College of
Arts and Humanities
BA English Literature
BA English with Creative
Writing
2015-2016
Department of English Language and Literature
www.swansea.ac.uk/artsandhumanities
DISCLAIMER
All reasonable efforts have been made to ensure that the information contained on this handout is accurate and
up-to-date when published, but we accept no responsibility for any errors or omissions.
The Department reserves the right to revise, alter or discontinue degree programmes or modules and to amend
regulations and procedures at any time.
It should be noted that not all the modules listed in this handbook will be available every year.
BA English Literature/English Literature and Creative Writing
Studying English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea
Swansea’s BA in English Literature offers an intense adventure in reading, through coverage of key periods, genres
and approaches, enabling students to become increasingly self-directing in their studies. As a Swansea literature
student you will progress through three years, each of which leads to increasingly sophisticated analytical skills,
independent thinking, self-motivation and management.
Swansea’s BA in English with Creative Writing gives students practical experience in many forms of writing for
the public, including fiction, poetry, drama, screenwriting and creative non-fiction. This practice-led approach is
enhanced by the opportunity to take English modules providing a thorough background in the history, traditions and
theory of literature.
Students taking the BA in English Literature may also take some Creative Writing and English Language modules. All
students have the opportunity to study abroad for a semester. There is a four-year option, with a full year abroad.
All Single Honours students also have the opportunity to take elective modules in other humanities subjects.
First year studies in both degrees offer a foundation in fiction, drama and poetry alongside an introduction to
different ways of reading, both practical and theoretical. Year 1 Creative Writing modules introduce students to the
art of writing in a broad range of styles. Teaching is through a combination of lectures and seminars.
English Literature
Studying literature is about interpreting and reimagining our world. It is about being open-minded, inquisitive and
willing to interrogate the world in new ways. Discussing literature challenges preconceptions, fosters creativity and
develops critical awareness.
Beyond Year 1 there are no compulsory modules in English Literature. In Year 2 you make choices from specified
groups of modules which consider literature in a variety of contexts – historical, cultural and theoretical. Modules
are taught in lectures and weekly seminars at which students get to know the seminar leader and their group. Year 3
is your opportunity to specialise further in line with your enthusiasms, to pursue particular interests sparked by the
previous two years or try something completely new. Teaching in Year 3 is in small seminar groups with lecturers who
are specialists in their field. There is also a Year 3 dissertation module which is taught through a mixture of workshops
and individual supervision sessions.
English with Creative Writing
Swansea’s Creative Writing programme prepares students to write effectively for a public readership or audience.
Writing for the public may include everything from writing novels, drama or poetry to speech-writing or
documenting public policy. The Creative Writing modules aim to extend students’ mastery of the techniques of
writing while also encouraging creative thinking. In Years 2 and 3 Creative Writing modules are taught through
practical writing workshops led by subject specialists.
English with Gender
This interdisciplinary programme examines the representation of gender in culture and society. Students consider
how portrayals of gender reflect, challenge or perpetuate cultural values and ideologies. Students on this scheme
take two thirds of their modules in English and one third in Gender. Gender modules offered within the English
department are marked with an asterisk.
Our degrees aim to provide students with advanced writing skills, excellent communication techniques and the
ability to develop a compelling argument in speech and writing. English at Swansea will enrich your cultural
understanding and provide you with the flexibility of mind to meet the challenges of the world beyond university.
Department of English Language and Literature
3
Year 1 - Module Information
In addition to the three compulsory modules, Single Honours English Literature students select three optional
modules. Joint Honours students must take two of the three compulsory modules, plus one other module from
within the English Department. English with Creative Writing students must take the two Creative Writing options.
These options are also available to English Literature students.
Compulsory English Literature Modules:
Monsters, Theories, Transformations*
The Stage Play World: An Introduction to Drama
Voices of Poetry
Creative Writing Modules:
Creative Writing: Fiction Genres
Creative Writing: Writing Styles
Literature Options:
Approaches to Gender in English Literature*
Introduction to American Literature and Culture
Literature and Society in Medieval Europe
Modern European Fiction: Texts and Contexts
Language Options:
Development of the English Language
Studying the English Language
Year 2 - Module Information
For Single and Joint Honours English Literature students, there are no compulsory modules in Year 2; choices are
made from within themed groups. English with Creative Writing students are guaranteed places on two Creative
Writing modules. Space permitting, Creative Writing options are available to students enrolled on English Literature
schemes.
Literature Modules:
American Word/American Image
Debating Texts: Theory in Literature
Fragments of Union: The Cultural Making and Breaking of Britain
Medieval Encounters
No-Man’s Land: Literature of the Great War*
Race and Ethnicity in Literature: American Perspectives
Reading Gender: Exploring the Bloody Chamber*
Revolution of the Exploring Word: Modernism
Revolution and Romanticism
Shakespeare: Page, Stage, Screen
Creative Writing Modules (open to English Literature students):
Introduction to Writing Creative Non-Fiction
Introduction to Writing Drama
Introduction to Writing Fiction
Introduction to Writing Poetry
Language and Linguistics (open to English Literature students):
Discourse Analysis
Psycholinguistics
Studying Dialect
Year 3 - Module Information
Year 3 students choose from a range of special topics taught in small groups. English with Creative Writing students
are guaranteed places on two Creative Writing modules. Creative Writing options are open to English Literature
students if places are available.
English Literature Modules:
African American Literature, 1910-1940: The Harlem Renaissance
Chaucer*
Contemporary American Fiction
Contemporary Women’s Writing*
Discovering Old English
Dissertation: English Literature
Dylan Thomas
The Erotics and Exotics of Romantic Orientalism
European Fiction and Drama
Exodus: Moses and Minority Literature
Hearts in Hiding: Hardy and Hopkins
Home Sweet Home: Staging Domestic Dangers in Renaissance England
Literature and the Metropolis: Representations of London Life, 1900-1939
‘Love, and a bit with a dog’: Comedy in Renaissance England
‘The point, however, is to change it’: Marxism, Theory and Literature
The Masculine and the Monstrous in the Middle Ages*
Modern Irish Fiction in English
Neo-Victorian Fictions*
Postcolonial Literature
Postmodernist and Post-War Fiction
Theorising Texts: Shakespeare, Brontë, James
Thomas Hardy
Triumphant Disasters, Disastrous Triumphs: Writing World War Two
Twentieth-Century Poetry
Uncanny places and cyberspaces: Gender and the Fantastic*
William Blake: Poetry and Designs
W.B Yeats
Creative Writing Modules (open to English Literature students):
Creative Writing Personal Project (available only to Creative Writing students)
Further Creative Non-Fiction Writing
Further Dramatic Writing
Further Fiction Writing
Further Poetry Writing
Language and Linguistics (open to English Literature students):
First Language Acquisition
Language in the Media
Prehistory, History, and Language
BA English Literature/English Literature with Creative Writing
Year 1 - Module Information
Compulsory English Literature Modules
EN-119 The Stage Play World: An Introduction to Drama
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
‘The Stage Play World’ is an introductory module which combines an overview of performance history -- from
classical Greek theatre to the present-day stage presentations -- with the development of reading and analytical
skills. The first third of the module has a skills emphasis, with a focus on how to read and understand a stage
script. The module then moves on to a consideration of how to analyse what is being read. The final third of
the course teaches students how to argue persuasively from that analysis. The module has been designed to
emphasise the continuous development of drama, together with its links to social and historical events and to
movements in other forms of art and literature.
