BA (Hons) Creative Writing and English with Humanities Integrated Foundation Year

Skills and Scholarship in Humanities

This module provides you with an introduction to and practice of the key skills associated with the success in Humanities. Foregrounded areas will include: defining research questions; accessing research (using libraries, archives, galleries, and online sources); engaged reading of different materials (including a substantial range of sources); constructing arguments and developing structure in communication; communication in written and oral formats, including concise and longer formats.

This module is a toolkit for the skills and scholarship needed to thrive and to enjoy the humanities.

Understanding Ideas, Images and Creativity: Reading Humanities through concepts, objects and pictures

Humanities used to be primarily engaged with written materials and the production of analytical new research in written forms. This is no longer the case (in fact since about circa 1975).

Humanities engage with multiple non-text based sources including: paintings, objects, advertising, film and television, music and sound, posters, photography, graphic narratives, landscapes, and digital materials (including AI generated sources).

This module aims to introduce you to this space and support you to use it as part of your development as a scholar. It also consciously asks you to contextualize and explore non-text sources in their frequently changing multiple and global contexts.

Global Skills for the twenty-first century

Humanities scholarship today is no longer bound by national frameworks. Ideas of frontiers and borders no longer limit the questions we ask. However, what are the skills for understanding this ‘world’ and how are they practised in inclusive and reflective approaches that are democratic and thoughtful?

This module therefore explores: questions of translation, cultural influence and power; cultural intersections and cultural differences, framing the global north and the global south after empire, unpacking where experiences are globalizing and hybrid or that are valued for their specificity and localized meaning and value.

It will ask how did views of the world get things wrong (e.g. early anthropology) and how do scholars think of ‘the world’ today.

Engaging with the ‘Cultural Life’

This module prepares you for exploring and working with ‘culture’ – meaning all forms of public expression associated with the humanities.

It asks what it means to be interested in culture? How we learn to access and explore culture and what barriers may limit access?

It will offer you a chance to define and pursue your own form of cultural activity – ranging from engaging with a form (e.g. writing or blogging criticism) or making new culture (creative writing; curation).

Research Project or Making Humanities Work for You

This module allows you to engage in either an independent research project in any area of the Humanities (subject to staff approval) or to engage in an equivalent 10 days of work experience.

It offers you the chance to pursue your own interest in your preferred humanities area or explore work experience targeted to a future career.

Contemporary Fiction: War, Women and the World – Bowen to MacLeod

This module considers the historical period since the Second World War, focusing in particular on the social, cultural and personal changes in relation to fiction. You will consider literary texts in relation to key contextual and historical information, looking at the new forms developed by contemporary writers in order to write about a period of social change, conflicts and controversies.

Creating Characters

This module introduces you to the basics of creating credible characters.

The module will prompt you to make artistic decisions about the history of your characters, the setting and time of your characters’ lives, character motivation and perspective.

Introduction to Writing Poetry

This module introduces you to the practice of writing poetry. You will focus on working in a variety of forms and voices, which explore imaginative territories and poetic processes.

Introduction to Writing Short Fiction

This module will build on skills and techniques acquired throughout your first semester, such as:

• concrete imagery
• writerly research
• notebook gatherings
• reflections on developing creative work.

You will encounter a variety of forms and voices in a range of examples from traditional and contemporary sources in both British and international short fiction.

Investigating Interpretation: Ideas in Literature From Marx to Barthes

The course traces the origin of ideas in literature through three key thinkers: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. These thinkers will introduce you to the notion that our language is crucial to the way the world is constituted.

Literature Now: Reading and Writing the Present Moment

This module introduces you to the contemporary cultural landscape by exploring recent literary texts and transformations of the literary (film, graphic novels, digital texts, gamification, etc.). Tracing multiple forms of ‘writing’ and ‘reading’, you will gain the capacity to engage creatively with the present and to develop your own critical responses.

Subverting the Subject: Ideas in Literature From Barthes to Butler

This module explores the ideas of a key set of thinkers who have sought to subvert traditional conceptions of ‘the subject’. Using literary fiction as a foundation, you will consider all the ways in which the concept of the subject might be determined by outside forces, rather than solely through the individual.

The Writer’s Notebook

This module introduces you to keeping a writer’s notebook and how to use this as a storehouse of ideas, images, research and drafts. You will also learn about the journey from rough idea to finished piece as you examine a selection of case studies of notebook entries, drafts and published work.

