English and French BA

Following your time spent living in a French-speaking country this advanced module will be your final step towards fluency. We'll help you continue to improve your oral and written skills using a wide variety of texts.

Your grammar expertise and vocabulary shall be deepened through the production of linguistic commentary and summaries. In addition, we'll help you develop translation skills. Your French writing skills will improve immeasurably as we translate into and out of French creative writing in different registers.

The module will examine the range of social, political and philosophical questions raised by mass immigration to France in the post-war period. These questions will be tackled through historical analysis of patterns of migration and changing immigration policies, as well as through the study of relevant films, novels and theoretical texts which engage with questions of citizenship, identity and ethnicity.

This module invites students to critically engage with representations of apparently disruptive and transgressive French and Francophone women from determining moments in French history between 1789 and 1945, including individuals who were violent, who took up arms, were transgressive, broke laws, and were institutionalized, deported, and defamed in the press, all in the name of social justice.

Examples include revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt, who dressed as a man in order to fight for women's revolutionary involvement and was institutionalised for madness, and Louise Michel, one of the women accused of setting devastating fires that gutted government and cultural institutions during the Semaine Sanglante of the Paris Commune. 

Students will analyse case studies in the light of the dominant gender discourses of their time (during the 1789 Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Belle Epoque, and the First and Second World Wars), as manifest in cultural representation, such as press, literary and visual sources.

Where possible, they will also study the voice of lived experience, via memoirs and works published by the women in question, in order to explore how their own perspectives interacted with representations of them.

The French Revolution has been subject to many different interpretations and re-interpretations over the last two centuries, and in this module we will be seeking to analyse it through the various forms of artistic works and cultural artefacts it produced cartoons, political speeches, journalism, drama, portraiture, song, and festivals.

This module looks at the various ways in which the novel has evolved and adapted to “the contemporary” by responding to the “everyday”. Giving an overview of the various approaches to the everyday in the contemporary novel from the 60s to the present, this module will explore how key authors negotiate, through their writing, the everyday’s indeterminacy and the unstable space it occupies between the social and the individual.

This module encourages students to evaluate the attitudes that are displayed towards different types of language variation in French both inside and outside France. It focuses in particular on attitudes towards varieties of French which differ from the Standard French used in Paris.

The module first introduces students to the concept of Standard Language ideology. It then introduces them to a variety of sources which display varying attitudes to French from the 17th century to the present day, including texts on ‘good usage’ in French, language advice columns, online blogs, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These sources are examined to determine what areas of the French language are viewed positively and what areas are critiqued, and the methods used to critique language.

The module also explores attitudes towards instances of proposed language change, including proposals to reform the French spelling system and to make language more gender inclusive, and attitudes towards regional varieties of French which different from Standard French, such as the French spoken in North America and Africa.

In addition, students are introduced to the various methods used to analyse and measure language attitudes and encouraged to consider the advantages and disadvantages of methods including corpus studies, questionnaire studies, interview studies and discourse analysis studies. 

This module aims to introduce you to key aspects of French documentary cinema by considering a range of documentary cinematic techniques, and by looking at the ways in which documentary form has developed over time. The module examines the work of a range of filmmakers and explores the theoretical, socio-cultural and ethical questions raised by documentary cinema.

You will develop analytical tools that can be used to understand the different ways in which documentaries attempt to engage audiences and deal in sophisticated and often challenging ways with a range of issues.

This year-long module is based on guided independent study of a chosen topic in the field of French and Francophone Studies for which supervision can be offered by the Department. Topics typically relate to a module taken in the second year, or to a module to be taken in the final year, and it is expected that students have some familiarity with the chosen field.

Dissertation topics in past years have included:

• The feminist and humanist aspects of Christine de Pizan's work.
• How Albert Memmi's philosophy of colonised identity is prefigured in his literary work.
• The representation of women in three novels by Dany Laferrière.
• The representation of women in the films of Jean-Luc Godard.
• The definition of malaise in the context of contemporary socio-economic and political issues in France.
• Presidential Power in the Fifth Republic.
• The urban landscape in surrealism.
• Translating humour from English to French.

