English Literature

Landscapes and Mindscapes (double module)

This module explores the relationship between the human mind / psyche, character and place, through an examination of the ways humankind has conceptualised, explored and exploited the world in which we live. You will examine why and how the ways in which we have viewed landscape, space and place in this and other worlds have changed through time. Students will encounter a range of creative representations of place and space from Renaissance pastoral and Romanticism’s veneration of nature, through Modernism’s celebration of the cityscape, to current anxieties about the degradation of the environment.

Crime, Culture and Transgression (double module)

The structures of society – physical, moral, philosophical – determine how human beings behave but, as this module explores, we are fascinated by our dark, resistant capabilities. Exploring ideas of transgression from Milton’s Satan, through post-Darwinian degeneration, and the Golden Age Crime novel, this module asks students to consider what happens when we don’t follow society’s rules.

American Vistas (double module)

This module introduces a variety of American prose and poetic texts studied for both their formal characteristics and the relation to their social, historical and cultural contexts. The module focuses specifically on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but will also familiarise students with a broad historical and textual range. Topics include the construction of America and its myths, the American Renaissance, voices and spaces of America, and slavery and race.

The Culture of Modernity (double module)

This module explores various definitions of modernity by focusing on a range of short stories, novels, plays, manifestos and essays from the late 18th century to the present day. It examines relationships between political, scientific, technological and philosophical dimensions of modernity, literary innovation and artistic experimentation. A range of sub-themes are investigated in each run, for example sexuality and the body, self-fashioning and narrativisation, mass culture and consumerism, and scientific and technological progress and terror.

Modern British Theatre in Performance

This module aims to introduce students to some of the major developments in British Theatre practice including (but not restricted to) playwriting from 1950 to the present day. It will give students the opportunity to use practical workshops to explore and perform modern and contemporary British theatre in a manner than is informed by critical and socio-political debates.

Modern British Theatre: 1950-Present

This module aims to introduce students to some of the major developments in British theatre writing and practice from 1950 to the present day.  It will give students a chance to explore modern and contemporary British, largely text-based theatre through a series of lectures and seminars in a manner that is informed by relevant critical and socio-political debates.

Stylistics

This option helps students to develop their textual sensitivity through innovative analysis of the language of literature. Students enhance their understanding of the relationships between language and interpretation in literary reading, and develop insights into how meanings are made available in texts. The module explores poetry, prose and drama, in written, performed and digital forms.

Creative Writing (Intermediate)

This module offers an intermediate course in developing the writer’s art. It provides students who took the Creative Writing (Introduction) option in Year One with the opportunity to continue their practice working with a published novelist.

English Literature Work Placement and Graduate Skills

This module provides an opportunity for students to develop work-based skills and knowledge by engaging with professionals and organisations that have links to language, literature and the arts more widely. Students evaluate and reflect critically upon this experience, linking theory and practice in a professional context.

Renaissance Tragedy and Comedy

This module gives you the opportunity to study a selection of early modern drama, both comedy and tragedy, by Shakespeare and other playwrights such as Thomas Middleton, John Ford and Thomas Kyd. Particular emphasis is placed on theatre history and contemporary aspects of theatre making. As a practical Drama module, teaching will be via practical workshop and seminar-style discussion. You will have the opportunity to write critically and comparatively about plays on the module as well as select a short scene for group performance.

Angry Writing: Protest Literature

This option examines the rich tradition of progressive protest in world literature. Using a broad definition of “protest literature,” we focus on the production and consumption of dissent as a site of social critique, using a wide variety of literary texts. We examine the historical links between forms of protest, social change, and meanings of literature; and we explore how various expressions of dissent function as political, ideological, rhetorical, aesthetic, and performative texts within specific cultural contexts. “Readings” range from novels, poems, and music to political pamphlets.

Guilty Pleasures: Victorian Sensation

This option introduces students to the ways in which sensation writing challenges the moral, social and literary conventions of the mid-nineteenth century. An unsettling blend of Gothic romance, newspaper reports and domestic realism, sensation writing was celebrated and condemned as a sign of modernity. Dealing with, as one critic of the genre put it, the 'mysteries which are at our own doors’, sensation literature would give rise to crime fiction, the detective novel and the suspense thriller. The module explores how surface ‘Sensational’ themes of adultery, bigamy, madness and murder reveal deeper cultural anxieties about gender roles, class mobility, science and the body.

Human-Animal

This option explores the representation of interaction between humans and other animals in a range of literary forms across the twentieth century. We consider texts which respond to our humanist fear of becoming beast-like, including texts which represent non-human animals as antagonists, or objects, or as a vehicle to explore the human condition, or merely as a source of entertainment, along with works which attempt to penetrate the experience and mindscape of animals. We go on to look at texts which reflect a post-humanist and post-Christian sense of our connection with non-human animals – texts much more critical of the human-animal opposition, and human treatment of non-human species more generally.