Set Texts: Sophocles, Oedipus Rex; Shakespeare, Measure for Measure; Ibsen, A Doll’s House; Chekhov, Three
Sisters; Carol Churchill, Top Girls
Assessment: coursework and examination
EN-100 Monsters, Theories, Transformations
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
Literary works open up different meanings depending on the questions we ask of them and the assumptions we
bring to them. Literary meaning is in continual transformation. This module examines some of the ways in which
this occurs through critical reading and intertextual revision. The first half of the module looks at two works, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, that have been plurally interpreted by critics; the second half
of the module considers the transformation of narrative and ideology in the ‘intertextual’ revision of Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre by Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. The course looks at how meaning in literature is transformed
and how it transforms the ways in which we see the world.
Set Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso
Sea
Assessment: close reading / textual analysis (800-1,000 words), one essay (1,600-2,000 words), two-hour exam
EN-114 Voices of Poetry
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
‘Voices of Poetry’ is an engaging and exciting module which aims to introduce students to poetry and the various
voices it articulates. Taught by well-known poets as well as scholars of poetry, this course will introduce students
to a wide range of poetic forms and literary periods, ranging from the medieval lyric to postmodern poetry, from
Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath. Particular attention will be paid to the interrelationship between meaning and form,
and how rhetorical figures, metre, rhythm, tone, register and the speaker’s voice create meaning. ‘Voices of Poetry’
will also foster an appreciation of how poetic forms are re-written in the socio-historical context in which they
were produced.
Set Text: The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Norton, 5th edn, 2005).
Assessment: 1,600-2,000 word portfolio and 1,800-2,000 word essay
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Literature Options
AM-113 Introduction to American Literature and Culture
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module offers an interdisciplinary survey of American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the
present day, examining the construction of a specifically American identity in relation to the sweeping social,
technological and economic changes which characterise American experience. The first half of the course
explores the historical development of America’s search for self; writers such as Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and
Edgar Allan Poe are studied in the context of America’s need to break from Europe, the motif of the wilderness,
the expansion of psychological and spiritual boundaries, and issues of race, gender and politics. The second
half of the module then explores the fate of the American self in the twentieth century, a self confronted by the
anonymity of the city, the dehumanizing forces of world war and the promises (and perils) of consumerism and
mass culture. This module explores American culture and literature in a lively and interdisciplinary manner, reading
the search for an American self as an attempt to come to terms with the bewildering transformation of the world,
and the position of the individual within it.
Assessment: Two essays of 2,000 words
EN-112 Approaches to Gender in English Literature
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
The development of feminist theory has brought about increased awareness for literary scholars of the importance
of gender in shaping the perceptions, expectations and subjectives of both cultures and individuals - and the texts
which they produce. This module therefore aims to introduce students to some of the primary issues connected
with the workings and analysis of gender in English Literature and the gendered contexts in which that literature
is produced. It will incorporate an introduction to some of the basic tenets of gender theory and its application
as a means of reading literary texts from a range of periods. It will focus on a small variety of poetic, dramatic
and fictional texts, examining the ways in which gender relationships are portrayed within them and the extent to
which they reflect, perpetuate and/or challenge the cultural values of the period and the social contexts within
which they are produced.
Set Texts: Elaine Showalter, ed., Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle (‘The Fifth Edition’
and ‘The Buddhist Priest’s Wife’); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle; Jackie
Kay, Trumpet;
A selection of war poetry by Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Alun Lewis and Lynette
Roberts
Short essays or extracts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Joanna Bourke, Judith
Halberstam, and Riki Wilchins will be provided.
Assessment: 2,000 word portfolio and 2,000 word essay
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Year 1 - Module Information continued
EN-113 Literature and Society in Medieval Europe
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module provides an introduction to medieval literature and cultures from 900 to 1500. The module introduces
key moments in medieval literary history, together with major cultural and linguistic developments. It provides a
basic overview of the Middle Ages which will form the basis for more specialised studies. Topics include significant
social and cultural issues of medieval life, such as war and chivalry, gender, courtly love, literature and learning,
identity and power. Major texts such as ‘The General Prologue’ from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales will be read in
translation alongside extracts from a range of other medieval texts such as Beowulf, Amis and Amiloun and The
Book of Margery Kempe. This is a compulsory module for the Honours programme in Medieval Studies, and it is
also open to students enrolled on any BA programme.
Assessment: 1,800 word essay and a two hour exam
MLE-100 Modern European Fiction: Texts and Contexts
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module introduces students to a selection of short narrative works by some of the major figures from
European twentieth-century literature. The short stories, novellas and short novels are from different literary
traditions (French, German, Italian, Spanish) and are studied because of their influence beyond the borders of the
countries where they were produced. They treat themes of alienation and murder, passion, sexual awakening,
and the triumph of the imagination over adversity. Love and politics are central each time. You will gain an
understanding of a variety of historical and theoretical contexts, such as Jewish Central Europe, feminism,
‘narrative from below’, the avantgarde and modernist experimentalism.
Set Texts: Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories; Bertolt Brecht, Short Fiction; Ingeborg Bachmann, The
Thirtieth Year; works by Italo Calvino, Annie Ernaux and Juan Goytisolo
Assessment: coursework, examination
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Year 1 - Module Information continued
Creative Writing Modules
EN-117 Creative Writing: Fiction Genres
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
An innovative module that will introduce the student to the art of writing within a broad range of genres. Weekly
lectures will introduce each student to authors of specific genres, such as the thriller, historical fiction, fairytale,
horror, fantasy, science fiction and romance. Each lecture will be followed by a seminar that will focus on a variety
of methods used to write in that specific genre. Regular assignments will offer the student an opportunity to write
creatively - a unique opportunity to expand, discover, and explore their emerging writerly voice. Built into the
module is a wide reaching reading programme that will assist each student to be conversant with the traditions
of writing in a specific genre, whilst encouraging close reading and editing skills. Students will be taught by
published authors who work within these particular genres, and will also have the opportunity to hear these authors
read and discuss their own new work and works-in-progress. The module aims to examine the structure, voice,
setting and genre of specific written material so as to initiate curiosity, create empathy, and focus on increasing
an understanding of the structures used within writing character, setting and historical context in a specific genre.
