Our course expands on the traditional study of English, giving you the chance to put it into practice.
Our English degree looks to expand your understanding of what the subject is about through encounters with literary and non-literary texts. You’ll explore how English is used in theatre, poetry, professional and everyday conversations, media texts, non-verbal communication, your own writing, and, of course, novels. Your studies will also integrate language and writing alongside literature. You’ll develop skills in each of these areas and have the opportunity to create and pursue your own path that combines language, literature, and creative writing or focuses on two specifically.
BA English will be delivered online in 2020/21 to facilitate optimum learning in the context of COVID-19. The benefits of this approach are that you will develop additional skills that are much needed in our fast changing world including:
Throughout your studies you’ll have plenty of opportunities to put your skills into practice. As part of your studies you’ll produce your own texts in a range of different styles, engage in critical and theoretical debates, explore the work of others, and develop your own investigations.
You can participate in a range of extracurricular activities, including (virtual) West End performances, library and gallery visits, the student-run North London Story Festival and the UK Linguistics Olympiad.
A whole host of different career paths are available after you graduate with a BA in English, as the excellent critical, communication, and creative skills gained on the course are in high demand with many employers. You’ll be able to join fields like publishing, advertising, civil service, politics, plus many more. Many graduates go on to do a PGCE in primary or secondary education with many becoming teachers.
We know sometimes you’ll need assistance and support when it comes to your studies. During your time with us you will get assistance from a Personal Tutor. If you require a little extra help, we have Student Learning Assistants and Graduate Academic Assistants on hand to help.
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You will develop an understanding of the global range of work in English by exploring linguistic, literary and creative approaches. You will focus on media, popular and professional texts alongside core literary and creative ones.
You will take four modules a year (if studied full time) over three years. Each module is designed to be flexible, allowing you to bring your own interests to the assignments and develop key skills and knowledge that will benefit not only your final independent project but also your ambitions and career goals beyond this course.
You will learn how to write in different forms and for different purposes and to give a range of types of presentations. You will gain competence in penetrating communication, and the ability to engage in close reading and rapid analysis. You will develop the ability to draw creatively on your specialist knowledge and skills in English to work in diverse environments such as education, publishing, media and marketing. You will develop distinctive creative, investigative, theoretical and critical skills.
We’ve made temporary changes to some course modules for students starting in 2020 in response to the coronavirus outbreak. If you’re applying to start this course or progressing into year one, two or three this autumn, there’s info on these updates below.
This module introduces key topics and methods for work in English. It develops your ability to reflect on your own practice and personal development within and beyond this programme, and on your career plans. You also develop your ability to produce, interpret and evaluate texts in a range of media and genres, your understanding of methods and approaches used to explore texts and practices, and your understanding of the cultural and other contexts in which texts are produced and circulated.
This module explores how the English language varies among geographical regions, different social groups and individuals. You will learn how to recognise and describe phonological and grammatical variation in language use and will track the development of English from a language of a small island in Europe to the global lingua franca it is today. You will develop your own empirical projects, investigating local, new and international Englishes.
In this module, you explore different ways in which we make sense of the world and communicate with others through creative or professional writing. You will develop your reading and writing skills through exploration of a wide range of literary or journalistic forms and through writing practice in these forms. You will practise reflective evaluation of your own and other’s creative work through self and peer review.
This module introduces you to the various methods of interpreting literature, and develops skills for personal critical analysis of prose, poetry and drama. You will learn about some classic texts and literary traditions from Shakespeare to the present, as well as examining how contemporary literature engages with and challenges past traditions. The module also examines one sub-genre such as fairy tale to explore how the form expands in relation to changing social and political contexts, looking at how texts are adapted and transformed by contemporary writers. Indicative writers studied include T. S. Eliot, Angela Carter and Zadie Smith.
In this module, you focus on the role of research and practice in English and connect this to professional contexts. You will create texts using particular techniques and critically appraise them for literary, creative and academic purposes. You will also develop your practical and collaborative research skills,, your ability to communicate in professional contexts, and prepare for your independent project in your final year.
This module explores how humans learn to speak and how this differs from communication by other species. It introduces a range of methods used to explore this question and key theoretical approaches. You will explore work on the stages involved in language acquisition, and on how language and language acquisition interact with other aspects of cognition, with other kinds of communicative and non-communicative behaviour, and with environmental factors.
