographical scrutiny.

THE RISE AND FALL OF BRITISH POWER

Code HIS-5011A

Credits 20

You will examine Britain's expansion and decline as a great power, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the mid-twentieth century. During this module, you will consider the foundations of British power, the emergence of rivals, Britain's relationship with the European powers and the USA, and the impact of global war. You will also investigate the reasons for Britain's changing fortunes, as it moved from guarding the balance of power to managing decline.

NAPOLEON TO STALIN (and beyond): THE STRUGGLE FOR MASTERY IN EUROPE

Code HIS-5017B

Credits 20

This module deals with the rivalries of the Great Powers from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the onset of the Cold War and its end with collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We shall be examining topics such as the Vienna system; the Crimean War; Italian and German unification, the origins of the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War period.

MODERN GERMANY, 1914-1990

Code HIS-5018A

Credits 20

We will introduce you to German history in the twentieth century, which was characterised by various radical regime changes and territorial alterations. Topics include German world policy and nationalism in the late imperial period; imperialism and expansionism during the First World War; the challenges of modernity in the Weimar Republic; the rise of Hitler and the formation of the Nazi empire in Europe; the post-war division of Germany and the legacy of the Third Reich; the nature of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) dictatorship and the problem of West German terrorism; as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification. Special attention will be given to questions of nationalism and national identity, issues of history and memory, and Germany’s role in Europe and the world. On completion of this module you will have developed a solid understanding of one of the most dramatic periods of German history when the country oscillated between the two extremes of war and repression, on the one hand, and the return to peace and democracy, on the other.

THE COLD WAR: A NEW HISTORY

Code HIS-5024A

Credits 20

This module analyses the emergence, development and end of the Cold War. In doing so it examines political, ideological and legal aspects of conflict between and within states, issues of sovereignty, nuclear strategy and arms control, as well as peacekeeping and non-violent resistance. Alongside political developments, themes such as everyday life, culture, sport and the existence of alternatives during the Cold War era will also be considered.

HERITAGE AND PUBLIC HISTORY

Code HIS-5026A

Credits 20

What shapes our view of history and heritage? How do we balance academic approaches with the need to engage an audience? How do we assess the significance of historic buildings and sites? On this module you’ll explore these questions by studying the ways in which history is presented in the public sphere, in museums and galleries, at heritage sites and historic buildings, in the media and online. Through lectures, seminars and field trips you’ll gain an understanding of different current approaches to history and heritage, exploring themes such as the role of museums, the commemoration of historic events and the development of digital heritage.

EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE: WARRIORS, SAINTS AND RULERS

Code HIS-5042A

Credits 20

You'll explore the experiences and fortunes of the peoples of the western peninsula of Eurasia between the rule of the Emperor Constantine I in the 330s and the call to crusade in the 1090s. At the beginning of the period, the lands centred on the Mediterranean and much of its hinterland were situated within the Roman empire. Yet, within three hundred years, this empire had disintegrated and been replaced by a number of successor states, ruled by competing dynasties. These states included Visigothic Hispania, Vandal Africa, and Merovingian Francia. Another—in fact, the longest lived of all the successor states—was the eastern empire centred on Constantinople, long known to historians as ‘the Byzantine empire’. By the close of the 7th century, many of these states had themselves been conquered by Arabic and African warriors committed to the new religion of Islam and been incorporated in the Caliphate centred on the city of Damascus—an empire which easily rivalled the might, spread, and power of Rome before its own collapse and fission in circa 1000. What Islamic rulers could do, so too could Christian ones. In 800 the son of a Frankish usurper, Charlemagne, was crowned emperor of the West. The actions and ambitions of this emperor were as formative and as formidable in the history of 9th and 10th century Europe as those of Napoleon in the 18th and 19th. The heirs and successors of Charlemagne—whether Frankish, Ottonian, or Scandinavian—were long compelled to negotiate his legacy and memory. By the 11th century, even the Roman pontiffs, now advancing a new programme of reform and renewal, were looking to situate themselves in relation to his Salian successors. The summons to liberate Jerusalem and rescue the Greek empire in the east, carefully tailored to the aspirations of the new élites of Francia and Catalonia, was perhaps the most explosive strategy advanced by these Roman pontiffs. This course is thus broad in chronological scope, covering more than eight hundred years, and extensive in geographical range, taking us from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from the Atlas mountains to the North Sea. In the course of this journey we'll meet many warriors, saints, and rulers, both female and male.

THE FIRST BRITISH EMPIRE

Code HIS-5045A

Credits 20

Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, the English crossed the oceans and claimed territory on every continent other than Antarctica. This module surveys the creation and growth of British Empire, examining its origins and its impact on an array of peoples. In the context of studying how the empire spread and functioned, we will consider the varied experiences of Africans, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Protestant refugees from the continent of Europe, the peoples of India, the Irish, and British settlers across the globe. The complex, intimate, and often violent interactions of these groups led to ideological battles pitting loyalism against republicanism, for example, and imperial “civilization” against an array of indigenous cultural revivals. At first glance these struggles may seem to place the British against the subject peoples of their empire, but on closer examination it becomes apparent that they fractured nearly every population within the imperial domains. The creative energy of the British Empire stemmed in large part from collaborations between British groups and individuals and segments of their purported imperial subjects in building, reforming, or in some cases seeking to destroy the structures of imperialism

THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST

Code HIS-5048B

Credits 20

We will look at the modern history of the Middle East, primarily concerning the political history of the region as well as relations between Middle Eastern countries and Western powers. Our aim is to encourage you to think critically about historical processes of state formation, the legacy of colonialism/imperialism, the role of culture and identity, and the significance of natural resources and economic factors.

PROPAGANDA

Code HIS-5050B

Credits 20

This module introduces you to the history and theory of propaganda, and its role in society. You’ll consider what constitutes and defines propaganda. Focusing on the 20th century, we examine propaganda in a range of political settings, both totalitarian and democratic, in the local context of the relationships of power and communications. The module is structured chronologically, starting with the development of propaganda during World War I and finishing with a consideration of propaganda in the 21st century.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN, 1914 TO THE PRESENT

Code HIS-5057B

Credits 20

The Great War transformed domestic expectations and ushered in an age of Mass Democracy and economic hardship. After 1945 the welfare state and full employment saw rising affluence, accompanied by the emergence of youth cultures, a sexual revolution and new forms of radicalism and identity politics. The economic crisis of the 1970s sped-up deindustrialisation whilst the neoliberalism of Thatcher and her successors deepened inequalities and stoked nationalist sentiment. We explore the social, political and economic history of these tumultuous years.

FRANCE FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE BELLE ÉPOQUE

Code HIS-5059A

Credits 20

You will be introduced to an eventful period of history during which France exercised a preponderant role over European affairs and culture. The module will provide you with the essential background knowledge of political events, revolutions and wars but it will also encourage you to explore deeper social and cultural trends. In the first weeks we will reconsider ‘Old regime’ France, drawing attention to its dynamism and cultural richness before turning to the crises that discredited Bourbon absolutism. In subsequent weeks we will focus on the Revolutionary-Napoleonic epoch: our endeavour here will be to explain why the Revolution was revolutionary in theory, violent in practice and dictatorial in consequence. We will then reflect on the Restoration. Using extracts from Hugo’s Les Misérables as our starting point, we will look at how rapid industrialization generated social tensions that successive ministries tried to diffuse through repression and reform. Next, we will look at the France of the Second Republic and Second Empire; our focus here will be Napoleon III’s modernization initiatives and dramatic remodelling of Paris. Finally, we will approach the history of the Third Republic between 1870 and 1914 from three angles: its success in making the populace feel French; science, art and culture; and its nationalistic foreign policy, which contributed toward undermining the general European peace. The seminars for this module will provide us with an opportunity to analyse and discuss in depth an eclectic range of primary sources, including textual documents (in English translation) ranging from constitutions to period fictional writings, maps, advertisements, artwork, extant material and architectural evidence, and music.

HISTORY OF MODERN ITALY

Code HIS-5060B

Credits 20

Since the unification of the states of the Italian peninsula, the history of modern Italy has been the subject of intense historical debate. Modern Italy has often been cast as a ‘weak’ state and ‘fragile’ nation, riven by particularism and by competing secular and religious ideologies, ‘economically backward’, less successful than its national neighbours, and ‘the least of the Great Powers’. More recent historiography has sought to challenge or modify these perceptions in a number of ways, and this course examines modern Italian history from unification to present day, in the light of these ongoing historiographical debates. a) Italian nationalism, the process of Italian unification and the attempts to create national unity after 1870; b) the relationship between socio-economic change and political development in Liberal Italy; c) the impact of the First World War on Italian society and politics; e) the nature of the Fascist regime and its impact on Italian society; f) the radicalisation of the regime, its racial policies and the quest for Empire; g) Italy’s role in World War II, the reasons for the collapse of the Fascist regime, and the emergence of civil war. h) Italian history since 1945

BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: INTERNATIONAL HISTORY SINCE 1890

Code HIS-5065A

Credits 20

The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed a period of immense instability and change with the emergence of the United States as an international actor in the West and the Japanese break from the Chinese sphere of influence in the East. This was underpinned by technological developments, the expansion of global empires, extreme economic dislocation and two global wars. You will examine the conduct and content of the foreign policies of the major powers from the 1890s, with the Sino-Japanese War and the Spanish-American War, to the Japanese occupation of Asia. This will include assessing the interplay of the political, military, economic, strategic and cultural forces that shaped the beginning of the twentieth century and which continue to resonate in the contemporary world.

FROM STALIN TO PUTIN: THE LONG SHADOW OF THE WAR

Code HIS-5065B

Credits 20

World War II and the immense sacrifices the Soviet people made in defeating Nazism left multiple long-lasting legacies that shaped the multi-ethnic Soviet and post-Soviet Russian state, society and economy. This module aims to give you a better understanding of the state of contemporary Russian politics, society and economy through detailed historical enquiry of Russia’s path since 1945. It is divided into two main parts: in part one you will examine key periods of post-war Russian history in chronological order, and in the second part you will look more closely at key contemporary in their historical perspective. These will include the question what it meant to be Soviet and its legacy; geopolitical imperatives, which only recently led Putin to invade Crimea; identity politics and historical commemoration; the transition of the economy from a planned economy to a market economy; and the complex mutations and adaptations of power structures in Russia that gave birth to Putin’s ‘managed democracy’.

JAPAN IN MODERN TIMES

Code HIS-5066A

Credits 20

In just a few decades Japan emerged from its feudal and isolationist condition and became a thriving capitalist nation-state with imperialist ambitions on the world’s stage. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the country re-invented itself, combining the strength of its traditions with Western models of government, economic management, social structure and culture. Samurai gave way to elite bureaucrats; a skilled industrial workforce gradually displaced the peasantry; education expanded with remarkable speed; new infrastructure transformed the physical landscape. New patterns of daily life, social tensions and cultural aspirations accompanied these changes. The aggressive expansionist policy and authoritarianism of the 1930s precipitated the country into a war with devastating consequences, only for Japan to resurrect itself as a global industrial power and stable democracy in the post-war era. This module examines this process of transformation from circa 1850, when Western powers pressured Japan into opening to international trade, to the oil shock of the 1970s that brought an end to Japan’s high growth phase. You will pay attention to the intellectual and cultural trends that informed Japan’s development, and investigate concepts such as revolution, national identity, civilizational discourse, late imperialism, and historical memory. You will also explore social and economic change as reflected in lived experience, for example in farms and villages at the turn of the century; on the home front during the Russo-Japanese War; in bustling cities during the Taisho era; in colonial outposts before and during the Pacific War; and in occupied Japan afterwards.

ANATOMY OF A CITY: PARIS, 1682-1815

Code HIS-5066B

Credits 20

Through this module, you will encounter the largest, most dynamic city in the wealthiest and most populous nation in eighteenth-century Europe. Against a backdrop of France's fraught politics between the age of Louis XIV and the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era, you will gain an intimate sense of Paris as a changing urban space that provided a stage for radical experimentation in everything from art and fashion through to high finance and luxury lifestyles. You will grasp how Paris during the enlightenment functioned at different levels, from the removal of garbage to enforcement of justice. This will involve delving into a rich variety of textual and visual sources alongside extant material evidence from the city itself.

TUDOR ENGLAND

Code HIS-5067A

Credits 20

The Tudors are England’s most famous royal dynasty. This module seeks to move beyond the traditional stories of Henry’s turbulent marriages and Elizabeth’s stunning victory over the Spanish Armada. You'll gain a better understanding of the change and turmoil the Tudor century caused, not just to the monarchs themselves but to the lives of their subjects, the everyday people of England. Beyond establishing a strong chronological knowledge of the 16th century and its religious upheavals, the module will consider issues of gender; the changing construction of the social order; the importance and developing role of local elites; problems caused by poverty and dearth; and the position of England within Britain itself and within Europe.

STUART ENGLAND

Code HIS-5067B

Credits 20

We will explore the dramatic century of Stuart rule in England. This ‘century of revolution’ included the union of the English and Scottish crowns, the dramatic upheaval of the civil wars, and the continued political instability that led to the birth of political parties and the Glorious Revolution. While exploring these political themes we will also consider developments such as: the birth of modern news culture, crowd politics, civil society and coffee shops, the origins of empire, state formation, and the emergence of England as ‘a nation of shop keepers’ and Europe’s great ‘constitutional monarchy’.

ARTS AND HUMANITIES PLACEMENT MODULE

Code HUM-5004B

Credits 20

This module will provide you with the opportunity work within a creative/cultural/charity/ heritage/media or other appropriate organisation in order to apply the skills you are developing through your degree to the working world and to develop your knowledge of employment sectors within which you may wish to work in the future. The module emphasises industry experience, sector awareness and personal development through a structured reflective learning experience. Having sourced and secured your own placement (with support from Careers Central), you work within your host organisation undertaking tasks that will help you to gain a better understanding of professional practices within your chosen sector. Taught sessions enable you to acquire knowledge of both the industries in which you are placed as well as focusing on personal and professional development germane to the sector. Your assessment tasks will provide you with an opportunity to critically reflect on the creative and cultural sector in which you have worked as well as providing opportunities to undertake presentations, gather evidence, and articulate your newly acquired skills and experiences.

CREATIVE WRITING: INTRODUCTION (SPR)

Code LDCC5004B

Credits 20

Have you ever wondered what it means to write creatively? Or how you might articulate what Zadie Smith calls ‘your way of being in the world’? Together we’ll address these questions. You’ll explore the work of some of the finest writers in the world, while also receiving clear guidance on how you might bring shape to the promptings of your imagination. This module will get you writing prose fiction and/or poetry. While there is no single, authorised way to write, there are things worth knowing about. You’ll discover some of these things in class; others you’ll pick up through being alert to what you have read and the way in which it functions. The most important thing, however, is to discover your own way of doing things. What drives you to capture a certain moment, or tell a certain story in a certain way? That’s what we'll be aiming for. Along the way you’ll develop an understanding of the craft of writing – the technical nuts & bolts – while acquiring the disciplines necessary to being a writer - observation, drafting, and submitting to deadlines. You'll be guided through a series of themes and concepts that go to the heart of creative writing, from voice and structure, to imagery and form. You'll generate material throughout the course, both through guided exercises and private study. Very often you'll be asked to write about ‘what you know’, drawing on notebooks, memory, family stories, your sensory impressions. In prose you will go on to look at such things as character, dialogue, point-of-view, ‘showing’ versus ‘telling’, plotting, etc. In poetry, there will be an exploration of the possibilities of pattern and form, sound, voice, imagery, and rhythm. By the end of the course you’ll have developed a body of work to call your own and a sense of what it means and what it takes to write seriously.

CREATIVE WRITING: INTRODUCTION (AUT)

Code LDCC5005A

Credits 20

BEGINNERS' FRENCH I - A1 CEFR

Code PPLB4013A

Credits 20

Bonjour, comment ça va? Do you want to understand what this means and how to say it? This module will help you to master basics of French language and communication. This module is perfect for you if you have never studied French before (or have very little experience of it). Throughout the semester, you’ll develop reading, listening, speaking and writing skills at the A1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This means that you will learn to communicate about yourself and your immediate environment in a set of concrete, everyday situations. You’ll be taught in a very interactive and friendly environment, and will often work in pairs or small groups. Your two-hour seminar will focus on listening, reading and writing skills, while the oral hour will help you to develop your confidence in speaking. We’ll tackle some grammatical notions in class, but always as a means for you to improve your communication skills. You’ll also have opportunities to explore aspects of the cultures where French is spoken thanks to the various documents we will use to develop your linguistic skills (songs, podcasts, leaflets…). You’ll be assessed by two course tests: the first will cover listening, reading, and writing skills and the second will cover your speaking skills. On successful completion of this module, you’ll be able to understand and use familiar everyday expressions aimed at both the satisfaction of concrete needs, or those used to describe areas of most immediate relevance. You’ll be able to introduce yourself and others, ask and answer questions about personal details, and interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly. Please note that students should not have a level of French that exceeds the level of this course. This module is probably not appropriate for you if you have a recent French GCSE at grade C or above, if you have studied French abroad, or if you have learnt French in an informal setting (such as in your family). If you have such experience, please contact the Module Organiser as soon as possible to complete a level test.

BEGINNERS' FRENCH II - A2 CEFR

Code PPLB4014B

Credits 20

Parlons français ! This module will help you to further your basics of French language and communication in order to enable you to cope with concrete situations. This module is perfect for you if you have taken Beginners’ French I – A1 CEFR, or if you have some experience of French language. Throughout the semester, you’ll develop reading, listening, speaking and writing skills at the A2 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This means that you’ll be able to cope in a number of situations, including some you may encounter when travelling. You’ll be able to talk and write about yourself and your immediate surrounding environment in some detail, and you’ll work on handling short social exchanges. You’ll be taught in an interactive and friendly environment, and will often work in pairs or small groups. Your two-hour seminar will focus on listening, reading and writing skills, while the oral hour will help you to develop your confidence in speaking. We’ll tackle some grammatical notions in class, but always as a means for you to improve your communication skills. You’ll also have opportunities to explore aspects of the cultures where French is spoken, thanks to the various documents we will use to develop your linguistic skills (songs, podcasts, short articles and videos…). You’ll be assessed by two course tests: the first will cover listening, reading, and writing skills and the second will cover your speaking skills. On successful completion of the module, you’ll be able to understand and use expressions related to areas of immediate relevance, or that you may encounter when travelling. You’ll be able to communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a direct exchange of information. You’ll be able to describe in simple terms aspects of your background, immediate environment and needs. Please note that you should not have a level of French that exceeds the level of this course. This module may not be appropriate for you if you have a recent French GCSE at grade B or above, if you have studied French abroad for a long time, or if you have learnt French in an informal setting (such as in your family). If you have such experience, please contact the Module Organiser as soon as possible to complete a level test..

BEGINNERS' FRENCH I - A1 CEFR (SPRING START)

Code PPLB4015B

Credits 20

Bonjour, comment ça va? Do you want to understand what this means and how to say it? This module will help you to master basics of French language and communication. This module is perfect for you if you have never studied French before (or have very little experience of it). Throughout the semester, you’ll develop reading, listening, speaking and writing skills at the A1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This means that you will learn to communicate about yourself and your immediate environment in a set of concrete, everyday situations. You’ll be taught in a very interactive and friendly environment, and will often work in pairs or small groups. Your two-hour seminar will focus on listening, reading and writing skills, while the oral hour will help you to develop your confidence in speaking. We’ll tackle some grammatical notions in class, but always as a means for you to improve your communication skills. You’ll also have opportunities to explore aspects of the cultures where French is spoken, thanks to the various documents we will use to develop your linguistic skills (songs, podcasts, leaflets…). You’ll be assessed by two course tests: the first will cover listening, reading, and writing skills and the second will cover your speaking skills. On successful completion of this module, you’ll be able to understand and use familiar everyday expressions aimed at both the satisfaction of concrete needs, or those used to describe areas of most immediate relevance. You’ll be able to introduce yourself and others, ask and answer questions about personal details, and interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly. Please note that students should not have a level of French that exceeds the level of this course. This module is probably not appropriate for you if you have a recent French GCSE at grade C or above, if you have studied French abroad, or if you have learnt French in an informal setting (such as in your family). If you have such experience, please contact the Module Organiser as soon as possible to complete a level test.

BEGINNERS' GERMAN I - A1 CEFR

Code PPLB4018A

Credits 20

Have you ever wished you could order your mulled wine at the Christmas market in German? How would it feel be to be able to introduce yourself in German or survive a basic conversation in the language? Or do you simply want to understand what makes the Germans, the Austrians, or the Swiss tick? These questions highlight the central learning achieved within this module. Our beginners’ course in German is perfect if you have very little or no prior knowledge of the language. You will gain the confidence to use German in basic conversations as you develop a first understanding of German sounds and essential grammar. You will build up a bank of key vocabulary to survive in real-life situations. You will also gain a greater awareness of German traditions and ways of thinking to help you make sense of a country that is deeply rooted in the heart of Europe. In a relaxed environment you will participate in classroom-based activities, working in pairs and groups to try out and be creative with new sounds, words and phrases. The fun of language learning will never be far away and promises to give you the confidence to make the first steps in German. As well as speaking and listening to each other you will discover the joy of understanding an authentic German text and to write an amazing first paragraph in German. A first course in German will enable you to add a vital skill to your CV. At this crucial political and cultural moment in time the study of the German language and culture will without doubt make you a more attractive graduate and informed global citizen, whatever your specialism or area of interest. Please note that you should not have a level of German that exceeds the level of this course.