Emphasis will be placed on the theory and practice of reading, comprehension and writing.
Set Texts include: Madeline Ashby, vN; Kristin Carshore, Graceling; Lee Child, The Hard Way; Angela Carter, The
Bloody Chamber; Robert Harris, Fatherland
Assessment: One essay on the nature and practice of writing of 1,500 words; One creative work of 1,500
EN-118 Creative Writing: Writing Styles
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
An innovative module that will introduce the student to the art of writing within a broad range of styles. Weekly
lectures will introduce each student to authors of specific styles, such as poetry, writing for theatre, song writing
and professional writing. Each lecture will be followed by a seminar that will focus on a variety of methods used
to write in that specific style. Regular assignments will offer the student an opportunity to write creatively - a unique
opportunity to expand, discover, and explore their emerging writerly voice. Built into the module is a wide reaching
reading programme that will assist each student to be conversant with the traditions of writing in a specific genre,
whilst encouraging close reading and editing skills. Students will be taught by published authors who work within
these particular genres, and will also have the opportunity to hear these authors read and discuss their own new
work and works-in-progress. The module aims to examine the structure, voice, setting and style, of specific written
material so as to initiate curiosity, create empathy, and focus on increasing an understanding of the structures used
within research, writing character, setting and historical context in a specific style. Emphasis will be placed on the
theory and practice of reading, comprehension and writing.
Set Texts include: Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace and Other Short Stories; Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint;
Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood; Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet
Assessment: An essay response of 1,500 words and a creative work of 1,500 words, plus a reflective analysis of
1,000 words
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Language Options
ALE-120 Studying the English Language
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
How did English become a global language? What exactly is Standard English? What do slips of the tongue reveal
about language? ALE120 Studying the English Language answers these questions and many more. The module is
an introduction to the diversity and history of English, and to relevant contemporary and classic work in linguistics.
Other topics discussed in the lectures and accompanying course-book include the effects of dialect and accent
on identity, swearing and offensive names in English, language and gender, language planning, and theories
about the origin of language. The course-book, Studying the English Language, by Rob Penhallurick (Palgrave,
2010, 2nd edition) is the backbone of the module. The weekly lectures add further detail and discussion, and are
supplemented by seminar class meetings.
Assessment: Three hour examination
ALE-116 Development of the English Language
Year 1 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This course allows students to become familiar with the origins of the languages of Britain; to track the
development of the language from Old English; to study the process whereby a standard language evolved and
to study selected texts from the Old and Middle English periods.
Assessment: coursework and examination
Department of English Language and Literature
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Year 2 - Module Information
Literature Modules
EN-206 Debating Texts: Theory in Literature
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
Literature generates debate, and speaks to us differently depending on the questions that we ask of it. This course
looks at how our understanding of meaning in literature changes when we think about critical debates concerning
the role of realism, language and subjectivity in texts. We take three texts from different periods, and look at the ways
in which the texts (and debates around them) raise questions of realism, language and subjectivity, and how the
texts comment on these issues. We begin with a classic of 19th century realism, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854),
move on to the groundbreaking work of modernist experiment, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and end with a
powerful example of postmodern representation, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
Assessment: 33% assignment / 67% assignment
EN-207 The Revolution of the Word: Modernism
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module is an introduction to the modernist literature of the early twentieth century. It focuses upon the literary
response to the crisis of modernity, particularly in relation to colonialism and the First World War, and to the way gender
and the unconscious were conceptualised. We will explore the tension in modernism between continuity, tradition,
wholeness and myth, on the one hand, and fragmentation, transgression and alienation, on the other. Students will be
encouraged to understand how some modernist writing proclaims itself as a revolutionary art of the new which, in T.S.
Eliot’s phrase, ‘dislocates language […] into meaning’. We study in detail novels by Conrad, Joyce and Woolf, and analyse
the best known of modernist poems, Eliot’s The Waste Land as well as individual poems by Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda
Doolittle) and W.B. Yeats.
Assessment: 33% assignment / 67% exam
EN-266 Medieval Encounters
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
Many of the elements of our shared culture were first imagined or developed in the medieval period, but have
continued to speak to post-medieval readers. This module will introduce students to the literature of the medieval
period, with a particular emphasis on contacts or encounters between medieval texts and more modern cultures
via literary translations and transformations. These translations will include both medieval responses to earlier
classical and biblical traditions, and modern re-imaginings of medieval texts and ideas (including the notion of
‘medievalism’). A major theme of the course will be the cultural continuities and discontinuities between medieval
literature and later texts, and the ways in which medieval narratives and images were adapted to meet the needs of
other cultural circumstances. Students will develop an awareness of key aspects of medieval literary culture including
ideas of authorship and authority, religious traditions, and romance or Courtly Love codes. Students will also gain an
understanding of the functions of translation and re-appropriation in literary and cultural production. All texts will be
available in modern English (or fully-glossed) versions.
Assessment: 33% assignment / 67% exam
Department of English
Languages,
Language
Translation
and Literature
and Media
12
BA English Literature/English Literature with Creative Writing
Year 2 - Module Information continued
EN-237 Reading Gender: Exploring The Bloody Chamber
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module will analyse narratives of female enclosure and gender conflict in a selection of texts from the
fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Our specific focus is the story of the serial wife-killer Bluebeard: we will
begin by examining variants of this fairy-tale narrative before both tracing it back to its medieval antecedents
and following its continuing presence as an influence on more contemporary texts. In the process, we will
discuss theories of gender, race and class in order to account for the persistent presence of this story in Western
culture.
Assessment: Poster presentation, portfolio and essay
EN-242 Shakespeare: Page, Stage, Screen
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module offers an introduction to Shakespeare’s writing. Students will think about the plays in performance
but they will also attend to his play’s different textual forms. Lectures and seminars will introduce key contextual
information and will focus on close reading language and performance. Regular timetabled film screenings will
allow students to see the plays performed. Plays studied include The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, As You Like
It, Hamlet and The Tempest.
Assessment: 33% Assignment / 67% Exam
AM-215 American Word/American Image
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module explores the central works of twentieth-century American fiction in relation to American visual culture
including film, art, photography and pop culture. This approach seeks to situate American literature in terms
of a wider context of modern cultural production, examining the status of word and image in American arts
and letters in the early and mid parts of the twentieth century. Students will be encouraged to draw parallels
and explore tensions between different modes of textual exchange, exploring the sources, interactions and
arguments that underpin the role of a writer in an increasingly visual, image-saturated society. Topics will include
Edith Wharton and the Art of the Gilded Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American (Consumer) Dream, Ernest
Hemingway and Modern Art, William Faulkner and Hollywood’s Image of the Deep South, John Steinbeck and
photographs of the great depression.
