English at Sussex
Why English? Why
Sussex?
• Imagination; creativity;
thinking; knowledge
• Critical reading
• Understanding of cultural
and literary history
• Literature, reading and
imagining – creating, recreating - the world
• Creativity and expression
• Meaning and value
BA English year 1
• Texts in Time
• Critical Approaches
• Reading Genre (or elective options)
Texts in Time
• Texts in Time
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What is literature? How has it changed over time? What is the relationship between
writing and the historical moment in which it was produced? How can we read texts
to understand the ways in which they comment on and intervene in their particular
cultural contexts? How do literary and other kinds of cultural artefacts enable us to
reinterpret history and culture? How does the study of texts from other historical
periods better enable us to understand our own?
These are some of the questions which we will be exploring during the course.
Texts in Time 2 explores many different kinds of writing (poetry, autobiography,
essays, novels) as well as visual texts (film, photography, the graphic novel) in their
historical and cultural contexts. For those of you who have already taken Texts in
Time 1, this course continues the chronological movement already begun on that
course. Texts in Time 2 is divided into three blocks, delivered over the spring and
summer terms. The first block (spring, weeks 3-6) addresses texts from the
nineteenth century, the second block (weeks 7-10) focuses on 1922, a key moment
in Modernism. The final block (summer term, weeks 1-4) looks at contemporary
writing and culture. Each week brings a new text or texts into con Each week brings
a new text or texts into consideration, but all are connected within each block to an
overarching theme.
Critical Approaches
How do we go about reading and interpreting a literary text?
Do readers interpret texts differently at different historical and cultural moments?
Could our interpretations of texts be affected by forces beyond our control, forces such
as the workings of language, unconscious desires, class, race, gender, sexuality or
nationality?
How is it that some texts, Shakespeare's plays, for instance, are highly valued by our
culture, while others have been lost or devalued?
Who or what decides which literature will survive to be read and studied on English
courses?
Reading Genre
What is genre?
How do texts use literary convention to exploit genre – to develop,
change, challenge, readers’ expectations of genre?
How does genre act to shape a text and a reader's understanding of it?
How does genre help us to understand the relation between literature
and the ‘reading community’?
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Sussex English
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Critical inquiry
Interdisciplinarity
Textual Politics and Literary Theory
Creative and Critical Writing
Excellent students and discipline-leading
faculty
• Broad, flexible, exciting curriculum that
offers both scholarly range and research
led expertise
BA English year 2
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Autumn term:
The Novel
Plus one English option
Plus one elective option
Spring/Summer:
Period of English Literature (1500-1625; 1625-1750; 1750-1880;
1880-1940
• Plus one English option
• Plus one elective option
• Options include: ‘Staging the Renaissance; Writing and the Great
War; Tragedy; The Art of Short Fiction; European Film and
Literature; Reading Postcolonial Texts; Sense and Sexuality; The
18th Century Novel
BA English year 3
• Autumn term:
• Period of English Literature (1500-1625; 1625-1750; 1750-1880;
1880-1940)
• Special Author option (choices include Marlowe, Wordsworth,
Beckett, Dickens, Hardy, Woolf, Rushdie, Ishiguro)
• Spring/Summer:
• Modern and Contemporary Options (choices include Twenty-First
Century Literature; Literature and the Environment; Late
Modernism; Literature and Film)
• Special Subject option (choices include Renaissance and
Restoration Theatre, The Uncanny, Irish Writing After Joyce, Islam
and Literature, Utopias and Dystopias, The Literatures of Africa,
Avant Garde Cinema
Teaching and assessment
• Teaching in small groups, lectures and
academic advising sessions.
• A range of assessment modes that are
geared towards the course being
assessed. These include short essays,
oral presentations, longer essays,
dissertations, take away papers, portfolios
and unseen exams.
After the degree
• 70% of recent graduates in a graduate job
(employability in a recent survey matched
Sussex with Bristol, only behind Kings
College London and Cambridge).
• Destinations include journalism, teaching,
information industries.
• High percentage of students go on to
further study, and then onto careers in
academia and other professions.
The Studio at Charleston
Stephen Tomlin's original plaster bust of Virginia Woolf made in 1931