BEGINNERS' GERMAN II - A2 CEFR

Code PPLB4019B

Credits 20

Do you want to refresh and further develop your basic German skills? Would you like to converse with a native speaker beyond the first introductions? Or do you simply want to understand a little more about what makes the Germans, the Swiss or Austrians tick? This follow-on course is perfect if you have completed the Beginners 1 module or have very basic knowledge of the language. You will gain more confidence in using German in conversation as you become ever more familiar with essential German grammar. You will learn how to express opinions, wishes and requests, and how to master the skill of congratulating and complimenting other people. During this module you will also gain further awareness of German traditions and ways of thinking to help you make sense of a country that is deeply rooted in the heart of Europe. In a relaxed environment you will participate in classroom-based activities, working in pairs and groups to try out and be creative with new words and phrases. The fun of language learning will never be far away and promises to give you the confidence to maintain a conversation and express yourself to a target audience in writing. As well as speaking and listening to each other you will apply a range of strategies to help you make sense of authentic German texts. A solid beginners’ course in German will enable you to add a vital skill to your CV. At this crucial political and cultural moment in time the study of the German language and culture will without doubt make you a more attractive graduate and informed global citizen, whatever your specialism or area of interest. Please note that your current level of German language should not exceed the level of this course.

POST A-LEVEL GERMAN 1/I - B1 CEFR

Code PPLB4020A

Credits 20

Would you like to become a more fluent German speaker who is able to deal with most situations whilst travelling? Do you need the confidence to survive a work placement abroad or a term at a German university? Or maybe you are keen to learn how to write an essay or deliver a short presentation German style. This advanced course in German is perfect if you have completed both intermediate modules or have A-level experience in German but not if you are already working at a higher level than this . You will become more independent in conversation and discussion with others as you start to study grammar at an advanced level. You will learn how to build up an argument in German and describe and evaluate basic statistical information with confidence. During this module you will improve your understanding of the German way of thinking through looking at and evaluating conventions in the world of work and at universities in German-speaking countries. In a relaxed environment you will participate in classroom-based activities, working in groups to experiment with more advanced grammar. There will be plenty of opportunities to present and discuss topics within the safety of small peer groups. Throughout the module there will be a strong emphasis on understanding more complex authentic texts and audio-visual material. We will set you regular written tasks to build up what it needs to produce a perfect essay. A first advanced course in German will add a rare and therefore highly valued skill to your CV. It allows you to work and study abroad with more confidence. At this crucial political and cultural moment in time the study of the German language and culture will make you a more attractive graduate and informed global citizen, whatever your specialism or area of interest.

POST A-LEVEL GERMAN 1/II - B2 CEFR

Code PPLB4021B

Credits 20

Do you aim to become a more fluent and spontaneous German speaker? Are you interested in current social and political affairs in German-speaking countries and would like to find out more? Or maybe you would prefer to further develop your essay-writing and presentation skills to be able to bring your viewpoint across effectively? This follow-on course is perfect if you have completed the Post A-level I/I module or have sound A-level experience in German. This module is also open to near-native speakers of German, who seek to develop their written skills and improve their grammar. You will become more independent in conversation and discussion with others as you study selected grammar and some specialist vocabulary at an advanced level. You will learn how to build up an argument in German and put it forward convincingly. During this module you will improve and refine your understanding of contemporary Germany through looking at and evaluating current political and social affairs. In a relaxed environment you will participate in classroom-based activities, working in groups to experiment with more advanced grammar. There will be plenty of opportunities to present and debate topics within the safety of small peer groups. Throughout the module there will be a strong emphasis on understanding more complex authentic texts and audio-visual material. We will set you regular written tasks to build up what it needs to produce a perfect essay. An advanced course in German will add a rare and therefore highly valued skill to your CV. It allows you to work and study abroad with more confidence. At this crucial political and cultural moment in time the study of the German language and culture will make you a more attractive graduate and informed global citizen, whatever your specialism or area of interest.

BEGINNERS' SPANISH I - A1 CEFR

Code PPLB4022A

Credits 20

Do you want to learn a new language? Do you want to access the Spanish-speaking world? Are you about to travel through Spain or any Spanish-speaking country in Latin America? Then, it´s the right time to enrol to Beginners´ Spanish I. This module will improve your academic education and will provide you with the confidence to advance towards intermediate and advanced levels. It sounds good, doesn't it? You will develop your reading, writing, listening and speaking skills and you will have the opportunity to receive personal feedback on all your efforts. You will take part in classroom-based activities, working in pairs and small groups exchanging ideas and supporting each other in the process of learning the language. You will also be able to focus on real life situations as well as the ability to communicate effectively in those situations. There will also be opportunities to explore aspects of the cultures where Spanish is currently the main language. By the end of this module, you will have the linguistic competence necessary to understand and use common, everyday expressions and simple sentences, to address immediate needs. If you have a recent Spanish GCSE grade C or below, or an international equivalent, then this module is appropriate for you.

BEGINNERS' SPANISH II - A2 CEFR

Code PPLB4023B

Credits 20

Have you ever taken any basic Spanish course? Do you want to carry on studying this well spoken language after taking Beginners´ Spanish I? Do you feel that learning a language might be a relevant skill for your career? Then, Beginners´ Spanish II is what you really need. This module will improve your academic education and will provide you with the confidence to advance towards upper intermediate and advanced levels. But, how will you make it? Thanks to this module, you will work on your reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. You will get the personal feedback on every single of your efforts. You'll take part in classroom-based activities, working in pairs and small groups exchanging ideas and supporting each other in the process of improving this language. You'll also be able to focus on real life situations as well as the ability to communicate effectively in those situations. There will also be opportunities to explore aspects more carefully of the cultures where Spanish is the mother tongue. By the end of this module you will be able to understand commonly used, everyday phrases and expressions related to areas of experience especially relevant to them (basic information about themselves, and their families, shopping, places of interest, work, etc.). If you have a recent Spanish GCSE grade B or above, or an international equivalent, then this module is probably not appropriate for you - please contact the module organiser as soon as possible to be sure).

BEGINNERS' SPANISH I - A1 CEFR (SPRING START)

Code PPLB4024B

Credits 20

BEGINNERS' ARABIC I

Code PPLB4029A

Credits 20

This course is a pre-requisite to the study of Arabic language. You will master the alphabet: the script, the sounds of the letters, and their combination into words. You are introduced to basic Arabic phrases and vocabulary to help you have introductory conversations. You will develop essential speaking, listening, reading and writing skills as well as a solid understanding of the structure of the language in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Some aspects of the Arab world and culture(s) are covered.

BEGINNERS' ARABIC II

Code PPLB4030B

Credits 20

This is the second part of a beginners' course in Arabic following on from Beginners' Arabic I. Students with a basic knowledge of Arabic writing and speaking may join this module.

INTRODUCTION TO BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE I

Code PPLB4031A

Credits 20

How would you converse with someone who is deaf? At work? In school? In an emergency? How can you avoid typical faux pas due to ignorance of a different culture? Can a 'signed'/'visual' language 'convey as adequately' as a 'spoken' language? These questions highlight the central learning achieved in this module. This is a course in British Sign Language assuming no prior, or minimal knowledge of the language. Throughout the course you will discover aspects central to the Deaf World and its Culture, and how to communicate through a unique 'visual' language, a language that uses your hands and body to communicate! Teaching and learning strategies involve signed conversation (from early on), role-play, and lots of games and exercises that make a truly 'fun and enjoyable' module to take. You will learn a little about the history of the Deaf and Sign Language itself, and its long battle to be recognised. You will discover how using your body and hands can be an exciting and meaningful way of communicating. You will acquire a wide range of easily usable vocabulary, a deeper look into various features that make the language unique, and very different to spoken languages. On successful completion of this module you will have developed knowledge and skills that will enable you to communicate with a Deaf person. You will be able to take your British Sign Language studies onto the next level, broadening your knowledge and developing further, the skill within this amazing 'Visual' language. Please note that very occasionally subsidiary language modules may be cancelled due to low enrolment. Students who are found to have a level of knowledge that exceeds the level for which they have enrolled may be asked to withdraw from the module, at the Teacher's discretion.

INTRODUCTION TO BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE II

Code PPLB4032B

Credits 20

Having gained an insight in communicating using a 'visual' language, how would you relate a story, a narrative or a conversation using more than two people? How would you describe where something is in a room, the room itself or give directions involving a map? This module builds on your studies in British Sign Language giving you confidence and further skills in communicating with the deaf. Teaching and learning strategies continue to involve a more fluent signed conversation, role-play, and lots more games and exercises embedding your learning that makes this an exciting module to take! In this module you will continue to look at deaf culture, address and look at various equipment that assists the Deaf in their everyday life. For example, how do they know someone is at the door? Can they communicate over the telephone? What would happen if you were in a building on fire? On successful completion of this module you will have developed knowledge and skills that will enable you to communicate confidently with a Deaf person. Your will broaden your knowledge and understanding of a truly unique and amazing form of communication and a culture so very different than what you may have encountered before. Please note that very occasionally subsidiary language modules may be cancelled due to low enrolment. Students who are found to have a level of knowledge that exceeds the level for which they have enrolled may be asked to withdraw from the module, at the Teacher's discretion.

INTRODUCTION TO BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE I (SPRING START)

Code PPLB4033B

Credits 20

How would you converse with someone who is deaf? At work? In school? In an emergency? How can you avoid typical faux pas due to ignorance of a different culture? Can a 'signed'/'visual' language 'convey as adequately' as a 'spoken' language? These questions highlight the central learning achieved in this module. This is a course in British Sign Language assuming no prior, or minimal knowledge of the language. Throughout the course you will discover aspects central to the Deaf World and its Culture, and how to communicate through a unique 'visual' language, a language that uses your hands and body to communicate! Teaching and learning strategies involve signed conversation (from early on), role-play, and lots of games and exercises that make a truly 'fun and enjoyable' module to take. You will learn a little about the history of the Deaf and Sign Language itself, and its long battle to be recognised. You will discover how using your body and hands can be an exciting and meaningful way of communicating. You will acquire q wide range of easily usable vocabulary, a deeper look into various features that make the language unique, and very different to spoken languages. On successful completion of this module you will have developed knowledge and skills that will enable you to communicate with a Deaf person. You will be able to take your British Sign Language studies onto the next level, broadening your knowledge and developing further, the skill within this amazing 'Visual' language. Please note that very occasionally subsidiary language modules may be cancelled due to low enrolment. Students who are found to have a level of knowledge that exceeds the level for which they have enrolled may be asked to withdraw from the module, at the Teacher's discretion.

BEGINNERS' CHINESE I

Code PPLB4034A

Credits 20

Did you know you could speak Mandarin in some way already? Try these: coffee as cah-fay, sofa as sharfah, pizza as pee-sah. Yes! Chinese people say these words pretty much as you do! Do you want to get an insight into Chinese culture? Are you planning an adventurous trip in China to explore the diversity of life and communicate with the local people? Your ears will be exposed to pinyin and you will begin to master the deceptively simple Chinese alphabet. You will open your eyes and mind to acquire meanings by drawing the characters. You will build up your vocabulary incredibly quickly, and soon learn to initiate conversations and read simple texts. You will work with your peers during grammar classes and classroom-based oral seminars which cover introduction to pinyin (pronunciation) and the common tricky sounds, word order, sentences at a basic communicative level, the spelling rules of hanzi (Chinese characters), building up your vocabulary, and topic relevant cultural norms. At the end of the module, there is a brief introduction to the Chinese daily meals and sentences you need to order food from a restaurant. By the end of the module, you will be able to recognize and pronounce pinyin confidently. You will develop knowledge of basic sentences. You will be able to understand simple linguistic rules so that you can carry on learning in the future. You will be able to greet people fluently. NOTE: Please note that students speaking other varieties of Chinese (e.g. Cantonese) are not eligible for this module.

BEGINNERS' CHINESE II

Code PPLB4035B

Credits 20

Thinking about brushing up on your Mandarin? Planning an exciting trip to China? Still struggling with pinyin and reading Chinese? Then this module is designed for you! You will explore more sentence patterns in daily life communicative situations. You will build up your character blocks rapidly. You will acquire discourse skills in these scenarios. You will stretch your linguistic ability by becoming aware of cultural norms so that you can communicate with local people freely, but without a scary amount of vocabulary. The module comprises two sessions per week: a two-hour grammar class and a one-hour oral seminar. You will participate in these to learn different ways to ask questions, tenses, reading characters, cultural norms in contexts and topics ranging from friends and family and housing to leisure and health. You will write short essays throughout the process. By the end of the module you will have established a solid foundation in Mandarin, and will have achieved a communicative level. You will be able to recognise about 200 Chinese characters. You will be able to compose messages to your friends or future colleagues. You will be able to express your needs while traveling, and to enjoy the cultural diversity of megacities like Shanghai and Beijing. NOTE: Please note that students speaking other varieties of Chinese (e.g. Cantonese) are not eligible for this module.

BEGINNERS' GREEK I - A1 CEFR

Code PPLB4036A

Credits 20

BEGINNERS' ITALIAN I - A1 CEFR

Code PPLB4038A

Credits 20

You already have a smattering of Italian. Think of ‘latte’, ‘panino’ and ‘tiramisu’! Would you like to find out more, learn to pronounce words like ‘bruschetta’ and ‘ciabatta’ correctly? How about learning to get by on holiday or working in Italy, while sampling the abundant cultural and culinary delights? This is a beginners’ course in Italian assuming no prior knowledge of the language or minimal familiarity (see above). You’ll learn to communicate simply but effectively in basic conversations and understand the relevant details of announcements and notices around you. You’ll master the essential grammar and vocabulary to enable you to express yourself clearly and not feel tongue tied when immersed in the hustle and bustle of Italian life. On your language journey you’ll encounter the culture of different Italian regions. They all have something special to offer, from world class design to dramatic adventure terrain, and with your new language skills you’ll be ready to explore and connect with people. In the classroom you’ll start talking Italian straight away, often working in pairs and small groups. As you will all have different strengths you’ll practise and exchange ideas in a mutually supportive environment. The course encourages success by providing thorough coverage of grammar and vocabulary via interesting and relevant contexts. A variety of writing tasks in class and for homework will help you to build up new skills and listening to a variety of recordings will build your confidence. Games, role-play and regular feedback and advice on learning strategies will lead to a very positive language experience. By the end of this module you’ll be able to express yourself simply but competently in Italian. You’ll no longer be afraid of unfamiliar material in real life situations and you’ll be ready to give it a go. The valuable experience of learning another language will pay dividends in other areas of academic and personal life too. This module is an introduction to Italian but you can continue your Italian journey by taking the Beginners’ Italian II module in the spring semester. Please note that if you are found to have a level of knowledge in a language that exceeds the level for which you have enrolled, you may be asked to withdraw from the module at the Teacher’s discretion. Please note that this is a subsidiary language module. Very occasionally, subsidiary language modules may need to be cancelled if there are low levels of enrolment.

BEGINNERS' ITALIAN II - A2 CEFR

Code PPLB4039B

Credits 20

You have enough Italian to get by when in Italy, or for communicating with Italians socially or for business. Do you now want to deepen your understanding of the language and learn the tools to enable you to really connect? Do you want to get to grips with those ‘little words’ that really bind words into phrases, allowing you to manipulate the language and make it work for you? To take this module you will need to have completed the Beginners’ Italian I module (even if it was in a previous academic year) or have reached an equivalent level. You will continue to study the different tenses and grammatical structures while improving your spoken Italian and honing your listening skills. You’ll become more competent in Italian, but you’ll also gain a solid foundation on which to build in the future; whether continuing with Italian or with other languages (the learning strategies are very flexible and can be applied in many other academic and creative areas). The classes will be interactive and you’ll support each other and help each other while learning in a friendly stress free environment. The module will yield a lot of new vocabulary and it will also show you how the language works. You’ll discover an innovative approach to extending a basic knowledge of Italian by using the widest possible variety of texts, such as autobiographical extracts, newspaper articles, anecdotes, jokes, advertisements and recipes (to name just a few of the materials used). You’ll work in pairs and small groups and enjoyment in the classroom will lead to increased confidence when trying out your new skills. Regular feedback on your oral, listening and written work will motivate you to explore further and make the most of other resources outside of the classroom (such as the internet, phone apps and cinematic experiences). By the end of this module, you’ll have added a vital skill to your CV, and you’ll be very keen to get to Italy to try out your newly learnt talents (if you have not already done so)! Please note that if you are found to have a level of knowledge in a language that exceeds the level for which you have enrolled, you may be asked to withdraw from the module at the Teacher’s discretion. Please note that this is a subsidiary language module. Very occasionally, subsidiary language modules may need to be cancelled if there are low levels of enrolment.

BEGINNERS' JAPANESE I

Code PPLB4040A

Credits 20

Do you want to explore Japanese culture or travel to Japan? Would you like to enhance your career opportunities? This is a beginners’ course in Japanese assuming little or no prior experience or knowledge of the language. In this module, you’ll learn reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. You’ll gain the linguistic understanding of a number of real life situations, as well as the ability to communicate effectively in those situations. There will also be opportunities to explore aspects of the cultures where Japanese is spoken. Particular emphasis will be placed on your acquisition of a sound knowledge of grammar. Please note that this is a subsidiary language module. Very occasionally, subsidiary language modules may need to be cancelled if there are low levels of enrolment. Please note that if you are found to have a level of knowledge in a language that exceeds the level for which you have enrolled, you may be asked to withdraw from the module at the Teacher’s discretion.

BEGINNERS' JAPANESE II

Code PPLB4041B

Credits 20

Have you ever taken any basic Beginners' Japanese I? Then, the Beginners’ Japanese II is what you really need. You will continue to study the different tenses and grammatical structures while improving your spoken Japanese and honing your listening skills. By the end of this module you will be able to understand commonly used, everyday phrases and expressions related to areas of experience. Please note that very occasionally subsidiary language modules may be cancelled due to low enrollment. Please note that students who are found to have a level of knowledge that exceeds the level for which they have enrolled may be asked to withdraw from the module at the Teacher’s discretion.

BEGINNERS' JAPANESE I (SPRING START)

Code PPLB4042B

Credits 20

BEGINNERS' RUSSIAN I - A1 CEFR

Code PPLB4043A

Credits 20

Winston Churchill once said that ‘Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. Russia gave the world Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shostakovich, Chagall and borsch! Would you like to know more about the largest country in the world and unwrap some of the mysteries of its history, culture and politics through its language? This is a beginners’ course in Russian assuming little or no prior experience or knowledge of the language. In the first week you’ll acquaint yourself with the Russian alphabet (it’s not that different) and learn to read Russian. At the end of the course you’ll know all the basics of Russian grammar, will be able to read simple texts and to use your speaking skills in real-life situations (in case you find yourself lost in Red Square)! You’ll participate in classroom-based activities, often working in pairs and groups exchanging ideas and supporting each other in your exploration of the language. You’ll be able to improve and develop your grammar and vocabulary skills through watching Russian films, reading newspaper articles and short stories, discussing their content and expressing your opinion. Having a Russian language course on your CV will give you an advantage over other graduates, and it will also provide work opportunities in Eastern Europe, Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. This course will also help you to become a more informed global citizen whatever your specialisation or area of interest. Please note that you should not have a level of knowledge in Russian that exceeds beginners’ level when enrolling on this course, or you may be asked to withdraw from the module (at the Teacher’s discretion). Please contact us if you’re unsure.

BEGINNERS' RUSSIAN II - A2 CEFR

Code PPLB4044B

Credits 20

Winston Churchill once said that ‘Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. Russia gave the world Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shostakovich, Chagall and borsch! Would you like to know more about the largest country in the world and unwrap some of the mysteries of its history, culture and politics through its language? Before enrolling on this course you’ll need to be acquainted with the Russian alphabet, able to read and write in Russian, and to know a few initial items of grammar and vocabulary (skills that will be learnt in the Beginners' Russian I module). At the end of the course you’ll know all the basics of Russian grammar, you’ll be able to read more complex texts and you’ll have improved your speaking skills in real-life situations (in case you find yourself lost in Red Square)! You’ll participate in classroom-based activities, often working in pairs and groups exchanging ideas and supporting each other in your exploration of the language. You’ll be able to improve and develop your grammar and vocabulary skills through watching Russian films, reading newspaper articles and short stories, discussing their content and expressing your opinion. Having a Russian language course on your CV will give you an advantage over other graduates, and it will also provide work opportunities in Eastern Europe, Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. This course will also help you to become a more informed global citizen whatever your specialisation or area of interest. Please note that you should not have a level of knowledge in Russian that exceeds the beginners’ level specified above when enrolling on this course, or you may be asked to withdraw from the module (at the Teacher’s discretion). Please contact us if you’re unsure.