Assessment: Two x 3,000 word essays
Department of English Language and Literature
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Year 2 - Module Information continued
EN-239 No-Man’s Land: Literature of the Great War
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module examines First World War writing from the point of view of combatants and non-combatants; men
and women; those who experienced the war first hand, and those for whom it is an historical event. Linking
these myriad viewpoints is the image of No-Man’s Land which functions as the preeminent symbol of the
Great War as fought on the Western Front. It is a site laden with complex meanings, connotative of trauma,
commemoration, political failure and gender crisis. On this module we will tease out such implications through
novels, memoirs, poetry and drama.
Assessment: Two essays
EN-241 Fragments of Union: The Cultural Making and Breaking of Britain
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
The nationality question has been a persistent theme in British politics, most obviously in recent decades in
relation to questions of immigration and settlement, Britain’s membership of Europe, the ‘troubles’ and ‘peace
process’ in Ulster, and the resurgence of forms of devolution and nationalism in Wales and Scotland. This
course explores the ways in which the diverse literatures of the British Isles have responded to, and shaped,
debates around these issues. The questions asked on the course will include: How does a ‘four nations’
approach, well-established in historical studies, function in literary studies? What are the key differences and
similarities between the literatures produced in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales? To what extent does
literature reflect social identities, and to what extent is it active in their creation? If all identities are in a sense
‘imagined’, why have certain kinds of identities been significant in particular periods? Is an aesthetics informed
by nationalism inevitably conservative and restrictive? Are linguistically experimental writers always sceptical
of collective identities? Are we witnessing the ‘break up’ of Britain in contemporary literature, or is Britishness
being reconstructed anew?
Assessment: Two written assignments.
EN-240 Revolution and Romanticism
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
In this module students will study some major texts of British Romantic poetry and prose in the historical context
of contemporary debates on revolutionising society. We will trace a dialectic between Romantic individualism
and social concern in poetry, revolutionary ‘propaganda’, gothic fiction and the romantic novel. Through
detailed critical analysis we will focus on the various ways in which writers sought to unmask bourgeois
hypocrisy and political corruption; to portray lower-class life and sexuality honestly; or to invoke tradition and
question change. The philosophical implications of such terms as ‘Romanticism’, ‘Sensibility’, and ‘Subjectivity’
will be explored, and the ideology of different literary styles, contrasted. Though we will be reading a varied
selection of texts, a continuing concern will be on the ways in which social changes are embodied in literary
consciousness, and on the relationship between experience and perception.
Assessment: 33% Assignment / 67% Exam
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Year 2 - Module Information continued
AM-204 Race and Ethnicity: American Perspectives
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module provides an introduction to the range and diversity of contemporary African American, Native American,
Asian American and Chicano/a literature. Focusing on works by both well-known and emerging writers, it encourages
students to situate the module texts within their cultural, historical, social and political contexts. At the same time,
emphasis is placed on recurring themes and motifs, including memory and trauma; silence, language and speech; the
complex intersections between gender, sexuality and ethnicity; and rewriting history. Topics for discussion include:
Toni Morrison’s incorporation of the vitality of black oral culture and music into the literary domain in Jazz; masculinity,
disguise and fantasy in David Hwang’s gender-bending play M. Butterfly; the politics and poetics of space in Hisaye
Yamamoto’s understated engagement with the traumatic history of Japanese American internment in her short fiction;
and LeAnne Howe’s mocking challenge to ethnic stereotyping in Evidence of Red.
Creative Writing Modules
EN-234 Introduction to Writing Fiction
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
Building on the overview of fiction genres in EN-117, this course, which is workshop-based, takes a practical
approach to getting started as a writer of fiction. Through a combination of expert instruction and practical
exercises, together with a thorough reading programme, EN-234 guides students on the path towards writing and
improving their own fictional prose. The emphasis will be on the short story form. Students will create a portfolio of
fiction work, on which they will be assessed.
Assessment: coursework
EN-236 Introduction to Writing Drama
Level 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This lecture/workshop module leads the student through the theory and practice of writing drama. Short weekly
assignments will be set, and these will be brought to the workshop to be considered communally. The module
considers the relationship between writer, play, actors and audience. It examines methods of structuring material
so as to reinforce curiosity and create empathy and suspense, and explores issues of character and dialogue.
Emphasis will be placed throughout on the practicalities of the creation of script.
Assessment: coursework (one assignment + reflective essay)
EN-204 Introduction to Writing Creative Non-Fiction
Level 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module provides an introduction to some of the main forms of documentary (or factual) writing, a vast field which
includes perhaps more financial opportunities for the professional (and would-be professional) writer than some other
kinds of creative writing. Students will learn how to research and structure their creative non-fiction. Basic proof-reading
and editing skills will be taught. Although entitled ‘Creative Non-Fiction’, this genre is indeed a branch of creative writing.
Accordingly, the artful deployment of language is fundamental to success in the various genres studied on the syllabus. Most
kinds of documentary writing are more dependent than, say, the novel or the short story, on a sense of target readership,
and the course invites students to determine what kinds of readership(s) they are writing for and then to tailor their prose
accordingly; adaptability and flexibility of style is thereby encouraged in a wide range of genres, from feature articles,
psychogeography, interviews and profiles to articles, essays and reviews.
Assessment: coursework (two portfolios + reflective essays)
Department of English Language and Literature
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Year 2 - Module Information continued
EN-232 Introduction to Writing Poetry
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module consists of weekly workshops, in which students will be introduced to the craft of writing poetry, paying
close attention to the specific language of the poem, and the relationship between form and content. This will
occur against a background theme of the changing role of the poet in society and how it has affected poetic form,
as well as an exploration of the position of poetry - whether performed or published - in the past and the present.
The focus each week will be on writing and rewriting, and weekly workshops will include discussion of published
poetry and the students’ own work.
Assessment: coursework (portfolio + reflective essay)
Language and Linguistics Modules
EN-260 Studying Dialect
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module tells the story of the study of dialect down the centuries, emphasizing the study of varieties of the English
language. It looks at the early interest in ‘provincial’ English, through to the development of systematic dialectology
in the nineteenth century, the advent of the sociolinguistic approach in the twentieth century, and on to the current
diversity of methods and research. In doing so we also look at the history of dialect dictionaries, linguistic atlases,
and national dialect surveys; at cultural attitudes towards non-standard English; and at the range of theoretical
underpinnings of dialect study: philological, structuralist, and generative.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
ALE-211 Psycholinguistics
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This course explores the field of psycholinguistics and its concerns; the brain and biological systems; speech
perception; words and meanings; sentence processing; text and discourse; first language acquisition; bilingualism;
and second language acquisition.
