English and Creative Writing BA (Hons) Year two modules

The English and Creative Writing BA (Hons) modules listed below are just to give you a flavour of what might be available in your second year and are subject to change. In addition to the core module in English Literature, students must choose options that include at least 30 credits in English Language and 30 credits in Creative Writing modules in second year.

Year two (Level 5)

Core module:

Exploration and Innovation: 14th to 18th Century Literature 

This module looks at the birth of English literature, offering an introduction to literature written between the medieval era and the mid-eighteenth century in England and Europe. It includes examples of poetry, drama and prose organised around key themes such as power, faith, love and sexuality.

Optional modules:

Ways of Reading

This module questions the value of literature to society and equips you with a critical ‘toolkit’ through study of the influential theoretical approaches that have shaped the past and present of literary studies, such as post-structuralism, feminism and Marxism. 

Screen and Literary Adaptations of the Classics

This module explores what happens to classic English literature when it is adapted into other media, including film, television and new literary novels. You will explore the adaptation of iconic literary texts such as William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. 

Text Technologies

This module draws on the expertise of DMU’s Centre for Textual Studies to expand your understanding of the history of textual production from manuscript, to print, to digital text. You will make and write with a quill pen, print a poem using moveable type and a hand-operated printing press, and learn to create a scholarly digital text online. 

Sex and Death in Romantic Writing, 1780-1830 

We shall examine manuscripts and different editions in order to study how texts were revised during a period of sexual, political & social revolution that was also a period of death and disease produced by colonial and European war. Subjects for discussion will include: sexual taboos - opium - slavery - war - genius - exploration; interest in the supernatural and Gothic; imaging the afterlife; the quest for identity. Writers studied may include Coleridge, Southey, Blake, Mary Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth and DeQuincey, Clare, Mary Shelley, Stedman. 

Twentieth Century Literature 

How did literature in English evolve during the twentieth century? How did it respond to major historical events and social and cultural changes such as World War I and II, the decline of the British Empire, and shifting gender, class and race relations? This term-long module offers students the opportunity to examine the diverse and experimental twentieth-century literature of writers such as E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Poets of World War I and II, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, or Margaret Atwood. 

Millennial World Fiction

Following a broadly chronological structure, this module covers a diverse range of twenty-first-century fiction from several continents. This enables an international, contemporary perspective on a range of concepts, including memory, nationality, class, ethnicity, and gender, made cohesive by the novels’ common interest in identity. While the texts will be updated regularly, genres covered may include dystopian science fiction, the coming-of-age novel, historical fiction and/or the counterfactual. Issues addressed may include Americanisation, migration, the human/post-human and social justice. 

Sociolinguistics

Language in the real world; an examination of how language reflects and is shaped by the environment in which it is used. 

English Language in UK Schools

An introduction to the issues and debates surrounding English Language as a subject in the UK system, of particular interest to those considering a career in teaching. 

Introducing English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)

This module introduces students to some of the principles, methods and practices of teaching English to speakers of other languages. This module cannot be taken if the student has taken ‘Foundations in English Language Teaching for International Learners’ at level 4. 

Language in Context

On this module you learn about pragmatics, the study of language use in context, and how utterance meaning can go beyond the meanings of the words used. 

Grammar: Analysing linguistic structure

How are words and sentences put together? This module builds on the first-year modules to further develop your skills in grammatical analysis. 

Semantics: Analysing linguistic meaning

What are meanings made of? An examination of the complex subject of linguistic meaning, and the study of the various ways in which we communicate (or fail to communicate) clearly and unambiguously. 

Research Methods for Linguists

This module introduces students to key principles of conducting effective research within the specific context of linguistics. 

Phonetics and Phonology

Investigating the sounds and structures of spoken language, and examining the acoustic landscape of speech. 

Word, Image, Sound

Allows you to explore the many ways in which words work in dialogue with visual and aural elements. In term 1 this involves ‘new media’: making audio-visual pieces in elementary software that allows you to blend word, image and sound into a unified piece; and making multi-linear digital pieces that prompt the reader to make their own ‘choices’ in their online journey through them. You will also write poetry stimulated by visual art, and poetry that is itself visual in the way it experiments with the layout of words on the page (and have the opportunity to print these designs in a studio). In term 2 you will practice the craft of screenwriting, and graphic novel and audio scripts; and will have the opportunity to gain recording studio experience too. 

Writing Place

This module will enable students to explore, through creative practice, the role place has as a major stimulant in writing. Students will write fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction in a variety of forms in order to explore the creative resources offered by local history, regional myths, environmental issues and hidden histories. There will be a keen focus upon ‘world building’, and emphasis upon the importance of research to writers.

Note: All modules are subject to change in order to keep content current.