INTERMEDIATE GERMAN II - A2/B1 CEFR

Code PPLB5033B

Credits 20

Would you like to take your German to a higher level and start to become a more independent user? Wouldn’t it be tempting to be able to describe the plot of a good film or book? Or take part in simple discussions and manage to hold your own? Fancy promoting a TV-series from to a native German speaker? This follow-on course is perfect if you have completed the Intermediate module or have basic A-level experience in German but not if you are already working at a higher level than this. You will become more independent in conversation with others as you continue to explore essential grammar and vocabulary at a higher level. You will learn how to talk about experiences, hopes and ambitions in a more complex way and how to master the skill of persuasion. During this module you will develop a deeper understanding of the German way of thinking through looking at current affairs and iconic German television programmes. In a relaxed environment you will participate in classroom-based activities, working in groups to try out and be creative with new words and grammar structures. The fun of language learning will never be far away and promises to give you the confidence to hold your own in discussions and presentations. As well as speaking and listening to each other you will apply a range of strategies to help you produce and understand longer texts. A sound intermediate course in German will enable you to add a vital and highly valued skill to your CV. At this crucial political and cultural moment in time the study of the German language and culture will without doubt make you a more attractive graduate and informed global citizen, whatever your specialism or area of interest.

INTERMEDIATE SPANISH II - A2/B1 CEFR

Code PPLB5034B

Credits 20

When studying this module, you’ll already have taken beginners’ Spanish modules or be at GCSE level, but not exceeding this. You’ll be introduced to aspects of the Spanish language in a variety of cultural contexts. It will enable you to converse with native Spanish speakers, read and understand specific information in short texts starting at intermediate level. Through Spanish, you’ll learn to present information and engage in discussions. Using popular cultural forms such as film and media, you’ll develop your reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. Upon successfully completion of this module, you will have achieved an advanced level of Spanish.

INTERMEDIATE ARABIC I

Code PPLB5035A

Credits 20

An intermediate course in Arabic is for those students who have taken Beginners' Arabic I and II or who have a GCSE in the language. In this module you will build on, and further enhance, existing reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. A key component is the exploration of themes that develop interculturality. Specific aspects of language are revisited and consolidated at a higher level. The emphasis lies on enhancing essential grammar notions and vocabulary areas in meaningful contexts, whilst developing knowledge of contemporary life and society that focuses on culture and current affairs. Please note that very occasionally subsidiary language modules may be cancelled due to low enrolment. Please note that students who are found to have a level of knowledge that exceeds the level for which they have enrolled may be asked to withdraw from the module at the Teacher’s discretion.

INTERMEDIATE ARABIC II

Code PPLB5036B

Credits 20

A continuation of Intermediate Arabic I, this module offers you lively dialogues, varied texts and exercises, plus fascinating cultural insights. You will cover a wide variety of topics such as leisure, news and media, arts and cinema, as well as an end-of-unit focus on the geography, culture and dialects of major Arab countries. The course has three contact hours per week. Alternative slots may be available depending on enrolment. Please note that very occasionally subsidiary language modules may be cancelled due to low enrolment. Please note that students who are found to have a level of knowledge that exceeds the level for which they have enrolled may be asked to withdraw from the module, at the Teacher's discretion.

INTERMEDIATE RUSSIAN II

Code PPLB5038B

Credits 20

Winston Churchill once said: ‘Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. Russia gave the world Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shostakovich, Chagall and borsh! Would you like to know more about this largest country in the world and unwrap some of the mysteries of its history, culture and politics through its language? This course is intended for students who completed UEA Beginners’ Russian Course or who have studied Russian before, but not those who are working at a higher level in the language. You should be able to read and write in the language and should be familiar with the basics of Russian grammar. You’ll participate in classroom-based activities, often working in pairs and groups, exchanging ideas and supporting each other in your exploration of Russian language, literature and history. You’ll get acquainted with finer and more nuanced aspects of Russian grammar and stylistic usage. You’ll be able to further improve and develop your grammar and vocabulary skills through watching Russian films, reading newspaper articles and short stories, discuss their content and express your opinion. A Russian language course on your CV will give you an advantage over other graduates; it will also help if you are interested in seeking work opportunities in Eastern Europe, Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. In the current political and cultural situation, the course will help you to become a more informed global citizen whatever your specialisation or area of interest.

INTERMEDIATE ITALIAN I

Code PPLB5039A

Credits 20

Do you want to delve further into the cultural mosaic that is Italy and discover more about ‘La Dolce Vita’? Do you want to engage with the country, its language, its people, their way of life and culture, and discover what makes them tick? Take your Italian to the next level, consolidate your skills and move away from basic conversations to real debate and dialogue. In a relaxed and friendly collaborative environment you will participate in classroom activities to boost your confidence and enable you to engage with authentic Italian recordings and texts. Reading and writing texts will be more complex and take for granted references, context, and levels of understanding that are challenging but very rewarding. Regular feedback will help build your confidence and working in pairs and small groups will allow you to share your particular strengths with other students and really enjoy the process at the same time. You will be encouraged to find your own successful learning strategies and do research outside the classroom using the internet and other valuable language resources. By the end of this module you will have covered most of the tenses and will have started studying the subjunctive mood in order to express your opinions in a more subtle way. You will learn the capacity for sophisticated handling of the language, improve your vocabulary through an innovative approach to self- study and be confident enough to initiate real communication when visiting Italy for business or pleasure. You should have completed the Beginners’ Italian one and two modules at UEA or have GCSE level Italian or the equivalent before starting this module. You should not already have a level of Italian that exceeds the level of this module. This is not suitable if you’ve already studied Italian for several years at another university or college.

INTERMEDIATE ITALIAN II

Code PPLB5040B

Credits 20

Do you want to continue to build proficiency in all four language skills (listening, reading, speaking, and writing) and expand your cultural knowledge of contemporary Italy? Do you want to focus on language usage rather than abstract concepts and meet Italy head on? You will participate in classroom-based activities, often working in pairs and small groups; exchanging ideas and supporting each other in your exploration of the Italian language. One of your main goals will be to use your language skills actively and creatively in meaningful communication. You will also gain a greater understanding of cultural and political issues through engaging with current topics and you will focus on different learning strategies such as using your background knowledge or doing research online. Interesting texts will help facilitate your understanding of authentic reading material and you will become familiar with different writing styles and genres as well as natural language written by and for native speakers. By the end of this module you will be able to express yourself in Italian in a more subtle way and you will understand language spoken by native speakers in a variety of different contexts, formal and informal. The simulated real-life situations will have prepared you for working, studying, or travelling in Italy or communicating with Italians whilst in this country in a social or business setting. Before starting this module you should have completed the Intermediate Italian One module or studied up to a similar level in another institution or at UEA. You should not already have a level of Italian that exceeds the level taught in this module.

ADVANCED ENGLISH I - B2 CEFR

Code PPLB5043A

Credits 20

Do you want more practice in speaking in English? Do you feel you lack sufficient vocabulary to express yourself well? Do you need help with your pronunciation? Do you have problems with English grammar and writing essays? As a non-native speaker, you will need to already have an upper intermediate/ advanced level of English (IELTS 6.5-7.5 or equivalent) but will want to reach a more competent level. If so, you can take both Advanced English I & II or just module I or just module II. You’ll analyse and discuss articles in the media and listen to academic talks and news reports on contemporary topics; through writing tasks, you will have the opportunity to express your ideas in clear and coherent terms, and you will receive personal feedback on your efforts. You will participate in classroom-based activities, often working in pairs and groups exchanging ideas and supporting each other in your exploration of the language. You will be able to focus on improving aspects of your pronunciation and grammar as well as expanding your vocabulary. You will also gain a greater understanding of cultural and political issues through topics such as Education & Critical Thinking, Globalisation and The Environment. You will be assessed mid-term, and in the final weeks through a seminar presentation (30%) and listening, reading and writing tasks (70%). By the end of this module you will be able to express yourself more confidently orally, be better able to understand recorded material and will have increased your vocabulary base; you will be more able to read complex texts and write more accurately with fewer grammar errors and greater range of expression. Such language support will be of immense benefit for all aspects of your UEA academic programme, will please your tutors and enable you to obtain higher grades! Please note that very occasionally subsidiary language modules may be cancelled due to low enrolment. Please note that students who are found to have a level of knowledge that exceeds the level for which they have enrolled may be asked to withdraw from the module, at the Teacher's discretion.

ADVANCED ENGLISH II - B2 CEFR

Code PPLB5044B

Credits 20

Do you want more practice in speaking in English? Do you feel you lack sufficient vocabulary to express yourself well? Do you need help with your pronunciation? Do you have problems with English grammar and writing essays? As a non-native speaker, you will need to already have an upper intermediate/advanced level of English (IELTS 6.5-7.5 or equivalent) but will want to reach a more competent level. If so, you can take both Advanced English I & II or just module I or just module II. You’ll analyse and discuss articles in the media and listen to academic talks and news reports on contemporary topics; through writing tasks you will have the opportunity to express your ideas in clear and coherent terms, and you will receive personal feedback on your efforts. You will participate in classroom-based activities, often working in pairs and groups exchanging ideas and supporting each other in your exploration of the language. You will be able to focus on improving aspects of your pronunciation and grammar as well as expanding your vocabulary. You will also gain a greater understanding of cultural and political issues through topics such as Time & Sleep, World Population & Urbanisation and Tourism. You will be assessed midterm, and in the final weeks through a seminar presentation (30%) and listening, reading, and writing tasks (70%). By the end of this module you will be able to express yourself more confidently orally, be better able to understand recorded material, and will have increased your vocabulary base; you will be more able to read complex texts and write more accurately with fewer grammar errors and greater range of expression. Such language support will be of immense benefit for all aspects of your UEA academic programme, will please your tutors and enable you to obtain higher grades! Please note that you should not have a level of English that exceeds the level of this course.

INTERMEDIATE JAPANESE I

Code PPLB5060A

Credits 20

Do you want to explore Japanese culture or travel to Japan? Or would you like to enhance your career opportunities? An intermediate course in Japanese for those students who have taken Beginners' Japanese I and II or who have a GCSE or similar qualification in the language. You will build on, and further enhance, existing reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. A key component is the exploration of themes that develop interculturality. Specific aspects of language are revisited and consolidated at a higher level. The emphasis lies on enhancing essential grammar notions and vocabulary areas in meaningful contexts, whilst developing knowledge of contemporary life and society that focuses on culture and current affairs.

INTERMEDIATE JAPANESE II

Code PPLB5061B

Credits 20

Do you want to explore Japanese culture or travel to Japan? Or do you want to enhance your career opportunities? You will continue to build upon what you have learnt in Intermediate Japanese I. A key component is the exploration of themes that develop interculturality. Specific aspects of language are revisited and consolidated at a higher level. The emphasis lies on enhancing essential grammar notions and vocabulary areas in meaningful contexts, whilst developing knowledge of contemporary life and society that focuses on culture and current affairs.

INTERMEDIATE FRENCH I - A2 CEFR

Code PPLB5150A

Credits 20

The four elements you will study in this intermediate French module are: Listening Comprehension, Writing, Translation and Grammar. While the emphasis is on comprehension, the speaking and writing of French are also included. You should have pre A level experience (or equivalent) of French and wish to develop this to a standard comparable to A2 in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). You should not have a level of French that already exceeds the level of this module and should not have already studied AS or A level French/Baccalaureate/Level B1 in the CEFR.

INTERMEDIATE GERMAN I - A2 CEFR

Code PPLB5151A

Credits 20

Would you like to take your basic German skills to a higher level? Wouldn’t it be tempting to be able to express a range of feelings in German? Or take part in simple discussions and manage to hold your own? Fancy presenting a cultural event in your country to a native German speaker? This module is perfect if you have already completed Beginners modules or have sufficient pre-A-level experience of German but not if you are already working at a higher level than this. You will become more competent and confident in conversation with others as you explore essential grammar and vocabulary at a higher level. You will learn how to express opinions and preferences in a more complex way and how to master the skill of agreeing and disagreeing. You will gain the confidence to present to a small audience and shine in the process of it. During this module you will develop your understanding of the German way of thinking through shining a light at cultural traditions and events. In a relaxed environment you will participate in classroom-based activities, working in groups to try out and be creative with new words and phrases. The fun of language learning will never be far away and promises to give you the confidence to hold your own in basic discussions and presentations. As well as speaking and listening to each other you will apply a range of strategies to help you produce and understand longer texts. A basic intermediate course in German will enable you to add a vital skill to your CV. At this crucial political and cultural moment in time the study of the German language and culture will without doubt make you a more attractive graduate and informed global citizen, whatever your specialism or area of interest.

INTERMEDIATE SPANISH I - A2 CEFR

Code PPLB5152A

Credits 20

When studying this module, you’ll already have taken beginners’ Spanish modules or be at GCSE level, but not exceeding this. You’ll be introduced to aspects of the Spanish language, in a variety of cultural contexts. It will enable you to converse with native Spanish speakers, read and understand specific information in short texts starting at intermediate level. Through Spanish, you’ll learn to present information and engage in discussions. Using popular cultural forms such as film and media, you’ll develop your reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. Upon successfully completion of this module, you will have achieved a higher-intermediate level of Spanish.

INTERMEDIATE GREEK I

Code PPLB5157A

Credits 20

Greek is one of the official languages of the EU and is spoken by about 11 million people in Greece, Cyprus, and in various communities throughout the world. You will be surprised by the number of Modern Greek words that are already familiar to you, including scientific and technical vocabulary. Greek also opens the door to a unique and fascinating culture. UEA is one of the few British Universities offering Modern Greek, so stand out from the crowd and go for Greek. If you have a GCSE in Greek (or equivalent experience, i.e. Greek Beginners II) this module is for you. This module will enable you to build on, and further enhance, existing reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. A key component is the exploration of themes that develop interculturality. You will consolidate at a higher level, specific aspects of the language. The emphasis will lie on enhancing essential grammar notions and vocabulary areas in meaningful contexts, whilst you will develop knowledge of contemporary life and society that focuses on culture and current affairs. You will enhance your reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. The aim is to equip you with the linguistic understanding of a number of real life situations, as well as the ability to communicate effectively in those situations. Particular emphasis is placed on acquiring a sound knowledge of grammar. By the end of this module you will be able to: discuss/read and write on the following Topics: Leisure / culture/sports Travel / Car Hire Meeting people (2) (formal-informal)/Receive a guest/visito Please note that very occasionally subsidiary language modules may be cancelled due to low enrolment. Please note that students who are found to have a level of knowledge that exceeds the level for which they have enrolled may be asked to withdraw from the module, at the Teacher's discretion.

INTERMEDIATE RUSSIAN I

Code PPLB5158A

Credits 20

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN PRACTICE

Code PPLC5168A

Credits 20

Have you ever thought about what you could do to improve the world? This module will help you find answers to this question. We will explore how you can become a more informed and engaged global citizen by developing your intercultural and citizenship competences. You will develop the knowledge, critical understanding, values and attitudes that can be mobilised and deployed in a broad range of fields involving intercultural communication. The seminars will be highly interactive and the assessment will involve practical projects. A distinctive feature of this module is the practical understanding and application of concepts to specific intercultural issues and global challenges in critically reflective teaching sessions. The teaching will offer a balance between practice and theory and classroom sessions will include group work activities and public lectures. Through this module you will enhance your opportunities to gain employment where intercultural communication to real-life contexts is required. By the end of this module you will have developed the ability to employ effective and persuasive arguments in the formulation of solutions to real global challenges. The module will be delivered in English and you don’t need to speak a foreign language to take it.

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION ACROSS BORDERS

Code PPLC5172B

Credits 20

Interested in how and why countries communicate? Want to know more about what happens when communication between countries goes wrong? Are global companies behaving like sovereign nations? Since humans evolved a sense of identity, group belonging, and hierarchy, our relationships with our neighbours have been constantly changing as we compete over resources and space. We will explore intercultural ‘incidents’ between different countries, socio-cultural groups and global organisations and will introduce you to ways that we can analyse how the different perceptions of these ‘incidents’ are reflected in the media. You’ll gain a firm grounding in global communication, and analytical methods and concepts. You’ll begin the module by exploring fundamentals of global communication and how we can start to analyse media sources, using a range of case studies and real world examples. You’ll then delve deeper, discussing key topics such as diplomacy, propaganda, censorship, laws, and the evolution of global companies as legal entities and political persuaders. By looking at the different ways countries, Ambassadors, political leaders and countries communicate, you’ll really approach the subject of intercultural communication from a Global perspective. You’ll learn through a mixture of seminars and self-directed study. You’ll be assessed though a piece of course work and a group project. You will have to deliver a formative presentation. On successful completion of the module, you’ll have established your analytical knowledge and skills needed to support more advanced modules on Discourse Analysis. You’ll develop your research, writing, group work and presentation skills. And you’ll explore global issues of concern and really get to grips with how media sources can different when discussing the same incident.

GLOBALISATION AND FRENCH CULTURAL IDENTITIES (LEVEL 5)

Code PPLF5006B

Credits 20

Do you want to explore what makes the French so French? Is there any such thing as a French cultural exception? How has society and the relationship between the French and the French state or religion evolved over time and how has that shaped social behaviours, attitudes, laws, and values in France? These are some of the questions that will be the subjects of this module, available for students with or without any prior knowledge of the French language. By taking this module, taught and assessed in English, you will gain a deeper understanding of French society and important aspects of its institutions. You will understand France's attempts to retain its cultural identity, despite trends of homogenisation. You will look at themes such as education, arts, politics, literature, and thought, and examine questions such as the role of the state, the support of the film industry, the history and legacy of Cartesian reasoning, centralisation, and universalism. Those themes will be discussed, sometimes challenged, through the exploration of a range of illustrations, documents and readings. By the end of this module, you will have developed awareness of important and structuring features of French culture, you will have developed intercultural skills. If you are a student in international relations, you'll have a better understanding of what influences social and political representations, constructions, and decisions. As a student of languages, you'll be able to support your comprehension and expression skills by a thorough understanding of the French culture.

FRANCE, FRANCOPHONIE AND THE WORLD (LEVEL 5)

Code PPLF5175A

Credits 20

Today, French is still spoken on all five continents. Whether you are interested in language, culture, history, or politics of the French-speaking world, this module is perfect to expand your awareness of those aspects beyond the Hexagon. You'll study the origins of the Francophonie and discuss the relevance of the organisation. Studying the variety of contexts and societies in the French-speaking world today will allow you not only to contrast situations but also to understand important challenges and the role and impact of policies at different levels, from local administration to international relations. You will discuss issues of postcolonialism, study key events and personalities and explore many important cultural aspects. You will analyse a range of material, in English, that will include newspaper and magazine articles, television, and radio programmes and will also learn from academic journals on the topics. At the end of this module, you will have a broader understanding of the cultural, historical, economic, linguistic, and geopolitical links between France, its overseas territories and the rest of the French-speaking world. Teaching and assessment will be in English.

POST A LEVEL SPANISH LANGUAGE 2/I

Code PPLH5053A

Credits 20

Do you want more practice in Spanish? Do you feel you lack sufficient vocabulary to express yourself well? Do you want to discover and discuss contemporary aspects of Spain and Latin America? Both Post A Level Spanish 2/I and 2/II will offer you the opportunity to further develop your speaking, listening, reading and writing skills at a higher level in Spanish. You will analyse and discuss writing and translation skills, explore different aspects of Spain and Latin America, from general topics to current affairs and issues of the Hispanic world, and improve the ease of communicating ideas through increased fluency, breadth of vocabulary and accuracy of oral expression in Spanish. You will be able to focus on improving aspects of your pronunciation and grammar as well as expanding your vocabulary, and also gain a greater understanding of contemporary Spanish issues through topics such as los movimientos nacionalistas, la crisis española or la identidad latinoamericana. Participation will be in classroom-based activities, often working in pairs and groups exchanging ideas and supporting each other in your exploration of the language. By the end of this module you will be able to communicate with some fluency and spontaneity, express yourself in Spanish more confidently orally, and take an active part in discussions relating to current Spanish and Latin-American issues. You will be more able to read complex texts and write more accurately with fewer grammar errors and greater range of expression, as well as translate extended English and Spanish texts. Such language support will also build up your intercultural and transferable competences. Note: Both Post A Level Spanish 2.I and 2.II are compulsory for all second-year Single Honours Spanish students as well as being an option for any student who has done Post-A-Level Spanish Language 1 (or B1 CEFRL).

