Literature | www.essex.ac.uk/lifts | E admit@essex.ac.uk | T +44 (0)1206 873666


BA Literature and Sociology allows you to study topics from literature and from sociology. In your first year, you take a core literature option, Introduction to Literature, and a core sociology option, Sociology and the Modern World: Sociological Analysis I, which both give you a good grounding in key theories for both subjects. You can then choose optional modules from across both departments and, in your first year, from outside both departments, where appropriate.


BA Literature and/with Modern Languages enables you to combine the study of a wide range of literature options with the study of one or two modern languages, from French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.


The literature component seeks to answer the following questions: how has literature changed between the time of Shakespeare and today? What happens when you approach English literature from a European perspective? What kind of language do we use in order to understand and analyse literary texts? The modern languages component has a triple focus on developing language proficiency, cultural awareness and professional skills (not only translation skills, but also web and publishing skills, and film production and video editing skills, such as subtitling and voiceover). Our focus on skills aims to help you acquire a wide range of employability skills which will enhance your career prospects.


How are the courses


structured? First year


In your first year (as in your second and final years), you take four modules. The first year serves as an introduction to the area of study in which you will specialise for the remainder of your time as an undergraduate at Essex. For most of our courses (either single honours or joint honours), you will take a first-year module that serves as an Introduction to Literature, a module on The Enlightenment (a period of critical inquiry that reached its high-point in the eighteenth century and helped establish the foundations for our modern society), two half-year modules entitled Close Reading Skills and Writing Skills, and one other module. If you plan to take BA Film Studies and Literature,


166 | Undergraduate Prospectus 2012


you will take Introduction to Film. Similarly, if you intend taking BA Drama and Literature, you will take an Introduction to Theatre Studies module. Other students may take the film, drama and creative writing options in the first year, subject to the availability of places. If your course involves US literature, you will also take a half-year introductory module in that area. Most courses involve the introductory modules Close Reading Skills and Writing Skills.


Introduction to Literature explores poetry, drama and narrative in a series of seminal works that have helped shape and invigorate English and European literature, past and present. The emphasis is on a combination of close reading and open questioning designed to test generalisations through a careful study of selected literary texts.


The Enlightenment looks at the period between 1650 and 1800 that was marked with dynamic social, political, economic and religious upheaval – new ideas and political philosophies challenged traditional beliefs culminating in the revolutions in America and France in the late eighteenth century. Using texts in literature, philosophy, politics, and history, as well as examining the artwork of the period, this module explores how and why this dramatic change occurred and the significance of the period for modern humanities study.


Close Reading Skills/Writing Skills are two half-year skills modules which provide the tools necessary for university-level study. Close Reading Skills trains you to analyse literary texts in detail and provides you with the vocabulary to discuss those texts. Writing Skills will help you develop essential essay writing skills.


Second year


In your second year, you follow a series of core modules that lay the foundations for your particular course. For BA English Literature this means second-year modules in Early Modern Literature (of the period 1300-1750) and Versions of Modernity (from 1750 to the present). For BA English and United States Literature, the module on US Literature Since 1850 is taken instead of one of these two modules. You will also take a module called Approaches to Text. The courses involving film studies, drama and


creative writing have specific second-year modules dedicated to their respective courses. Other joint courses have different requirements, involving the study of modules in other departments.


Third year Third-year modules are chosen from a wide variety on offer, usually between 20 and 25 each year. Indicative titles include: The History Play; Postcolonial Literature; Icelandic Literature; Transformations of Fairy Tale; Film and American Culture; Understanding and Writing Science Fiction; Twentieth-Century Political Theatre; Myth and the Creative Process; Caribbean Literature; Hollywood Directors; Reading in Romanticism.


There is also the option of applying to write a 10,000-word project on a literary topic of your own choice (in place of reading for one of the four third-year modules). This piece of research is known as the independent study project and is an ideal way for students intending to proceed to postgraduate study to acquire one of the skills necessary at that level.


Titles of recent independent study projects include: Men Writing Women: the representation of the female in the fiction of Thomas Hardy and D H Lawrence; Beyond Nostalgia: America reconsidered in the recent fiction of Don de Lillo and Philip Roth; Transformation and the Ancient Epic; J G Ballard’s Fictive Psyches; Gay Writers in 1950s America; Paranoia in Sylvia Plath’s poetry; Gothic Fiction: From Castle to Country House; Italian Neorealism in Literature and Film; Raswood Yards at Dusk: The Poetry of William Carlos Williams.


Can I study abroad? We operate an exchange scheme with universities in Denmark, France, Finland, Greece, Germany, Spain, and Italy (the ERASMUS programme), which you can apply to follow in your second year. This period of time abroad offers a host of benefits, including the opportunity to view the world (and literature) from another perspective. For further details, see page 56. The nine-month course of study, from October to June, spent abroad, carries full recognition of your assessment for that year and counts towards your final degree result.


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