Consciousness in Fiction
The module will explore in depth techniques for the presentation of consciousness in novels and other fictional texts. Students will learn about the linguistic indices associated with the point of view of characters and the various modes available to a writer for the presentation of characters thoughts and perceptions. Alongside detailed examinations of narrative texts which portray consciousness, students will also study different theories put forward to explain the nature of writing consciousness in texts. Our stylistic analyses of fictional minds will also aim to account for historical changes in the techniques used for consciousness presentation.
Psychology of Language
This module considers three fundamental and interrelated questions about psycholinguistics:
- acquisition, or how language is acquired
- comprehension, or how words, sentences, and discourse are understood
- production, or how words, sentences, and conversations are produced
Potential topics include, but are not limited to: lexical influences on sentence comprehension and production; first and second language acquisition; reading; language disorders (e.g., dyslexia, aphasia).
Second Language Acquisition
Arguably the most important subdiscipline for the understanding of language teaching is SLA; therefore, this module will focus on this area to ensure that students have a sound understanding of how language is learned.
English Vocabulary: Teaching and Learning
This module covers the various aspects of knowledge that are required to fluently use a word: meaning, written form, spoken form, grammatical properties, frequency, register, collocation, and association. Practical aspects of teaching vocabulary will also be covered, including vocabulary teaching activities, vocabulary learning strategies, vocabulary testing and the use of corpora.
Advanced Research Methods in Applied Linguistics: Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
The module looks at various approaches of collecting and processing data using both qualitative and quantitative methods of investigation. With a focus on the area of applied linguistics, students will be introduced to the process of hypothesis formulation and testing, issues of interpretation, evaluation and replicability of data and of research results, questionnaire and interview design, data gathering and recording, statistical description and analysis, qualitative data analysis and interpretation.
Business and Organisational Communication
The module investigates the multidisciplinary subject of business and organisational communication. It covers a wide range of quantitative and qualitative approaches, examining how individuals and groups use spoken, written and digital forms of communication to get work achieved successfully. The range of methodologies and analytical frameworks for interrogating business and organisational communication include: conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics and speech act theory and ethnography. The module also highlights contemporary issues emerging from the field, exploring, for instance, the influence of context, new multi-media technologies and globalisation on communication in commercial domains and organisational environments. The module emphasises how the findings of communicative research can be practically applied in teaching and training materials and in consultancy work.
Language, Gender and Sexuality
The course will explore the relationship between language and gender in spoken interaction and written texts, drawing on key approaches in the areas of discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics. Students will focus on the ways in which: gender and sexuality affect the language we produce when interacting with one another in a variety of contexts; the critical analysis of how individuals and groups of people are represented in the media, in ways related to their gender and/or sexual identities; issues of sexist and discriminatory language towards LGBT people. Various theoretical paradigms that have been presented to explain the relationships between language, gender and sexuality will be critically examined, along with ideologies associated with gender and sexuality that operate in society and influence discourse. Students will be encouraged to combine theoretical thinking with hands-on analysis of data from authentic examples of spoken interaction and from a variety of publications including the popular media. The practical consequences of the discipline in term of how findings can have a political impact on wider society will also be discussed.
Cognition and Literature
This module represents a course in cognitive poetics. It draws on insights developed in cognitive science, especially in psychology and linguistics, in order to develop an understanding of the processes involved in literary reading. The module also develops skills in stylistics and critical theory.
Group Dynamics and Motivation in the Language Classroom
This module offers an introduction to the main psychological factors and processes that determine the way students learn foreign languages within an institutional (classroom) context. The focus will be on two key issues that have a considerable practical significance: (a) language learning motivation and (b) the internal dynamics of the learner group that can either enhance or hinder the individual members' learning achievement. Key topics to be discussed will include the components of L2 motivation; strategies to increase student motivation; structural and developmental characteristics of the 'good' learner group; group building techniques; effective leadership roles; cooperative language learning.