POST A LEVEL SPANISH LANGUAGE 2/II

Code PPLH5154B

Credits 20

INTRODUCTION TO THE EUROPEAN UNION

Code PPLI5044A

Credits 20

Who rules the EU? What does it do concretely for EU citizens? How democratic is it? How serious are the challenges it is currently facing, from the reform of its economic governance to Brexit? To explore these questions, and more, you'll examine the development, structure, nature and functions of the European Union. You'll look at the history and theories of European integration from the 1940s to the present day. You'll explore the institutions and processes which run the EU, and demystify its main policies. The aim of the module is not only to ensure that you understand the ‘nuts and bolts’ of what the EU is and how it works. You'll also examine critically and articulate contending arguments on key issues such as the role of the member-states in the European system of governance; the EU's democratic credentials; the causes and consequences of Brexit; or the influence of the EU in the world. The EU is an integral part of its member states' structures of governance and it influences their domestic political, social and cultural life, as well as EU neighbouring countries. Understanding how the European Union works is important in many jobs at local, national or international levels in the public, private and third (community and voluntary) sectors. This module is recommended if you intend to progress to the 'European Studies with Brussels Internship’ module in Year 3.

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY

Code PPLI5056B

Credits 20

Why are wars fought? What is peace? What is security? International Security introduces you to these key issues in global politics. In the first part of the module, you will explore the continuing salience of violent conflict and the use of force in world politics. While some have argued that the advent of globalisation and spread of liberal democracy would make violent conflict less relevant in today’s world, war and the use of force remain an integral part of the international system. In exploring these issues, you will study a variety of perspectives on the causes of war and peace to examine the roots of violent conflict and security problems in the present day. In the second half of the module, we will turn to contemporary ‘critical’ debates around international security. These include constructivist and feminist perspectives on what security is, how it is achieved, and whether it is desirable. We will also investigate the host of seemingly new security challenges that have increasingly captured the attention of policymakers and academics. How useful is it to think of issues such as environmental degradation, gendered violences, and poverty as security issues? What do we gain and lose in broadening security studies beyond a narrow focus on warfare and military power?

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

Code PPLI5059A

Credits 20

What does the world look like to a Marxist, or a liberal, or a feminist, or a realist? We all hold particular ideas about how the world works: about why certain events happen, who the key actors in the international system are, and whether it is even possible to change things for future generations. Theories of International Relations (IR) attempt to capture these assumptions, explaining the world in different ways to others. You will explore how the discipline of IR emerged in the early 20th century, before investigating the very different theories which have shaped, and sometimes dominated, academic and policy makers' ideas about how the world actually works.

POWER, WEALTH AND NATIONS: GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

Code PPLI5161B

Credits 20

What if I told you that the West was no longer the power centre of the world’s economy? Could Pax Sinica provincialize the UK as political economic power settles over Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta? What would Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich List have to say about global transformations underway in the global political economy? And, as Susan Strange famously put it: cui bono: Who benefits from all these transformations? Multinational corporations, nation states, financial sector, exporting economies, citizens? You’ll investigate the accumulation of wealth, movement of capital, centres of power, flows of globalisation, patterns of trade, and the ubiquity of finance in a world being transformed by innovation where emerging powers challenge the status quo of North Atlantic powerhouses.

CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE SOCIETY

Code PPLJ5012B

Credits 20

In this module, you’ll analyse contemporary Japanese society using topical issues in Japan and deepen your understanding of the country and people. All lectures are conducted in English. Throughout the module, you’ll learn about various topical issues such as family, gender and education, uncover the roots behind these and develop your findings and ideas into a discussion. You’ll use various materials including academic articles and digital resources including online news articles and audio-visual materials. Through not only reading the news but also considering the stories in depth and the reasons behind the issues happening in Japan, you’ll develop and improve your research and analytical skills. You’ll also be able to discern and compare similarities and differences between Japanese culture and society and your own country.

INTRODUCTION TO JAPANESE POPULAR CULTURE (LEVEL 5)

Code PPLJ5147A

Credits 20

Japanese popular culture is now a global phenomenon. To understand how this came about, you will study the topic in terms of theories of social, economical, and historical analysis. You will learn about various cultural forms and practices, including manga/anime, media, art, and music in Japan as seen from different perspectives. You will also discuss and critically analyse the role of Japanese popular culture within and outside Japan. Your seminars will consist of three main parts: lectures, original audio/video materials, and group discussion or activities. Your contribution to weekly discussion/activities is essential. Lectures, reading materials, and assessments will all be in English. On successful completion of this module, you will have a good understanding of the main genres of Japanese popular culture, and be able to further explore your own interests, academically, in any form of Japanese popular culture.

LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Code PPLL5019A

Credits 20

What do we actually do when we engage in ‘conversation’? How do we create meanings without actually saying what we mean? Why does how we say something matter more than what we say? In this module we will address these questions and explore how linguistic meaning, in any language, works on a number of levels so that speakers are able to communicate much more than what they say in their words. You’ll consider the extent to which language expression is influenced by social, cultural and psychological factors and why communication problems may arise even when speakers think they are speaking ‘the same language’. We’ll discuss the ways in which relationships of power, solidarity and intimacy may be shaped by particular uses of language in everyday interactions and how humour or irony may be generated when speakers break conventional patterns of communication. By the end of this module you’ll have a clear understanding of how verbal and non-verbal expressions combine to convey a variety of meanings in different contexts: professional as well as personal. You’ll have learnt to appreciate how the way we talk is influenced by our need to be valued and respected but also why speech may be manipulative and undermining. Classes will include group discussions of examples collected by you each week so that you can immediately appreciate how concepts apply in practice. In your final assignment you’ll build on this understanding and analyse a verbal interaction of your choice (such as a celebrity interview, a chat show dialogue or an e-mail exchange) to identify how meanings are exchanged in that specific context.

UNDERSTANDING SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING (LEVEL 5)

Code PPLL5175B

Credits 20

Have you thought about becoming a language teacher? Do you know what that means? Would you like to give it a try? This is an introduction to second language teaching and learning, where you will explore theoretical and practical approaches to language learning. You will learn what teaching a foreign language means through different methodologies and practical approaches, as well as understanding the peculiarities of both language and culture in second language acquisition, emphasizing factors like context, motivation, first language or individual characteristics. Participation will be in classroom-based activities, often working in pairs and groups exchanging ideas and supporting each other in your exploration of second language learning and teaching. You will be able to observe real language classrooms and deliver language teaching in real contexts, and also gain a greater understanding of what theoretical and practical aspects of teaching and learning are essential in foreign languages.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE & CONFLICT: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

Code PPLM5002B

Credits 20

Political violence, individual or collective, is easily condemned as an irrational and barbaric phenomenon, with little relevance for understanding political developments and social change. A lot is down to LeBon’s famous nineteenth century accounts of the crowd as ‘a primitive being’ so destructive ‘that the interests of the individual, even the interest of self preservation, will not dominate them’ (LeBon, 1995). The taboo of violence persists despite attempts of social and political theorists to engage with the issue and understand different forms and contexts, from riots, to religious violence and terrorism. The aim of the module is to break this generalized taboo by tracing the role (explicit or implicit) of political violence in political theory and its function in processes of socio-political transformations and change. Critical engagement with contemporary theoretical and empirical debates around the issue and the examination of mass and new media representations of political violence will enable students to develop a sophisticated understanding of the origins, logics, perceptions and outcomes of political violence and conflict.

MEDIA, GLOBALISATION AND CULTURE

Code PPLM5003B

Credits 20

What role do media and communication play in processes of globalisation? How is an ever more global media creating cultural change? In this module you will explore the cultural implications of global media and culture by investigating audience practices and media representations. It begins by introducing the main theoretical approaches to mediated globalisation, before examining how these work in practice. Indicative topics include the power of global branding, global celebrity culture, global publics and local audiences, transnational cultures, and representations of migration.

LIES, ALGORITHMS AND CONCERTOS: UNDERSTANDING MEDIA AND CULTURAL POLICY

Code PPLM5005B

Credits 20

How should we deal with the dissemination of 'fake news'? What role do algorithms play in the media we consume, and is it concerning? What kind of government intervention is there in media markets and in cultural life and how does this get decided? This module will enable you to understand the dynamics and issues of media and cultural policy and how various levels of governance are involved in regulating media cultural sectors. The module will start by introducing you to public policy and policy making processes, covering multi-level governance, multi-stakeholderism, and the policy cycle. It will then enhance your understanding though deep dives into current issues in media and cultural policy, such as audiovisual media policy, arts institutions, net neutrality, harmful content on platforms, sports and premium content rights, urban regeneration through culture, evolving models of (self/co-)regulation. The module will draw on examples from across the globe and at various level including local, regional, national and supra-national policy making, with special efforts made to integrate ones from non-Western contexts. You will have the opportunity to work on real policy issues and practice professional skills in simulations and assessment activities. This module is for anyone interested in media and culture or in public policy in general. It covers topics that touch our daily lives so would be useful to anyone concerned about the shape of our society.

THE MEDIA AND IDENTITY

Code PPLM5042B

Credits 20

How do the media shape how we see ourselves? Or indeed how others see us? In a world of social media, self-branding and the increasing importance of mediated forms of identity, on this module you will explore critical ways of thinking about the relationship between culture, media and the self. Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches in the field of media and cultural studies, this module asks you to use research methods from autoethnography to content analysis to explore both their own identities and the way in which identities more broadly are formulated through contemporary media culture. Through discussing the representation of identity in media content, as well as issues of media production, regulation and consumption, you will critically reflect upon the relationship between media culture and social power and consider how social and technological changes impact on the ways in which identity is experienced in everyday life. On successful completion of this module, you should be able, at threshold level, to critically reflect upon the ways in which media texts construct social identity and should be able to discuss the relationship between media and identity with awareness for social, institutional and technological factors that shape both media production and consumption. Assessment is by group presentation and independent research project.

DIGITAL MEDIA AND SOCIETY

Code PPLM5053A

Credits 20

For better or worse, digital technologies are hyped at having revolutionised society. This module will provide you with an introduction to the ways in which the internet and other digital technologies are (and are not) affecting society from theoretical and empirical perspectives, and how society shapes technology. Topics covered include: the evolution of the internet; the network society ; regulating new media; the radical internet and terrorism; social networking, blogs and interactivity; culture and identity in the digital age; and how the internet affects politics and the media.

TRANSLATION AND ADAPTATION (LEVEL 5)

Code PPLT5024B

Credits 20

We will consider the processes of translation and adaptation in a range of media, such as films, games and theatre, and the issues associated with them from the perspective of ‘Translation Theory.' We will attempt to establish where the boundary lies between the terms ‘translation’ and ‘adaptation,’ and we will examine some of the most important theories of translation. You will look at various ways of thinking about key concepts such as ‘cultural and pragmatic equivalence,’ ‘fidelity,’ ‘coherence/cohesion,’ and the ethical role of the director/adaptor. You will devote your time to the exploration of types of adaptations in different genres, and you will present case studies from recent articles in a variety of adaptations in your language pair, such as adaptations for cross-cultural theatre, adapting from books to video games, cross-cultural adaptations of queerness in short stories, ideology, and children’s stories adapted for films across languages and cultures. You will develop the linguistic skills, cultural competence and critical thinking required for the production of a case study of a selected adaptation in your language pair. On completion of this module, you will be able to situate yourself in relation to critical readings in the field of ‘Translation Theory’ and to reflect on the ethical dimension of the translator, especially as it relates to the act of adapting in situations of intercultural conflict and communication. This module is only available to students with a foreign language.

TECHNOLOGICAL TOOLS FOR SUBTITLING AND DUBBING (LEVEL 5)

Code PPLT5026B

Credits 20

What factors need to be born in mind when creating subtitles? What tools are used to create these texts? This module provides first-hand experience of subtitling and dubbing of film clips and documentaries, which will provide you with first hand, practical, experience of this important media technique. You’ll become familiar with software used for interlingual and intralingual subtitling and dubbing at professional level, studying the linguistic and technical constraints for the creation of audio-visual texts. You’ll undertake practical exercises involving cueing, text compression and segmentation, respecting time and space constraints and that will teach you how to conform the conventions of good practice. You’ll explore, analyse and assess different types of technological tools used for audio-visual translation at professional and amateur levels, using selected film/TV series/documentary extracts in several languages. Practical activities are used creating challenges posed by the interplay of audio, image and text. Studying this module will provide you with the necessary skills for the creation of subtitles at a professional level, giving you practical experience of using professional software. Taught together with Level 6. Assessment commensurate with level. This module is not suitable for year 2 students of Japanese Ab Initio or Post GCSE because of the challenging nature of the assessment tasks (comprehension and translation of authentic Japanese video clip extracts). Should you wish to explore media accessibility tools, 'Technological Tools for Media Accessibility' (Level 5) is available. Please note that final year Japanese degree students are welcome to join the equivalent module at Level 6 'Technological Tools for Subtitling and Dubbing'.

WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

Code PPLX5064A

Credits 20

In this second year module you will examine in depth the works of selected thinkers who are seminal to the Western tradition of political thought, and have shaped the ways in which we think about politics even today, including Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill and Machiavelli. You will also compare their work thematically, with a focus on themes such as the natural law and social contract traditions, and other schools of thought which have been influenced by these traditions. The module will be based on the study and interpretation of key primary texts and will enable you to develop skills of textual analysis and critique. It will also provide some of the historical background necessary to study more contemporary political theory at 3rd year undergraduate level, as well as building substantially on some of the political theories encountered on Social and Political Theory at first year level. The module is taught by a combination of weekly lectures and seminars, supported by private study of your own, and you will be assessed by coursework, usually a combination of an essay and a portfolio which reflects on your reading and seminar performance throughout the semester.

POWER AND SOCIETY

Code PPLX5159B

Credits 20

This module introduces students to key perspectives in 19th & 20th century social and political theory. Central to this module is an interest in the relationship between economic, social and cultural structures and individual agency and identity. Areas explored include the following: social conflict and consensus; conceptions of power and domination; Marxism and neo-Marxism; critical theory; structuralism; poststructuralism; ideology and discourse; postmodernity; the self and consumer society.

STATES, INSTITUTIONS AND CITIZENS

Code PPLX5162B

Credits 20

Political systems around the world are facing profound challenges and transformations. Established democracies in Europe and North America have seen the rise of populism, as marked by election of Donald Trump in the USA, the Brexit referendum in the UK or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Democracy has also been in retreat in many states which democratised or partly democratised after the cold war such as Russia and Poland. At the same time, autocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa have come under pressure, with movements such as the Arab Spring signalling aspirations amongst many people for a more democratic system of governance. This module provides you with a critical understanding of how political systems vary around the world and the pressures facing them. It begins by focusing on the drivers of democratisation. It then proceeds to consider how political institutions such as the executive, legislature and the degree of decentralisation vary - and the effects that this has. Finally, we consider new trends in citizen's voting behaviour at the ballot box and pressure groups campaigning for change. You'll gain a critical awareness of current debates in comparative politics and develop key skills including critical evaluation, analytical investigation, written presentation, and oral communication.

POLITICS IN THE USA

Code PPLX5164A

Credits 20

The election of Donald Trump as President in 2016 has radically changed US politics. Yet to fully understand the current times, contemporary American politics needs to be put into context. This module covers the historical themes that exist in US politics from the eighteenth century to the present day. The emphasis will be on modern political history and contemporary politics, but this will be underpinned by a knowledge of the political philosophy at the time of the formation of the United States, the governmental structures, and political developments over historical time.

APPLIED PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCES

Code PSY-5014B

Credits 20

This module explores a range of contemporary applications of psychological science. Theoretical approaches and research will be covered alongside examples from popular media, films, current events, and case studies.

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Important Information

Students can only take ONE dissertation but may take a further Philosophy Special Subject in addition, if suitably qualified. Students wishing to take the Philosophy dissertation or special subject modules must complete the form circulated in advance of the Enrolment Fair.

Assessment for Year 3

In the final year most modules are assessed by a larger piece of your own work or a number of more in-depth essays.

Your final degree result is based on the marks for all your modules in the last two years, weighted 40:60 so that more importance is attached to the fully mature work of your third year.

Compulsory Modules

Optional A Modules

(30-90 credits)

TRAGEDY (pre-1789)

Code LDCD6106A

Credits 30

You will look at the long history of tragedy in an effort to understand what, if anything, allows us to call both Oedipus Rex and Death of a Salesman tragedies. We will begin with the age-old question of what is the difference between tragedy in “real life” and on stage. Our answers to this question will help us isolate what it is that makes a performance specifically tragic rather than “merely” dramatic, moving, emotional. Our first readings will focus on the ancient Greeks, the inventors of tragedy, and the religious, artistic, and political circumstances that helped create this genre. Throughout the semester we will repeatedly return to the Greeks to see how more modern tragedies adapted or rejected their notions of the tragic and created new tragic criteria particular to their own time and place. We will look at the ways in which ancient tragic notions of personal responsibility are affected by new ideas about mental health, socioeconomic pressure, nature, and Christianity. Also, as we see tragedy moving into different media, such as opera, the novel, and film, we will examine the ways in which the different media of music, prose, and cinema affect the tragic effect.

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: NONSENSE AND MODERN WRITING

Code LDCL6015A

Credits 30

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 experimentation and literary nonsense. Beginning with two 19th-century writers, Carroll and Dickinson, you will go on to explore various of the radical disruptions in ordinary sense and meaning practiced across 20th-century writing, asking about their purposes and possibilities, and inquiring into what they tell us about ordinary language. You will take in such subjects as William’s Empson’s analysis and practice of poetic ambiguity; surrealism’s Freudian inquiry into the illogical language of the unconscious; Joyce’s invention of new words to express this illogic; Plath’s surrealist play with metaphor; the early Auden’s distortion of syntax, pronoun, and tense; and Ashbery’s indeterminacy. We will read such work against various theories of nonsense, laughter, and play. Your principal focus will be on poetry and language itself and there will be detailed discussions of word-history, ambiguity, broken syntax, incomplete metaphor. Major topics will include the relation of nonsense to dreams, jokes, games, and madness, and this will be informed by psychoanalytic theory, especially in Freud’s writing. This is not a course on children's literature, but on some very challenging modern literature, mostly poetry. You will need to enjoy uncertainty and have good close-reading skills. There will be opportunities for creative writing of nonsense and creative writers are encouraged to take the module. By the end of the module you should have an understanding of the various ways in which modern writers have revolutionised and distorted language, and the reasons why they did so. You should be able to analyse the differences to meaning made by such distortions, and to trace the gaps in sense that they open. You should be able to draw on relevant theories of nonsense, laughter, play, childhood, and language, to enrich your analysis. You could offer your own creative writing in the same mode of nonsense, and if so, this will show an understanding of the techniques of the writers studied. In either case, you will have done some of your own original reading, thinking, and research, beyond the texts and topics covered in seminars.

DRAMA AND LITERATURE: THE QUESTION OF GENRE

Code LDCL6017B

Credits 30

You will explore the relationship between the study of literature and the study of dramatic performance both creatively and theoretically. Its practical aspect consists of an adaptation for the stage of a literary text, which you will freely chosen and test by workshop performance, and its theoretical aspect consists of attempts to define the narrative modes of the epic, the lyric and the dramatic, with the dramatic further dividing into tragedy and comedy. These two aspects of the course converge in considerations of how you have drawn on these narrative modes in your own adaptations, and how great writers throughout the centuries have created works which stand on thresholds between them e.g. theatrical novelists or lyrical dramatists. One question which underlies all critical engagement with the subject of genre is whether generic awareness should be understood as an historical encumbrance which stands in the way of representing or expressing personal experience, or whether it is a necessary and enabling resource for increasing the receivers’ pleasure or extending their philosophical horizons. Critics have stood on either side of the debate.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (AUT)

Code LDCL6018A

Credits 30

You’ll be provided 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.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (SPR)

Code LDCL6019B

Credits 30

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.

QUEER LITERATURE AND THEORY

Code LDCL6033B

Credits 30

This module offers you the chance to learn about LGBTQ literature and its development in English-speaking countries, as well as approaches to queer theory, and the relationship of both literature and theory to culture and current events. This means analysing sexuality and gender and the representation of such identities in literature and society, and discussing topics such as intersectionality, the body, and heteronormativity. Authors studied may include James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Gore Vidal, and Sarah Waters, as well as children’s books and young adult novels by Nancy Garden, Ellen Wittlinger, and Marcus Ewert. Authors of theoretical texts looked at may include Nikki Sullivan, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Luce Irigaray, 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, so you will also discuss current events and their links to literature and theory. You will look at a variety of genres in order to see how these different text types work, how they queer genre, and how they approach similar themes in different ways.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Code LDCL6038A

Credits 30

This module offers you the chance to learn about children’s literature and its development. It starts with the history of children’s literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through Aesop’s fables, fairy tales, Victorian and Edwardian literature, and examining authors that might include A.A Milne, Dr. Seuss, Sherman Alexie, and Melvin Burgess, amongst others. The course looks at issues of genre and content as well as at historical context. Theoretical readings on children’s literature are also closely engaged with. By studying the development of children’s literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society. This module is creative and critical and students have a chance to write for children in it.

MADNESS AND MEDICINE: WOMEN'S WRITING IN THE REGENCY

Code LDCL6043A

Credits 20

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.

