BA (Hons) Creative and Professional Writing with English Literatures

This module explores the social, political and philosophical contexts of the English and global Renaissance through its literary culture.

This module aims to integrate the critical reading of horror and speculative fiction with the student's own choice of writing assignment. You will examine theories of representation in various forms and cultures and consider past and contemporary markets, publication outlets and trends for horror and speculative fiction texts. Especial attention will be paid to ways in which the horror and speculative fiction genres can be made more diverse and inclusive by means of addressing contemporary debates around sex, gender, race, class and health through fiction.

This module will focus on the key themes, ideas and characteristics of the Gothic genre, situate them in their historical and philosophical context, and attend to the ways in which the representation of the Gothic has developed over the centuries since it first emerged out of the shadows of the Enlightenment. We will begin with John Aikin's 'Sir Bertrand: A Fragment' and end with Helen Oyeyemi's 'White is for Witching' and in between examine a range of literary texts. Close attention will be paid to the ways in which the genre has featured in a range of media and cultural environments, including, visual art, film, music, television and youth subcultures. Topics such as cultural anxieties, the ideology of the sublime, sexual politics, and strategies of subversion will be foregrounded, as will the array of critical perspectives and readings that the Gothic has generated. We also examine the ways in which themes such as gender, class and race intersect with the concern of the gothic tropes that we examine.

In this module you'll research the readership and style of various magazines, websites (including blog spaces) and organisations, with a view to writing perfectly pitched feature articles. You will learn the varied forms of the feature and get practical experience of working on real-world publication ideas. This practical experience will also include the establishment, design and up-keep of an independent blog space, to provide a working knowledge of journalism/feature writing online. You will also have to produce a professional profile for yourself as a writer. Practical application is emphasised in this module and the assessment is relevant to the current freelance writing industry.

In this module students will develop an understanding of the narrative approaches used in writing crime and psychological thriller fiction. We will also consider the different target groups these works may be written for. Students will analyse examples of crime and thriller fiction, and then use their acquired knowledge of the conventions and possibilities in those genre to create and evaluate examples of their own crime and thriller writing. Throughout the semester, students will be given the opportunity to present work and receive feedback for such work, in both written and verbal form. This will culminate in a portfolio assessment at the end of the semester, where written feedback will again be provided.

This module offers students the opportunity to explore ways of working creatively with region and identity in their writing, particularly with regard to how the former impacts on the latter. It will consider the significance of setting, and the extent to which voice and character can be determined by place. It will create a context in which students can reflect on, and respond creatively to, their own environment as a means of producing original writing in a variety of forms.

The various futures of writing involve a number of emerging practices. Good writers and editors can put their skills to use in a myriad of professional careers, including content writing and editing, book and magazine publishing, corporate communication, podcast writing, video games, publishing, web content development, arts promotion, advocacy, and many others. Although the career opportunities are wide and various for this discipline, all of them assume that practitioners have learned to handle text professionally and can apply key skills in a variety of industry contexts.   In this module, you will learn different writing skills and registers to build your own portfolio as a professional writer. You will become familiar with professional fields such as marketing, content writing, podcasts, video games, journalism, and more. You will also explore other aspects of the professional writing career such as having a writing routine, dealing with rejection, creating professional relationships with agents and publishers, finding a writing community and many more.   Assignments will build your skills in document design, writing in multiple modes and media, usability testing to develop more accessible texts, and ethical considerations for communication in professional settings.  

We live in a time of fraught climate, ecology and nature debates and poetry is taking a centre stage in these discussions. This module is a creative exploration the cutting-edge practices of Geopoetics - The Expression of the Earth. This module will develop your awareness of geological, ecological and geographical debates and concerns and consider how the Earth Sciences can be used in conjunction with poetry. You will be encouraged to offer your own creative voices to the existing poetic conversations about nature, climate and the living world.

This module provides an opportunity to apply academic skills and knowledge to a project negotiated with an external organisation. Students are required to identify, negotiate and research an issue which is relevant to both their academic study and the external organisation. This enables the student to demonstrate an awareness of academic research within an organisational context, together with an understanding of the parameters of research methodologies within an academic framework.

