The above is a sample of the typical modules we offer but is not intended to be construed and/or relied upon as a definitive list of the modules that will be available in any given year. Modules (including methods of assessment) may change or be updated, or modules may be cancelled, over the duration of the course due to a number of reasons such as curriculum developments or staffing changes. Please refer to the
Sociolinguistics of Work
Communication is an essential aspect of any workplace. From the language used in the cockpit of aeroplanes, to the language used in advertising and call centres, spoken, written and visual discourse is at the very centre of, and often defines, contemporary work practices.
Discover the theories and insights of sociolinguistic-related research, as applied to a vast array of work-related and institutional settings. We cover a range of communicative topics that reveal how language is used and abused in the workplace and institutional setting, including:
- linguistic coercion in courtrooms, classrooms, prisons
- electronic communication
- miscommunication
- advertising communication
- critical discourse analysis and multimodal critical discourse analysis
- political talk and the use of persuasive discourse
- jargon, double speak, and fake news
Often taking a critical perspective on language in the workplace (exposing inequities in institutional discourse), the module will emphasise the vital relationship between power and communication in the workplace. It shows how looking closely at and through language can illuminate and enhance communication in a range of workplaces and institutional settings.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Business and Organisational Communication
Investigate the multidisciplinary subject of business and organisational communication.
We cover a range of quantitative and qualitative approaches, examining how individuals and groups use spoken, written and digital communication to enact their workplace identities, how workplace teams and communities communicate effectively and how tasks at work get achieved through communication.
The wide range of methodologies and analytical frameworks for interrogating business and organisational communication include:
- conversation analysis
- corpus linguistics
- critical discourse analysis
- pragmatics
- linguistic ethnography
- sociolinguistics
We also highlight contemporary issues emerging from the field, exploring, for example, new multi-media technologies and globalisation on communication in commercial domains and organisational environments.
The module demonstrates how the findings of communicative research can be practically applied in teaching and training materials and in consultancy work.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Intercultural Communication
With ever increasing interactions in the world today taking place between people of diverse cultural backgrounds, it is important to consider how language use may lead to misunderstandings and communicative difficulties.
In this module, we explore language use in different cultural environments and in interactions between speakers of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
We look at what language barriers might be present, and how these might be overcome. We examine intercultural interactions in a variety of contexts, including:
- business and other professional encounters
- the media
- education
This module is worth 20 credits.
Language Teaching: Speaking and Listening
Develop your skills and knowledge relating to teaching second language (L2) speaking and listening. The module is suitable for all, whether you have prior language teaching experience or not.
As a basis for discussion, we focus on teaching English as a foreign/second language. You will explore issues and ideas not often included on teacher training programmes, including topics relating to:
- Spoken grammar
- Fluency and pronunciation
- Metacognitive approaches
- Varied textbooks and materials critique
The module is centred around the notion of research informed practice, and we will draw on diverse bodies of research to inform discussion. We then relate this to a practical critique of English language textbooks, materials and activities, and consider their relevance and/or application to varied English language teaching contexts worldwide.
You have the opportunity to analyse, plan, prepare and present a research-informed teaching activity to your peers, designed to target a specific aspect of speaking/listening of your choice. These will contribute to a Speaking and Listening Activity Database. This is growing resource throughout the module, providing a concrete forum for resources and ideas sharing.
You will both reflect on and relate the issues under discussion to your own experiences as a language learner, and/or as a language teacher.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Research Methods: Corpus Linguistics
Corpus linguistics provides methods for studying collections of electronic texts. These could be written texts (including literary texts), material from the internet, or transcripts of spoken language.
We introduce fundamental corpus methods, that include:
- retrieving and interpreting word frequency information
- studying patterns of words in the form of concordances
- analysing key words and key semantic domains
The module will explain these concepts and illustrate methods through case studies, with an emphasis on the use of corpus methods for the purposes of discourse analysis.
Through hands-on sessions, you will practise using corpus analysis software and several online interfaces. Throughout the module, you are encouraged to reflect on the applicability of a range of methods to your own areas of interest (for example, literary linguistics, critical discourse analysis, ELT).
For the assessment, you will complete a small-scale corpus project on a topic of your choice (in consultation with the module convenor). This project can test ideas that might be further developed during the dissertation.
Cognition and Literature
This module represents a course in cognitive poetics. It aims to understand the meanings, emotions and effects of literary reading based on our current best understanding of language and mind. This means drawing on insights developed in cognitive science, especially in psychology and linguistics. You will also develop skills in stylistics and critical theory.