CHAUCER (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6053A

Credits 30

This module explores the rich and complex writings of Geoffrey Chaucer which we read in relation to their social and cultural contexts (literary, political, theological, philosophical). The module is structured in three parts: after an introduction via a selection of Chaucer’s shorter poems and one of his dream visions (the “Prologue” to 'The Legend of Good Women'), we spend four weeks concentrating on 'Troilus and Criseyde' (in my opinion Chaucer’s very greatest work) and then another four on the riches of the 'Canterbury Tales'. We approach Chaucer’s writing in a number of complementary ways. We attend to the brilliance of Chaucer’s poetry formally by considering his use of literary and generic convention; we approach his writing comparatively by looking at Chaucer’s engagement with classical (Ovid, Boethius, the traditional stories of Troy) and older French and Italian writing (Dante and Boccaccio); we consider the ways in which Chaucer’s writing records and responds to the historical circumstances of late-fourteenth-century England (particularly in the royal court and within London); and we look at the manner in which Chaucer’s works were written and read (‘published’ and circulated) within a medieval manuscript culture and at the implications this has for an understanding of his work. For we might propose that the aim of this module is essentially twofold: to explore together some superlative Chaucerian poetry and, at the same time, to allow you to develop further as medievalists and Chaucerians, encountering the distinctive challenges and possibilities that come with working with this material.

VIRGIL'S CLASSIC EPIC (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6054B

Credits 30

After the Bible, the 'Aeneid' is probably the single most important and influential work in the Western cultural tradition. For T. S. Eliot, it is the “classic of all Europe.” It is also one of the most extraordinary – moving, complex, formally and philosophically subtle and ambitious – poems we have. This module is devoted to exploration of the 'Aeneid' and to its medieval reception. In the first half of the module we will look at Virgil’s poem in relation to its literary models, particularly in Homer’s great epics, 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey', within its own Roman (Augustan) context, and in its formal complexity. The second part attends to the medieval reception of the Aeneid: the accommodation of its challenging pagan difference and the co-option of its remarkable cultural authority within new religious, political, and literary contexts. We will explore Dante’s response to Virgil’s poem in the Divine Comedy alongside those of Augustine and Chaucer; we read medieval Romance reworkings of Virgil’s classical epic; and we consider the variety of ways in which medieval writers looked to continue the 'Aeneid' in their own distinctive ways.

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

You’ll be provided with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period before 1789 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: (pre-1789) (SPR)

Code LDCL6062B

Credits 30

MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN TRADITIONS (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6066B

Credits 30

Who has not heard of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table? Yet why, of all medieval traditions, is this legend the most pervasive medievalism of modern culture? To answer this question we return to the Middle Ages to discover the development from its 12th century Celtic roots, through heroic and romance cultures to its final flourishing in the 15th century in a work by Malory, which all modern versions (including film and tv) are today based upon. The source base of the medieval Arthurian legend is diverse, encompassing chronicle, ballad, courtly and popular romance in verse as well as prose. A variety of English Arthurian texts will be read alongside the folklore of the Welsh Mabinogion collection, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influential Latin work and French Romance texts (in translation). This module focuses on the literary and ideological innovations of Arthurian writers and on the intertextual relations which hold between medieval Arthurian texts. Students will examine the genres and voices of medieval Arthurian narratives, including its resort to prophecy, epic discourse, pseudo-historical discourse, pseudo-exegesis and courtly romance. The various national responses to ideas of myth, legend and history, the cultural significance of differences in the representations of women in the various texts, as well as questions regarding individuality and selfhood that arise in literature produced in a volatile period of religious and social uncertainty and dissent will be explored. This module will enable students familiar with medieval Romance to enhance their awareness of the Arthurian traditions, but is also suitable for students who are encountering medieval literature for the first time.

MEDIEVAL MONSTROSITIES (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6081B

Credits 30

Did medieval people really believe in monsters? Giants, dragons and half-human hybrids are just some of the fantastical creatures that populate Middle English literature. Too readily dismissed by modern readers as mere whimsy, or else the product of credulous minds, instead this module takes monsters seriously as revealing facets of a sophisticated myth-making society. You will consider monsters in a range of genres such as romance, saints' legends, travel writing and visual imagery, as well as their reception by medieval and modern readers and critics. You will interrogate the various discourses of monstrosity and consider what makes a monster through consideration of topics such as: the horror and allure of the monstrous body; monstrous appetites; sexuality and sexual deviance; geography and racial alterity. You will also explore the literary and cultural construction of 'human monsters' (women, pagans, Jews) rendered 'other' due to their perceived divergence from societal and religious norms. You will be able to apply your developing understanding of the discourse of monstrosity in a range of practical contexts such as field trips. Previous experience of Middle English literature will be an advantage but is not required. By the end of the module you should have a more nuanced understanding of the place of monstrosity in medieval literature and have an increased awareness of the ways in which language is used to both shape and respond to perceived differences.

LYRIC (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6087A

Credits 30

The module will incorporate a historical survey of Western lyric, looking at its inception in the poetry of Pindar and Sappho, and the Aristotelian division of poetic arts in lyric, dramatic and epic. It will cover lyrics from Provencal troubadour poets through the Italian and English renaissance to Romantic lyric. Finally, it will cover the fate of lyric in the present day, from 'conceptual writing' and 'post-humanism' which offer a thoroughgoing rejection of lyric, to the embrace of lyric in contemporary young poets. The module will start by considering the question: 'What is lyric'? The purpose is not to establish a transhistorical concept of lyric as genre or mode, but rather to see how different thinkers at different times have approached it. This is a particularly timely question for literary criticism and poetics. We will isolate certain tropes, ethics, and focal points that are taken to be characteristic of lyric, whilst at the same time probing the historicity of lyric as a concept, especially regarding the ideology of the lyric 'I' that is associated with romanticism.

ROMANTIC AND GOTHIC ORIENTALISM, 1720-1830

Code LDCL6091B

Credits 30

The fascination with the mysterious East and the Exotic was an important element of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century writing and has serious consequences for global politics today. Stereotypical representations of eastern religions, Holy Wars, ruthless and cruel tyrants, and eastern women still resonate today in how we view ISIS, Jihad and eastern 'despots' from Saddam Hussein to Kim Jong-un. In this module you’ll explore the material history of the increasing British colonial involvement in the 'East' in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; how that 'East' was constructed and represented for a western metropolitan audience; and explore the rich cultural productions of that involvement in poetry, fictional, prose and visual art. Texts that you’ll discuss will include writing by well-known Romantic writers, such as S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Thomas de Quincey, as well less familiar works by William Beckford, Sir William Jones, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and Thomas Moore. You’ll explore the extraordinary influence of the magical and sensual tales Arabian Nights (including Aladdin) on both Gothic and Romantic period writing. Areas we will discuss will include: India, Persia, the Levant, and China. You’ll also consider such writings in the light of contemporary postcolonial theories of Orientalism including criticism by Edward Said, Gayatori Spivak, Srinivas Aravamudan and others. In this module you’ll concentrate in particular on the representation of the Indian people, places and cultures of the Indian sub continent. You’ll address issues such as Sati, opium addiction, the supernatural, featuring genies, demons, gods and goddesses as we encounter eastern cultures and religions though western eyes. We will visit fantastic gardens and enter the closely-guarded harem. During this module you’ll also speculate on how our contemporary opinions about eastern peoples and customs are influenced by the Oriental Renaissance of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

LATIN AMERICAN NARRATIVES

Code LDCL6093A

Credits 30

'Who would have imagined fifteen years ago that writings of the outcast Chilean Roberto Bolaño who washed ashore in Barcelona via Mexico, would exercise so wide an influence on writers in Spain, Latin America and across the world?' (Granta, Issue 113) And yet, Bolaño's literary output is unthinkable without Borges, just as the Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez's Secret History of Costaguana is inconceivable without Conrad’s Nostromo. Throughout this module you’ll discover the ways in which literatures travel across national boundaries. You’ll explore the web of literary influences woven into some of these Latin American narratives, as well as trace the itinerary of these influential threads as they travelled from the South of the American continent to other literatures. You’ll explore the core of storytelling that underpins Latin American literature and which surfaces in various forms of writing, from the short story to the prose poem and the novel, as well as the 'rewriting' exercise/critical appraisal, such as Alejandra Pizarnik's The Bloody Countess. You’ll read works by Borges, Cortazar, Bolaño, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Clarice Lispector, Alejandra Pizarnik, Valeria Luiselli, amongst others. You’ll be encouraged to close read texts and share your ideas in seminars and one-to-one tutorials, as well as through written work.

THE CONTESTED PAST: LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

Code LDCL6097A

Credits 30

How do we negotiate the darker aspects of our past, particularly when individuals' experiences clash with official history? This module explores the public and private practices of remembering and forgetting in the aftermath of civil war, totalitarianism, colonialism or otherwise repressive rule. In particular, we'll examine the writer's role as collaborator, witness, archivist or dissident: how does the writer facilitate access to, and debate about, contentious, painful or obfuscated history? Our approach to the politics of commemoration is interdisciplinary and draws on ideas from philosophy, historiography, memory and cultural studies as well as heritage and museum studies. The primary material encompasses a range of fictional, non-fictional and visual material from a wide range of genres; most of it is postwar and relatively recent. Since these are global issues, you will also encounter writers from formerly colonised nations in Africa and Asia and from Central and Eastern Europe: be prepared to read in translation.

TRAVEL LITERATURE (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6108B

Credits 30

The 18th-century reading public eagerly devoured narratives of travels around the world. You’ll survey the diverse range of travel literature this century produced. You’ll read accounts of actual and fictional travels, as well as narratives that fall somewhere between the real and the imaginary. Key questions for you will be how travellers' identities and ideas are reshaped through the experience of journeying, how our texts both articulate and question the ideologies underpinning Britain's maritime empire, and how voyage literature connects to other literary genres, including the novel, romance, history, utopia, and anecdote. The readings include texts such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters from Turkey.

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'.

T.S. ELIOT AND TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY

Code LDCL6122B

Credits 30

The poetry of T.S. Eliot has a unique place in modern verse as a body of writing that combines mass popular appeal with intense intellectual challenge. The first part of your module will take you chronologically through the various stages of Eliot's Collected Poems, from the 19th-century influences that combined to produce 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1915) to the wartime contexts of his final major poem, Four Quartets (1935-1942). It will also offer an introduction to Eliot's literary criticism as well as to criticism written about him. The first coursework essay will take the form of an editorial commentary on a chosen poem or passage, giving you an opportunity to follow up allusions and interpretations through wider reading. The second part of your module will look more broadly at Eliot's influence as a poet, critic, and editor. Beginning with his own views of the need to reinvent poetry's cultural significance for the 20th century, you will consider the importance of Eliot's example to the next generation of modernist poets (such as W.H. Auden, W.S. Graham, Lynette Roberts) as well as later poets in Britain and Ireland (such as J.H. Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney) and the Americas (such as John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Octavio Paz). The final project will be a 3,000-word essay on any Eliot-related topic of the your choosing, and may take the form of a creative-critical poetry portfolio and self-commentary in response to the reading for the course.

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.

WRITING RELIGION IN THE AGE OF JOHN MILTON (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6134A

Credits 30

This module begins by introducing you to the central mythic drama of Christianity: in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and 'fell' from perfection; to save humankind, God had to turn his own son into a mortal man and let him be crucified. This story raises the most profound questions about the origins of evil, free will, redemption, and the nature of God. The module seminars unfold through intensive close-reading of the early-modern literary masterpieces which were shaped by these questions, culminating in an in-depth study of all the major late poetry of John Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Before reaching Milton, we read major works by his influential predecessors, which might include authors such as John Donne and Edmund Spenser, and we also pay close attention to writing by women, especially that of Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681), who wrote her own poetic account of the Fall at the same time as John Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Summative assessment takes the form of a 5000-word project in which you will explore the module’s central questions by tackling at least two of the texts we’ve studied. You will be given formative questions every week (and writing exercises in some weeks) to help structure your learning. The module assumes no knowledge of religion, John Milton, or of early-modern literature in general.

CHARLES DICKENS: BEYOND REALITY

Code LDCL6136A

Credits 30

Charles Dickens has been described, and cherished, as one of the great chroniclers of the panorama of mid-Victorian society. At the same time, much modern criticism has rightly emphasised what a strange and innovative writer he is, less a documentary social realist than an early practitioner of what might now be called 'magical realism'. You will examine works from across Dickens's writing career, in a variety of different modes - fiction, journalism, essays, and public speaking - reading them not only in the context of Dickens's times, but also in the context of how other writers in those times dealt with comparable questions, and as part of a larger investigation of art and its relations to the world. As a result, you will be able to develop your interests in the relationships between social reality and its literary representations, in a module which combines in-depth study of Dickens with a broader engagement with theories of realism.

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.

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6144A

Credits 30

You’ll be reading two of the most important novels of the 18th century over several weeks so that you can attend to them closely as they unfold in time. The novels are Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. The secondary readings will engage the central debates happening in novel studies today. You’ll have the opportunity to experiment with ways of working with texts beyond close reading and draw on the methodologies of book history and of the digital humanities.

MINOR LITERATURES: RESISTANCE, RADICALISATION AND READING

Code LDCL6146A

Credits 30

You'll explore writing as a site of resistance and protest and consider representation itself as inherently political. Does this make the work of a reader radical, or how can that work be radicalised? Taking a lead from the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, you’ll ask what it means to write or speak a dominant language in such a way that it stutters or stammers? What would such writing or speaking look or sound like? Deleuze and Guattari suggest that minor literature (minoritarian form in general) takes a dominant, hegemonic, major language and forces it to ‘say’ something different, and to do so differently, dislocating (deterritorialising) it so that a new voice (speaking from a new constituency) can be heard. They use the works of Kafka, a Czech Jew writing in ‘official’ German, as a representative example of how a dominant, major language can be pressed into the service of a minor literature, as a way of inscribing new constituencies, while other critics have considered sub-cultures’ re-appropriation of language, post-colonial writing back, musical subgenres and alternative/underground cinema as also being iterations of minoritarian impulses. You’ll explore various aspects of writing or speaking back, writing against the grain, saying the things major language finds itself unable or uncomfortable to speak about, and articulating the unheard. Writers and texts might include Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, Elias Khoury, Dana Spiotta, Jennifer Egan, along with punk ‘zines, samizdat writing and manifestoes.

FROM KAFKA TO SEBALD: ASPECTS OF 20TH CENTURY 'GERMAN' WRITING

Code LDCL6148A

Credits 30

You will be presented with an opportunity to study in depth a number of key works of 20th century German literature and to explore ways in which they respond to, and reflect, the upheavals of 20th century history. While the focus will be largely on works of prose fiction, this does not preclude the study of other genres. Starting with the modernist crisis of language ( Chandos-crisis ) we will look at works by authors such as Kafka, Rilke, Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf and W. G. Sebald. All works studied are available in translation so that a knowledge of German, while always welcome, is not a requirement.

REALITY BITES: CREATIVE NON-FICTION AND CULTURAL HISTORY

Code LDCL6154B

Credits 30

This module is concerned with three genres that are ostensibly non-fictional: travel writing, the memoir, and literary journalism. All of these texts are written in the first-person and yet often claim to be objective and factual. What precisely is the difference between fiction and non-fiction? And what is 'creative' in creative non-fiction? Much of this prose examines issues of identity and cultural history, mixes the exotic and the mundane, and assembles a peculiarly hybrid text that might include photography, ethnographic passages, anthropological techniques, and quite a bit of social history. Above all, it offers us literary reflections on a reality often perceived to be peculiar, ‘other’ or disturbing. Note that much of the writing here comes from continental Europe and the Americas. We will examine the stylistic, typographical or visual means by which writers make claims on authenticity or, conversely, undermine our faith in their complete veracity. We will reflect on how personal experience and research have been translated into engaging prose without narcissistic wounds being paraded, libel threats looming, or an armada of footnotes crowding the page. What are the techniques, in memoir, travel writing and literary journalism, that account for the pleasure readers take in the company of a narrating, wandering or reflecting first-person persona? How and why is (creative) non-fiction so often also an intertextual space for commenting on reading and on the nature of the literary? NB: This module is independent of the practice-based 2nd option The Writing of Journalism and is not concerned with news journalism, blogs, or feature writing; however, it continues that module’s concern with prose style and voice and interrogates issues of verifiability.

GLOBAL MODERNISMS

Code LDCL6156B

Credits 30

Anglo-American modernism is one part of a movement that spread from 19th-century Europe across the globe. This module investigates the ways that English has engaged with modernism as it reaches outward to the European periphery and beyond. International modernist authors are available to English readers in multiple translations. You’ll learn to assess different English versions of each text, relating stylistic analysis to questions about the intellectual, artistic, and political legacies of modernism. You’ll study lesser-known poets and novelists such as Italo Svevo in Trieste, rescued from oblivion by James Joyce and author of the comic psychoanalytic memoir Zeno’s Conscience; Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, who wrote under multiple poetic identities, each with its own fictional biography; Clarice Lispector, brought as a child from Ukraine to Brazil, where she produced meticulous, unsettling accounts of consciousness; and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, creator in Trilce of one of the most daring lexical and syntactic experiments of the avant-garde. On successful completion of this module, you’ll be able to produce comparative analysis of different translations, evaluating them critically in relation to key modernist concepts, claims and writing practices. You’ll have expanded your understanding of modernism’s international reach and the ways that we understand that reach in English. The module is taught by seminar and assessed by summative project. It will be of particular interest if you’ve studied modernism, translation, or international literature earlier in your degree. There is no language requirement but if you have knowledge of the relevant source languages, you’ll be given the opportunity to use that knowledge.

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.

BANNED BOOKS

Code LDCL6162B

Credits 30

The right to free expression is seriously threatened in many places in the world; it has also never been so passionately defended. You will focus on the history of banned books from the early 20th century to contemporary literature. Novels, poems and plays have often been banned on the grounds of political sedition, obscenity, and blasphemy. You will consider the changing nature of literary censorship, the legalistic and philosophical arguments for and against censorship, the nature of arguments in defence of free expression, why literary writers have so frequently pushed the boundaries of the acceptable and the impact of technology on the history of censorship and free speech. You will trace a series of shifting arguments about why free speech matters: from the drive to explore sexuality in literature, to the politicisation of free speech during the cold war, to current debates about blasphemy and free speech, as well as the idea that free speech is a so-called key Western value. Some of the texts studied on the course will be set because they are, in themselves, explorations of the boundary of prohibition and free expression. Of importance too will be the impact of global communication networks on free speech debates: in the context of the internet, does the nation state control the dissemination of literary texts? If not, what are the implications of the absence of legal control? You will consider both English language texts and texts in translation. Authors considered will probably include James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Boris Pasternak, Salman Rushdie, Elif Shafak and Margaret Atwood, but the authors studied on the course are likely to change to include unfolding censorship events and issues.

AFTER NATURE: LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

Code LDCL6164B

Credits 30

Where do debates in environmentalism, cultural geography and literary criticism meet? What does contemporary literature have to tell us about our relationship with space, place, landscape, nature, rurality, ecology, and even a ‘sense of planet’? On this module you will encounter a range of post-war and contemporary forms, from poetry, short stories, the novel, and literary non-fiction to visual art, the radio essay and film. Each will offer fresh and surprising ways of thinking about a range of different contemporary environments and about our place in a changing world. We will consider in what ways literary genres and traditions have helped to create and produce our understanding of geography in the past and how recent literary works have reworked some of these genres and traditions to mark contemporary changes. We will consider, for example, how authors since the environmental crisis have engaged with/inherited/reworked early modern chorography, the Romantic travelogue, the naturalist’s journal, and the rural essay. To what new ends are these forms put in an uncertain and unstable modern world? Among others, the course will explore work by Alice Oswald, Rana Dasgupta, Tim Robinson, Kathleen Jamie, Patrick Keiller, J.G. Ballard, and Robert Macfarlane. It will also include trips to investigate the nature writing holdings at UEA’s British Archive for Contemporary Writing. Assessment will give you the opportunity to, initially, create your own critical or creative radio essay/podcast (formative) and, later, develop a deeper knowledge of one of the week’s themes, building your own critical (or creative non-fiction) project around it (5,000 word summative). While there are no pre-requisites, this module complements and develops themes explored on level 5 ‘Writing the Wild’ and level 6 ‘Urban Visions: The City in Literature and Visual Culture’.