Assessment: assignment and exam
ALE-218 Discourse Analysis
Year 2 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module introduces students to key approaches and research methodologies in the broad field of discourse
analysis, including ethnography of communication, speech act theory, pragmatics, register analysis, genre analysis,
and interactional sociolinguistics/conversation analysis. We will discuss these approaches, their strengths and
limitations, and critically examine the application of these approaches in empirical research studies. The course
features hands-on data analyses, and students will be responsible for carrying out an original discourse analysis
based on original data.
Assessment: assignment and exam
Department of English Language and Literature
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Year 3 - Module Information continued
The specialist optional modules offered in Year 3 will vary from year to year, but an
indicative description of sample modules is given below:
English Literature Modules
EN-314 Chaucer
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This course examines a selection of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in all their complexity, perversity, and accomplishment.
We will focus on a range of genres (romance, lays, fabliaux), themes (class, religion, marriage, sexuality and gender,
power, as well as story-telling, authorship and textuality), and cultural preoccupations central to Chaucer’s age (social
mobility, relations between the sexes, moral and religious orthodoxy and deviance). We will pay specific attention
to how the texts represent and construct emerging identities in the later Middle Ages. This course emphasises the
importance (and rewards) of an attentive work on language and close critical analysis.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-334 Modern Irish Fiction in English
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module concentrates on a selection of Irish Fiction from the twentieth century. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man (1916) is a modernist Bildungsroman, passionately engaged with the political and religious contexts
of a Dublin upbringing. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (first published in English in 1955 though previously
written in French) is one of the best known of all twentieth century plays: in it “nothing happens, twice.” Flann
O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (completed in 1940, though published posthumously) is a cerebral comedy, and
an Irish vision of hell. A second strand in this unit will consider the construction of social and political identities in
what appear to be more realist types of Irish fiction- particularly narratives of the “Big House” which centre on the
decline of the Anglo-Irish class. We compare short stories by Sean O’Faolian and Frank O’Connor to Elizabeth
Bowen’s novel The Last September (1929) set in a demesne in County Cork during the Anglo-Irish War. Finally, we
turn to how divisions in mid-century independent Ireland are manifested in John McGahern’s volume of short stories
High Ground.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-335 European Fiction and Drama 1850 – 1920
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module studies, in English translation, six major works of fiction and drama produced in Europe during the
period 1850-1920. This module studies, in English translation, six major works of fiction and drama produced
in Europe during the period 1850-1920: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Ibsen’s The
Wild Duck, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and Kafka’s The Trial.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
Department of English Language and Literature
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Year 3 - Module Information continued
EN-339 Dylan Thomas
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This course offers the chance to study the work of a leading twentieth century writer in the locale where he was born,
brought up, and arrived at creative maturity. One of its main aims is to question the myth of the life which has dogged
past interpretations of Thomas by re-placing his writing in its literary, historical and critical contexts. Using critical and
theoretical approaches suggested by the work itself—linguistics, surrealism, psychoanalysis, theories of Gothic and
the body, Welsh identity, war, popular culture and the pastoral—it explores the ways in which Thomas developed
his explosive alternative to the ironic-realist tradition of English poetry by mediating the crises of his times (the Great
Depression, world war, and the Cold War) through his hybrid poetic, a blend of revolutionary modernism and
traditional form. You will learn about Thomas’s radical and exciting treatment of poetic creativity, language and the self,
sex and biology, religion, the child, and what today we would call green issues.
Assessment: Coursework (two essays)
EN-374 Theorising Texts: Shakespeare, Brontë, James
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
As readers of literary texts, we bring with us a host of assumptions and expectations about how meaning
works in literature. The fact that we have such assumptions (say, about gender, history, culture and language)
makes us all literary theorists, whether we know it or not. This course draws on a number of key literary
theories - for example, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and New Historicism - in order to
see how theoretical insights transform the meanings of literary texts. We focus discussion around three literary
texts from the Renaissance, Romantic/Victorian and modernist periods: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Emily
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-383 W.B. Yeats
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module offers the chance to study one of world literature’s most significant poets in some detail. We will
approach Yeats’s writings from a wide variety of angles: romanticism, modernism, nationalism, Ireland, Europe,
literary techniques, political concerns etc. Concentrating primarily on his poetry we will locate his writings within the
contexts of late romanticism, international modernism and Irish nationalism. His various meditations on the role of the
artist, on politics, on love and on aesthetics will be explored and discussed.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
Department of English Language and Literature
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Year 3 - Module Information continued
EN-390 The Erotics and Exotics of Romantic Orientalism
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module extends political and historical reading of Romanticism to embrace the cultural, institutional, and sexual
politics of Empire. We shall examine the intertwined roots of Romanticism and Orientalism: the exotic, the erotic, and
the despotic. The craze for sensual and sensational escapism ushered in by the Arabian Nights Entertainment had
involved a voyeuristic invasion of the seraglio. Romantic writers were also absorbed by that fragrant and forbidden
space, but was such Oriental escapism at odds with their social and political concerns? Exactly how did their works
reflect contemporary cultural and imperial encounters with Asia and blur the margins of imaginative and actual
power? Key issues to be explored will include cultural stereotypes such as contemptuous misogyny and the capricious
cruelty of the Oriental despot; liberty and libertinism; the earthly paradise; and the longing for feminized dreams of
the East.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-391 Wales: Singular Noun, Plural Experience
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
Welsh identity and the experience of Wales is multiple and self-consciously constructed and contested in the English
language literature of this country. This course will explore a national literature which engages with questions of
home and belonging, borderlands and the sometimes tense relationship between England and Wales. We will study
an exciting selection of short stories, novels and poetry with the help of a range of critical concepts.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-398 The Masculine and the Monstrous in the Middle Ages
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
Focusing on a variety of medieval texts written by both men and women within a variety of genres, this co-taught
module will utilize a dynamic and interdisciplinary approach to examine the ways in which the male body is
gendered in medieval texts and how that body interacts with sin, sexual aberrance and monstrosity. Using as
a point of reference medieval and contemporary theories of masculinity and monstrosity, it will examine the
complex and often paradoxical constructions of masculinity in the texts under scrutiny and the purposes such
constructions may have served in defining both the ‘Same’ (men) and the ‘Other’ (anybody/anything else). The
module will complement work on medieval texts undertaken in year 2 (although this is not a prerequisite), as
well as offering a more focused examination of masculinity within specific medieval socio-religious contexts.
It is hoped that many of the readings offered and produced during the module will be student-led, and will
demonstrate the continued relevance and importance of medieval literature as a means of understanding the
roles played by gender and monstrous discourse within culture and society to this day.
