WELCOME TO THE FACULTY OF ARTS SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND PERFORMING ARTS BA (HONOURS) ENGLISH

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1 WELCOME TO THE FACULTY OF ARTS SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND PERFORMING ARTS BA (HONOURS) ENGLISH August 2011 Welcome to English in the School of Humanities. We are delighted that you have chosen to come and study with us and we very much look forward to meeting you in Plymouth in September. Our first contact with you will be in induction week about which you will be given further details. Here you will meet the English staff and be introduced to your degree programme and to the wider University environment. You will be formally enrolled, receive your timetables, and have the opportunity to visit the Library and to set up an e- mail account in the media workshop. Most importantly, you will meet with your advisory tutor, a member of the English team who oversees your progress throughout your three years with us, and whom you may consult about any academic or personal issue. The activities in induction week will help to familiarise you with the campus, with your accommodation, with English and support staff, with your programme of study, with extra-curricular activities run by the Student Union, and of course with other students. As a BA English student, this will be an opportunity for you to begin to find out more about, for example, the creative writing magazine, Ink, the new Arts Society, run by English students, the Peninsula Arts Literature Series with its programme of guest speakers, and other arts events in Plymouth at the Theatre Royal or the Plymouth Arts Centre. We are sure that your first year with us will be academically challenging, as you begin to engage with new approaches to the study of literature. The first year of our degree encompasses a very wide range of writers and texts in three such approaches period studies, critical theory, and creative writing giving you a sound foundation for the second and third years when you will have opportunities to select specialist modules that reflect your own academic interests and strengths. Details of the modules you will be taking as a first year student in English are given below together with reading lists of the set texts. We do not, of course, expect you to have read everything on these lists but it may be useful for you to familiarise yourself with some of the reading required for the first term and especially with some of the longer literary works. Reading ahead in this way may be of help to you as modules will often move quite quickly through the set texts. Best Wishes, Dr Angela Smith Subject Leader

2 BA ENGLISH: Single Honours, Major and Minor All students study 1 during one academic year comprising 60 credits during the first or autumn term and 60 credits during the second or spring term. Single Honours students First term (Autumn): ENGL 114, ENGL126, ENGL 128 ( each) Second term (Spring): ENGL 116, ENGL 131 and ENGL 129 ( each) Major Honours students First term (Autumn): ENGL 126 and ENGL 128 * Second term (Spring): ENGL 116 and ENGL 129 * * plus from minor programme Minor students First term (Autumn): ENGL 114 () Second term (Spring): ENGL 116 () ENGL 114: The Practice of Reading and Writing: Rhetoric Module Leader: to be confirmed This module invites you not only to study but also to practise the textual techniques and strategies frequently used by writers of prose fiction and expository prose. You will engage with such issues as the handling of time, focalisation, intertextuality, authorial voice, symbolism, narrative levels, the progress of an argument and the use of examples. F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1926) with an introduction and notes by Tony Tanner, Penguin Classics, 2000 Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, Penguin Books, 2000 ENGL 116: Introduction to Theory Module leader: Dr Min Wild This module aims to provide Stage One students with a basic map of modern critical methods, including liberal humanism, structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist and postcolonial criticism. Students will be provided with a reader containing a range of primary materials and short literary texts which will be discussed in seminars and lectures. Literary Theory: An Anthology,Second Edition, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell,

3 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins The Yellow Wallpaper (any ed.) Malouf, David, Remembering Babylon (Vintage, 1994) ENGL126 Texts in Context Module leader: Dr Peter Hinds Set texts include: Shakespeare, William, Much Ado About Nothing, ed by Claire McEachern (Arden Shakespeare, 2006) Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, ed by Stevie Davies (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2006) Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway, ed by Stella McNichol (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2000), introduction by Elaine Showalter The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed by Stephen Greenblatt et al, 8 th edition, vol.1 (Norton: New York, 2006) ENGL 128: The English Toolkit Module Leader: Dr Annika Bautz This module aims to support students in the transition to higher education from their former modes of study. The module provides students with The English Toolkit, a range of study skills which should enable students to adapt to a new learning environment and to increase awareness of the skills of independent study, planning, research and timemanagement needed to work at University level efficiently. The study of selected texts will allow students to consider the ways in which texts relate to each other historically and to understand various forms of inter-textuality, encouraging the critical examination of the constitutive conventions of different modes and genres of writing. Much of the literature you will study involves dynamic acts of transition; of individuals, of the community, of the environment. Atwood, Margaret, The Penelopiad Austen, Jane, Sense and Sensibility Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot (Faber). Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin) Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice, translated by David Luke (Vintage)

4 ENGL 131: Poetry: Elements and Forms Module leader: Dr Paul Lawley This module introduces students to the pleasures and challenges of the close analysis of poetry. The elements and forms of verse are considered, alongside matters particularly germane to the use of language in poetry. Through lecture and seminar example is given and guidance offered in the analysis of a range of poetry written in English. Keegan, Paul, ed. The Penguin Book of English Verse, Penguin, Wainwright, Jeffrey, Poetry: the Basics, 2nd ed., Routledge, ENGL 129 The Eighteenth Century and its World Module leader: Dr Bonnie Latimer The course anthology is The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 8th edition, vol. 1 (New York, 2006). You will already have bought this for ENGL126 in the first term. You will also need, in reading order: John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (1728) - this is available in two editions. EITHER ed. Bryan Loughrey and T. O. Treadwell (Penguin, 2003) OR ed. Vivien Jones and David Lindley (New Mermaids, 2010). Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. Thomas Keymer and James Kelly (Oxford, 2007) Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740), ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford, 2001) Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764), ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford, 1998) - there is also a good Broadview edition available, ed. Frederick Frank, but it is more expensive Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals (1775), ed. Tiffany Stern (New Mermaids, 2004). This is also available in a collected edition of Sheridan's plays, ed. Eric Rump, which is also fine, and actually cheaper! Also, please note that it is quite important to buy the Oxford World's Classics editions of the Defoe and Richardson; this is because the Defoe has no chapters and so if you buy a different edition it will be hard to find your place in class. The alternative Penguin version of Pamela is actually a different version of the text (a nineteenth-century edition).

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