DARK ROMANTICISM: THE GOTHIC INHERITANCE

Code LDCL6166A

Credits 30

Who hath not loiter'd in a green church-yard, And let his spirit, like a demon-mole, Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard, To see scull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stole; Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr'd, And filling it once more with human soul? (John Keats, 'Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil (1817) 'Dark Romanticism' is a literary subgenre of 'Romanticism', reflecting a fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. Intimately related to Gothicism, it has haunted the Romantic movement ever since its beginnings in the eighteenth century. Romanticism's celebration of unity, creativity, and sublimity has always been menaced by a dark and contrary fascination; with melancholia, insanity, nightmare, criminality and death; with ghosts, monsters and vampires; and with the grotesque and the irrational. The term 'Dark Romanticism' was coined by Mario Praz in his classic study, The Romantic Agony (1933) to discuss European Romanticism's obsessive concern with duality, desire, agony, suicide, morbidity and decadence in the decades following the French Revolution. Numerous recent scholars have since discussed Romantic writing's preoccupation with the psychologically unusual and aberrant from a variety of perspectives including the literary, historical, philosophical and, more recently, a medical point of view. In this module, we will explore this compelling but dangerous interrelation between Romanticism and the Gothic at work in a range of 'agonies' preoccupying our writers: addiction, depression, insanity, cannibalism, monstrosity, homosexuality, the femme fatale, the double, the demonic lover, the vampire, and the Romantic pre-occupation with Lucifer himself. Our module will focus on writers such as J. W. Goethe, S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, Thomas De Quincey, James Hogg, and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre and Dr John William Polidori, author of that most influential story 'The Vampyre' (1819). We will read key Romantic period texts including Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Byron's Don Juan, Keats's 'Isabella or the Pot of Basil', Coleridge's 'Christabel', James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Percy Shelley's drama, The Cenci, as well as lesser known but influential works. You will be encouraged to deliver group presentations on these key texts and subjects, developing your own interests and ideas and working towards the longer research essay by which the module will be assessed.

RACE, WRITING AND IDENTITY IN POST-WAR BRITAIN

Code LDCL6168B

Credits 30

How did the legacy of its empire affect and shape British society during the period of increasing immigration from its former colonies following the Second World War and even now? How did the writing of those immigrants represent the social conflicts and tensions of that period, especially experience of racism and the resistance to it? How have contemporary minority ethnic writers responded to the challenges of the contemporary period, in which racism has taken new forms, such as Islamophobia and anti-refugee movements? You’ll focus on the ways in which postcolonial ideas can help us to understand and reflect upon the aftermath of empire in Britain. You’ll use selected writings by Black and Asian British writers to explore questions of race and racism, culture and ethnicity, religion, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, identity, and belonging that have been stimulated by post-war migration to Britain by residents of its former colonies. These issues will be set in the context of past and contemporary debates about British identity, and how these debates have been shaped and reshaped in response to the successive arrivals of migrants from other parts of the world, and by the creative, intellectual and everyday interventions of those migrants themselves. The main topics of study will be The literature of arrival – post-war Britain and ‘first generation’ migrants; The cultural politics of race, racism and anti-racism; Multiculturalism, belonging, hybridity and negotiation – the re-shaping of British identities; The new politics of exclusion – asylum seekers and Islamophobia.

LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 1660-1750 (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6170A

Credits 30

What is science? What is scientific language? Did you know that there was no such thing as a scientist until 1833? We’re accustomed to thinking of literature and science as separate disciplines – science deals with cold hard facts, literature with the imaginary and fictional – but to the occupants of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such a distinction would have been strange and unfamiliar. On this module, you’ll investigate how the current separation between literature and science came about. You’ll explore the social, cultural, and ideological imperatives that secured the dominance of science in intellectual discourse; you’ll examine how notions of scientific objectivity emerged; and you’ll discover how the new and allegedly more ‘rational’ knowledge produced by scientific practice was received by its first audiences. You’ll read a variety of texts, ranging from advocates of the new science (such as Thomas Sprat, part founder of the Royal Society in 1660, and Richard Bentley, proponent of later Newtonian philosophy); to early modern scientific writing (such as Robert Hooke, who famously described a fly’s eye seen through a microscope, and Robert Boyle, whose experiments with a bird inside an air pump became one of the most well known images of the enlightenment); to literary estimations of the value (or otherwise) of scientific knowledge. This module will provide you with a sense of historical perspective, and an understanding of the kinds of agenda implicit in the modern claim that STEM subjects make the humanities seem both impracticable and unprofitable.

NEW NARRATIVE

Code LDCL6172A

Credits 30

New Narrative began as a late 20th century creative rebellion. From its origins in 1970s punk, second-wave feminism and the gay rights movement, New Narrative writers explored and exploited the relationship between the personal and the political, gossip and literature, high and low art. It is the place where the tell-all memoir meets critical theory, and the place from which writers talked about their own desires and their own experiences in order to challenge the status quo. It is also a writing of friendship and coterie, a place to collaborate and to be influenced: many texts from the New Narrative movement were worked on in workshops that took place in the back rooms of bookshops or in each others’ apartments in San Francisco. Over the last 40 years, New Narrative has spawned generations of radical, experimental, genre-defying writers, from Kathy Acker to Chris Kraus to Maggie Nelson. You'll explore the major themes of New Narrative through reading key texts from the movement. You'll also explore the theoretical and cultural influences surrounding the movement. You will think carefully about the role of the writer in relation to the text, particularly the phenomenon of the ‘cult’ writer; you'll be encouraged to focus your critical studies on one particular New Narrative author in order to explore their life and legacy alongside their body of work. Finally, there will be opportunities to produce your own ‘freak’ and genre-defying texts.

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.

WRITING VERNACULAR, WRITING VOICE

Code LDCL6178B

Credits 30

How does one give voice to the self? This question has preoccupied Twentieth and Twenty First century writers who, in a quest to successfully define themselves and others, have pioneered new language forms. In this module we’ll consider writing voice and vernacular as a language performance aimed at articulating a particular identity. We’ll examine Modernist writers who held orality as a high virtue, Feminist writers determined to develop writing approaches independently of men, writers of colour who have resisted imposed languages, and working class writers committed to presenting true-to-life speech, profanities and all. The writers we’ll examine share a sense that an established literary language has hindered or silenced them, and the module will ask questions which explore the responses to this predicament, such as: how can natural speech be rendered on the page? How do texts achieve an audible and recognisable voice? What does it mean to make use of linguistic codes which are condemned or deemed inferior? Reading may include essays, novels, memoir, short stories, theatre monologues and journalism. For instance, Trainpotting by Irvine Welsh, The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit, How Late It Was How Late, by James Kelman, ‘The Life of Ma Parker’ by Katherine Mansfield, ‘Story in Harlem Slang’ by Zora Neale Hurston, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, ‘The Case for Reparations’ by Ta Nehisi-Coates and Bitch Doctrine by Laurie Penny. In the first half of the module we’ll examine the many ways in which writers use language to challenge literary conventions, salvage histories and reclaim voices and we’ll draw on relevant ideas and criticism including Feminist Theory (such as, The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, Gender Trouble by Judith Butler) Critical Race Theory (such as, The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates, The Race for Theory by Barbara Christian, Africa’s Tarnished Name by Chinua Achebe, and we’ll consider questions of language and power explored by critical thinkers like Mikahail Bakhtin in Speech Genres and Other Essays, Gayatri Spivak in Three Women’s Essays and Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks. In the second half of the module, you’ll have the opportunity to workshop your own writing inspired by the module. You’ll reflect on your own identity as a writer, consider how different texts speak to you and discover the challenges and opportunities offered through exploring and producing you own vernacular writing.

STORIED BODIES: GENDER, SEXUALITY, WRITING AND THE VISUAL AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

Code LDCL6180B

Credits 30

This interdisciplinary module investigates the interweaving of literature and visual culture in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focused on Britain and France, and paying particular attention to the ways in which gender, sexual and working identities, bodies and relationships are depicted, performed, disrupted, questioned and sometimes radically reimagined. The writers and artists at work in this period produced a rich stew of aesthetic and literary innovation, often experimental and provocative in tone, style and subject matter. The cultural movements which are combined under the general heading of the ‘fin de siècle’, including Symbolism, Aestheticism and Decadence, also contributed to the development of modernism and this module is intended as an opportunity for students who wish to extend their studies from the Level 5 Victorian Writing and Modernism modules and to explore both interdisciplinary and creative-critical opportunities. We will examine different kinds of writing (novels, short fiction, drama, essays, experiments in art criticism, science and pseudo-science) and art (painting, photography, early film), as well as dance and performance.

RENAISSANCE OBSCENITIES (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6184B

Credits 30

The Italian Renaissance was predicated on the recovery and imitation of classical models, and subsequently by an artistic (re)turn to the natural. But what if those models were deemed obscene or pornographic by Christian morality? Are they any less valid intellectually or artistically? Should we (or can we) ignore the imitation of such models? And are all forms of the natural to be celebrated, or are some to be suppressed? This module examines the culture of artistic, moral and intellectual freedom that emerged in the early sixteenth century in Italy, coincident with the advent of print, a culture which was suppressed by Church and State via the Counter-Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century. Obscene and pornographic texts and images which explicitly illustrated diverse sexual practices and sexualities were produced, disseminated, copied, censored, prohibited and destroyed. The module examines the classical precedents and models for Renaissance erotic and pornographic works, their late medieval precursors, and the spread of such literature by English imitators following the Counter-Reformation. It examines the threat that libertine culture posed to the Church and State (which were not always in agreement), the legal and intellectual responses in England and on the continent, the establishment of the papal Index of Prohibited Books and the Italian Inquisitions in Rome and Venice, and early forms of censorship. Crucially, these obscene materials were not alien to humanism, the core intellectual project of the Renaissance, but were defended as being entirely in-keeping with its classicizing impulses. In fact, the obscenities were produced for the most part by those with a humanist education. The module ultimately examines the moment at which print culture, Renaissance idealism, and State control intersected and clashed. Each week opens with a discussion of a particular piece of Renaissance art deemed obscene or scandalous, pertinent to the texts that week. Students will present on the art in order to introduce the week’s focus.

WRITING CONSCIOUSNESS: STYLE AND MODERNIST FICTION

Code LDCL6186B

Credits 30

What is style? It is the most essential and yet most elusive property of writing. How can we possibly describe something so intangible? and how can we discover and develop our own distinctive styles as writers, of fiction and non-fiction? These questions were raised with new urgency, precision, and ambition by modernist writers, who urged both that an attention to style was the first aim of good criticism, and that any good writer must develop by trying their hand at imitating and parodying the styles of previous writers, in the way that painters once were taught by imitating previous painters. This creative-critical module approaches these questions and explores these techniques through a particular focus on one of the central strands in modernist fiction, the representation of consciousness. We will focus on novelists and writers including Henry and William James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Dostoevsky, Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Eimearr McBride, subjecting to close analysis each writer’s style: among many other topics this will include the way they break up the linearity of the sentence to do justice to the non-linear nature of the mind; how they explore self and other through the figure of the double and the full range of characters across a novel; and how they render the story-telling property of consciousness through experiments in plot. We will consider such subjects as desire, anxiety, memory, sexuality, gender, and race. Students will be expected both to analyse style and to seek to imitate it: we will, to give one example, write about Dorothy Richardson and also try to write like her, and in doing so to develop both our critical understanding and our own writing skills. This is meant to be a ‘bridge module’ of particular use to students who wish to develop as writers of fiction, whether or not they are students in English and Creative Writing. But it will also help all students develop their distinctiveness as writers of non-fictional prose and their capacity to reflect on the implications of different ways of making sentences and paragraphs.

Optional B Modules

(30-90 credits)

DISSERTATION OR SPECIAL SUBJECT I

Code PPLP6102A

Credits 30

In this module, you’ll explore a topic in philosophy that is of particular interest to you as an individual, normally based on ideas that have emerged from your work on previous modules in philosophy, or from seeing the connections between more than one area of your studies. In some cases, you might be able to pursue an area of philosophy that is not otherwise included in the undergraduate curriculum but in which we have research expertise among the full time staff (and for these areas, it may also be possible, where workloads permit, to organise a group study programme, or ‘special subject’, for you to work together with several other students with the same interests). When enrolling for this module, you’ll need to include a second choice on your enrolment form, and you’ll need to have achieved an overall average of 60% or above in your second year assessment, with good attendance and good submission of formative work in the second year. You’ll need to fill in the form sent by the module organiser in advance of module enrolment, in order to secure a place on this module. You’ll also need to agree a topic with a supervisor (if this is not possible, you’ll need to move to a different module). NB You may not take more than one supervised dissertation on any degree, but you may take up to two of these philosophy modules as group study programmes (or 'special subjects'). Please contact the module organiser for details. Teaching arrangements will be settled after you’ve enrolled on the course.

DISSERTATION OR SPECIAL SUBJECT II

Code PPLP6104B

Credits 30

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND POLITICS FOR THIRD YEARS

Code PPLP6138A

Credits 30

RELIGION AND WORLD PHILOSOPHIES FOR THIRD YEARS

Code PPLP6139A

Credits 30

MIND AND LANGUAGE FOR THIRD YEARS

Code PPLP6141A

Credits 30

In this module you will be invited to engage with some of the key issues that figure in Philosophy of Mind and in Philosophy of Language, and to identify the interconnections between the two. Some major thinkers in the field, both recent and from earlier periods of the Western canon of philosophy, will be studied, and chosen set texts may be selected for close attention as relevant. Topics might include the mind-body problem, the nature of mind and its relation to the brain, issues connected with meaning and understanding, how (if at all) language governs, limits or facilitates thought, and the relation between language and the things about which we use it to talk. By taking this module in your third year you will explore a selection of these topics. If you took the complementary Level 5 Mind & Language module in year 2, you can complete the course by taking this module in your third year, so as to cover the full range of topics, or you can take this one as a stand-alone module.

ETHICS FOR THIRD YEARS

Code PPLP6142B

Credits 30

What is morality? And in what ways does it impinge on our lives, in deciding what to do? There are issues relating to ethics that are theoretical and meta-ethical, about what kind of judgements are being made and what is their basis in fact or in some realm of values; there are normative issues, about how, if at all, a theory can help to predict or decide what a person ought to do or which dispositions are commendable; and there are practical issues, about the real dilemmas of life and death, about fairness, love and compassion, as we face them in the world, and not just in imaginary trolley-problems . To complete a course in ethics you would want to explore all these aspects of the subject, and during this module you’ll engage with a selection of these, focusing either on the theoretical aspects, including attention to some major historical figures, or more on practical ethics. If you took the complementary Level 5 module last year, you can complete the Ethics course in your third year by taking this module as well, or you can take this as a stand-alone module.

KNOWLEDGE SCIENCE AND PROOF FOR THIRD YEARS

Code PPLP6143B

Credits 30

PHILOSOPHY MEETS THE ARTS (THIRD YEAR MODULE)

Code PPLP6144B

Credits 30

Philosophy has much to say about the arts, and much to learn from them. In this module you will have a chance to explore some aspects of this relationship. Some issues that arise fall into what we would call aesthetics and the philosophy of art: we can ask about the value of art, aesthetic experience and judgement, artistic creativity, interpretation and representation, and we can investigate the views of many past thinkers on these matters. On the other hand, we can also use art to illuminate philosophy, and for this purpose we have chosen to focus primarily on cinema (while the module “Literature and Philosophy” investigates similar questions in connection with literature”). This module will focus on one or other of these two aspects of the encounter with beauty and the arts, so if you have already taken the complementary module at level 5, in your second year, you can also take this in order to cover both aspects of the subject, or it can be taken as a stand-alone module.

ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY FOR THIRD YEARS

Code PPLP6145B

Credits 30

How can we avoid environmental catastrophe? How can philosophy help? The relationship between human beings and the natural world is the basis of everything we are and yet we do not seem to have found a way to avoid destruction, degradation and potential catastrophe. In this module we will examine various ways in which philosophy can examine our relationship with the natural world and contribute to the fight to protect the planet. Topics may include the ethics of climate change; value theory and nature; human-animal relationships; the ways science, art and politics affect our relationships with the natural world. This module will cover a selection of these topics. It can be taken as a stand-alone module or, if you took the associated Level 5 module in your second year, you can add a new focus to your work in this area by taking this third year one as well.

KEY THINKERS AND TEXTS FOR THIRD YEARS

Code PPLP6146A

Credits 30

The history of philosophy, from ancient times to our own, is richly studded with exciting and innovative thinkers, whose ideas still spawn a vast volume of research and reflective criticism. These great minds are our partners in many fascinating slow-motion dialogues that extend over decades, centuries, and even millennia. We converse with them about some of the most significant issues in the field. In this module you’ll join in this discussion by joining a seminar focused on reading and discussion of some more of the original texts (in English translation, if that is not the original language), under the guidance of a research expert in the field. Texts are selected by the seminar leader, to complement your other second and third year modules, and will not include precisely the same texts as are included elsewhere in the philosophy Honours programme. Rather we’ll aim to focus on thinkers whose work is insufficiently addressed in the other modules. Examples of thinkers most likely to appear in the seminars for this module include Plato, Aristotle, the Presocratic Philosophers, Ancient Sceptics, Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, George Berkeley, thinkers from early Analytic philosophy, early or late Wittgenstein, Simone Weil or Iris Murdoch. During this module you’ll be taught in a seminar/reading group style, with each group meeting on a weekly basis for twelve weeks. One or more such seminar groups may meet, depending on student enrolments and staff availability, and each group will be reading a different text or texts, from a different period or school of thought. You’ll be enrolled into whichever group interests you most (you’ll need to say which one you want to attend when you sign up for the module). Seminar groups will run with a minimum of ten students in the group: if you choose a group with less than 10 participants, you’ll be offered a choice of a different seminar group or a different module. This is a free-standing module that can be taken by itself. However, if you took the complementary module for second years at Level 5, then adding this module in your third year will allow you to thereby create a two-semester course, and to explore a wider selection of historical thinkers, as a fitting supplement to the topical modules that you’ll have taken over these two years.

EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHIES (THIRD YEAR MODULE)

Code PPLP6146B

Credits 30

How can we make sense of the vast and complex world we are plunged into at birth? What happens when we become alienated from the world and its everyday meaning? If there is no absolute meaning assigned to human life by divine authority, does life have any meaning at all? Are we absolutely free to make sense of the world in any way we choose? Does death present an ultimate limit to human existence and freedom? Existential philosophers have grappled with these questions and in the process developed new ways of thinking about art, science, politics, divinity and every aspect of human life. Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the key founders of existential philosophy and his work began an important tradition that influenced thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. This module will focus either on the explosive work of Nietzsche himself or on the existential tradition he inspired, so if you have already taken the complementary module at level 5 in your second year, you can also take this in order to cover both aspects of the subject, or it can be taken as a stand-alone module.

Optional C Modules

(0-40 credits)

US INTERVENTIONISM, THE CIA AND COVERT ACTION

Code AMAH6003B

Credits 30

Covert intervention represents the most controversial aspect of U.S. foreign relations. No agency is more closely associated with it than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Supposedly hidden from view, the CIA is nonetheless known around the world and is regularly in the news and a fixture on our cultural landscape. We will reveal the hidden history of how and why the United States has manipulated abroad from the twentieth century to the present. We discover how we come to understand the “secret world of covert action. After an introduction to the key conceptual and historical debates regarding covert action as a tool of U.S. foreign policy, you will examine key moments and cases of U.S. interventionism, from Europe, to Asia, to Africa, to Latin America, to the Middle-East, and in America itself. Have clandestine activities been consistent with official policies or do they represent a form of covert imperialism? How have they been resisted? You will gain a sound understanding of the institutions and processes behind covert action, especially the role of the CIA, and analyse how American interventionism is debated at home. You will work with previously classified sources, the latest secondary literature, and draw on fictional sources like films and novels to gain a fuller and richer understanding of the topic. As a result, you will be able to debate ongoing questions regarding covert American power and the nation’s role in the world.

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND EMPIRE

Code AMAH6041A

Credits 30

Racism knows no borders. African Americans have long been attuned to the international character of white supremacy. As the black intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois noted at the dawn of the 20th century, racism in the United States “is but a local phase of a world problem.” You will examine the global character of the black freedom struggle in the United States. Historically denied full citizenship rights in the United States, African Americans often looked abroad in their fight against racial prejudice – connecting the struggle against Jim Crow to calls for colonial independence around the world. Over the course of the semester, you will explore how and why black Americans forged transnational alliances that challenged racism on a local and a global level. Covering connections between African Americans and movements for racial justice in Europe, Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and beyond, you will be asked to critically engage with the global political outlook of prominent black figures, including Marcus Garvey, Claudia Jones, Huey Newton and Barack Obama. On successful completion of your module, you will have a broad knowledge of the global forces that have shaped African American history. In addition to this, you will be able to identify and engage with theories relating to transnational, diaspora and black Atlantic history. Finally, you will be able to critically reflect on how people and cultures are connected throughout the world.

GENDER IN AMERICAN CULTURE

Code AMAS6032B

Credits 30

The Statue of Liberty is emblematic of the democratic ideals espoused since the American Revolution. Yet, the feminine figure that stands aloft in the New York skyline is also symbolic of discourses of gender: the ideals and expectations shaping men and women’s lives as gendered beings. You will consider how traditional discourses of gender have shaped the identity of Americans and the American nation. You'll start with an overview of traditional conceptual models of masculinity and femininity in 21st century America. You'll then use a variety of case studies for the remainder of your module to enable you to think carefully and critically about how particular models of gender operated within certain contexts. These case studies will include debates around the body and representations of gender in iconographical form and visual culture, in addition to reflecting on gendered rhetoric in the political arena, the workplace, and institutions such as the military. You will consider how particular ideals of gender have been articulated in various contexts and how this has informed wider discourses central to the American nation. You'll learn through a mixture of seminars and self-directed learning, with a particular focus on class discussion in the sessions. You'll be asked to prepare and deliver a class presentation, either in a group or alone, for a particular session of your choosing. This can then form the basis of your ideas for later work if you'd like. You'll be assessed entirely through coursework. Throughout the module you will develop knowledge and skills to enable you to take forward either to postgraduate study or in your chosen career. You'll develop your communication skills, growing intellectually through the weekly discussions, which will enable you to effectively position an argument. You'll also expand your research, writing, and presentation skills.