Assessment: portfolio and essay
Department of English Language and Literature
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BA English Literature/English Literature with Creative Writing
Year 3 - Module Information continued
EN-3010 Uncanny places and cyberspaces: Gender and the fantastic
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
The boundaries of fantastic writing appear to be infinite: unconstrained by realism, it is a place of limitless
imaginative possibilities. The novels and films studied on this module, however, use the fantastic text as a space
in which to articulate often claustrophobic narratives of confinement and problematic gender relations. We will
begin by studying novels that draw on the conventions of the gothic and the ghost story in order to defamiliarise
the domestic space, and dramatise the fears and frustrations of the female subject confined within it. We will end
the module by examining the technological configurations of space found in science fiction narratives in order to
examine whether the virtual world offers more liberatory possibilities for the gendered subject.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-3011 Discovering Old English
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module will draw on sources from Anglo-Saxon literary and material culture – textual and archaeological
evidence – to offer insights into the period. Texts will be read in translation, but there will also be some
opportunities to encounter Old English in the original. We will explore major cultural transitions in the period,
including shifts from orality to literacy and from a secular warrior society to Christianity. We will also think about
how texts interact with their historical contexts and how we can recover Anglo-Saxon cultural values, politics and
debates through close textual reading and analysis.
Assessment: Coursework (two essays)
EN-3018 Neo-Victorian Fictions
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This option explores the persistent fascination of twentieth/twenty-first-century writers with the Victorian age, its
global contexts and textual/sexual politics. Discussion will centre on how and why (post)modern authors revise,
subvert and deconstruct the Victorian novel and re-work nineteenth-century preoccupations with race, class
and gender. Drawing mainly on the emergent body of neo-Victorian criticism, but also gender and postcolonial
theory, the module will analyse modern-day writers’ interventions in a range of Victorian cultural discourses (e.g.
criminality, imperialism, sexology) and consider how such interventions problematise the relationship between
literature and history. Finally, the course will consider to what extent historical revision/reconstruction reveals as
much about the writer’s present as the re-imagined past.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-3019 Thomas Hardy
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
A study of five novels by Thomas Hardy, chosen to introduce and illustrate the range of his work and its principal
themes, with particular emphasis on his exploration of marriage, parent-child relations, the class system, and the
impact of modernisation upon rural communities and individual consciousness.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
Department of English Language and Literature
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Year 3 - Module Information continued
EN-3027 William Blake: Poetry and Designs
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
From his early ‘Songs’ to his late epics, Blake’s poetry and designs are concerned with struggle and critique. A poet
of the Romantic period, Blake often overturns Romantic assumptions, such as the Romantics’ celebration of ‘nature’.
A Christian visionary, Blake reinvents Biblical tradition, restoring the sacred text to its origins, for him, in poetry.
A political radical, Blake interrogates the workings of power and ideology, assaulting the injustices of his day and
welcoming the eruption of the French Revolution. An artisan artist, Blake prints his own books in the form of the
‘illuminated book’, an innovative combination of text and design. The module explores a selection of Blake’s poetry
and illuminated plates from the early ‘Songs’ to the political prophecies and Lambeth books of the mid 1790s, and
concentrates on the radical nature of his art. It examines Blake’s dialogue with his culture and the interaction of the
verbal and visual in his work.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-3028 - Contemporary Women’s Writing
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module will study a range of novels published by women from 2005 onwards. We will interrogate the validity
of the term ‘woman’s writing’, as well as looking at how contemporary female authors both play with and contest
women’s traditional association with narratives of domesticity and romance. Texts studied will include Michele
Roberts, Reader, I Married Him (2005), Audrey Niffenigger, Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), Maggie O’Farrell, The Hand
that First Held Mine (2010), Helen Oyeyemi, Mr Fox (2011), Zadie Smith, NW (2012), Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
(2013), Ali Smith, How To Be Both (2014), Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests (2014). Topics discussed will include the
body, queerness and sexuality, motherhood, masculinity, memory and rewriting, female histories, house and home,
feminism.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-3029 Postmodernist and Post-War Fiction
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This course examines some of the fictions of the late twentieth century which, marked by a formal self-consciousness,
have sometimes been referred to as postmodernist. The usefulness of this category, regarded as a chronological period
after modernism or as a self-reflexive theory of narrative, will be fully tested. We will consider how the problem of
representing history is connected to the defamiliarisation of realist narrative. In the first part of the module, we study
a novel which has been termed ‘historiographic metafiction’, an anti-war novel which incorporates science fiction
and a novella in which a woman takes charge of the narrative by seeking out her unwitting murderer. We then turn
to more recent novels, two of which lead the reader directly back to the Second World War but continue to probe
the consolations of mimetic realism and to question the recuperative power of memory. Texts discussed include
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Muriel Spark, The
Driver’s Seat (1970), Jorge-Luis Borges, ‘Emma Zunz’ [photocopy], Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (1995), Ian McEwan,
Atonement (2001), W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001).
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
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EN-3031 – Dissertation: English Literature – Teaching Blocks 1 + 2
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 40
The Dissertation is an optional, two-semester, 40-credit module in which you produce your own research project
under the supervision of a member of the English literature staff. The topic should fall within staff research and
teaching specialisms broadly defined. A first-semester programme includes building research, summary and
bibliographical skills, the ability to synthesise succinctly, planning and organisational skills, correct presentation
of a thesis, presentational skills and public speaking. You submit a preliminary proposal in the first week of term,
and subject to approval are assigned a supervisor. You attend group sessions in Semesters 1 and 2, and meet
your supervisor individually in Semester 2.
Assessment:
• Research proposal and annotated bibliography – 2250-2500 words (15%)
• Dissertation plan (chapter divisions) - 1250-1500 words (15%)
• Dissertation - 8,000-10,000 words (70%)
EN-3032 ‘The point, however, is to change it’: Marxism, Theory and Literature
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
Marxism is one of the most powerful methodologies for analysing power structures and historical change ever
devised. It has also been - in accordance with Marx's assertion that 'philosophers have only interpreted the
world; the point, however, is to change it' - one of the most powerful agencies in the history it analyses. Yet for
all Marxism's totalising tendencies in the political sphere, Marxist literary theory has been true to the dialectical
essence of its founder's philosophy to the extent that it now consists of a rich multiplicity of critical approaches,
ranging from body-centred theories of the carnivalesque to profound and melancholy analyses of the relationship
between Modernism and popular culture. This course matches important Marxist critics and theorists, or groups
of theorists, with specific texts or films, testing the explanatory power and claims of the theories at the level of
close reading and what Marxism calls 'praxis'. At all times, attention is paid to the fact that Marxism does not
merely act upon literature; because Marx and many of his successors were often shaped by literature, Marxism
itself, to a significant degree, is a literary product, the creation of deeply literary sensibilities.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
Department of English Language and Literature
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Year 3 - Module Information continued
EN-3033 Triumphant Disasters, Disastrous Triumphs: Writing World War Two
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
Over seventy years after it broke out, the Second World War still exerts a huge - some would say distorting influence on the national psyche. Yet, despite the fact that few new writers emerged in these six years, the War
had major effect on many established writers, providing the stimulus for an outburst of creativity and profoundly
altering the trajectory of their careers and the nature of their work. Through the poetry, fiction, film, speeches,
memoirs and journalism of the time, this course traces literary responses to the war, from the Dunkirk debâcle
to the bitter-sweetness of a victory that marked the end of the Empire and Britain’s Great Power status. It is
particularly alert to what distinguished this ‘People’s War’ from its predecessors, exploring the creative tensions
between London and the regions, civilians and combatants, classes and sexes, and covering writing by front-line
combatants and draft-dodgers, civilians and spies, aristocrats and bohemians. By locating literary texts in the
broader cultural context of wartime film, music and the visual arts, as well as the political and historical currents
of the early 1940s, this module aims to reveal a much richer and more complex response to the conflict than the
moral crusade we are usually presented with, and to give a glimpse of the modern Britain that emerged out of the
ashes, bombsites and trauma.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-3036 ‘Love, and a bit with a dog’: Comedy in Renaissance England
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
In Tom Stoppard’s screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, Shakespeare’s early comedy, The Two Gentlemen of
Verona, is performed before the Queen. When the actor playing Launce is attacked by his unruly dog, Crab,
the audience, hitherto unamused, break into laughter. Turning to a nonplussed Shakespeare, the theatre
entrepreneur Philip Henslowe snorts, ‘You see…comedy…love, and a bit with a dog, that’s what they want’. This
module will take the question – what is comedy? – seriously. Often, comedies are patronized when compared
with tragedies, but comedies contain in them matters of importance, opening up questions of gender, politics,
religion and morality. This module will encourage students to challenge preconceived ideas about comedies
and to confront, head on, thorny critical issues, such as whether comedies ought to be funny, or whether they
ought to end happily. Students will be asked to consider what it means to call a play a comedy; in doing so,
they will explore some of the most audacious, inventive and controversial plays of the English Renaissance.
These include: John Lyly, Galatea (1584), William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (1595), Ben Jonson,
Volpone (1606), Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), Thomas Dekker and Thomas
Middleton, The Roaring Girl (1611), Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure (1668).
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
Department of English Language and Literature
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Year 3 - Module Information continued
EN-3037 Exodus: Moses and Minority Literature
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
The story of Moses and the journey from slavery in Egypt in search of the Promised Land is one of the
foundational tales of Western culture, and has been particularly central for minorities. Moses’ own mixed identity
is an important part of the story: he was born a Hebrew, raised as an Egyptian, married a Midianite, and then
returned to Egypt to liberate the slaves from whom he had been estranged. The diversity of cultures within the
story are not only witnessed by Moses but found within Moses himself. We will read the book of Exodus to see
how Moses’s multiculturalism is handled there, and will draw on the insights of Freud and others in interpreting
the text. We will then proceed to analyse the uses to which the story has been put in the African American,
Jewish and Welsh literary traditions. The reading for this course is diverse - from the scriptures to hymns and
spirituals, from novels to psychoanalytic theory. Why has this story been so influential? To what cultural and
political uses has it been adapted? Can this ancient narrative help us recognize, negotiate and understand our
own identities and multicultural realities today?
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-3039 Home Sweet Home: Staging Domestic Dangers in Renaissance England
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
According to most theories of dramatic genre, comedies were supposed to detail the life of low-born people;
tragedies were the sole preserve of royalty and nobility. In the sixteenth century, Sir Philip Sidney argued that
comedy handled ‘our private and domestical matters’ but tragedy dealt with the tyranny of kings. Thankfully,
drama does not always respect theory: from the 1590s onwards playwrights began to make ‘ordinary people’
the focus of tragedy. In doing so, they destabilized fundamental assumptions about the nature of tragedy. In
this module, students will explore the variety of ways in which playwrights handled ‘private and domestical
matters’. Households are shown to be contested spaces in which lurk hidden dangers, but the domestic worlds
of the Renaissance stage are also intimately connected to the wider world of public life. In particular, the module
will consider the fraught and complicated way in which domestic plays represent women: on the one hand,
condemning them as adulterers and murderers, or configuring them merely as victims, on the other, presenting
them sympathetically, as rebels against patriarchy.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-3042 Postcolonial Literature
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module is an introduction to postcolonial literature and theory. We will focus on key cultural, political and
literary concepts such as the colonial ‘other’, cultural hybridity, rewriting history, language and resistance. The
intersections between different kinds of identity including gender, race, nationality and sexuality will be explored
across a selection of texts from very different colonial/postcolonial situations across the globe: including Nigeria,
Zimbabwe, New Zealand, the Caribbean (Guyana) and Wales.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
Department of English Language and Literature
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Year 3 - Module Information continued
EN-3043 Poetry in the 20th Century
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
‘Poetry in the Twentieth Century’ is a survey of English-language poetry from Modernism to the new
millennium. The module begins with American poetry and the imagists who worked in Paris and London,
many of whom, like Ezra Pound, H.D. and e.e. cummings, were American. The module examines the
relationship between the development of imagism and the work of other American modernist poets such as
Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. The module then turns to the English poets of
the mid-twentieth century and the work of Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, before considering some of the
recent English-language poets of Ireland and Wales, including Seamus Heaney and Gwyneth Lewis.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
EN-3044 Hearts in Hiding: Hardy and Hopkins
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This course aims to explore the poetry of two of the most innovative and influential English poets of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The emphasis will be upon close reading of selected texts to
investigate both poets’ fascination with individuality and distinctiveness, with creativity and perception.
Discussion will centre on their respective responses to emotional crises and the impact of division and
desolation. We shall consider the critical, cultural and political contexts of their poetry, focusing on issues of
gender, genre, aesthetics, the nature of language, poetry and the imagination. Key questions of similarity
and difference will be raised as we consider the extent to which their originality exploits tension between the
traditional and the experimental.
Assessment: Coursework (two esays)
AM-316 Contemporary American Fiction
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
The subject of this course is the astonishing vitality and energy of contemporary American fiction, a rude
health all the more remarkable given the number of pessimistic readings of the current cultural scene. After all,
Postmodernism tells us that ours is the age of the sequel, the remake and the copy, preoccupied with a manic
recycling and re-branding, as if to disguise the fact that notions of originality and authenticity have now been
used up. Many commentators claim that the age of great artistic revolution is over, and in its place we face
a sense of cultural exhaustion and glazed indifference, the endless pastiche, parody and knowingness – a
culture of deja-vu. But is any of this true? Do we truly live in a world where everything has already been said, a
culture characterised by empty spectacle, blank repetition, and a declining faith in the notion of literature itself?