Cognitive poetics attempts to find answers to the following questions:
- How is it that different readers interpret the same literary work differently?
- How can we care emotionally about fictional people in books?
- How do some literary works make you cry, or laugh, or be fearful or joyous?
- How do we understand the minds of other people, real and imaginary?
- How do literary works create atmosphere, tone, and ambience?
- Does reality and fictionality matter?
- How does language create worlds?
You do not need to have a background in both linguistics and literary studies – either area will be perfect preparation for your exploration of cognitive poetics. You will be taught in a small-group two-hour tutorial discussion.
The Teaching of Language and Literature
This module examines the principles, challenges and practices of integrating language and literature teaching at further and higher education levels, particularly within the language classroom. It adopts a literary linguistics approach, balancing the use of linguistic tools for literary analysis with the exploration of literary elements to deepen understanding of linguistic concepts.
You will engage with a diverse range of texts and text-types from both analytical and pedagogical perspectives. The module explores various approaches to language, linguistics and literary study, focusing on their application in different teaching contexts. While not a formal teacher training module, it will appeal to those interested in pursuing careers in teaching English language, linguistics, literature or English Language Teaching (ELT).
Writing Workshop: Fiction
Explore in depth how to write effective and compelling fiction.
Through in-class discussion and weekly readings and exercises, this module pushes and extends your own craft and technique.
Along the way, you’ll explore how to approach short story, flash fiction and novel writing. You’ll also be introduced to a range of secondary and critical texts that will help you deepen your own understanding of form, genre and style.
You will discover:
- key prose-writing techniques, including point of view, characterisation, dialogue and setting
- a range of form and genre, and the techniques and approaches that are relevant to them
- a range of critical texts that deepen and extend your understanding of prose writing technique
Creative Writing Conventions and Techniques
Develop your fiction through exercises and analysis of point of view, narrative voice, dialogue, and plot, among other techniques.
Expand your poetic range by playing with different approaches to form, exploring a range of creative techniques and sharpening your interpretive skills.
You will be encouraged to reflect on your writing output and incorporate the critiques of others when editing and developing your work.
Writing Workshop: Poetry
Explore a range of poetic conventions, and the contexts in which poetry is produced, whilst developing your own poetic style.
Through the ‘practitioner’ approach, you are not only supported in your craft but encouraged to work towards submitting your work for publication.
The reading list for this module includes:
- poetry magazines
- new writers’ anthologies
- debut poetry collections
- poetry in performance
Shakespeare: Text, Stage and Screen
Explore the changing meanings of Shakespeare’s plays across text, stage and screen.
The module examines three plays in depth, looking at their literary interest (from textual history and sources to thematic concerns and characterisation) and their performative possibilities on stage and in film. The module is redesigned each year to take advantage of what theatres are currently staging.
By approaching the plays from multiple angles, you will discover the varied potential for reinterpretation and recreation that each text offers.
You will build on seminar discussions to develop your own project question about:
- the interpretive possibilities that the plays offer
- the choices made by specific interpreters of the text
Your project will be developed in consultation with tutors to consider the interplay of performance and text.
Learning to Read: Criticism for Creative Writers
One of the key things you need to be able to do as a writer is critique and contextualise your own work.
This not only involves being able to edit and draft your work, it also includes understanding the wider influences from other literary and non-literary works.
These skills are really important when it comes to writing the critical essay – something you have to do alongside the creative work on the course. Yet, this module also explores how criticality itself offers new kinds of creative forms and approaches too, breaking down the traditional divide between prose, poetry and creative non-fiction.
You will explore:
- How to critically examine your own creative work
- How to write a critical essay
- New hybridic forms of writing that cross traditional boundaries (for example, prose, poetry and non-fiction) such as autofiction and autotheory
- New writers of creative, critical and hybridic work
Learning to Publish: Contemporary Forms and Practices
Gain a practical introduction to the world of contemporary publishing, including:
- journals
- small presses
- online writing
- digital narratives
- social media
You will explore the landscape of contemporary publishing, both offline and online, and study the practical skills needed to research, write, edit, and publish writing across a range of forms and platforms.
The module is structured around practical writing tasks, working towards a real-world publication project which will form the basis for your assessment. You will be taught through a mixture of lecture-style content on relevant topics and practice-based workshops.