Agents of Change: Women’s Writing in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

This module explores the challenges made by women’s writing, both critical and creative, to established authority over the past two centuries.

Creative Non-Fiction: Writing Lives

This module introduces you to the versatile genre of creative non-fiction, in which writers employ skills transported from fiction to lend dramatic complexity to factual narratives.

Using autobiographical material as a base, you will generate dramatic scenes on a variety of topics and themes.

Creative Writing: Poetry, Form and Freedom

This module will enable you to develop a variety of sophisticated traditional poetic forms and to develop experimental free verse poems within a reflective contemporary poetic practice.

Experiments in Fiction: Magic, Detection, Sci Fi and Beyond

This module aims to provide you with an understanding of, and ability to recognise, a range of genres in prose fiction.

You will gain an understanding of genre as a means of classification and understand that the way a text employs genre shapes its meaning.

Fairy Tales: Early Modern to Postmodern

Gain an informed historical and critical perspective on a powerful literary and cultural tradition beginning with the fairy tales written in early modern Italy, continuing through Perrault, D’Aulnoy, Grimm, Andersen to the work of more contemporary authors such as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. It also asks where we can turn to for modern fairy tales, through a focus on the use of fairy tale tropes in the work of J.K Rowling and Philip Pullman.

Fiction for Children

This module introduces you to writing fiction for children.

The module will extend and deepen your key writing skills as you learn to pay particular attention to such things as suitable and age-specific subject matter, appropriate language, a more active narration, faster pacing and the demands of greater immediacy.

Poetry: 1300 to the Present

The module aims to develop your understanding of rhythm, rhyme, free verse, diction, particular verbal effects, timbre, tone and voice. It will encourage awareness of the centrality of genre to a wide range of poetic practice from the Renaissance to the present day.

Prose Fiction: The Dynamic of Change

This module will explore the dynamics of change in the contemporary short story.

You will examine model short stories and how they invariably dramatise a significant change in character, and/or situation.

In doing so, you will understand how to analyse the devices writers use to shape narrative, and to create tension and conflict.

Renaissance to Restoration

This module explores the evolution of poetry and prose throughout the Renaissance era and into the Restoration period of the 17th century, as result of major political and religious turbulence.

You will consider the works of Spencer, Marlowe and Shakespeare, who begin to explore gender and history in their work, before moving on to the satirical poetry of Donne, Marvell, Milton, and Rochester.

Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries

The module will also assess how far second-generation Romantic poets developed the key Romantic theme of reform, as you consider the influence of the French Revolution on the work of British writers during the 18th century.

You will study the work of renowned and revered Romantic poets including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Wollstonecraft, alongside the work of Mary Shelley and Jane Austen.

Work Placement

The work placement module allows you to develop your skills in a work environment and gain vital experience to put you ahead in your future career. This allows you to gain experience in, for example, a workplace such as a local newspaper or as a writer-in-residence. You will then use the skills you have learnt on your course in order to reflect critically on the world.

World Literature: Roots and Routes From Conrad to Afrofuturism

This module explores the role of literature in making the modern world. Using texts from around the world, you will consider a new sense of the globe, colonial relations and the new post-colonial world.

You will consider our sense of having roots in the world, especially national roots.

Charting a path through texts from the late 19th to the 21st century, the module does not aim to ‘represent’ the totality of world literature. Instead, you will study a selection of texts that engage with crucial issues. Within these, you encounter a variety of themes: from the violent imposition of imperial power, to the ecological challenge of global climate change.

Writing for the Screen

This module introduces you to the craft of writing a short cinematic screenplay.

The module focuses on the building blocks of screenwriting, with a focus on:

• visual storytelling
• plot (using treatments and step outlines)
• scene-building
• research skills
• characterisation
• setting
• sound
• struggle
• movement
• layout.

You will experience the collaborative nature of screenwriting, and explore the role of the screenwriter within the broader institutional framework of the industry.

Reenchanting ‘the West’: Learning from Myth and Sacred Texts

This hybrid English and creative writing module presents wisdom and wonder tales from around the globe, and explores their influence on contemporary literature, including as inspiration for your own poetry and/or fiction.

You will have a choice of English or creative writing submissions.

British Culture Wars

This module explores conflict within British culture from the start of the 19th century to the turn of the new millennium.

You will consider the reaction to obscene publications and other literary controversies and moral panics of Victorian Britain, through to the liberal reforms in the 1960s and the self-censorship and the baleful influence of Hollywood on British cinema.