Independent Study in English

This module offers students the chance to study a literary topic of their choosing, working independently or in groups under the supervision of a lecturer. Students taking this module design their own study programme and form of assessment (e.g. a long essay, a performance, a report, a video documentary, a blog, etc.).

The Shock of the New: Avant-Gardes and Experiments in 20th Century Literature, Theatre and Cinema

This option explores the daring technical and formal experimentation, as well as the philosophical speculation and political engagement, of modernist writing and art. However, it stresses that these individuals were not only radical artistic innovators: they saw themselves as members of a cultural “avant-garde” that fundamentally re-imagined society. This option explores the dynamic political and social forces that brought experimental art into ever closer contact with everyday life. Each week it considers how essential events in European and North American culture map onto key avant-garde networks by focusing on the work of one or two central texts or figures.

Robots, Cyborgs and Digital Worlds

What does our devotion to technology tell us about how we understand life in the twenty-first century? Has digital culture changed the ways in which we relate to the world around us, to others, and to ourselves? This option allows to critically explore some of these issues and considers the future of writing in an age of mass media communication.

Advanced Options Modules

The Advanced Options allow students to develop a deep knowledge of a specialist area by working with experts on research-led topics. Single honours students can choose up to three options; Combined can choose up to two. Options change yearly but may include:

• African-American Avant-Gardes
• The Theatrical City
• The Victorian Supernatural
• Poverty and the Novel
• Utopias
• The Pre-Raphaelites
• Women and Modernism
• Witchcraft and Magic
• Urban Jungle: The American City in Modern and Postmodern Literature and Culture
• Staging Riots, Resistance, and Power
• Spectacular Origins: Theatre, Madness and the Mind

Dissertation Module

In doing a dissertation, you work one-to-one with a specialist lecturer to devise, research, and write a 10000-word project on a topic entirely of your own choosing. The dissertation gives you a degree-ending capstone which tests all the skills of literary research, critical reading, time-management, planning and focused writing that you have learned over the course of your studies. You may use the dissertation as an opportunity to focus on a familiar area, or to address a literary subject not covered by the degree curriculum. Combined honours students have the option of writing a dissertation which embraces both of their chosen subject areas.

Contemporary Literature

This module engages with literature from the last ten years in order to explore how issues directly relevant to students’ lives, such as globalisation, post-9/11 culture, and digitalisation, are being debated in literary texts. The module also offers students an opportunity to relate this recent material back to other modules they have studied over their degree, to examine the resonances and echoes of recurrent cultural ideas across centuries.

Creative Writing (Advanced)

This module brings together the skills developed in the Creative Writing modules in Years 1 and 2, enabling students to work on a longer piece of writing and to develop an understanding of how a book works as a whole. Through exposure to visits from a literary agent and/or editor, they also learn about the submissions process for publication. The final submission for the module is a large piece of 6000 words (or equivalent in poetry) which shows an awareness of the final publication context within which the submission might exist, for example - chapters from a novel or memoir, or short stories/poems/essays from a proposed anthology.

Methodology of Foreign Language Teaching

An introduction to the theory and practical application of the principles of second or foreign language teaching at secondary or adult levels. This module enables candidates to develop an awareness of a range of teaching techniques and apply these to the language classroom.

Opera and Politics

This module introduces the political agendas that have governed the composition and production of opera since its birth to the twentieth century. The course aims to develop skills of argument and debate through the detailed study of two or more repertory operas, in terms of their libretti, music, historical and cultural contexts.

Understanding Communication

Communication is an essential part of social life - the glue binding humans together. From our solitary readings to our computer-mediated social networking, and from our hallway chats to the academic papers we write, we are constantly involved in designing and producing messages that express who we are and allow us to coordinate our thoughts and activities with other people. This module zooms in on communication as a form of social action, and examines how a range of factors - psychological, social, cultural, semiotic, etc.- govern how we engage with one another to achieve our goals.

Work placement

You can explore possible careers in the Work Placement Module and gain valuable work experience while earning credit towards your degree. You will build on the skills and knowledge you have gained to engage with professionals in the fields of publishing, journalism, education, cultural heritage and literary history. Recent placements have included the Oxford Story Museum, the Oxford Literary Festival and Oxfam. Students organise placements themselves, and Oxford Brookes Careers Centre is on hand to provide assistance. Students are responsible for their own travel and associated costs, therefore it is advised that they organise placements bearing this in mind.