BA (HONS) ENGLISH (Q300)
LEVEL 1 MODULE DESCRIPTIONS AND READING LISTS
UPGPFV-60-1: WRITING ABOUT READING/READING ABOUT WRITING
This module is the core first year English module at UWE. Its principal objective is to advance your
skills in writing and reading to an undergraduate standard. All English students, whether on Single or
Joint Honours programmes, will take this module. It is a double weighted (60 credit) module and will
occupy half of your timetable: two one hour lectures and one 2 hour seminar.
In the first semester the focus is on writing about a variety of texts. The emphasis will be on
developing a critical vocabulary to articulate your responses to poems from the renaissance to the
present day, short stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a novel, The Great Gatsby and
a play, Macbeth. The assessment in the first semester is geared around testing your ability to write
short, precise analyses of these texts utilising the technical vocabulary that will be a platform for all
your future study of English literature.
The second semester encourages you to engage with critical, theoretical and contextual responses to
literary texts, that is, to read about writing. This semester is organised into the following categories:
History, Authorship, Language and Power. As you engage with these categories you will be asked to
read texts selected from the medieval period to the present, but the emphasis will fall equally on
primary and secondary reading. The assessment in the second semester is based on developing your
research skills and working towards writing an academic essay. At the end of this module you should
possess the fundamental skills that will underlie your English degree.
In preparation for this module please read the opening chapter of Furniss and Bath’s Reading Poetry,
Fitzgeralds’ The Great Gatsby and Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
READING LIST (To be purchased—note: it is important to buy the stated edition)
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. London: Penguin, 2007.
Cuddon, J. A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4th ed. London: Penguin, 2004.
Furniss, Tom and Mike Bath. Reading Poetry. 2nd ed., London: Longman, 2007.
Ferguson, Margaret, Ed. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. New York: Norton, 2005.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1926. London: Penguin, 2000.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. 1606. Ed. Nicolas Brooke. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
Unsworth, Barry. Morality Play. 1995. London: Penguin, 2000.
ASSESSMENT
The assessment includes the following: close reading Portfolio; creative writing; research exercise;
essay; exam.
UPGPPG-30-1: ONCE UPON A TIME: STORIES, CHILDREN AND LITERATURE
‘Once Upon a Time’ is a 30 credit module focused on questions of narrative, as it functions in prose,
poetry and drama, in both oral and literary culture. It considers the ways that stories are constructed
and narrated, especially as they relate to the rendering of human experience, and on the role of the
reader in building meaning. It also addresses the relationship between narrative form and subject
matter – not least in folk-tale and the genres that have grown from it. The thematic centre of ‘Once
Upon a Time’ is the representation of childhood, both as it rendered explicitly, through fictional UWE
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accounts of childhood, and implicitly, through the production of stories deemed suitable for children.
Changing historical concepts of children’s interests, needs and natures will be addressed through the
study of narratives for and about them, taking into account the ways in which certain narrative forms
and strategies have at various times been considered particularly suitable for children’s consumption.
READING LIST
Please buy the following texts (these are given in the order in which we will study them):
Maria Tatar ed., The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: Norton, 1999.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. 1860. Ed. Charlotte Mitchell. London: Penguin, 2004.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Ed. Hugh
Haughton. London: Penguin, 2003. (NB: the set text is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, though
Through the Looking-Glass is useful additional reading)
J. M. Barrie. Peter Pan and Other Plays: The Admirable Crichton; Peter Pan; When Wendy Grew Up;
What Every Woman Knows; Mary Rose. Ed. Peter Hollindale. Oxford: OUP, 1999. (NB: the set text is
Peter Pan – you do not need to read the other plays). Note that we will study the PLAY version, NOT
the novel.
L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between. 1953. Ed Douglas Brooks-Davies. London: Penguin, 2000)
Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa. London: Faber, 1990.
ASSESSMENT
The assessment includes the following: Text comparison; oral presentation; creative writing; essay;
exam.
UGPPPF-30-1 BEYOND THE HORIZON: SPACES AND PLACES IN LITERATURE
Beginning with a sense that borders are there to be crossed, boundaries there to be transgressed and
frontiers there to be pushed, this 30 credit module interrogates and considers the role played by
space and place in world literature. Reflecting our broad geographic scope, the module covers a wide
time-span, including literature from the early modern period to the present day, resisting a
chronological ordering while nevertheless conveying a sense of the very literary history that informs
writings from ‘beyond the horizon.’ In this way we accord an importance to the specificities of locality
and geography while also enabling enquiries into more abstract yet, crucial concepts of spaces within
literature pertaining to literary history and ideas about the canon, as such some of our texts are
therefore presented as responses or writing back to a ‘core’ of English literary works that are refigured
by such interactions. The first text to read in preparation for this module is Othello. Also you should do
some research online into colonial and postcolonial writing.
READING LIST (To be purchased—note: it is important to buy the stated edition)
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Coetzee, J. M. Foe. London: Penguin, 1987.
Friel, Brian. Translations. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. London: Vintage, 1999.
Rushdie, Salman. East, West. London: Vintage, 2006.
Shakespeare, William. Othello, Ed. E. A. J. Honigman. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Cengage,
2006.
ASSESSMENT
The assessment includes the following: Oral report; Anthology; close reading; exam
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