Contemporary Short Fiction: Writing the Here and Now

This module will enable you to explore, as active writers and readers, the strategies, innovations and preoccupations of contemporary writers of the short story. You will read and analyse the craft, technique and rigour of three to four highly regarded short story collections from the last 15 years.

Digital Writing: Writing for the Community of Strangers

On this module, you will harness the skills developed in non-fiction modules in year one and year two to engage with new possibilities in digital writing, including:

• blogs
• games
• websites
• online journalism
• Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook
• texts
• podcasts
• comments forums
• campaigns
• hypertext

and the non-linear; e-books; apps; fan fiction; reviews, etc.

English Literature Dissertation

The Dissertation enables you to build on your research and writing skills developed during the first two years of the degree. It gives you the opportunity to work independently on a research project of your own choosing (with supervision), to pursue specialist interests and to strengthen and enhance your knowledge of a chosen subject.

Creative Writing Dissertation

The Dissertation in Creative Writing gives students the opportunity to work independently on an imaginative writing project of their own choosing. This may take the form of a fiction project, a poetry project, a play or screenwriting project or a creative non-fiction project. It will include a related essay in which the student-writer investigates a particular artistic, aesthetic or cultural issue of relevance to you as a contemporary writer OR the work of a particular writer who will be influential as you develop your own body of work for the Dissertation project.

European Literary Legacies: Writing the City

This module will deal with connections between the reader, author and cityscape.

Using Venice as an example, as well as key psychogeographic works by Benjamin, de Certeau, Debord, Sinclair and others, you will examine key works created and inspired by Venice over the past 400 years.

By doing so, you will consider how cityscapes are created and affect conceptualisations of settings outside the boundaries of their original texts.

Fairy Tales: Early Modern to Postmodern

Gain an informed historical and critical perspective on a powerful literary and cultural tradition beginning with the fairy tales written in early modern Italy, continuing through Perrault, D’Aulnoy, Grimm, Andersen to the work of more contemporary authors such as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. It also asks where we can turn to for modern fairy tales, through a focus on the use of fairy tale tropes in the work of J.K Rowling and Philip Pullman.

Gothic, Romanticism and Women’s Writing: From Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen

The aim of this module is to introduce you to the exciting range of women’s prose writing in the late 18th century, as you consider the relationship between such writing and the political debates of the period.

You will discover how this writing, while often underrated, was of importance to Romantic aesthetics, often primarily understood and defined in terms of poetry written by men.

Making It Strange: Writing the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Modern Gothic Novel

This module offers you the opportunity to develop your creative skills within genres that focus on worlds that lie beyond the tradition realm of ‘realism’. These forms of ‘Beyond Realist’ texts have a distinguished pedigree stretching back to humanity’s earliest myths, epic narratives, folklore and fairy tales. You will explore how to write within genres such as science fiction, fantasy and contemporary Gothic as you learn their specific complexities and intricacies.

The Cultural History of Death

This module explores how literary representations of the historical and social treatment of the dead presents a vivid insight into the cultural behaviour, ideology and social order of different cultural and historical contexts.
You will explore the beliefs and attitudes towards the dead within literature from the Middles Ages through to more contemporary examples and debates.

Unforgettable Corpses: Literature, Cultural Memory and the First World War

This module will examine literary products of the First World War, the methods by which the authors reproduced, described and fictionalised their experiences.

The second half of the module will also consider the use of First World War tropes in literature produced in the latter half of the 20th century, compare the application of those narrative devices, and critically assess the later use of those devices.

Writing Flash Fiction

‘Flash Fiction’ is an exciting new way of telling stories. By composing their own portfolio of very short fiction, you will be challenged to see the form from the inside, and to focus upon the creative challenges that are unique to ‘flash fiction’. These challenges will be brought into additional focus by workshops that require critical reflection upon the evolving work.

Writing the Novel

On this module, you will write the first chapter of a contemporary novel, deepening skills gained on short fiction modules in Years 1 and 2. Having acquired skills in narrative, imagery, characterisation and theme, you will now be encouraged to develop these skills in greater depth while engaging with the demands and challenges of a longer form.

Writing, Environment and Ecocriticism

This module will offer you the opportunity to explore the ways in which contemporary writers and critics engage with images, issues and concepts of the environment in novels, poetry and non-fiction. You will choose whether you wish to engage with the themes of the module as a critic or a creative writer.