Teaching takes place in the form of regular individual meetings with the allocated supervisor, and group meetings with the module convenor, centred more generally on research and writing skills.

Semester 1 is devoted to research, reading and planning, leading to the submission of a dissertation abstract, chapter outline and preliminary bibliography, as well as the presentation of posters. In the second semester, students write up and complete the dissertation under the continued guidance of the supervisor.

In this module students learn to devise and develop projects and teaching methods appropriate to engage the age and ability group they are working with. The module enables students to gain confidence in communicating their subject, develop strong organisational and interpersonal skills, and to understand how to address the needs of individuals.

Through the exploration of lyric poetry, this module examines cultural and literary change from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. It will consider the rise of ‘named poet’, the interaction of print and manuscript culture, the representation of love, and the use of the female voice. It will develop further students’ confidence in handling formal poetic terminology and reading poetry from this period. It will also enable students to think pragmatically about the transmission of lyric in modern editions, and about how best to represent the form.

Explore the novel from the late twentieth century onwards, in Britain and beyond.

We will concentrate on the formal operations and innovations of selected novelists, considering how the contemporary socio-historical context influences these questions of form. Topics considered include:

• an interrogation of the ‘post-consensus novel’
• an exploration of postcolonial texts which represent the transatlantic slave trade
• the cultural politics of late twentieth-century and twenty-first century Scottish literature

Contemporary fiction is focused on writing emerging from Britain and closely-related contexts in the post-war period. This module offers strands structured around a number of political, social and cultural frameworks in Britain. These include:

• formal analysis and literary innovations in Britain
• temporalities and the representation of time
• issues of gender, race and class
• histories of colonialism and slavery
• national traditions and politics of state
• the country and the city
• postmodernism

This module particularly explores the network of relationships between context, content and form, supported by related literary and cultural theory and philosophy.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This stranded module provides students with a detailed introduction to the major works of a single author (e.g. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence). Students will select one author to study from a range on offer. They will then have the opportunity to consider in detail important thematic and stylistic aspects of their chosen author’s work, taking account of the chronological development of his/her writing practice (if relevant), and his/her relationship to key historical and literary contexts.

This module focuses on the connections between literary texts, politics, and relevant historical/cultural contexts in gothic texts. You may cover:

• poetry
• novels
• graphic novels
• films

Examples include The Haunting of Hill House (both Shirley Jackson’s novel and the Netflix adaptation), The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, and Saga of the Swamp Thing by Moore, Bissette and Totleben, and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake.

You will explore various critical and theoretical approaches to literature, film, comics, adaptation, and popular culture. The module also seeks to decolonise Gothic Studies, including work by creators from a wide range of backgrounds who identify with a diverse range of subject positions.

This module is worth 20 credits.

The years from 1660 to 1830 are enormously important, especially in terms of the representation of the self in literature: Milton promoted the idea of the poet inspired by God; Pope and Swift mocked the possibility of anyone truly knowing their self; Wordsworth used poetry to explore his own life; and Byron and Austen provided ironic commentaries on the self-obsessions of their peers. This period also saw the rise of the novel (a form that relies upon telling the story of lives), a flourishing trade in biography, and the emergence of new genre, autobiography.This module will look at some of the most significant works of the period with particular reference to the relationship between writers and their worlds. Topics might include: the emergence, importance and limitations of life-writing; self-fashioning; the construction – and deconstruction - of the ‘Romantic’ author’; transmission and revision; translation and imitation; ideas of the self and gender; intertextuality, adaptation, and rewriting; creating and destroying the past; and writing revolution.Texts studied will range across poems, novels and prose; they might include Paradise Lost (1660) and Frankenstein (1818). Authors studied might include Rochester, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, Austen, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Mary Shelley.

This module introduces key modern and contemporary poets.

You will build a detailed understanding of how various poetic forms manifest themselves in particular historical moments. Unifying the module is an attention to poets’ responses to the political and ideological upheavals of the 20th century.

The module will include such (primarily) British and Irish poets as:

• W.B. Yeats
• T.S. Eliot
• W. H. Auden
• Dylan Thomas
• Ted Hughes
• Sylvia Plath
• Wislawa Szymborska
• Tony Harrison
• Seamus Heaney
• Derek Mahon
• Adrienne Rich
• Geoffrey Hill
• Jo Shapcott
• Patience Agbabi
• Alice Oswald

Some of the forms examined will include: the elegy, the pastoral (and anti-pastoral), the ode, the sonnet (and sonnet sequence), the ekphrastic poem, the version or retelling, the villanelle, the parable and the sestina.

To develop a more complete perspective on each poet’s engagement with 20-century formal and political problems, we also examine these figures’ writings in other modes. This includes critical essays, manifestos, speeches, and primary archival materials such as letters and manuscript drafts.

Grounding each week will be readings on poetry and the category of the ‘political’ from an international group of critics, including such thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Charles Bernstein, Claudia Rankine, Peter McDonald, Angela Leighton, Christopher Ricks and Marjorie Perloff.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Moving from the Spanish Armada of 1588 to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, we will read a range of texts and authors.  Through these works, we will explore major themes of the period's literary and intellectual culture, such as witchcraft, music, allegory, and others.  There will be an emphasis on understanding the literature in its historical era, and in its subsequent reception and influence.  In your final assessment, you will have the opportunity to design and pursue your own research question, blending close analysis of the period’s literature with discussion of its historical contexts.

This module will consider Irish literature and drama produced in the twentieth century. Taking the Irish Literary Revival as a starting-point we will consider authors in their Irish and European context, such as W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, James Joyce, Seán O'Casey, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel and Marina Carr.

The focus throughout will be upon reading texts in relation to their social, historical, and political contexts, tracking significant literary and cultural responses to Irish experiences of colonial occupation, nationalist uprising and civil war, partition and independence, socio-economic modernisation, and the protracted period of violent conflict in Northern Ireland. Discussion will also seek to highlight a number of recurrent thematic issues, including language, tradition, gender and sexuality, class, place, and memory.

World Literature examines the late twentieth and early twenty-first century globe through its correlates in fiction. The primary materials for the course will be post-war Anglophone works drawn from a wide geographical range across the world. After introducing the history of the idea of world literature, these works will be situated within a series of theoretical ‘worlds’: world literary systems; post-colonial criticism; cosmopolitanism; world ecologies; resource culture; literary translation theory. The module will also attend to critiques of 'world literature’ as a concept.

Speaking, listening, reading, and writing are a complex set of behaviours that are a fundamental part of our daily lives. And yet they remain difficult to fully explain.

When you hear ‘FIRE’, you immediately look for an exit and start moving. Yet all that a speaker has done is produce a string of sounds. Your mind distinguishes these from the murmuring of other voices, feet clomping on the floor, and any background music. Your mind matches the sounds f-i-r-e with a word, retrieves the meaning, and relates them to the current circumstances and responds accordingly.

How does the mind do this? And what makes our minds so special that we can do this? On this module, we begin to address these questions.

You will consider:

• Is there a language gene?
• What makes human language different from animal communication?
• What is the relationship between thought and language?
• Does everyone talk to themselves? What purpose does our inner voice serve?
• How do we learn language? And does cognition underpin our ability to learn language?
• What do language deficits tell us about language and the brain?
• How do we understand and produce speech, words, and sentences?
• What is the best way to teach children to read?
• How is sign language similar to/different from spoken language?

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module explores the vital role that discourse plays in various communicative domains in healthcare and workplace settings. Students will explore these domains through a variety of contemporary frameworks for examining discourse and communication, including critical discourse analysis, multi-modal discourse analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics.The module offers the opportunity to analyse and reflect on the discourses of healthcare and the workplace, as two crucially important domains of social and professional life. To this end, professional and healthcare discourses will be investigated through a range of genres and communicative modes, including face-to face communication advertising, media discourse and digital interactions. The module offers a rich resource for discourse-based studies of language in professional and social life and enables students to examine the strategic uses of communicative strategies in specific social settings.

This module provides comprehensive knowledge of feminist theory, as applied to a series of language and linguistic contexts.

You will explore a range of analytical approaches to language, including conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics. You will also respond to, and critically engage with, contemporary real-world problems associated with gender and sexuality, through the consideration of discourse-based texts.

Topics covered include:

• gender and sexual identity construction in a range of interactive contexts
• sexist, misogynistic, homophobic and heteronormative representations in texts
• feminist theory from the 1970s to the present, with particular focus on contemporary approaches to gender theory

This module is worth 20 credits.

The module is designed to provide students with an understanding of the process of English Language Teaching (ELT) and of the theoretical underpinnings of this practice. In this module students will learn the principles behind the learning and teaching of key aspects and skills of English, including:

• vocabulary
• grammar
• reading
• writing
• speaking
• listening
• intercultural communicative skills

Students will also learn how to apply these theoretical principles to the development of teaching materials. This module will therefore be of interest to students who want to pursue a teaching career, and in particular to those interested in teaching English as a second or foreign language.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This is a course in advanced stylistic analysis, exploring threads of stylistic patterning across literary and cultural history. Building on your prior knowledge of both linguistic and literary scholarship, the module bridges the gap between literary and linguistics aspects of the BA degrees. The course focuses in particular on aspects of style from a formalist, functionalist, cognitive, social and narratological perspective, as well as adding a historical dimension to the study of style. The module provides you with an understanding of how linguistic techniques contribute to the creation of meaning and literary interpretations. There is also an engagement with the emotional response of readers, as well as the practical application of literary linguistic pedagogy, in accordance with the educational and applied linguistic traditions of the discipline. The module represents an engagement with the professional, scholarly and disciplinary practices of literary stylistics.

The module employs the study of place-names to illustrate the various languages - British, Latin, French, Norse and English - that have been spoken in England over the last 2000 years. You will learn how place-name evidence can be used as a source for these languages, and also for the histories and landscapes of the country. The module coursework can be directed at a geographical area of particular interest to the student.

The genre of dream-vision inspired work by all the major poets of the Middle Ages, including William Langland, the Pearl-Poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The course will aim to give you a detailed knowledge of a number of canonical texts in this genre, as well as ranging widely into the alliterative revival, and chronologically into the work of John Skelton in the early sixteenth century. The course will depend upon close, detailed reading of medieval literary texts, as well as focusing on the variety and urgency of issues with which dream poetry is concerned: literary, intellectual, social, religious and political.

The module will explore the unique saga literature of medieval Iceland, with close reference to its historical and cultural contexts, via a selection of set texts. The set texts will be studied in translation but understanding will be enhanced by some study of the Old Norse-Icelandic language. Topics covered may include representations of kinship, gender, health, belief, the supernatural, landscape, emotion, feud and violence within the Old Norse sagas as well as stylistic and literary features of the sagas themselves.

This module focuses on the creative process of making theatre as an ensemble. The first half of the module explores a range of theory-in-practice approaches to performance, such as those of Stanislavski, Lecoq, Laban, Meyerhold, along with approaches to devised, physical theatre influenced by companies such as Frantic Assembly and Gecko. For the second half of the module, students draw on these practical and theoretical models as they develop and rehearse a short, assessed, ensemble piece(s) for public performance. Students are also asked to critically reflect on the process of making performance encountered during workshop, rehearsal and performance on the module.The module builds on the understanding of performance conventions developed through practical workshops begun in the first year 'Drama, Theatre, Performance' module, and the performance theory-through-practice approach of the second year 'From Stanislavski to Contemporary Performance' module.  

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen major changes in the way theatre is financed, produced, and presented, on stage and on screen. This module delves into the fascinating world of theatre production, beginning with late nineteenth-century actor-managers and the development of long-running, commercial productions and moving through subsidised theatre, touring and national theatre companies, processes of remediation (particularly through film), and the advent of the mega-musical.

The module utilises case studies including Shakespeare in production, new plays, revivals and international hits such as Les Miserables and Hamilton, to illustrate how theatre responds to changing contexts and audiences. A portfolio assessment allows students to respond to key subjects and types of theatre explored on the module.