Ways of Reading: An Introduction to Literary Criticism
This module will address questions around authorship, textuality, and different ways of interpreting texts, as well as considering what goes into the creation of a ‘text’, as a production between writers and their environments. You will learn key skills around research, writing, referencing, critical reading and forming critical arguments that will help you to develop as an English student.
Reimagining the Literary Canon
This module invites you to understand and to question the ‘English Literary Canon’: that is, the texts that have tended to be defined as the ‘most significant’ works of English Literature, and that traditionally underpin its teaching. You will consider the enduring significance of ‘great’ works to our present-day realities, and will develop your own views regarding the question of literary ‘greatness’.
American Literature: Writing Self and Nation
Learn about the many authors, literary movements, and historical events that have shaped American literature from the birth of the republic to the contemporary period. You'll read writers such as Walt Whitman, Washington Irving and Alice Walker. Alongside this you'll pay attention to women writers, African American writers and other ethnic writers, considering how this work transforms the whole picture.
The Book Group: Reading Critically, Writing Professionally
This is a two-part module. The first part will focus on developing your scholarly voice. Working in small groups, with a tutor, you will be required to contribute verbally in a sustained discussion on a single text every week, becoming skilled in concentrated intellectual conversation and textual analysis.
In the second half, the same groups and seminar leaders then work together on Curating Nottingham, a section of the module designed to hone writing skills whilst also introducing students to the practicalities of writing professionally.
Core Modules:
Culture and Anarchy
Discover ways in which the tension between culture and anarchy has repeatedly surfaced as a driving force in the development of English literature. The module takes a broad historical period ranging from the late 19th to the late 20th Century as its backdrop, but will focus on numerous important moments where various understandings of 'cultural' and 'anarchic' activity have influenced social landscape and on literary texts themselves.
Publishing in Practice: From Journal to Conference
This module aims to enable students to work collaboratively to produce a professional output, either a conference for a public audience, or a published journal. Students will work in groups, and each student will undertake a professional role as well as producing an output. This will enable students to develop professional skills relevant to their intended career, and to articulate employability skills including the effective contribution to successful team projects.
OR
Curating Literary Events: From Magazine to Launch
This module aims to enable students to work collaboratively to produce a professional output, a literary magazine and / or launch event. Students will work in groups, and each student will undertake a professional role as well as producing an output. This will enable students to develop professional skills relevant to their intended career, and to articulate employability skills including the effective contribution to successful team projects.
Optional modules:
Shakespeare and Co.: the Early Modern Stage
The module will be structured around four or five thematic clusters of dramatic genre, selected from a range of preoccupations of the period itself and of later critical responses to it. Examples of these include, but are not limited to: Jacobean tragedy, Shakespearean comedy, ‘problem’ comedy, city comedy, and history.
Romantic Revolutions 1780-1851
Study the political and social writings of the period of 1780-1851 to create a context for this module’s engagement with Romantic literature. This module will explore how far revolutionary political and social change is reflected in the experimental themes and forms of Romantic writing.
Creating an Anthology: Developing Editorial Vision
In the first unit, a programme of lectures and seminar/workshops, will build on your close-reading and critical skills. In the second unit, you will be taught further theoretical concerns specific to the editing and scholarly presentation of texts. You will be guided in applying the skills and knowledge already learnt as you work in groups constructing a critical anthology of your own, and you will be invited to reflect on the processes involved as you work towards the final versions of the anthologies you have chosen to compile.
Ethnicity in American Writing: Place, Identity and Form
Racial Identity and ethnic diversity have been central to the American experience since the nation’s founding. In this module you will examine literary interactions between people of different ethnic backgrounds and see how writers use ethnicity as a tool of resistance.
British Women Writers between the Wars (1918-1939)
Look at how a new generation of professional women writers represented women’s experiences of modernity in texts written between 1918 and 1939. This module will encourage you to provide a a thorough introduction to British women's writing and the importance that this period provided for women's history.