This module provides the opportunity for students to conduct their own research into a negotiated subject of their choice within the areas of English Language Studies or English Literary Studies. It requires students to demonstrate the analytical skills acquired over length of their English degree, including the abilities to construct and sustain an argument, and to support it using evidence.

The Creative and Professional Writing Project enables you to work independently in an area of your choice and under the supervision of an appropriate member of staff, who then serves as the supervisor of that project. It allows you an opportunity to pursue an interest in a given subject/issue related to creative or professional writing or to produce extended creative writings to a greater depth and breadth than before. At the same time, it provides you with the chance to display the skills in organisation and research methods you’ve acquired in previous modules, as well as to demonstrate your mastery of the craft of creative and professional writing.

This module maps, historicises and analyses our rapidly changing experience in the digital age, which confronts us with new and diverging forms of social relationships, identities and changing human behaviour. The module explores how narrative form is changing by paying attention to new modes, media, formats, platforms and reading devices with new temporalities and possibilities, such as literature published via Twitter, gaming narratives, cell phone novels, and new genres such as 'tech thrillers'. We also analyse game narratives. Particular attention is paid to gender representation in the digital age, digital inequality in relation to class and ethnicity, and how technology responds to post-secular contexts. Relevant theoretical contexts include post-humanism, digital humanities, AI and computational literary studies.

This module aims to provide students with an understanding of the Modernist period and the terms ‘modernism’ and 'avant-garde' in some of their classifying and critical uses, and to develop and deploy reading skills appropriate to modernist and avant-garde texts across a selection of works, including some from continental Europe and the USA and Latin American. We will begin with a screening of Salvador Dali's film 'Un Chien Andalou' and end with a short story by the first openly gay black writer in the USA, Richard Bruce Nugent, in between we will examine the work of James Joyce, Latin American Frida Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S Eliot, David Garnett, and Leonora Carrington amongst others. In addition, some sessions will be dedicated to the analysis of Modernist theory and the texts and to an examination of relevant contextual tropes such as gender theory, psychoanalysis and the concept of the fragmented subject (Freud, Jung and Spielrein) and theories of time (Bergson) and race (Walker).

This module draws on a range of texts and cultural practices to address the extremes of representation. We will examine some examples of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural texts that are hidden from mainstream society, and those which are rejected by both/either the populace and the academy. Our objects of enquiry will be representational strategies, and their real effects on individuals and on society. Topics may include debates around representations of racism, genocide, disablism, sexual 'deviance', blasphemy, obscenity, political extremism, cancel culture, screen violence, animal rights and wrongs. Students are asked to contribute their own examples of problematic texts and to engage with current and ongoing culture wars. A wide range of theoretical approaches will be applied, including postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, cultural materialism, animal studies, disability studies.

This module follows on from 6CW001 Writing the Novel: Planning, Process & Preparation with the unique aim to enable you to continue to develop a longer work of prose at UG level. Since you will have already completed the first 4,000 words of an original novel together with a synopsis of the complete story as part of your 6CW001 submission, this complementary follow-on module will take you beyond those first chapters, enabling you to have the vision of the whole work as you continuing writing towards a mid-way point and/or beyond. This module will, therefore, be completely unique in its pedagogical strategy by tailoring weekly module content according to your collective and individual writing objectives. This will mean a fair percentage of self-directed study to further your creative process and in terms of meeting more personalised learning outcomes. For example, as per your requests, we might focus upon managing the genre balance or ensemble cast storylines; the techniques used in narrative tension for story arcs; instigating subtexts out of contexts. In essence, you will take ownership over your own learning as devised from your own practice. Module teaching will, therefore, be a combination of seminar and workshop, peer review, tutor supervision and peer mentoring, close reading analysis, publication pitches, guest speakers, and self-promotion techniques. You will look to complete the next 4,000 words of your project, including an account of how the project will add to existing canons, and how it may be pitched to prospective publishers.