WRITING AMERICAN RIGHTS

Code AMAS6063A

Credits 30

The American nation was founded, at least in principle, on ideals of freedom and equality. Yet the history of rights in the United States is characterised by exclusion, injustice, and 'exemptionalism.' From the colonial seventeenth century through to the present day, ideas and ideals of rights and legal personhood have been explored, debated, interrogated, and extolled in American writing, from early pamphlets through the novelistic and poetic forms to art and music. This module will explore the relationship between rights formation, law, and the literary imagination examining such topics as natural rights, native sovereignty, reproductive rights, reparations, civil rights, LGTBQA+ rights, international and domestic rights, and human rights (for example). The module demonstrates the importance of the cultural history of creative engagement with the law and rights.

THE CRUSADES

Code HIS-6001A

Credits 30

We will consider the history of the Crusades and the Crusader States from 1095 to 1291, covering a broad range of themes, religious , military and social, and taking into consideration the relations between Christians and Moslems in the Holy Land. Particular attention will be paid to primary sources, which are abundant and available in English translation.

RUSSIA IN REVOLUTION 1905-1921

Code HIS-6004B

Credits 30

More than a century after Lenin's Bolsheviks proclaimed the world's first socialist revolution in Petrograd, the events of 1917 retain their power to fascinate, inspire, bewilder and repel. How can we understand the Russian revolution, why did it happen, and what did it mean for the people who made and lived through it? On this module we'll use a range of sources, including contemporary documents, newspaper reports, and memoirs - some translated specially for this module - to answer these questions. We start with the run-up to the revolutionary events of 1905, when the whole empire was convulsed with strikes, uprisings and armed clashes. We then take the story through the Tsarist regime's attempt to shore up its authority through limited consitutionalist concessions, before looking at World War One and the fall of the monarchy. We'll look in detail at what happened in 1917 and why - not only in the Russian heartland but also in certain non-Russian parts of the empire. Finally, we'll examine the civil war and why the Reds won. Throughout, we put the story in its historical, political and geographical context, always with an eye to its impact on later developments up to today. By understanding the events of a century ago, you'll gain insights into the Russia of today and the troubled and turbulent post-Soviet area. You'll also gain invaluable experience of carrying out in-depth independent research and presenting your findings.

NATIONALISM IN EUROPE SINCE 1789: Shaping Identities in the Age of Modernity

Code HIS-6019A

Credits 30

You will examine in depth the history of nationalism in Europe from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. The central theme is the relationship between the rise and development of nationalism and the shaping of images and discourses about Europe. You will consider and compare the strength of nationalism to the weakness of Europeanism in order to improve your historical understanding of identity formation processes in the modern age. In this sense, it does not consider the nation and Europe as being one the denial of the other, but as forces interacting in complex ways and, in given instances, feeding upon one another. Centred on this theoretical concern, you will be offered a broad survey of the history of nationalism from the Age of Enlightenment to the European integration process, explaining how it has developed into a mass movement and an ideology affecting so deeply the life of millions of individuals across Europe. The perspective used will be that of the cultural historian and the historian of ideas and ideologies. A variety of different primary sources – including pictures, novels, private correspondence, newspaper articles, political tracts and pamphlet, history books, films, songs, etc… – will be used to highlight, on the one hand, the ambiguities of modern nationalism, to explain its quasi-religious nature and explore its strength and resilience. On the other hand, they will help us investigate how and to what extent discourses about Europe affected, after the Second World War, one of the greatest projects of political engineering ever attempted, highlighting the economic success of EU integration and considering its incapacity to create a strong attachment to EU institutions. The course is interdisciplinary in nature. While it is essentially addressed to historians, especially if you are interested in cultural history and in the history of ideologies, it also considers sociological issues and topics that would appeal if you are interested in politics.

IMPERIALISTS, PASHAS & REVOLUTIONARIES: IRAQ, 1914-2003

Code HIS-6020A

Credits 30

This module explores the eventful and troubled history of modern Iraq. Taking its starting point in the nineteenth century, when Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire, the module explores how the country came under British tutelage following the Great War and how it subsequently experienced a turbulent history as various political actors sought to wrest control of the newly established state. The module pays special attention to key moments when the course of Iraq’s history changed, such as wars, military coups, and revolutions, but also periods in between when society returned to some sort of normality. It will particularly focus on the rise of political ideologies, especially Arab nationalism, and its local counterpart, Iraqi nationalism – but also other ideologies such as socialism, communism and Baᶜthism. Saddam Hussein’s domination of the country (1979-2003) is also an important element of the module.

YOUTH IN MODERN EUROPE

Code HIS-6023A

Credits 30

The importance of youth as a driving force for social change has been recognised by many historians. Young people were often at the forefront wherever revolutions took place, wars were fought and tensions in society erupted. However, the historical study of youth is still a relatively young discipline. This module uses ‘youth’ as a prism to study key themes in 20th century European history, such as the experience of war, life under dictatorship and the longue durée of social change. We shall examine the diverse experience of youth in Western and Eastern Europe during war and peace times, including the Communist and Nazi state-sponsored youth systems, and also the way in which generational experience and conflicts became underlying forces for social and political change. The module employs a strong comparative approach and countries studied include France, Britain, the Soviet Union, West and East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The seminars will be accompanied by several film screenings.

VICTORIAN UNDERWORLDS

Code HIS-6026A

Credits 30

You will be introduced to the darker side of life in Victorian Britain. Though this was undoubtedly a period of economic prosperity, not everyone shared in the gains. You will look at those who, for reasons of poverty or ‘deviance’ were confined to the margins. Topics include the criminal and insane, gender and insanity, prostitution, drink, slums, the London Irish, and Jack the Ripper. By looking at the margins and the misfits, we will seek to gain a deeper understanding of British society in the 19th century.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR: A NEW HISTORY

Code HIS-6051B

Credits 30

We will explore the impact of the First World War on European and non-European states, societies, and cultures. Our aim is to broaden and deepen the students’ knowledge by introducing some of the lesser known aspects of the conflict, such as the campaigns on the Eastern front, in Africa, or the Middle East. You will investigate the role and perception of colonial troops in the European theatre of war and examine the war efforts of such countries as Italy, Serbia, the Ottoman Empire, and Australia. Further topics to be discussed include alliance politics and the role of neutral states, psychological effects of ‘industrialised slaughter’, atrocities against non-combatant civilians, captivity and occupation, state propaganda and the spiritual mobilisation of intellectuals, as well as processes of social change with regard to home and family life, ethnicity and class. We will draw on a wide range of primary sources, including poems, paintings, and film. In their coursework, students will have the opportunity to study more specific issues, such as naval and aerial warfare, British military strategy, civil-military relations in democratic and autocratic states, medical innovations, the war experiences of children, or questions of memory and commemoration.

DEATH IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Code HIS-6052B

Credits 30

In medieval England, death and what lay beyond were constantly visible. Parts of the landscape were given over to the dead: there were barrows, haunted by the pagan dead; cemeteries for the Christian dead; and lonely hermitages, whose occupants spoke with the dead. ‘King Death’, shown as a skeleton with spear or bow, would strike down the living at any age. Ghosts wandered forth from the grave, and vivid images of the dead were painted in churches, haunting churchgoers every Sunday, dancing before their mind’s eye in their dreams. Visions of the dead were not uncommon, and sometimes they made such demands on the living that the latter spent their lives serving them. Studying death, you will learn about the impact of this universal and timeless fear, and you'll discover the role of belief systems in combating deep anxieties that are part of the human condition. The module is designed as much for beginners as for those who have studied medieval history before. Through lectures, seminar discussion, and private study, you'll develop an understanding of beliefs about death and the otherworld in medieval England; how medieval people prepared for death; how ghosts and the undead irrupted into their world; the role of those who served the dead or acted as mediators between the dead and the living; demons, the evil dead and saints (the holy dead); and how death was represented in medieval art. Our trip around East Anglian churches explores tombs and wall paintings. At the end of module, you'll have gained the capacity to reflect on human belief systems; and by studying death you'll also discover strategies for coping with the fears which have accompanied life in every age and culture.

CONTESTING THE PAST: REPRESENTATION AND MEMORY

Code HIS-6077B

Credits 30

In this module, you will explore how the past is constantly constructed and reconstructed in the present. In the first part of the module we will consider how mnemonic processes are created, by who, and for what purpose. Commemoration, memorialisation, and visual representations form a key part of this process. In the second part of the module, we will study the ways in which individuals and groups remember and how this often differs from official or mediated discourses. In the third and final part, we will explore various ‘memory conflicts’ and their present day consequences. Throughout, film, photography, visual and audio media, and oral history will form key components of our studies.

SLAVERY IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC WORLD

Code HIS-6081A

Credits 30

This module begins by surveying African, Native American and European labour regimes in the fifteenth century in order to establish a foundation for studying the transformations that followed European imperial expansion and the inauguration of the transatlantic slave trade. We will examine the process of enslavement in Africa, North America, and the Mediterranean; the ransom, exchange and sale of captives; and the development of slave markets in the European colonies in the Americas. We will study childhood and family life in various enslaved communities; the material lives of slaves; and the rise of distinct cultures within the African diaspora. We will compare the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and British Empires with regard to the practice of slavery. We will also trace patterns of slave resistance, escapes, rebellions, and the creation of maroon communities. The semester will end with an examination of the tangled international politics surrounding the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and the end of plantation slavery across the Atlantic World.

GRAND STRATEGY

Code HIS-6082A

Credits 30

This module examines the theory and practice of grand strategy in historical and contemporary contexts from a variety of analytical perspectives. It defines grand strategy as ‘the calculated relation of means to large ends’. It focuses on how parts relate to the whole in whatever an individual, a corporation or a nation might be seeking to accomplish. The strategists considered range over some two and a half millennia. Some represent the best thinking and writing on this subject; others exemplify success and failure in the implementation of grand strategy.

GLOBAL APPETITES: SUGAR & SPICE AND COFFEE & RICE

Code HIS-6084B

Credits 30

For all people, from kings to commoners, daily life in the early modern period revolved around the consumption of food. Preparing, presenting, and eating food was central to social lives and had cultural significance. Food played a major role in political developments at international, national and local levels, with concern focused on regulation, the avoidance of contamination, agricultural improvement, nutrition, and imperialist expansion. During the early modern period economic cycles were dependent on the weather, which affected local harvests. For centuries before the European discovery of America, cannibalism had served as a marker of evil. It figured prominently in mythic depictions of distant, dangerous peoples, and accusations of cannibalism accompanied widespread attacks against Jews. The early European adventurers who explored Africa and the Americas were often preoccupied by cannibalism, and their fears were cited to justify conquest, colonization, the displacement of indigenous peoples, and slavery. Many exotic new foodstuffs arrived in Europe during this time. Spices from the East such as cinnamon and nutmeg gave flavour to products which would become staples, such as rice and potatoes. New fruits and vegetables such as tomatoes and pineapples were often initially greeted with skepticism. The impact of sugar on western diets cannot be over-emphasized, expanding waistlines, rotting teeth (it was even used as a tooth cleaning agent) and being moulded into sweet sculptures to show-off at fancy banquets. This was edible conspicuous consumption. Sugar refineries were established across Europe, and sugar was sold in cones wrapped in blue paper. Initially a food of the rich, it was eventually considered a staple food. However, the poor did not merely emulate the rich in their consumption of these products. Like many other products, sugar has a dark history too, and its production relied on slavery and the manipulation of diets elsewhere. Coffee, tea and chocolate changed during the early modern period from medicinal substances, to luxuries, to habitual products. This module will allow students to consider the venues of consumption – the coffeehouses and the alehouses, as well as taverns, markets and inns. It will also consider the surviving material culture of food – oyster shells, cutlery, crockery and cookware. The history of food trade and middlemen will, inevitably, form part of this module. The European countries with the most extensive trading networks had the most varied diets. Initially, this was the southern part of Europe – the Iberian Peninsula and Italy, where ports were supplied from the East and across the Atlantic. Eventually, the Dutch and the English overtook Mediterranean countries, allowing their citizens better diets with more exotic goods. In the London parish of St Giles Cripplegate in the late-seventeenth century there were over four hundred victuallers, many cooks, confectioners, a wafer maker, a gingerbread maker and a noodleman. Food and ways of eating were loaded with moral significance. In the minds of many commentators, diets continued to distinguish civilized peoples from savages, and humans from beasts. Closer European contacts with Native Americans and East Indians in the seventeenth century triggered a re-examination of good and bad diets, and helped inspire the first concerted efforts in England to promote vegetarianism. This module will consider the history of food from various perspectives: production, distribution, regulation, preparation, consumption, and conflict. It will draw upon a variety of historical and geographical contexts to examine how people came to eat what they ate – with Europe being the main focus, but also widening the scope to take in foodstuffs transported from right across the globe. The primary source material will also be varied, and will include export lists, diaries, travel accounts, images, surviving material culture, didactic manuals by people such as Thomas Tryon and Eliza Smith and fiction by the satirical pub landlord Ned Ward and the novelist Tobias Smollett. Twelve substantive sessions will be on these subjects: • Economies of eating – from banquets to domestic frugality • Cannibalism • Flavouring: sugar and spice • The bread of life: grains and carbohydrates. • Fridays, Fish and Empire • Preserving: fats and salt. • The fattened cow and fat pigs in clover – the agricultural revolution (fieldtrip to Holkham Hall) • Cooking – domestic, fast food and mass catering. • God and vegetables, savagery and vegetarianism • This Little Piggy went to market. Provisioning: market regulation, dearth, and riots • Beer Street and Gin Lane: Excess and intoxicants. • Wilful waste makes woeful want: Leftovers, adulteration and mouldy food.

CAMPS IN HISTORY AND MEMORY: THE 20TH CENTURY IN DETENTIONS, MIGRATIONS, AND EXPLOITATION

Code HIS-6086A

Credits 30

The late philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called the 20th century 'a century of camps'; for him, camps were testing grounds for totalitarian regimes. In this module, we will study the history of the violent last century through the unique lens of camps: concentration camps, forced labour camps, POW camps, refugee camps, and others. Through diverse material selected for the course, we will analyse the well-known events of the 20th century by looking at camps as places of detention, indoctrination, re-education, labour exploitation, and extermination. This unique angle provides insights into the politics of great totalitarian powers, as well as their models for organising and governing society and interacting with other nations of the world. Camps did not appear out of nowhere; each place of detention was part of an institutional network driven by divergent aims: to contain, correct, re-educate, punish. We will study these networks within their historical contexts, using diverse materials specific to each case. Also, a study of camps cannot be limited to camp walls and barbed wire; while static themselves and built to limit people's movements, camps were ironically dependent on the movements of people from place to place. Thus a study of camps inevitably involves the study of forced migrations. To acquaint you with the less studied side of global, regional and transnational interactions, this module will use a variety of sources, analyses, and methods in order to make sense of international regimes of detention, control, and punishment.

THE JAPANESE EMPIRE

Code HIS-6086B

Credits 30

The rise and demise of the Japanese Empire happened at an extraordinary speed. In the course of a few decades from the late nineteenth century onward, Japan secured colonial territories that stretched from Inner Mongolia and Manchuria to the South Pacific. This ambitious expansion unsettled the Western powers and affected the destiny of millions of ‘fellow Asians’, only to come to a disastrous end in 1945. Japan’s imperialist legacy remains complex and contentious today. Primary and secondary literature assigned in this module will take you to the specific ‘spaces’ – local, regional, national, transnational - that provided the context for Japanese imperialism. You will explore such topics as racial encounters in Taiwan, assimilation policies in Korea, utopian development in Manchuria and pan-Asian ideologies. At a micro-level, you will familiarize yourself with the lives of planners, settlers, colonized subjects, soldiers, and others. In a broader sense, you will acquire critical insights into imperialism as it unfolded in a non-western setting.

THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

Code HIS-6098B

Credits 30

‘The mother of our own’: that was how nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt described the culture of the Renaissance in Italy. Without a doubt the Italian Renaissance remains one of the most celebrated movements in European cultural history, a byword for ‘genius’, with a place in public consciousness so dominant for so long as to be intimidating, and surely ripe for questioning. For, to our modern eyes, the Italian Renaissance can look distinctly strange. Humanists saw in the reform of the language they spoke and wrote the path to a reform of society. Painting (but also architecture, sculpture, and even metalworking) sought to attain the status of literature, and all these arts grappled with the competing urges to emulate antiquity and imitate nature. Scholars and even priests sought to get closer to the One through the esoteric philosophy that they believed had come to them from Ancient Egypt and could even be found in hieroglyphs. Citizens and statesmen reconsidered their fate as soldiers and courtiers, as the Italian peninsula became the battlefield of Europe at the same time as it influenced the entire continent. Cities alternately incorporated and rejected communities of Greeks, black Africans, and Jews. Meanwhile, writers sought to understand and explain the contemporary political problems they faced through the study and writing of history. Students will grapple with this fascinating and contradictory period (c. 1425 – c. 1550) through the treatises and histories of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the poetry of Poliziano, Ariosto, and Vittoria Colonna, the (auto-)biographies of Vasari and Cellini, and the works of artists including Titian, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.

QUEENS AND QUEENSHIP IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Code HIS-6100A

Credits 30

This module explores the political and cultural role played by English and European queens in the early modern period. The module draws on a variety of primary sources (advice literature for queens, letters, plays, portraits and images of material objects including jewellery and clothes) in order to investigate the ways in which queens and noble women related to and exercised power. Relying on a variety of examples of queens, queen regents, queen consorts and women within the court, the module addresses questions such as: how was queenship conceptualized in the early modern period? What sources of legitimacy did queens draw on? How did they enact and display their agency and power? How can we identify female agency and the constructions of female career patterns within the court?

WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER: GLOBAL SEXUALITIES AND CONTEMPORARY QUEER CULTURES

Code HUM-6005A

Credits 30

The transnational movement of bodies, images, and capital has transformed modern conceptualisations of gender and sexuality. Sexual practices, identities, and subcultural formations have been altered through processes of migration and globalisation, as well as by the advent of new media technologies and the wide-reaching circulation of categories such as gay, lesbian, and transgender. In this context, this module aims to situate categories of gender and sexual difference within specific cultural and political contexts, and investigate non-normative gender and sexual formations in relation to emerging discourses on race and class and to anti-colonial theories of modernity and global capitalism. At the centre of the module sit questions such as: How have queer subjects been incorporated into nationalist projects and consumer culture? How has the liberal framework of human rights reshaped the struggles of queer movements outside the West? In what ways have transnational discourses on multiculturalism reshaped notions of queer community and belonging in global cities and in postcolonial metropolitan spaces? What role have media technologies and various forms of visual culture played in the reconstitution of gender and sexual identities and of representations of queer desire, affect, and kinship? Addressing these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, and drawing on case studies from different geographical regions and from different disciplinary fields, the overall aim of the module is to explore the varied ways local histories and geographies interact with the forces of political, economic, and cultural globalisation, focusing especially on the experiences of sexual minorities in the Global South and of queer diasporas in the Global North.

FAMILY LAW: ADULT RELATIONSHIPS

Code LAW-6013A

Credits 20

Adult Relationships Law is a socio-legal study of marriage (the formation of marriage, the purposes and status of marriage, claims to equal marriage), divorce (the ground of divorce, how the process works, whether the process should be reformed), financial settlements on divorce (what settlement can be expected, should prenups be enforceable), cohabitation without marriage (remedies on breakdown of the relationship, should cohabitants have divorce-style rights) and domestic violence. This module reflects both the practical application of family law – What is the law? How does it work in practice? – and the theoretical basis of the law – Why is the law the way it is? What does that say about society? How could we think differently about it, and change the law? It develops law-specific academic and practical skills as well as transferable skills.

INTERNATIONAL AND EU ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

Code LAW-6014A

Credits 20

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on? “(Henry David Thoreau, a letter to H.G.O. Blake, May 20, 1860). Our planet is being plundered, degraded and polluted at an unprecedented rate. This pattern of human activity compromises not only the right of future generations to a healthy environment, but also their ability to fulfil their most basic needs. The biggest environmental challenges of our time, such as climate change, trans-boundary pollution and the loss of biodiversity, require a common action by the international community as a whole. International Environmental Law represents the set of legal rules and principles that guide the international community in its collective effort to meet these challenges. This proposed module aims to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the context, foundations and the complexities of international environmental law, and its application through European Union (EU) law. It will review the historical background and the developments that shaped the evolution of this field of law. It will provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the unique legal principles and regulatory approaches that guide environmental law-making, as well as with some knowledge of specific subject-areas, such as climate change law, biodiversity law, and water law. This module will be taught through the use of a dual-themed approach; each part will be covered by two lectures; the first seminar will present the international regulatory framework (i.e. 'international environmental law'), while the following seminar will include a more concrete discussion on the manner in which international law was adopted into, and refined through, the EU framework. Such a teaching methodology will provide the students with a wider understanding of the topic; notably the students will grasp the relevance of international law to our everyday life, the challenge of balancing environmental goals with other policy objectives, and the manner in which general international law principles can be, and have been, concretised via EU law.

INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW

Code LAW-6020B

Credits 20

This module will introduce you to the standards and mechanisms of international human rights law. Lectures will lay a foundation for focused seminar discussions on the content and scope of selected rights (such as the right to life, freedom from torture, and freedom of expression and assembly). A Civil Society Advocacy Project will run alongside the seminars to ensure that you become familiar with the regional (European, Inter-American and African) and international (UN treaty-bodies, Universal Periodic Review, the UN Human Rights Council and its ‘Special Procedures’) mechanisms of human rights implementation and enforcement. Through this Civil Society Advocacy Project, you will be encouraged to reflect critically on the adequacy of rights-based solutions to real-world problems.

INTERCULTURAL BUSINESS COMMUNICATION (LEVEL 6)

Code PPLC6138A

Credits 20

Do you want to become an efficient intercultural communicator in Business settings? This module will allow you to develop your intercultural competence in the workplace in order to become an efficient intercultural communicator. You will be taught several strategies to acquire intercultural competence, especially in business contexts and the workplace. You will apply theoretical approaches to intercultural communication in order to understand how to be successful in communication across cultures, and to solve intercultural conflicts in Business contexts. You will take part in classroom-based activities in pairs and small groups with students from other cultures. You will analyse case studies in which cultural clashes impact on different areas of business and management, such as marketing, human relations, and international negotiations. You will develop intercultural competence in different business and work-related contexts. You will be able to build intercultural understanding, the promotion of international business exchanges, and the facilitation of cross-cultural adaptation. You may also get some insight in how to develop cultural consultancy for businesses. You will be assessed at the end of the module by an essay.

FRENCH YEAR 3 HONOURS (AUTUMN SEMESTER)

Code PPLF6004A

Credits 20

In this advanced French language module, you will develop your comprehension and production skills to C1/C2 level of the Common European Framework for Modern Languages (CEFR). Not only will you learn to control your style and register and express yourself with confidence but you will develop skills that will allow you to persuade, argue, discuss and justify ideas effectively. You will be able to research your own cultural topic and work towards oral activities such as presentations and discussions, but also to build an extensive essay in French, allowing you to systematise critical, writing and presentation skills. Speaking activities will allow you to fully engage with current affairs of the French-speaking world.

FRENCH YEAR 3 HONOURS (SPRING SEMESTER)

Code PPLF6006B

Credits 20

Are you ready to take your French beyond the classroom? If you are interested in applying your French language and translation skills and your ability to analyse, comment, and summarise in specialised and professional situations, this module is for you. You'll be able to use all that you have learnt in French across the course by working on briefs, summaries, translations, and studies of materials that will include technical and professional material from local and international organisations. One component of this module will allow you to hone your translation and writing skills by, for example, translating specialised documents and producing reports in two languages. There will also be the opportunity to use your sense of enterprise and creativity on group projects. In this core module, you will continue to develop your receptive and productive skills to the level C1/C2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). You’ll be able to understand complex and detailed audio documents such as meeting conversations or discussions on a specialised topic, and read and report on a range of written material. You will work on texts from a range of areas such as advertising, technology, or publishing, and will use your cultural knowledge and analytical skills to use those for module tasks. By the end of this module, you'll be able to express yourself confidently, clearly and professionally and will use your argumentative skills acquired in previous modules, to learn to negotiate and lead in your target language.

FRANCE, FRANCOPHONIE AND THE WORLD (LEVEL 6)

Code PPLF6146A

Credits 20

Today, French is still spoken on all five continents. Whether you are interested in language, culture, history, or politics of the French-speaking world, this module is perfect to expand your awareness of those aspects beyond the Hexagon. You'll study the origins of the Francophonie and discuss the relevance of the organisation. Studying the variety of contexts and societies in the French-speaking world today will allow you not only to contrast situations but also to understand important challenges and the role and impact of policies at different levels, from local administration to international relations. You will discuss issues of postcolonialism, the role of France on the international scene, key events and personalities and explore many other important cultural aspects. You will analyse a range of material, in English, that will include newspaper and magazine articles, television, and radio programmes and will also learn from academic journals on the topics. At the end of this module, you will have a broader understanding of the cultural, historical, economic, linguistic, and geopolitical links between France, its overseas territories and the rest of the French-speaking world. Teaching and assessment will be in English.

SPANISH YEAR 3 HONOURS (AUTUMN SEMESTER)

Code PPLH6007A

Credits 20

This module will develop your Spanish language skills at an advanced level. It fosters an understanding of various Spanish language features and develops critical cultural awareness. You’ll revisit specific components of grammar at a higher level, as well as problematic areas identified for improvement as well as learning academic writing skills. You’ll investigate and analyse the components that control the use of language when communicating in Spanish. The oral component of the module focuses on improving speaking and listening skills and widening vocabulary at a higher level. It is not suitable for native Spanish speaking visiting/exchange students. This module is conducted entirely in Spanish.

SPANISH YEAR 3 HONOURS (SPRING SEMESTER)

Code PPLH6017B

Credits 20

You will have the opportunity to develop your Spanish speaking, listening, reading and writing skills at an advanced level. You’ll develop higher level language skills further and you’ll acquire greater awareness of linguistic issues to aid inclusion and immersion in Spanish-speaking countries. You’ll explore the varieties of the Spanish language from a linguistic point of view and the variations of the Spanish language through the analysis and identification of extracts of spoken texts. The oral element of the module focuses on improving speaking and listening skills, whilst widening vocabulary. This module is conducted entirely in Spanish and is open to non-native Spanish speakers with near native competence in Spanish.

SHIFTING POWERS AFRICA IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Code PPLI6039A

Credits 30

What do you know about Africa? Is it still the Dark Continent, lost outside of time, or do you see it as the next exciting ‘happening’ place to follow fashion, use FinTech, and do business? Did you know that Timbuktu was one of the world’s greatest centres of learning? That West Africa’s gold underpinned the global economy? How about if I told you that an explosion of megacities is taking place in the Global South, principally in Africa as the continent’s population doubles to 2bn? You will look at Africa’s place and importance within the international system and more, including exploring China’s One Belt Initiative in East Africa, the African Union and security, and the African Development Bank’s ‘High five’ development plan.

TERRORISM AND COUNTER-TERRORISM

Code PPLI6040B

Credits 30

Although the term terrorism goes back to the French revolution, it was rarely employed until the 1970’s. Contrast this with today when terrorism, it seems, is everywhere we look: in foreign policy decisions, military interventions, homeland security measures, legal frameworks, newspaper headlines, speeches and sermons, films and video games, and, of course, in university modules such as this. In this module, we engage in a critical exploration of terrorism, counter-terrorism, and the academic field of terrorism research. You will explore the history of terrorism, and engage in debates around the definition and character of terrorist violence. Is it possible, necessary, or even desirable to separate terrorism from other forms of violence, for instance? The module will introduce different perspectives on the causes, types, and threat of non-state terrorism. You will examine a range of strategies for countering terrorism, and their political and normative implications. The module also explores the emergence and contribution of critical terrorism studies, examining issues including state terrorism, gender and terrorism, cultural representations of terrorism, and the production and influence of terrorism ‘experts.’

POLITICS AND FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ASIA-PACIFIC

Code PPLI6069A

Credits 30

This module will introduce you to important themes in international relations within the Asia Pacific, at a time when the region has assumed great importance. There will be a particular focus on the important historical periods in the relations between the USA, China and Japan. An understanding of elements of the trajectory of these relationships will be provided by taking a selection of historical subjects for analysis. While you will address the knowledge of history, and of long-term themes, in the latter part of the module you will consider contemporary political issues. This will require you to develop an understanding of the interaction of the United States with Asia, and China and Japan in particular.

POLITICS AND FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ASIA-PACIFIC

Code PPLI6070A

Credits 20

This module will introduce important themes in the American relationship with East Asia, at a time when the Pacific region has assumed great importance. There will be a particular focus on the important historical periods in the American relationship with China and Japan. An understanding of elements of the trajectory of these relationships will be provided by taking a selection of historical subjects for analysis. While this will address the knowledge of history, and of long-term themes, the latter part of the module will consider contemporary political issues. This will require an understanding of the interaction of the United States with Asia, and China and Japan in particular. This module is a 20-credit coursework-only version of POWER OVER THE PACIFIC: THE AMERICAN RELATIONSHIP WITH ASIA and is available only to Visiting, Exchange and Non-HUM Students.

IN AND OUT: THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION

Code PPLI6089B

Credits 30

You’ll address the politics of migration and citizenship. It will provide you with a background to political thought on citizenship, membership and belonging. You’ll then examine migration at the international, state and individual levels. The international level will focus on historical movements of people (such as from Europe and Asia towards the Americas) and contemporary flows of refugees and guest workers. The state level will look comparatively at immigration and emigration policies and critically assess the logic behind them. Attention will be given to different countries in various regions for comprehensive comparative evaluation. Different types of migration will be considered, including economic (such as non-immigrant and immigrant work visas), family (such as spousal and family reunification visas) and humanitarian (refugees, asylum seekers, and special humanitarian protections). The politics of these migration categories will be foregrounded, including governmental tactics of management, how they comply or fail to comply with international human rights norms, and the foreign policy implications of humanitarian visas. Finally the individual level will consider narrative accounts of migration in order to understand policy and practice from a bottom-up and experiential perspective. You’ll be encouraged to critically evaluate and analyse the politics of migration as manifest in the various policies and practices.

BRITAIN AND EUROPE

Code PPLI6090B

Credits 30

Understanding Britain's relationship with the European Union and how the EU works is important in many jobs at local, national and international levels in the public, private and third (community and voluntary) sectors. The EU has been an integral part of the structures of governance of the UK and arguably will continue to impact the UK’s political, social and cultural life after Brexit. This module will enable you to understand the complex relationship between Britain and the rest of the EU as we attempt to explain the ambivalence of the British towards European integration. We also track Britain’s changing policy from aloofness to eventual accession in 1973 and the development of a reputation as an ‘awkward partner’. The module culminates in the decision in 2016 to pursue ‘Brexit’ by examining its impact, management and the wider consequences.

BRITAIN AND EUROPE

Code PPLI6091B

Credits 20

Understanding Britain's relationship with the European Union and how the EU works is important in many jobs at local, national and international levels in the public, private and third (community and voluntary) sectors. The EU has been an integral part of the structures of governance of the UK and arguably will continue to impact the UK’s political, social and cultural life after Brexit. This module will enable you to understand the complex relationship between Britain and the rest of the EU as we attempt to explain the ambivalence of the British towards European integration. We also track Britain’s changing policy from aloofness to eventual accession in 1973 and the development of a reputation as and ‘awkward partner’. The module culminates in the decision in 2016 to pursue ‘Brexit’ by examining its impact, management and the wider consequences.

IN AND OUT: THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION

Code PPLI6092B

Credits 20

JAPANESE YEAR 3 HONOURS (AUTUMN SEMESTER)

Code PPLJ6010A

Credits 20

In this module, you’ll develop skills in reading, writing speaking and listening at an advanced level to equip you to be a more sophisticated Japanese language user. Throughout the module you’ll read various genres of reading materials, develop your oral presentation skills with project work, and learn academic writing in Japanese. You’ll also deepen your knowledge of Japanese culture, people and society through these materials and works. On successful completion of the module, you’ll be able to produce clear, well-structured short and long written and oral works, critically read a wide-range of materials which will develop into discussions, and explain and express your own ideas/opinions clearly and effectively in Japanese. You’ll also be able to use feedback actively and reflect on your own work.

JAPANESE YEAR 3 HONOURS (SPRING SEMESTER)

Code PPLJ6011B

Credits 20

This module is offered as a continuation module of JAPANESE HONOURS LANGUAGE 3/I. In this module, you’ll continue to develop an advanced level of Japanese for all skills to a higher standard, especially in an academic context. Your main activities will comprise researching a chosen topic, including acquiring competence using archives in Japanese, predict and prepare for a Q&A session after an oral presentation, structuring oral and written work clearly and logically to produce a formal oral presentation (speech) and an academic essay in Japanese. On successful completion of the module, you’ll not only polish your Japanese language, but also be able to gain the skills to research various materials in Japanese and state your opinions and arguments effectively on a specialised and complex subject. You’ll be able to showcase your Japanese language as well as your research and analytical skills in Japanese in the final oral and written piece of work.

INTRODUCTION TO JAPANESE POPULAR CULTURE (LEVEL 6)

Code PPLJ6012A

Credits 20

Japanese popular culture is now a global phenomenon. To understand how this came about, you will study the topic in terms of theories of social, economical, and historical analysis. You will learn about various cultural forms and practices, including manga/anime, media, art, and music in Japan, as seen from different perspectives. You will also discuss and critically analyse the role of Japanese popular culture within and outside of Japan. Your seminars will consist of three main parts: lectures, original audio/video materials, and group discussion or activities. Your contribution to weekly discussion/activities is essential. Lectures, reading materials, and assessments will all be in English. On successful completion of this module, you will have a good understanding of the main genres of Japanese popular culture, and be able to further explore your own interests, academically, in any form of Japanese popular culture.

UNDERSTANDING SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING (LEVEL 6)

Code PPLL6144B

Credits 20

Have you thought about becoming a language teacher? Do you know what that means? Would you like to give it a try? This is an introductory module to second language teaching and learning, where you will explore theoretical and practical approaches to language learning. You will learn what teaching a foreign language means through different methodologies and practical approaches, as well as understanding the peculiarities of both language and culture in second language acquisition, emphasizing factors like context, motivation, first language or individual characteristics. Participation will be in classroom-based activities, often working in pairs and groups exchanging ideas and supporting each other in your exploration of second language learning and teaching. You will be able to observe real language classrooms and deliver language teaching in real contexts, and also gain a greater understanding of what theoretical and practical aspects of teaching and learning are essential in foreign languages. Note: Taught together with Level 5. Assessment commensurate with level.

POLITICS AND POPULAR CULTURE

Code PPLM6037A

Credits 30

Popular culture links to politics in a variety of ways, some obvious, some less obvious. There are the politicians who seek the endorsement of film stars; there are the politicians who were film stars; and there are the rock performers who pretend that they are politicians. And then there are the states that censor popular culture, or those that sponsor it and use it as propaganda. We will explore the many ways in which popular culture and politics are linked. You will: - be introduced to competing theories of the politics of popular culture - those that see popular culture as political manipulation and those that see it as political resistance. - analyse examples of popular culture for the political ideas and values they represent. - look at how popular culture is used in political communication. - track developments in the political economy of popular culture, especially in relation to globalisation, digital media and power within the cultural industries. - debate the censorship of popular culture and use of state subsidies to promote it. - reflect on the effects of popular culture, and about its role in personal and collective identity.

POLITICS AND POPULAR CULTURE

Code PPLM6038A

Credits 20

TOPICS IN PUBLIC OPINION

Code PPLM6045B

Credits 30

The role of public opinion is paramount in any democracy, as the public is often asked at election times and in-between elections to confer legitimacy to politicians and to their decisions. Yet what determines the public’s opinion? How much does the public know about politics? How does political communication influence the public’s positions? And last, but not least, how do we measure public opinion? You’ll discuss old and new directions in answering these questions, drawing on political psychology and communication theories. The module is well anchored in current politics, and will provide you with the tools to understand current public opinion trends in the UK and other democracies.

TOPICS IN PUBLIC OPINION

Code PPLM6046B

Credits 20

ACTIVIST CAMPAIGNING

Code PPLM6076B

Credits 30

How do grassroots and third sector organisations campaign for social and political change? Rather than pose this as an abstract question, you will partner with existing organisations to conduct campaigns on specific issues such as climate change, tax avoidance or gender inequality. You will receive a brief from a partner organisation and be supported in planning, devising, and carrying out activities that will achieve the aims of the brief. Taught content will include strategies for both online and offline activism, analysing power relations at different scales, and ways of assessing the effectiveness of your campaigns, but the bulk of the module will be the experience of a “live” campaign. You will combine applied research skills with professional practice in the form of a “reverse internship.” As the partner organisations are embedded in the module, you will build valuable skills for employability as well as an opportunity for being supported in the exercise of engaged citizenship. You will be assessed by presentation and critical reflection. In the year 2017-2018 the partner organisation was Greenpeace, but partners may change each year.

DIGITAL POLITICS

Code PPLM6077A

Credits 30

Today's political world is more than ever influenced by digital technologies, from innovative social movements to 'fake news' and digital election campaigns. We will explore how the technologies influence political processes and how political processes in turn influence technology. We will examine the impact of digital media on electoral politics, examining key election campaigns (including recent UK and US elections) and the impact of social media, big data, and targeted advertising on their results. We will investigate how social movements (from Black Lives Matter to the Alt-Right) have been transformed through their use of digital networks. We will navigate the world of online politics, with a particular focus on the new culture wars being fought out in online environments. Finally we will explore the politics of the everyday, and the political effects of the technology platforms on which we live our online lives.

DIGITAL POLITICS

Code PPLM6078A

Credits 20

ACTIVIST CAMPAIGNING

Code PPLM6079B

Credits 20

How do grassroots and third sector organisations campaign for social and political change? Rather than pose this as an abstract question, you will partner with existing organisations to conduct campaigns on specific issues such as climate change, tax avoidance or gender inequality. You will receive a brief from a partner organisation and be supported in planning, devising, and carrying out activities that will achieve the aims of the brief. Taught content will include strategies for both online and offline activism, analysing power relations at different scales, and ways of assessing the effectiveness of your campaigns, but the bulk of this module will be the experience of a “live” campaign. You will combine applied research skills with professional practice in the form of a “reverse internship.” As the partner organisations are embedded in the module, you will build valuable skills for employability as well as an opportunity for being supported in the exercise of engaged citizenship. You will be assessed by presentation and critical reflection. In the year 2017-2018 the partner organisation was Greenpeace, but partners may change each year.

TRANSLATION WORK EXPERIENCE (LEVEL 6)

Code PPLT6019A

Credits 20

What is it like to translate for the real world to professional standards? Translation Work Experience is your chance to find out. The module is part of the PPL Professional Practice scheme and builds on partnership with public services locally and abroad to give you the opportunity to develop first-hand experience of professional translation (e.g. translation from, and into English, of information for local museums or museums in France, Japan or Spain). The work for the module is based on authentic briefs and carried out in groups with other home and visiting students or individually depending on assignments. It is very practical: it promotes hands-on sensitisation to aspects of professional commercial translation, to problems involved in translating to specifications, producing and presenting a product of professional standard, to techniques of translation and to the use of reference materials and support resources. You will hone your analytical and linguistic skills, and develop a range of key practical skills, including research skills, project and time management, reflective and review skills, peer and self-assessment. Assessment is by a variety of means, including translation and a critical report for which formative oral reports throughout the semester serve as a platform. As a record of your experience and of the skills developed, the report doubles up as evidence of your achievements for job applications and interviews. On completion of the module you are awarded a Professional Practice Certificate, also key evidence to further career prospects. The module is open subject to availability of briefs - a back-up module choice is essential. One hour per week timetabled. Other commitments including tutorials to be arranged. This module is only available to students on Honours language programmes or to PPL visiting students.

TRANSLATION AND ADAPTATION (LEVEL 6)

Code PPLT6021B

Credits 20

We will consider the processes of translation and adaptation in a range of media, such as films, games, and theatre, and the issues associated with them from the perspective of ‘Translation Theory.’ We will attempt to establish where the boundary lies between the terms ‘translation’ and ‘adaptation,’ and we will examine some of the most important theories of translation. You will look at various ways of thinking about key concepts such as ‘cultural and pragmatic equivalence,’ ‘fidelity,’ ‘coherence/cohesion,’ and the ethical role of the director/adaptor. You will devote your time to the exploration of types of adaptations in different genres, and you will present case studies from recent articles in a variety of adaptations in your language pair, such as adaptations for cross-cultural theatre, adapting from books to video games, cross-cultural adaptations of queerness in short stories, ideology, and children’s stories adapted for films across languages and cultures. You will develop the linguistic skills, cultural competence and critical thinking required for the production of a case study of a selected adaptation in your language pair. On completion of this module, you will be able to situate yourself in relation to critical readings in the field of ‘Translation Theory’ and to reflect on the ethical dimension of the translator, especially as it relates to the act of adapting in situations of intercultural conflict and communication. This module is only available to students with a foreign language.

ADVANCED TRANSLATION (FRENCH TO ENGLISH)

BA ENGLISH LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY