Each level of the degree includes a single year-long creative writing module taught by creative writing practitioners and active researchers. Each of these modules must be passed in order to progress to the next level and (in the case of the final module) for you to be awarded the degree.
Year 1 compulsory modules |
Module title |
Credits |
|
Explorations in Literature
Explorations in Literature
30 credits
This module introduces a wide range of works covering the major literary genres and embodying significant interventions or influences in the history of literature. The emphasis is on reading primary texts and discovering (or rediscovering) writers and cultures so that you will be able to make informed choices among more specialised modules later in your degree.
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30 credits |
|
Approaches to Text
Approaches to Text
30 credits
The module will introduce students to essential concepts in modern literary study, critical theory and literary criticism through a detailed engagement with literary texts, theoretical texts and literary criticism. Students will develop critical reading skills, gain a vocabulary for discussing and analyzing literary works, and through a close integration with the PASS programme, will build up their academic writing and research skills in a series of short, assessed exercises that will aid in the writing and revision of their course work in the first year and throughout the degree.
Principal texts might typically include Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Seamus Heaney's North, and Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba.
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30 credits |
|
Foundation Workshop in Creative Writing
Foundation Workshop in Creative Writing
30 credits
This workshop combines the study and practice of poetry and fiction in order to give you the opportunity to explore both genres, to develop your knowledge of form and technique and to lay the foundations of your own creative writing practice. The workshop, led by a creative-writing practitioner, will combine writing exercises with critical analysis of literary works from a broad range of cultures and eras, in addition to providing the opportunity to discuss your own work.
A pass in this module is compulsory for progression to the next level.
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30 credits |
|
Introduction to Literature of the Victorian Period
Introduction to Literature of the Victorian Period
15 credits
This module is based on writing in Britain between 1830 and 1870. Perhaps no period of literary history has been so subject to stereotyping as the Victorian, yet, as its chronological span alone suggests, Victorian literature is marked above all by its diversity. The literature of the Victorian period contains both the legacy of romanticism and the origins of modernism; its aesthetic and moral ideals are powerful, varied, and unstable. Most crucially, it is the site of debate: about morals, politics, religion, science, sexuality, gender, nationhood, empire, and, at its very basis, about the nature and function of literature itself. The texts featured on this module will represent the early Victorian period as well as a range of its genres, including poetry, novels and essays.
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15 credits |
|
Introduction to Poetry
Introduction to Poetry
15 credits
This module subdivides into two five-week sections, on ‘practice’ and ‘close readings’. The first concentrates on pivotal and innovative figures and movements in poetry from the early modern period to the present day, and the second explores fundamental issues in poetry through the lens of individual poems. Both sections are presented with the support of the department’s creative practitioners.
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15 credits |
You also choose three modules (totalling 90 credits) from a range characterised by wide literary, historical and contextual scope, of which at least one must encompass pre-1800 literature.
Year 2 option modules |
Module title |
Credits |
|
Drama and Transgression: From Prometheus to Faust
Drama and Transgression: From Prometheus to Faust
30 credits
This module explores a range of approaches to conflicts between divine or political authority and human claims to self-assertion and freedom; submission to orthodoxy; co-existence of orthodoxy and humanism; reconciliation of autonomy and theonomy; and the demise of divine law. The module introduces you to epoch-specific types of overlaps and tensions between religious and positive law, divine and human reason, feeling and understanding. The module also aims to increase your awareness of issues of gender and power, and investigates the nature of female revolt and violence in the light of the Aristotelian theories and traditional male academic and religious discourses.
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30 credits |
|
European Cinema
European Cinema
30 credits
This module Providing an overview of significant trends in European cinema since 1945, this module considers a number of specific films which reflect changing attitudes to contemporary European society and shifting notions of European identity. The first half explores the emergence of the various new cinemas in Europe after 1945 and the second examines a number of key films in order to explore how European identities have been projected and dramatised.
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30 credits |
|
Hollywood Cinema
Hollywood Cinema
30 credits
This module provides an analytical overview of some of the major areas of Hollywood cinema and its connection to the wider cultural landscape of the United States. Topics include:
- The rise of cinema and modernity
- Narrative cinema
- Definitions of melodrama
- Noir
- Westerns
- Psychoanalysis
- Femininity and masculinity
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30 credits |
|
Inventing the Nation: American Literature in the mid-19th Century
Inventing the Nation: American Literature in the mid-19th Century
30 credits
This examines a cluster of major American writers from the 1830s to the 1880s, all of which are engaged in shaping, describing, criticising and contesting the emerging American nation. We will examine literature’s role in the definition of national identity by exploring individual writers. We will also address the key ways in which the American literary tradition differs from its English counterpart. The writers of the so-called ‘American Renaissance’ – Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman – will be central to the module, as their writings are at the heart of the project of national self invention. However, the module will look at this project from alternative perspectives, including those of region, race and gender. It includes the study of film as well as texts.
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30 credits |
|
Literary London
Literary London
30 credits
During the 19th century, London easily outstripped all other contenders as the largest and most vibrant metropolis in the world. Inevitably, the city, with its extraordinary contradictions, was intimately involved with some of the century’s most major literary developments.
This module focuses on representations of the metropolis by a range of writers living and working in London across the period, and in so doing covers a range of genres (poetry, biography, essay, novel, crime writing) and subjects (everyday life, government, poverty, religion, law, empire).
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30 credits |
|
Literature of the English Renaissance
Literature of the English Renaissance
30 credits
You examine the literature and ideas of the 16th and 17th centuries, principally in poetry and drama. The major texts might typically include Marlowe, 'Doctor Faustus'; Shakespeare, 'Henry IV' and 'King Lear'; the poetry of Donne; Spenser, 'The Faerie Queene' (Canto 1); Milton, 'Paradise Lost' (Book 1); Webster, 'The Duchess of Malfi'.
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30 credits |
|
Literature of the Later Middle Ages: Society and the Individual
Literature of the Later Middle Ages: Society and the Individual
30 credits
This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice. You study English writing in the 14th and 15th centuries, especially social satire, the comic tale, varieties of romance, and autobiography. You study texts in relation to genre; society and morality; gender; dissent and individual consciousness. Texts might typically include Chaucer, 'The Canterbury Tales' (selection); romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and 'The Book of Margery Kempe'; the ‘Lais of Marie de France'.
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30 credits |
|
Moderns
Moderns
30 credits
In this module, you will study modernist writing in Britain, Ireland and internationally from the 1920s, including such works as Eliot, 'The Waste Land'; Woolf, 'Mrs Dalloway'; Joyce, 'Ulysses'; Brecht, 'Mother Courage'; poems of Yeats, Auden, Stevens and others.
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30 credits |
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Old English
Old English
30 credits
This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice. An introduction to the language and literature of the Anglo-Saxons, with consideration of a variety of themes and genres, including history, lyric, mythology, poetic elegy and romance. Some texts are read in translation. Major texts might typically include selections such as the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', 'Beowulf', works by King Alfred, Ælfric, and Bede.
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30 credits |
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Post-Victorian English Literature
Post-Victorian English Literature
30 credits
This module examines selected literary works across several genres in the period 1901-36, concentrating upon English-based writings in the non-modernist tradition. Topics for consideration include responses to social change and warfare, and new conceptions of Englishness and modern sexuality. Authors typically include Hardy, Shaw, Forster, Strachey, Brooke, Owen, Graves, Mansfield, Lawrence, Waugh, Holtby, and Orwell.
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30 credits |
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Restoration and 18th-Century Literature
Restoration and 18th-Century Literature
30 credits
This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice. You'll study English verse and prose satire 1660–1760, the Restoration comic stage, the rise of the novel, and landscape and poetry.
The principal texts might typically include selections from:
- Paul Hammond (ed), Restoration Literature: An Anthology
- Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
- Samuel Richardson, Pamela
- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
- and works by Burney and Johnson.
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30 credits |
|
Sensibility and Romanticism: Revolutions in Writing and Society
Sensibility and Romanticism: Revolutions in Writing and Society
30 credits
This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice. The module covers aspects of mid to late 18th century and early 19th century literature including ‘sensibility’, ‘pre-romanticism’, the Gothic novel and the emergence of the Romantic movement. Principal texts might typically include Sterne, 'A Sentimental Journey'; Goldsmith, 'The Vicar of Wakefield'; Austen, 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Mansfield Park'; Lewis, 'The Monk'; Scott, 'Waverley'; Brontë, 'Wuthering Heights'; selected poems of Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Wordsworth.
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30 credits |
|
Shakespeare
Shakespeare
30 credits
A study of the majority of Shakespeare’s plays, undertaken roughly in the order in which they were written or performed, is augmented by close analysis of the poetic means and theatrical conditions through which the playwright emerges.
Looking at the plays alongside the theatres of Elizabethan London and the social politics of the period, we will examine how language and drama evolve in Shakespeare’s craft, and the enduringness of his art. The module will take in a range of early modern concerns, political, social, domestic, geographical and aesthetic to explore the evolution of media – the written text and the theatrical production.
Specified passages from ‘set plays’ (annually varied) are set for close reading exercises in the module. Shakespeare’s other texts are placed within Shakespeare’s whole work and the culture of the age.
This module constitutes a ‘pre-1800’ choice.
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30 credits |
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Discourse and Society
Discourse and Society
15 credits
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15 credits |
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Aspects of the Novel
Aspects of the Novel
15 credits
You'll explore key developments and trends in the novel form the early eighteenth century to the present day. Beginning with Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the module goes on to look at representative landmarks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ‘realism’ and of later modernist and postmodernist fiction.
As well as attending to the distinctive features of the individual novels, we will investigate critical and theoretical accounts of the genre, paying particular attention to debates about mimesis, character, narrative voice and plot.
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15 credits |
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Contemporary Arab Migrant Writing
Contemporary Arab Migrant Writing
15 credits
You’ll examine the transcultural and transnational spaces imaginatively created in the works of Arab writers who are originally from North Africa and the Middle East and migrated to European and North American countries.
The core module texts are novels, memoirs, as well as short stories that cross boundaries spatially but also socio-culturally and linguistically. These works confront the waves of political repression, socio-economic crises, conflicts and geopolitical upheavals in the Arab world, as well as unprecedented rates of illegal migration, especially to Europe. The module texts are mostly Anglophone Arab literature and translations from Arabic and French, since 1999.
We will approach the texts as both specific to particular political and cultural geographies and also reflective of people’s physical and intellectual itineraries in a world where borders are alternately opened and closed. We will mainly look at place, memory, identity, home, diaspora, exile, refugee status, clandestine migration, surveillance, human rights, conflict, resistance, postcolonialism, nationalism, transnationalism, multiculturalism, assimilation dynamics and integration policies, gender, religious diversity and extremism, life-writing, as well as language, translation and the transcultural imagination.
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15 credits |
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Work Placement (English)
Work Placement (English)
15 credits
- The central objective is to enable you to take up a workplace learning experience which will benefit your studies, your skillset and your CV.
- The work placement will take place on one day per week over 10 weeks.
- Assistance will be given in sourcing a suitable placement.
- You will gain an understanding of key issues within the organisation and have access to data which will be invaluable in developing your research report.
- You will be supported in preparing the assignments through workshops and individual discussions.
- You will have the opportunity to relate your degree subject to real-life situations, develop a range of transferable skills and gain sector-specific experience, thereby enhancing your employment prospects.
Students who pursue this module are required to undertake 10 days of unpaid work at a host institution. The work is normally carried out over 1 day per week, although there is the possibility of working more than 1 day per week, depending on the student's and the host institution's availability. The type of work students would be expected to do should have some relevance to their academic studies. There is no expectation that the student should expect any sort of extensive or designated training such as that which might be offered to a professional working on a long-term basis at the institution. The student will be given guidance, however. The type of work which students might undertake on their placement may include (but not be limited to), for example, cataloguing, archive work, helping organise publicity for events or educational programmes, or shadowing a specialist in his/her work in a mostly observatory way.
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15 credits |
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Sociolinguistics: Language-use, Variation, and Identity
Sociolinguistics: Language-use, Variation, and Identity
15 credits
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15 credits |
You also choose modules (worth a total of 90 credits) from the full range offered by the Department. In addition, a rotation of single-term, 15-credit modules are also available.
Year 3 option modules |
Module title |
Credits |
|
Caribbean Women Writers
Caribbean Women Writers
30 credits
You explore representative African-Caribbean and Indian-Caribbean women’s writing – prose and poetry – since the 1960s, with comparative study of black women’s writing in non-Caribbean contexts. Principal texts might typically include Gilroy, 'Boy Sandwich'; Collins, 'Angel'; Hodge, 'Crick Crack Monkey'; Riley, 'Waiting in the Twilight'; Senior, 'The Arrival of the Snake Woman'.
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30 credits |
|
Decadence
Decadence
30 credits
This module explores the literature of the decadence in France and England in the 19th century. Beginning with definitions of the term ‘decadence’ and its antecedents in antiquity, the module considers the emergence of decadence as a literary tradition in France as a challenge to the orthodoxies of Romanticism and its subsequent treatment by English decadents and European Symbolists at the Fin de Siècle. The principal themes of decadence – degeneration, disease, sex, death – are traced in the work of writers in the 19th century and understood against the backdrop of contemporary cultural anxieties and controversies.
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30 credits |
|
The Emergence of Modern America: American Literature 1890–1940
The Emergence of Modern America: American Literature 1890–1940
30 credits
This module covers the period from the closing of the frontier in America to the eve of the Second World War; a period that saw both mass immigration and the growth of urban centres, the crash of 1929 and the onslaught of the Great Depression. Through a selection of poetry and fiction, the module traces some of the major themes of the period, such as: the literary and cultural move from Naturalism to Modernism; the Harlem Renaissance; Cubism and Avant Garde Aesthetics; Expatriate Writers and the cult of the Lost Generation; Regionalism; Documentarism and Photography; and the emergence of an American poetic vernacular. The module takes some account of the relation of the visual arts, photography and cinema to literature of the period.
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30 credits |
|
Approaches to Language and the Media
Approaches to Language and the Media
15 credits
In this course, you will learn to analyse a range of media text-types found in advertisements, magazine and newspaper articles, television and photography. Comparative studies with literary texts may also be included. The course will cover a number of approaches to the reading and interpretation of a range of media genres.
You will be asked to reflect upon features of language and consider how they work within texts and across a variety of contexts.
The course will draw on linguistics and discourse analysis. In the analyses undertaken, the ‘linguistic’ features of a text will be understood broadly to include the participants (i.e. the narrators, audience, observers and hearers, etc), audio-visual components, as well the cultural and ideological conditions within which these features occur.
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15 credits |
|
Modern American Fiction
Modern American Fiction
30 credits
You explore a variety of styles and approaches practised in the American novel and short story since 1945, including African-American and ‘postmodern’ fiction. Principal texts might typically include: R Ford (ed), 'The Granta Book of the American Short Story'; Nabokov, 'Lolita'; Kerouac, 'On the Road'; Ellison, 'Invisible Man'; Plath, 'The Bell Jar'; DeLillo, 'White Noise'.
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30 credits |
|
Modern Poetry
Modern Poetry
30 credits
The module surveys major trends and figures in English-language poetry since 1945, chiefly in the USA, Britain and Ireland, with close attention to linguistic and formal features characteristic of this period, and to patterns of influence. Authors for study typically include Stevens, Auden, Lowell, Larkin, Ginsberg, Ashbery, Gunn, Hughes, Plath, Hill, Harrsion, Heaney, and Mahon.
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30 credits |
|
Modernism & Drama (1880-1930)
Modernism & Drama (1880-1930)
30 credits
Whilst modernist drama on the European continent is characterised by a variety of pronouncedly anti-realist tendencies, modern English drama continues the tradition of Realism. The module explores the main contrasts and affinities between these modernist and realist trends, focusing on major innovative approaches to Realism and on precursors and varieties of modernist drama from 1880-1930. Through a close reading of representative texts, you will be introduced to a range of dramatic forms and techniques of the period in question. Examples from expressionist film will acquaint you with questions related to performance, stage set, and lighting.
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30 credits |
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The Art of the Novel
The Art of the Novel
30 credits
The module explores the history of the Western novel’s development since Don Quixote by focusing on representative landmarks of ‘realism’ and later modernist and postmodernist novels. We investigate a number of theoretical problems including those of narrative voice and strategy and of mimesis in the novel. Major texts might typically include: Cervantes, 'Don Quixote'; Austen, 'Emma'; Balzac, 'Père Goriot'; Flaubert, 'Madame Bovary'; Kafka, 'The Trial'; Proust, 'Swann’s Way'; Calvino, 'If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller'.
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30 credits |
|
Oedipus: Myths, Tragedies and Theories
Oedipus: Myths, Tragedies and Theories
30 credits
The module considers a number of dramas that feature the related figures of Oedipus and Antigone. The plays to be studied are drawn from disparate periods and cultures, and so the thrust of the module is to enquire into why the myth on which they are based has proved so perennial. As part of the effort to provide answers to this question, the module addresses relevant literary and cultural criticism and psychoanalytic theory.
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30 credits |
|
Postcolonial Literatures in English
Postcolonial Literatures in English
30 credits
This module analyses the literature and culture produced in the aftermath of, and in response to, the end of European formal colonialism. It addresses representations of colonialism and decolonisation, of the experience of postcolonial societies and of diasporic peoples. You consider issues of ethnicity, class and gender in postcolonial literatures, the claims of ‘nativist’ ideologies and cosmopolitan theories of ‘hybridity’, through a comparative analysis of different genres, regions and historical experiences of (post)colonialism. Included in text studies will be works by some of the following: R K Narayan, Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, V S Naipaul, Athol Fugard, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Mehdi Charef, Arundhati Roy.
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30 credits |
|
Studies in Literature and Film
Studies in Literature and Film
30 credits
The module explores the close relationship between literature and film in the 20th century. It offers a range of perspectives and methodologies for studying literature and film, both separately and in relation to each other, with an emphasis on cultural and historical criticism. The module also examines the particular characteristics of both literature and film and the cross-connections between them through a detailed study of selected poems, plays, essays, experimental films, and feature films. The texts studied will be drawn from a range of national literatures and cinemas. Foreign literary texts will be studied in English translation.
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30 credits |
|
Literature of the English Renaissance
Literature of the English Renaissance
30 credits
You examine the literature and ideas of the 16th and 17th centuries, principally in poetry and drama. The major texts might typically include Marlowe, 'Doctor Faustus'; Shakespeare, 'Henry IV' and 'King Lear'; the poetry of Donne; Spenser, 'The Faerie Queene' (Canto 1); Milton, 'Paradise Lost' (Book 1); Webster, 'The Duchess of Malfi'.
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30 credits |
|
Narratives of the Great War (1923-1933)
Narratives of the Great War (1923-1933)
15 credits
You'll gain an understanding of some major perspectives in modern narrative writing on the problematics of the Great War, with appropriate strategies for analysing and interpreting literary techniques for the exploration of representative themes; it concentrates on ways of remembering and/or historicising the war in narratives published between 1923 and 1933.
Particular attention is paid to the significance of gender and to divergent cultural perspectives in Britain, Germany, and France.
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15 credits |
|
Work Placement (English)
Work Placement (English)
15 credits
- The central objective is to enable you to take up a workplace learning experience which will benefit your studies, your skillset and your CV.
- The work placement will take place on one day per week over 10 weeks.
- Assistance will be given in sourcing a suitable placement.
- You will gain an understanding of key issues within the organisation and have access to data which will be invaluable in developing your research report.
- You will be supported in preparing the assignments through workshops and individual discussions.
- You will have the opportunity to relate your degree subject to real-life situations, develop a range of transferable skills and gain sector-specific experience, thereby enhancing your employment prospects.
Students who pursue this module are required to undertake 10 days of unpaid work at a host institution. The work is normally carried out over 1 day per week, although there is the possibility of working more than 1 day per week, depending on the student's and the host institution's availability. The type of work students would be expected to do should have some relevance to their academic studies. There is no expectation that the student should expect any sort of extensive or designated training such as that which might be offered to a professional working on a long-term basis at the institution. The student will be given guidance, however. The type of work which students might undertake on their placement may include (but not be limited to), for example, cataloguing, archive work, helping organise publicity for events or educational programmes, or shadowing a specialist in his/her work in a mostly observatory way.
|
15 credits |
This programme is mainly taught through scheduled learning - a mixture of lectures, seminars and workshops. You’ll also be expected to undertake a significant amount of independent study. This includes carrying out required and additional reading, preparing topics for discussion, and producing essays or project work.
The following information gives an indication of the typical proportions of learning and teaching for each year of this programme*:
You’ll be assessed by a variety of methods, depending on your module choices. These include portfolios of original creative writing and critical commentaries on your work for each of the workshops, coursework portfolios, long essays and examinations (various timescales and formats).
The following information gives an indication of how you can typically expect to be assessed on each year of this programme*:
*Please note that these are averages are based on enrolments for 2018/19. Each student’s time in teaching, learning and assessment activities will differ based on individual module choices. Find out more about how this information is calculated.
An undergraduate honours degree is made up of 360 credits – 120 at Level 4, 120 at Level 5 and 120 at Level 6. If you are a full-time student, you will usually take Level 4 modules in the first year, Level 5 in the second, and Level 6 modules in your final year. A standard module is worth 30 credits. Some programmes also contain 15-credit half modules or can be made up of higher-value parts, such as a dissertation or a Major Project.
Please note that due to staff research commitments not all of these modules may be available every year.