In this module you will explore the dynamic relationship between language and identities. You will examine how language shapes and is shaped by aspects of social identity, such as gender, sexuality, age, social class, culture, ethnicity, and institutional identities and roles. You will research identities in spoken, written, and electronic texts, applying key notions from interactional and critical approaches to linguistics.
This module will help you to understand the particular demands, constraints and potentials of the short film form. It will help you to understand the significance of story structure, visual storytelling and characterisation in conveying meaning and affect and how screenplays are written on the page. You will conceive, research and develop a short screen story, write and rewrite a short dramatic script, taking account of and evaluating feedback, including peer group feedback, and evaluate the completed work critically and analytically, formatting your screenplay to industry standards.
In this module you will develop your fiction-writing skills through medium of the short story. We'll explore a range of classic short stories, from Medieval tales, through canonical writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Anton Chekhov, to contemporary flash fiction and fantasy. Through work-shopped exercises, you will develop your skills in such key techniques of fiction as narrative voice, setting and atmosphere, pace and suspense, character and dialogue, and we will also learn about the distinctive and exciting publishing environment for short fiction.
This module explores the literary modes of realism, the anti-real and the fantastic in literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, looking at how these forms developed and how they adapt to a changing world. It considers philosophical discussions of reality, literature as social commentary and the role of the imagination. You will continue the development of your expertise through critical readings and comparative analysis of mimesis, metafiction, magical realism and fantasy to develop an appreciation of their diverse purposes and manifestations. We will look at writers such as Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Jackie Kay and J. K. Rowling.
In this module you will design and carry out your own independent project, which can take the form of an investigative project and report; a critical and theoretical discussion; or a creative project with reflection. Workshops will help you to develop a proposal and you will then work independently with advice from a designated supervisor to complete your project.
This module explores issues around the teaching of varieties of English in first and second language contexts. You will consider pedagogical, practical and policy issues, explore theories of language teaching and learning, and develop aspects of your own teaching philosophy which you will put into practice in preparing lesson plans and delivering parts of lessons to other students.
This module helps you to develop an understanding of contemporary multimodal communication. Focusing on media texts, you will explore the relationships between verbal and nonverbal modes and between different genres and different media. You will explore the variety of social and cultural forms and contexts of textual production, interpretation and communication. You will develop skills in textual analysis focusing on the roles of language, structure, form and reader in communication and interpretation. You will also explore the concept of mediation and a number of theories of media communication.
In this module, you will develop your understanding of how close reading of nonfiction, including forms such as travel and history writing, biography and memoir, can help you to develop your own creative writing abilities within these genres. It explores the nature of the self, its presentation in text, and the depiction of other lives, helping you to adopt different narrative structures and styles in your own work. It explores the notion of place and voice in nonfiction writing and helps you to understand how research informs writing while developing an understanding of styles found within the various forms and your own practice.
This module explores the tropes and subjects of popular fiction, including such genres as fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance, erotic fiction, historical fiction, and crime (The Whodunit and True Crime). It looks at genre-specific plot-shapes, settings, literary devices and characterisation, in addition to the variation offered by related sub-genres. It explores the contextualisation of new creative work within the marketplace and contemporary society, as well as analysing certain genre-defining classics. Taking all of the above on board, you will develop plot-outlines, write initial drafts, receive feedback from beta-readers and professional writers, and then produce final drafts.
This module examines representations of identity in relation to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class and nationality in global literature. Texts will be analysed using gender theory, critical race theory (CRT), Marxist literary theory and postcolonial theory, in order to appreciate the 'intersectionality', 'history' and 'politics' that define identity. The module also considers the impact of globalisation on literature in English, examining how classic and contemporary novels challenge established categories of nationality and identity, and how they represent the transnational movement of characters experiencing hybridity and multi-rootedness. Texts studied can include Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Indian and African poetry written in English. The first half of the module tends to focus on identity within the British Isles, while the second term tends to focus on identity beyond the British Isles.
This module helps you to develop your skills and practices at an appropriate professional level in the workplace, in industries relevant to the rest of your work on the programme. It enables you to locate and reflect on your academic learning in the day-to-day operation of industries and institutions and to prepare for carrying forward the outcomes of your studies into professional life.