Alongside the module, you also have the opportunity to take up a work placement with , the School of English's own literary journal.
Riotous Performance: Drama, Disruption and Protest
Explore a range of modern drama, all themed around the idea of riot.
We will explore the phenomenon of the riot, examining how it is defined and how it might relate to other kinds of western performance event.
You will:
- Analyse the way that riots have both been triggered by, and represented in, an assortment of other performances
- Compare and contrast material from a range of different chronological periods and across a range of different genres
Although this module is largely focused on dramatic texts, it gives you the opportunity to consider an assortment of other performance events. For example, we will analyse the drama of Synge and O’Casey, the ballet of Stravinsky and Nijinsky, and the performance poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Literature in Britain Since 1950
Concentrating on the novel, we examine literature in Britain since the Second World War.
This isn't an exhaustive overview of the period, rather we aim to present important topics and debates. This is done through an appropriate combination of teaching blocks, often focussing on particular themes or time periods.
We take 1950 as the starting point, after which distinctive post-war cultural and social trends began to emerge. In recent years, we have concentrated on rather more contemporary writing, for example in the period since 1990.
You will be working with our academics on materials which make up their most current and innovative research.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Speculative Fictions
Speculative fiction incorporates all those genres that imagine worlds not quite like this one, from science fiction to fantasy and beyond.
This module introduces a range of such fictions, attending to the generic traditions and historical context from which they emerge, as well as their ongoing cultural relevance. Both hugely popular and the object of increasing scholarly interest, speculative fiction allows for theoretical and critical discussion of a range of contemporary issues:
- Utopias and dystopias: future visions, past reflections
- Technology and the posthuman, from AI to the augmented body
- Loving the alien: alterity and identity
- Genre and beyond: expectations and experimentation
We also cover a range of different media, considering such forms as film and the graphic novel, testifying to the genre’s great scope and its ongoing power to intrigue and enthral as it explores the boundaries of time, space, and the imagination.
Literary Histories
It has often been suggested that the idea of literary history – a narrative that understands, classifies and explains the English literary past – is an impossibility.
The relationship between literature and the history of the time of its creation is an equally vexed and productive question. We will look at various ways in which literature has combined with the study of history and also how histories of literature have been constructed.
Topics explored include:
- The development of the literary canon
- Periodicity
- Inclusions and exclusions
- Reception
- Rediscoveries
- Representation
You will also look at the ways in which literary biography relates to the creation of literary histories. We will introduce key topics in the area and apply them to a variety of types of literature, and the myriad critical ways in which such literature has been viewed, both in its immediate moment and retrospectively.
Modernism and the Avant-Garde in Literature and Drama
Explore how writers of the modernist period responded to an age of dramatic change, and new formations in society, politics and art.
This was an an age in which revolutionary developments in science, technology, philosophy and psychology prompted the formation of radically new understandings of the self and the world.
糖心原创ing a range of literary, dramatic, cultural and critical texts, we consider the individual and collective nature of the formulation of radical aesthetics. We will be discussing modernist and avant-garde approaches to such subjects as:
- Subjectivity and consciousness
- Community and identity: gender, race, nation
- Experimental form and the literary marketplace
We will study these texts in relation to the many relevant contexts of the period, as well as by the light of more recent critical and theoretical approaches that continue to make new the work of the moderns.
Place, Region, Empire
Explore the relationship between literary texts and cultural concepts of place.
You will consider a selection of texts that can range from the 16th century to the present. You will also consider a range of critical and theoretical approaches to these texts, which will involve delving into cultural geography, literary history and theories of nationalism and postcolonialism.
Topics for discussion might include:
- Maps and cultural cartographies
- Urbanism and the literature of cities
- Travel and literary tourism
- Regional and provincial literature
- Nationalism and cosmopolitanism
- Colonialism and the postcolonial
- The literature of empire
- Ideas of community and dwelling
- The relation between literary and spatial forms
Writers studied will vary from year to year.
Poetry: Best words, Best Order
This module looks at various authors, movements, and genres in the history of English poetry, from 1500 to the present.
You will gain an overview of certain key chronological areas, and case studies of more specific movements or ideas. Themes and areas of focus may include:
- late medieval
- the 'drab'
- religious verse
- poetry and science
- Epicureanism
- verse epistles
- gender and recovery
- 'minor' poets and failure
- Empire and Romanticism
- the dramatic monologue
- modernist poetics
- free verse
- ecopoetics