English BA Welcome Pack

Modules and Reading Materials

Core Module

LIT1049 Reading and Writing our World is required for all students.  Please select to take this module either in the Autumn or Spring semester. You do not need to take it in both semesters.

LIT1049 Reading and Writing our World (Compulsory Module)  

The purpose of this module is to introduce students to the dual roles involved in the construction of textual meaning: writing and reading. In exploring imaginative and critical reading and writing practices in a range of genres, students will engage in identifying the relevance of textual creativity to real-world applications.

Required Texts:  

• Henry James, Daisy Miller – note:  there are two versions;  I recommend the 1908 version, which is not available online (please buy Oxford World Classics)
• A.S. Byatt, Possession (1990) – Vintage
• Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967/1973) – Faber

Other Texts (all freely available online – links available on NILE for poetry and here for fiction):

• Poetry:  Robert Herrick, John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, TS Eliot, James Joyce, Philip Larkin, Rita Dove, Tyehimba Jess
• Short Fiction: 
  – Jamaica Kincaid, ‘Girl’ (1978), short story (online)
  – Nnedi Okorofor, ‘Spider the Artist’ (2008), Lightspeed Magazine (online)
  – Zadie Smith, ‘Embassy of Cambodia’ (2013), New Yorker (online)
  – Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Mysterious Kor’ (library e-resource via Nelson)

Further Theoretical Reading if interested:
Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Library hard copy and e-resource).

Semester One Option Modules

1) LIT1037 Identity Under Construction

Module Description: This module introduces literatures with a primary focus on the constructions of identity, around issues such as race, class, gender and sexuality. Students also explore the concept of ‘identity’ to ask questions of form and genre, and thus consider key developments in the context of literary movements and social change.

The module will acquaint students with a range of writing including poetry, drama and the novel, which each have a focus on the concept of identity in some manner, as well as key critical and theoretical considerations, such as feminism, postmodernism and postcolonialism. The module will also equip students with a range of key and subject-specific skills relating to information retrieval, referencing, close reading and research.

Reading List
You may use any edition of the below texts. This is the order we will study them in:

• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (please note, this is in comic form, ie is a graphic novel)
• Samuel Beckett, Endgame
• Sarah Kane, Blasted
• Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
• Martin Amis, Money
• Andrea Levy, Small Island
• John Cooper-Clarke, Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt
• An additional selection of post-war poetry will be provided via Nile.

2) LIT1038 Contemporary Shakespeares

This module has two main aims:

To introduce you to Shakespeare as studied at degree level. This involves presenting Shakespeare as part of his historical, theatrical and literary worlds, familiarising you with a range of his plays across several genres – comedies, tragedies, histories, and late plays or ‘romances’ – and developing your skills in the close critical analysis of those texts.
To explore a) some contemporary critical approaches to Shakespeare, which might include presentism, cultural materialism eco-criticism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, film and performance criticism, and b) cultural appropriations of his life and work. We will look particularly at film, graphic novels, and theatrical performance, but will also discuss the range of ways in which Shakespeare appears in contemporary culture, which might include fiction, popular music, art, advertising, heritage and tourism, and so on.

The module is grounded in the assumption that the meaning and significance of Shakespeare is continually re-invented in relation to cultural, historical and political pressures, and that it is always unsettled, manifold, and subject to debate: hence the plural form, ‘Shakespeares’. Whilst proper attention will be given to the richness of the plays’ literary language, and the depth and complexity of their themes and form, we are not attempting to demonstrate their (nor their author’s) ‘greatness’ or ‘universality’, but the many ways in which they can be made to mean, motivated by different social interests in the present day.

Hopefully the module will leave you with an enduring enthusiasm for these texts and their capacity for re-interpretation, along with the critical capabilities to make your own mark on the world of Shakespeare.

Set Text:
Please buy William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, Second Edition, edited by Stanley Wells and others. Oxford University Press, 2005. (Paperback)

This edition contains all six plays we will be studying (and includes many more which will be useful for context). In addition to being a highly regarded scholarly edition, it is the least expensive, and perhaps the lightest, Complete Works available. Please note that this is the second edition (2005) and is in paperback.

Do not bring any other edition: in seminars, we will all need to be on the same page. Furthermore, notes and supporting materials in this edition will sometimes be set as preparation.

Reading List:
Please read the following plays carefully over the Summer, to get first impressions, and again before the seminar in which we discuss each one, to refresh your memory.
This is the probable order in which we will study them (although this could change):

• Hamlet
• Henry V
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Othello
• Romeo and Juliet
• The Tempest

3) LIT1048 American Dreams, American Nightmares: Race, Class and Gender

Welcome to the introductory American literature module on the English programme.

This module will introduce you to a range of texts that illustrate the development of a national literature and culture in the US from the Colonial period up to the present day. Through the study of novels, poems and non-fiction forms, seminars will analyse how American writing has developed alongside the emerging republic and how it has responded to key social and historical developments.