Intercultural Communication
This module will explore the use of language in interactions between speakers of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds from three different perspectives: Description, Development, and Assessment. With a growing proportion of interactions in the world today taking place between people of diverse cultural backgrounds, it is important to identify and describe language use which may lead to misunderstanding and communicative breakdown. This module will look at ways in which language barriers might be overcome in such interactions, and at the key factors in this process. We will examine intercultural interactions in a variety of contexts, e.g. business and other professional encounters, the language of the media, the language classroom, etc.
Sociolinguistics of Work
This module is intended to familiarise students with theories and applications of discourse-based sociolinguistics in relation to the context of work. It will cover a range of sociolinguistic, workplace topics, including a focus upon the following:
- workplace cultures
- language and identity, including power, ethnicity, age
- miscommunication
- intercultural communication
- critical discourse anaylsis and multimodal critical discourse analysis
- interactional sociolinguistics
The module will emphasise the crucial relationship between power and communication in the workplace, and demonstrate how recourse to discourse-inflected sociolinguistic analysis can illuminate and enhance communication in a range of workplaces and institutional settings.
Research Methods: Corpus Linguistics
Corpus linguistics provides methods for the study of collections of electronic texts (written texts, including literary texts, material from the internet, transcripts of spoken language, etc.). This module introduces fundamental corpus methods that include retrieving and interpreting word frequency information, studying patterns of words in the form of concordances, and 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 students will actively practise using corpus analysis software and several online interfaces. Throughout the module, students are encouraged to reflect on the applicability of a range of methods to their own areas of interest (e.g. literary linguistics, critical discourse analysis, ELT, etc.).
For the assessment, students will complete a small-scale corpus project on a topic of their own choosing (in consultation with the module convenor). This project can function to test ideas that might be further developed during the dissertation.
Language Teaching: Speaking and Listening
The main focus of this module is an exploration of methods for teaching L2 speaking and listening, as rooted in instructed EFL and ESL classroom environments. Participants will consider various aspects related to teaching L2 speaking and listening, including spoken grammar, fluency, pronunciation, strategies and input. Module content will draw on relevant bodies of research which inform approaches to teaching, and will relate this to a practical critique of L2 textbooks, materials and activities. Throughout the module students will have the opportunity to analyse, plan, prepare and present L2 speaking and listening activities.
Narratology
This module surveys key work in narratology, from literary, stylistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Combining a consideration of ideological and theoretical issues in narratology with methodological approaches from other areas of linguistic study such as pragmatics, discourse analysis and cognitive poetics, the module will explore narratological analysis in relation to both literary and non-literary narratives.
Creative Writing Conventions and Techniques
Develop your writing practice by exploring a range of creative techniques and media as they apply to both prose and poetry. You will be encouraged to reflect on your writing output and incorporate the critiques of others when editing and developing your work.
Writing Workshop: Fiction
Examine the process of novel writing by exploring various structures, techniques, and methodologies and engaging with an international body of work in genres such as fiction, creative non-fiction, and autofiction.
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, students are not only supported in their craft but encouraged to work towards submitting their work for publication. The reading list includes poetry magazines; new writers’ anthologies; debut poetry collections; poetry in performance.
Shakespeare: Text, Stage and Screen
This module offers students the opportunity to explore the fluidity and interpretive possibilities of the Shakespeare work and text across multiple genres. Built around three theatre trips, this module will go into depth on three plays, looking at their literary interest (from textual history and sources to thematic concerns and characterisation) and their performative possibilities, including at least one stage and one screen adaptation of each play. By approaching the plays from multiple angles, students will be able to consider the varied potential for reinterpretation and recreation that each text offers. Students will build on seminar explorations (taught by a team of tutors) to develop their own project question about the interpretive possibilities opened up by different versions, and the choices made by specific interpreters of the text. Projects will be developed in consultation with tutors to take into account the interplay of performance and text.