This module explores the role of the writer in America in the twenty first century, and seeks to account for the
seemingly paradoxical energy of the novel in an age of apparent exhaustion. Certain key themes – simulation,
the mediascape, a questioning of the real and an exploration of the gap between words and things – occur
across the novels under consideration, and the course will also consider issues of authenticity, individuality, and
political influence.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
Department of English Language and Literature
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AM-333 African American Literature 1910-1940: The Harlem Renaissance
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This course will examine the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro movement, which saw an unprecedented
flowering of African American cultural production in the first half of the twentieth century. Paying close
attention to the range of African American expression in music, visual art, poetry, fiction and the essay, we
will focus on a number of prominent themes in early twentieth century African-American literature, including
gender and sexuality; migration and urbanisation; and memory and history. Students will be encouraged to
think about the relationships between literary texts and their historical contexts, and to make connections
across genres, especially between literature and music. Particular emphasis will be placed on stylistic and formal
innovations to underline the diverse cultural and political positions that African American writers adopted
during this period.
Assessment: essay and exam
Creative Writing Modules
EN-306 Further Dramatic Writing
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module consists of a series of weekly workshops in the theory and practice of writing for performance. It will
clarify how writing for film and audio differs from stage writing and will include specific teaching sessions and
assignments in these areas of performance writing. Writing projects will be brought to the workshops to be
considered communally. The course will be taught through a combination of tutor-led discussion and
workshopbased exercises; techniques will be clarified by reading, viewing and listening to named productions.
Emphasis will be placed throughout on the practicalities of developing working scripts. Consideration will be given
to the collaborative aspects of performance writing - the requirements and contributions of other professionals
(actors, designers, directors, dramaturges/editors, technicians etc) in the development of a script.
Assessment: two portfolios (the first will be a radio script and reflective essay; the second will be a short film script
and a reflective essay).
EN-309 Further Creative Non-Fiction Writing
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
Ambitious ‘Creative Non-Fiction’ covers a wide range of genres and approaches, encompassing arts and literary
reviews, travel and landscape writing, political and persuasive essays, nature writing, interview-based profiles and
biography. Leading on from the introductory module ‘Creative Non-Fiction’, this course offers students an
opportunity to examine how these genres work and to test and improve their own skills through practical workshop
techniques.
Assessment: two portfolios and reflective essays
Department of English Language and Literature
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EN-319 Further Poetry Writing
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module consists of ten two-hour weekly workshops, which will deepen knowledge of the craft of writing
poetry, paying close attention to the specific language of the poem, and the relationship between form and
content. This will occur against a background theme of the changing role of the poet in society and how it has
affected poetic form, as well as an exploration of the position of poetry - whether performed or published - in
the past and the present. The focus each week will be on writing and rewriting and weekly workshops will
include discussion of published poetry and the students' own work.
Assessment: A portfolio of finished poems with a word count of 1,500 – 2,000, accompanied by a critical essay
of 1,000 words.
EN-3014 Further Fiction Writing
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module consists of a series of weekly one-hour lectures, each followed by a one-hour workshop, leading
the student through the theory and practice of writing fiction: regular assignments will be brought to the
workshop to be considered communally. Technical exercises will also be undertaken during each class,
leading to discussion and building the practical comprehension of the techniques of fiction writing. Built
into the module is a systematic programme of reading, both of modern and earlier works of fiction, to render
students conversant with the traditions in which they are participating, and to encourage close reading skills.
Concentrating on short prose, the course will teach the fundamentals of narrative and plotting; the use of
imagery and setting in fiction; the art of the charactersketch and the elaboration of character through setting,
dialogue and narrative. The course will be taught by a fluid mingling of tutor-led discussion and workshopbased exercises; writing techniques will be clarified by the reading and discussion of named works, shedding
light on creative practice by exercises in mimesis and parody.
Assessment: portfolio and reflective essay
EN-3026 Creative Writing Personal Project
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
The Personal Project in Creative Writing is an independent study module for those wishing to take their
creative work to a higher level. Students who choose to take this module should have a strong record
in Creative Writing. They will submit a creative writing portfolio of between 7,000-8,000 words. This
may take the form of fiction, poetry, drama or creative non-fiction. Students taking the Personal Project
in Creative Writing will receive 10 hours of individual or small group supervision. Supervisions will take
place at regular intervals with set targets and personal feedback.
Assessment: 7,000-8,000 word project
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Language and Linguistics Modules
EN-376 Prehistory, History and Language
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module has three sections: 1. The origins of language question- focusing especially on the ideas of Noam
Chomsky, Steven Pinker, and Terrence Deacon. This section gives us an in-depth insight into the theories
of the fundamental character of language. 2. The search for the Indo-European- focusing on rival theories
(for example, Colin Renfrew, JP Mallory, Marija Gimbutas) on the origins and spread of Indo-European
languages. This section provides an in-detail understanding of research into the language “family” that gave
us English. 3. The Old English to Middle English question - what is the evidence that led language historians
to identify a boundary between so called “Old” and “Middle English”? This section is about the historical
processes that changed the grammar, vocabulary, and spelling of English enormously in the Middle Ages.
Assessment: coursework (two essays)
ALE-305 First Language Acquisition
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module builds on the level two module ‘Psycholinguistics’. The aim is to develop a deeper understanding
of the processes, conditions and stages of successful first language acquisition, and also to consider variation
and disorders in child language acquisition, to explore methodological issues and principles in first language
acquisition research, and to provide a comparative model for the better understanding of second language
acquisition, including child bilingualism.
Assessment: essay and exam
ALE-316 Language in the Media
Year 3 Undergraduate
Credits: 20
This module builds upon work that you have done on discourse analysis in year 1, applying it to a range
of media texts, including television interviews, documentaries, political debates, social network sites, and
participatory news sites. You will use several of the main theoretical frameworks in Discourse Analysis to do so.
For example, you will draw upon the micro-analytic methods of Conversation Analysis to examine how political
interviews on television and radio phone-in programmes are routinely structured: how are they opened and
closed? how are ‘neutral’ questions posited? how are answers evaded? Likewise, using Im-Politeness theories,
you will examine verbal conflict and aggression in online political deliberation. You will also learn about the
similarities in the use of narratives across genres as diverse as documentaries, news and talkshows.
The course will improve your data collection and discourse analytic skills. It will also teach you to assess
critically the impact of media discourse upon contemporary society (and vice versa) and to evaluate discursive
practices whereby identities are legitimised and/or challenged within the media.
Assessment: assignment and exam
Department of English Language and Literature
28
BA English Literature/English Literature with Creative Writing
For further information, please contact:
Admissions and Marketing
College of Arts and Humanities
Swansea University
Singleton Park
Swansea SA2 8PP
Telephone: 01792 606980/606981
Email: ahadmissions@swansea.ac.uk
Follow us on twitter: Apply_Swansea_C
Department of English Language and Literature
29
For further information, please contact:
Admissions and Marketing
College of Arts and Humanities
Swansea University
Singleton Park
Swansea SA2 8PP
Telephone: 01792 606980/606981
Email: ahadmissions@swansea.ac.uk
Follow us on twitter: Apply_Swansea_C