The texts are arranged broadly chronologically but will be grouped around themes including race, gender, class, and counter-culture. The notion of founding a nation on the philosophical concepts contained in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will frame the question ‘What is an American?’ throughout the module, as will the ways in which critical perspectives can illuminate our readings of American texts.

The reading for each week is set out below. You must check the schedule in advance so that you can be prepared for every class. Many of these texts can be found on the NILE site but it is your responsibility to find, read and bring these to the relevant seminars.

The module is delivered through 2-hour seminars focusing on one major text over a week or shorter texts that will be discussed in a single seminar. There will also be a small number of online activities to engage with, these will help to supplement the work carried out in seminars. You MUST read the text prior to each respective seminar.

Reading List:

• Books:
  – Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (any edition)
  – Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (any edition)
  – Kate Chopin, The Awakening (any edition)
  – Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (any edition)
  – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (any edition)
  – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (any edition)
  – Richard Wright, Native Son (any edition)
  – Allen Ginsberg, Howl (any edition)

Please note that a selection of other shorter required texts will be made available through NILE.

• Filmography:
  – Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, Howl (2010), available on Box of Broadcasts for free: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand
  Direct link: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/0208AB02?bcast=123502597

Semester Two Optional Modules

1) LIT1045 Digital Culture and Print Media

Module Description: With an emphasis on the modern age, this module explores the relationship between literature and evolving media and technologies.  Texts range from entrenched classics to contemporary ‘Twitterature’ always seeking new understandings of literary meaning via the forms in which they are presented or published.  Understanding print and digital formats within mediated cultural frameworks allow for exploration of contemporary understandings of new skills and capabilities for reading now.

Required Books:

• H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds (1898) any edition (available online, or Penguin paperback)
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) Norton critical edition recommended (or online)
• Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) Penguin or Norton critical edition
• Jennifer Egan, Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) any edition

Online and Shorter Works:

• Orson Welles, ‘War of the Worlds’ (1938) – radio broadcast, online (YouTube)
• Wyndham Lewis, BLAST; Mina Loy ‘Feminist Manifesto’ and ‘Love Songs’
• W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’ (online)
• Twitter stories:  Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’ (here) and Teju Cole’s ‘Hafiz’ (here)

HyperText Narrative: 

• Shelley Jackson’s ‘My Body’ (here) and others

2) LIT1046 Decolonising the Bookshelf

Module Description: This module sets out to answer the question: what does it mean to decolonise the literary canon? It explores literary representations of global ethnic majorities within a range of texts written in English and drawn from different historical periods.

The module engages a range of critical approaches including post-colonialism and critical race studies to reframe literary debates about diversity and inclusiveness. It examines a range of topics and themes such as colonial discourse, legacies of slavery, writing back to the centre, the relationship between race, gender and class, cultural belonging and unbelonging, and decolonising the canon. It enables students to encounter and discuss a range of representations of the racialised self and other in a constructive, creative and collaborative way.

Reading List:

• Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Purple Hibiscus (any edition)
• Beaty, Paul, The Sellout (any edition)
• Blackman, Malorie,  Noughts and Crosses (any edition)
• Coetzee, JM, Foe (any edition)
• Emecheta, Buchi, Second Class Citizen (any edition)
• Evaristo, Bernadine, Soul Tourists (any edition)
• Ghosh, Amitav, The Hungry Tide (any edition)
• Phillips, Caryl, Crossing the River (any edition)
• Prince, Mary, The History of Mary Prince (any edition)
• Selvon, Sam, The Lonely Londoners (any edition)

3) LIT1047  Writing the Wild

Module Description: Writing the Wild explores literary representations of the natural world and the diverse ways in which writers have responded to the wild and the non-human. The module emphasises the significance of literary texts in contributing to contemporary debates regarding our relationships with the environment, other people and other animals, and how the rediscovery of our own wildness can help us to rethink and regenerate those relationships.

The module situates the discussion of literary texts in the context of broader social, cultural and political debates regarding the place of the human in the natural world. A range of literary non-fiction, fiction and poetry will be studied alongside reading in the fields of eco-criticism, wilderness theory and animal advocacy. You will be encouraged to establish a dialogue between literary and non-literary texts thereby understanding how literature reflects and informs current conversations about our relationship with the natural environment and with the other species that inhabit it. The module will establish a historical basis for contemporary discussions, drawing on texts from the nineteenth century onwards, and from both British and American writers. It will consider themes and concepts such as Wildness, Wilderness, Rewilding, Speciesism, Environmentalism, and the relationship between gender, race, social class and the experience of the natural world and other animals.

Essential Texts for the Module:

• Donna Seaman (ed.), In our Nature: Stories of Wildness, University of Georgia Press (2002)
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Norton Critical Edition (2019)
• Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Norton (2006)
• Cheryl Strayed, Wild, Atlantic (2012)
• Kathryn Aalto (ed.), Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World, Timber Press (2020)
• Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places, Granta (2007)
• Diane Setterfield, Once Upon a River, Penguin (2018)
• Richard Powers, The Overstory, Vintage (2019)
• Other poems and extracts from writers on nature, wildness and wilderness will also be studied on the module and these will be made available on NILE in advance of seminars.