Riotous Performance: Drama, Disruption and Protest
This module allows you to engage with a range of modern drama, all themed around the idea of riot.This module explores the phenomenon of the riot, examining both how such a notion is defined and how it might relate to other kinds of western performance event. In particular, the module asks students to analyse the way that riots have both been triggered by, and represented in, an assortment of other performances, and students will be encouraged to compare and contrast material from a range of different chronological periods and across a range of different genres. Although the module is largely focused upon dramatic texts, it will allow students the opportunity to consider an assortment of other performance events, as we analyse the drama of Synge and O’Casey, the ballet of Stravinsky and Nijinsky, and the performance poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Dramatic Discourse
Working with a range of texts from the early modern period to the present day, this module explores the relationship between the ‘dramatic text’ of the written script and the ‘theatrical text’ of the script in performance through the lens of linguistic analysis. Drawing on facets of stylistics and discourse analysis, the module considers the role of language in moving dramatic scripts from page to stage, exploring aspects of characterisation (such as identity, power and provocation), the role of language in story-telling on stage, and the 'management' of performance through stage directions.
Learning to Publish: Contemporary Forms & Practices
This module is designed to introduce students to the broad publishing landscape, including: journals, small presses, online writing and social media. Students will explore the landscape of contemporary literary journals 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 will be structured around practical work in support of The Letters Page literary journal, and will be a mixture of lecture-style content on relevant topics and practical writing workshops.
Learning to Read: Criticism for Creative Writers
Analyse how reading and writing techniques can be affected by literary, theoretical, personal, and cultural contexts. You will explore a wide range of texts, including hybrid forms such as the creative critical essay, the poem-essay, and art-writing.
Practice and Practitioners
Investigate the complex relationships between writer, genre and creative industries by studying the role of publishers, booksellers, editors, producers, and literary events in the production of prose and poetry. The assessment will consist of a portfolio of either prose or poetry, or a combination of the two, as well as a critical essay.
Literature in Britain Since 1950
This module embraces literature in Britain since the Second World War, taking 1950 as the starting point, after which distinctive post-war cultural and social trends began to emerge. The critical trend to divide the period into two, with 1979 as a watershed, will be subjected to critical scrutiny: continuities as well as discontinuities in the literature written before and after 1979 will be considered. Key practitioners will be discussed, but the aim is not to provide an exhaustive overview of the period, but rather to present a developed account of important topics and debates, using an appropriate combination of teaching blocks. We aim to offer a level of study that is appropriate for MA level, whilst clearly giving prospective doctoral students the opportunity to begin important work in the study of contemporary writing.The module concentrates on the novel.
Literary Histories
It has often been suggested that the very idea of literary history of a narrative that understands, classifies, and explains, the English literary past is an inherent impossibility. The relationship between literature and the history of the time of its creation is an equally vexed and productive question. This module will look at the various ways in which literature in the last few centuries has combined with the study of history, with significant changes in the ways in which works of the past are viewed, and also how histories of literature began to be constructed (a history of literary histories, so to speak) paying attention to such questions as the development of the literary canon, periodicity, inclusions and exclusions, rediscoveries, and lack of representation. It will also look at the ways in which literary biography, autobiography and life-writing relate to the creation of literary histories. This will be a team-taught module, introducing key topics in the area and apply them to a variety of types of literature from different historical periods, and the myriad critical ways in which such literature has been viewed, retrospectively.
Modernism and the Avant-Garde in Literature and Drama
This module will investigate radical strategies of aesthetic presentation and the challenge they offered to prevailing limits of personal, gender and national identity between 1890 and 1960. Through a selection of key literary, dramatic, cultural, and critical texts, the module will examine ways that modernist and avant-garde writings draw their formal, generic and political borders, how they reconfigure ideas of the self, and what the political consequences of that reconfiguration are. The module will also consider the multiple meanings of 'radicalism' in an aesthetic and literary context, relating those meanings to questions of taste, community, and the market. This will be a team-taught module which examines a wide spectrum of literature and drama, including as well the era's cultural criticism and more recent critical and theoretical studies. Some of the texts are difficult; students will be expected to have read material thoroughly before each seminar, and to come prepared to discuss its theoretical, aesthetic and political implications.