Black Writing in Britain
Examine a range of literary texts by black writers written in or about Britain from the 1950s until the present day.
Literature and Psychoanalysis
Investigate the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis by examining the way that psychoanalytic theory has developed the way that we interpret literary texts. By reading a selection of clinical, theoretical and literary texts, you'll be required to think about how different approaches to the human psyche have been understood and used by various readers and writers throughout different places and time periods.
Writing Works
This module will encourage you to study and partake in the practice of writing with a focus on the breadth of genre. You'll also rework samples of writing in specialist areas.
Voices and Visions
You'll be introduced to new writing specialisms with a particular focus on visual and vocal communication. Throughout this module you'll practice independent learning strategies and draft original creative work to enhance collaboration, research, editing and reviewing skills. You'll be taught how to combine information, think laterally and develop resonant visual and sonic narratives.
Core Modules
Dissertation
The final year dissertation module enables you to undertake a sustained, single piece of independently researched work on a topic of your choice, under expert supervision.
OR
The Creative Writing Dissertation
As an alternative to the the critical dissertation, you may wish to do a creative writing dissertation. This alternative will enable you to study and participate in the practice of writing, with particular focus on the production of a long piece of individual creative work.
Optional modules:
English and Creative Industries Project
The module will give you the opportunity to undertake project work in a small group, led by a project supervisor, and to produce a portfolio of critical and reflective writing. Working with an employer on a defined project you'll be able to put into practice the skills and knowledge gained over the course of their degree within a professional setting.
Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory
This module will be organized into three related thematic sections. The first will explore approaches to literature in contemporary theory, focusing in particular on innovative developments which work at the intersection of criticism and writing. Section two will examine debates about literature, culture, and technology which will include sessions on digital and other technologies, mobile devices, and electronic literature. Section three will consider recent debates about concepts of the world, transnational social processes, and global culture. These concepts and directions in contemporary theory will be approached through work by, among others, Giorgio Agamben, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, N. Katherine Hayles, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Gayatri Spivak. Throughout, it will reflect on fiction, poetry, and other literary writing that engages with this module’s principal concerns.
Early Modern Poetry and Prose
Learn about authors writing in the 16th and 17th Centuries and cover genres such as the sonnet, the epic poem, satire and radical writing. This module will expand your contextual knowledge while exploring political and religious contexts.
Gothic Rebels and Reactionaries
Investigate the rise of the Gothic Romance in the late 18th Century and its development into the 19th Century by examining key literary texts from the period. This module will research the ways in which Gothic is a conservative and a reactionary genre; supporting and challenging our perceptions of nature / nurture, natural / supernatural and male / female.
Reading Gender and Sexuality
Examine the politics and aesthetics of gender and sexuality in relation to the writing and reading of the 20th Century, the mid-century, the period of the sexual revolution and contemporary literature.
Postcolonial Texts: Narratives of Liberation
This module will focus on a range of postcolonial texts and consider the relationship between acts of representation and the politics of anti-colonialism and post-colonialism. This module will help you to develop the ability to work across a range of theoretical and literary texts in original ways.
Travel Writing
Gain an overview of travel writing and consider the relationship of travel writing to society and to other forms of literature. There will be an in-depth study of selected regions, authors and themes. There are many issues that you may want to explore, such as construction of self and place in travel writing and traveller's representations of other cultures.
Modernism and Modernity
Throughout this module you'll explore some of the central features of the many transnational movements of modernism through a selection of literary texts. You'll examine how the experimental qualities of modernist culture were conditioned by responses to changes in social and technological modernity. An innovative feature of the module is the focus upon the modernist little magazine (which will be studied in digital form, therefore introducing some of the ideas of Digital Humanities to students).
Nuclear Literature: Culture in the Atomic Age
Introduces students to the literary and cultural impact of a key technology and the latest debates in the Nuclear Humanities. Engaging students with research being undertaken into this subject at NTU, the module considers the representation of nuclear technology and science in literary texts, as well as the questions raised for literature by the dawning of the nuclear age.