See the course specification for more information:
Optional modules are usually available at levels 5 and 6, although optional modules are not offered on every course. Where optional modules are available, you will be asked to make your choice during the previous academic year. If we have insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, or there are staffing changes which affect the teaching, it may not be offered. If an optional module will not run, we will advise you after the module selection period when numbers are confirmed, or at the earliest time that the programme team make the decision not to run the module, and help you choose an alternative module.
Throughout the year, our students produce, create and work on a multitude of projects.
Recently they have worked in partnership with Haringey Sixth Form Centre to produce Haringey Unchained - a magazine dedicated to showcasing the creative talents of the students.
Read some more examples of our student's work below.
The excellent professional communication, critical and creative skills of English graduates are highly valued by all employers in the private and public sector. This course will leave you ideally placed for a range of employment opportunities in:
Our recent graduates have forged successful careers in:
Dr Charalambidou researches how the way we talk in everyday conversations is shaped by our age, gender, linguistic and sociocultural background. She is particularly interested in language and ageing, and in the concepts of tradition and authenticity in and through language. Her publications include a co-authored book on the construction of authenticity in national foods and drinks and papers on old-age and gender identities, joke-tellings, conversational recipe, and police-citizen encounters. She is currently leading a project on accent diversity in Higher Education. She enjoys teaching sociolinguistics and supporting students through their own investigative projects.
James is an acclaimed playwright. His writing includes ‘verse-prose’ plays, black comedy, issue-led plays (about elder abuse and dementia), plays for young people/schools and a Newham-based trilogy of site-specific plays; When Chaplin Met Gandhi, Revolution Farm and A Splotch of Red: Keir Hardie. His play, Dementia’s Journey, won the 2015 University of Stirling International Dementia Award. James is currently working on his new play Alice in Canning Town, a contemporary, urban adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, reconfigured for the East End and performed site-specific in Arc in the Park, an inclusive adventure playground in Canning Town. He is a PhD by Public Works candidate.
Professor Cobley is interested in the way in which language and communication are distributed across a wide range of different forms. Being concerned with how texts appear in numerous different media, therefore, he has been particularly drawn to the study of popular narrative and genres. Because there are many such texts, he believes that we need to develop short-hand ways to recognise certain kinds of texts and how they operate. For him, this is precisely the work which enables humans to know their environment more precisely, to achieve more in life and advance as a species. His latest books include Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics (Springer, 2016), Narrative (Routledge, 2013) and The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s (Palgrave, 2000).
Dr Lively has published four novels and two non-fiction books (including Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination (Chatto/Oxford University Press)), as well as short stories and journalism for the national press. He has worked as a writer/producer of television documentaries, including the multi award-winning Jihad: The Men and Ideas behind Al Qaeda (PBS/Channel 4). His doctorate, from the University of London, was for a thesis on philosophical and psychological approaches to narrative, and he continues to research and publish in that field. He is currently working on a collection of interlinked stories titled The Central Line, and he regularly reviews fiction for the Sunday Times.
Dr Barnard is the author of six acclaimed books, fiction and non-fiction, ranging from her Betty Trask award-winning novel Poker Face (1996) to The Book of Friendship (2011) and The Multimodal Writer (2019). As well as writing books for Virago and Macmillan HE, she has published extensive print and radio journalism for outlets such as the Guardian and the Independent, including the recent BBC Radio 4 programme, 'Digital Futures' (2019). Her academic research centres on employability and how the 'digital turn' has changed what it is to be 'a writer'.
Dr Dalton has previously taught at both Manchester Metropolitan University and Falmouth University. Under the author name A J Dalton, he is an author of fantasy, science fiction, horror, crime and literary fiction, with both Empire of the Saviours and The Book of Angels listed for a number of literary prizes. He also publishes academically on English literature and creative writing; his most recent title The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Dr Dalton teaches on both our BA and MA programmes, and also supervises PhDs in English literature and creative writing.
We’ll carefully manage any future changes to courses, or the support and other services available to you, if these are necessary because of things like changes to government health and safety advice, or any changes to the law.
Any decisions will be taken in line with both external advice and the University’s Regulations which include information on this.
Our priority will always be to maintain academic standards and quality so that your learning outcomes are not affected by any adjustments that we may have to make.
At all times we’ll aim to keep you well informed of how we may need to respond to changing circumstances, and about support that we’ll provide to you.
Start: October 2021, EU/International induction: September 2021
Duration: 3 years full-time, Usually 5 years part-time
Code: WP85
Start: September 2021
Duration: 1 year full-time
Code: Q3X1