Place, Region, Empire
This module will explore the relationship between literary texts and cultural concepts of place. Students will be introduced to a selection of texts that can range from the 16C to the present, and a range of approaches deriving from recent interdisciplinary convergences between disciplines including literary criticism, 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 to be considered will vary from year to year.
Speculative Fictions
This module will introduce students to the study of speculative fiction from across a broad historical spectrum ranging from the Medieval period to the present, including an awareness of the historical contexts out of which speculative genres emerge and of their ongoing cultural relevance. Not only is speculative fiction an area of ongoing scholarly and popular interest, but also it allows for the theoretical discussion of, and critical reflection on, key contemporary issues, such as the problem of evil, identity, alterity, freedom and terror. Students will read works by a selection of authors and will choose two particular authors either from the same historical period or from different periods to study in depth. The module will engage with a variety of genres and media, such as prose, poetry, film, the graphic novel and the illuminated manuscript(the exact selection of texts and type of text will vary).
Textualities: Defining, making and using text
This module provides an introduction to the presentation of text through editing and anthologising.It considers modes of transmission, both manuscript and print, and modes of representation, including scholarly editions and anthologies, both print and digital. It interrogates editorial theory and practice, including ‘best text’, genetic editing and single witness. Students are encouraged to apply questions of editing to their own areas of interest, and work through the practicalities of producing an edition themselves.
Poetry: Best words, Best Order
This module will look at various authors, movements, and genres in the history of poetry written in English from 1500 to the present, offering both an overview of certain key chronological areas, and cases 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.
Reading Old Norse
This course provides an intensive introduction to the Old Norse language, taking students through its grammar and through a selection of texts in prose and verse. Each week an aspect of language will be studied through exercises and focussed work on extracts from ‘real’ Old Norse. By the end of the module, students will have an understanding of Old Norse grammar and syntax, and will be familiar with texts from a number of genres, extracts of which they will have translated. Understanding of the language and of the set texts and their literary and cultural context will be tested in the coursework assessment.
Reading Old English
This module provides an intensive introduction to the Old English language, taking students through its grammar and through a selection of texts in prose and verse. Each week an aspect of language will be studied through exercises and focussed work on extracts from ‘real’ Old English. By the end of the module, students will have an understanding of the Old English grammar and syntax, and will be familiar with texts from a number of genres, extracts of which they will have translated. Understanding of the language and of the set texts and their literary and cultural context will be tested in the coursework assessment.
Research Methods in Viking and Anglo-Saxon Studies
The module provides a substantial grounding in the research resources and methods appropriate to interdisciplinary Viking and Anglo-Saxon studies. All teaching takes place through an intensive extended field-trip and a series of workshops. The workshops will introduce you to a variety of approaches to the study of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, including runology and name-studies, as well as providing a practical insight to public engagement and museums. You will also be given basic bibliographical training and the field-trip will provide an opportunity for you to discover a range of material and linguistic evidence relevant to the study of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, and to understand the importance of interpreting the evidence within its landscape setting. You will produce a portfolio of assessed work to reflect your learning in these areas. Please note that the timing and location of the field-trip are to be decided. As part of this module students will also have the opportunity to learn about public engagement through the well-established 'Vikings/Anglo-Saxons for Schools' project.
The History of the Book: 1200-1600
This module introduces the study of the book as artefact. Students will learn about methods of construction and compilation, handwriting and early printing techniques, reading marginalia as well as text; they will also be introduced to the benefits and applications, as well as the problems, of applying an understanding of the artefact to the texts contained within.
Middle English Romance
This module considers twenty-first century historicized readings of a major English literary genre, and demonstrates that medieval English romance texts can be set in complex and profound critical relationship to each other and to other artistic media. Such an approach is possible largely because of the vibrant and privileged international socio-literary milieu in which many romance tracts were first written and received. Students will be encouraged to explore how reading Middle English romance texts can equip us with vocabulary and concepts to discuss the cultural specificities of the literary representations of romance, love and chivalry in this period, the representations of public and private identities, and the questions regarding individuality and selfhood that arise in literature produced in a volatile period of religious and social uncertainty and dissent. These are all issues that now define “the Middle Ages” for modern scholars.