BA (Hons) English, Media and Cultural Studies

This module will enable you to analyse the social, cultural and political importance of the mass media in precise ways.  Centrally positioned as leisure resources and tools of citizenship, the media have a major impact on how we understand our world, ourselves and other people.  At the same time, the media cannot be taken as simply offering ‘windows on the world’; the image of reality that we get from television, radio, music, press, the internet and film is more accurately understood as a construction whose version of reality is influenced as much by economic, political and aesthetic factors as it is by the world in which we live. This module will introduce you to a range of methods for studying media texts, and their relevance for an understanding of contemporary socio-cultural debates. 

The aim of this module is to provide you with an understanding of the basic strands of literary and cultural theories, such as feminism, Marxism, postcolonial theory, and psychoanalysis. It will allow you to explore and evaluate these theoretical perspectives through practical application to literary texts as well as to other primary sources.

This module introduces you to the study of the institutions that produce our media and the audiences that consume them. We will consider broadcast media institutions and examine the tensions that are created when trying to serve the public interests of citizens and the private interests of shareholders. Current institutional case studies include the BBC and the birth of radio, ITV and the early years of television and the rise of Sky in an era of apparent deregulation. We will then move on to examine what audiences may take from their consumption of media and how we can go about researching them. We will consider a range of topics including early research into media effects, uses and gratifications theory, the encoding/decoding model and ethnographic studies of domestic media consumption.

Professional writers produce content for audiences. On this module you will develop your writing skills to a professional standard to produce an original portfolio of writing, containing a feature, review, news story and podcast. You will also critically reflect upon your work and the influence of your practice on the content you have produced. On the module you will learn about: attribution and referencing; editing and proof-reading; writing to meet a brief; various forms of journalistic practice, e.g. print, online, podcasts. 

This module will introduce you to Liverpool as a global city with a rich literary heritage, tracing the creativity and multiculturalism which has shaped, and continues to shape, our world-famous city. You will read a range of works authored by or about Liverpudlians and consider the historical, social, and geographical contexts for writing in and of the city.

This module introduces you to the study of English literature at undergraduate level, through set texts drawn from different historical periods and covering fundamental literary categories (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama). It will give you a grounding in the key terms that you will need in critical writing, such as form, narrative, character, and irony, and in the skills needed for English studies, including close reading, reading quickly and efficiently, and researching and writing essays.

Public Communication is a work-based learning module about advertising and its role in awareness raising, communicating information and persuasion. We will introduce you to the study of advertising as persuasive communication and you will examine both theoretical and popular responses to advertising as a cultural form and develop critical analytical skills to deconstruct it. We will then move on to the world of Public Information Campaigns (PICs), those not-for-profit campaigns that encourage us to eat healthily, to drive soberly and to engage in sexual activity safely. You will be briefed by a real-world client about a Public Information Campaign they want you to develop. You will then work in campaign teams to design and then pitch a campaign in response to the client brief.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to a range of seventeenth-century writings in their historical and cultural context to enable you to recognise different forms and genres used in the period. This module will also facilitate an understanding the concept of the Early Modern and issues of historical change and continuity.

This module focuses on the emergence of a modernist movement in Europe and America at the beginning of the 20th century and lasting until the decades after the close of the Second World War. You will be introduced to the literature, culture and politics of modernity through an engagement with a variety of modernist texts.

This module enables you to develop a critical vocabulary to enhance your understanding of poetry. You will be introduced to a range of poetry from different periods, in different forms and from different cultural locations. Alongside this, you will learn to identify the aesthetic qualities of different poetic traditions.

This module will introduce you to the field of postcolonial studies through a selection of literary and critical works. It will introduce the debates on the relationship between art, politics and culture at the heart of postcolonial literary criticism.

In this module, you will develop an understanding of the manifestations of Romanticism in nineteenth-century literature to assess the cultural afterlife and importance of Romanticism and its modes. You will explore the connections between politics, social history, and literary culture in Britain during a period of social instability and intense and rapid changes in many areas of life at home and abroad.

The aim of this module is to analyse a wide variety of short writing from the post-Second World War era to develop skills of close reading and textual analysis. You will also explore the relationship between short writing and modernity/contemporary culture.

Within this module, you will extend your familiarity with a range of Victorian texts including novels, poetry and essays. You will explore how the Victorian age was characterized by rapidly developing scientific discourses and popular interest in them and understand how contemporary understanding of genre and cultural prestige were inherited from the Victorian period.

This module promotes independent learning activities to give you an opportunity to pursue their own research-informed projects. This module promotes key skills relating to Level 5 work identifying a set of aims or key questions exploring a body of published literature relevant to the project, and effectively communicating information, arguments and analysis.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to the diversity of auto/biographical writing. It will equip you with the critical vocabulary and analytical tools to explore and analyse modern life-writing. You will understand key critical topics relating to life-writing, including the relations of subjectivity and form; the intersections of gender, race, class and embodiment; the role of memory and nostalgia; narrative strategies of confession and secrecy.

The module examines a distinct field of communications practice, that of public relations – but it’s not just a module for students with PR in mind as a career option.  We’re all familiar with the concept and the language of ‘spin’. PR practices have become pervasive: tactics that we see people engaging in all the time, from politicians to reality TV celebrities. This module enables you both to critique what goes on in the name of public relations and also to make creative use of its tools and practices.  Central to the module is the idea of producing effective communication – in our case, effective, persuasive writing. We think about how organisations go about doing this: how they cope with challenges that threaten their reputation, and how they take advantage of opportunities to build up their reputation.

Magazines are a popular form of journalism, read by many thousands and often staffed by freelance writers. In this module you will both critically evaluate journalistic practice, in contemporary publications like Vogue, Cosmopolitan and When Saturday Comes, and produce professional standard copy for real-world audiences. The module focuses upon contemporary industry practice with an emphasis on lifestyle and feature journalism. You will examine a range of issues that influence the production and consumption of popular journalism. You will undertake research for your own professional-standard portfolio of original reviews and features which meet the professional demands of real-world publications.

From Spotify to podcasting, the rise of digital media technologies has seemingly led to an ever-expanding range of ways to engage with popular culture. This module questions how far these developments have led to transformations in our experiences of popular cultural texts. For example, how is engaging with a podcast different to listening to radio? In what ways has YouTube transformed our consumption of music videos? Paying particular attention to popular music, the module explores the implications of the mediation of music across a range of technological forms, including: radio, podcasting, video games, television, narrative and documentary film, YouTube and social media. 

This module examines slavery from a long historical interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. It will analyse a range of 'slave texts' such as autobiographies, novels about slavery, abolitionist poetry, and contemporary film, to interrogate the diverse ways in which slavery has been represented historically, and contemporary debates around that history.

This module will develop your understanding of the relationships between gender, sexuality, and literature. Building on the feminist theory you will encounter in your first year, you will explore literature’s role in the developments of the sexual politics and gender norms of Western society and culture since the nineteenth century and up to the present day.

This module focuses on post-1948 literature about ethnic diversity in Britain. You will explore a tradition of writing by and about post-colonial migrants and their British-born children, including works of prose, poetry, and drama, and read these texts in relation to contemporary debates about multiculturalism, race and (anti-)racism, and British identity and society.

This module covers a range of working-class literary traditions and genres from the nineteenth century to the present. You will examine the relationship between literary form and social class, consider how working-class writers have appropriated and developed particular genres, and explore the intersections between class and other markers of identity.

Building on your encounters with key strands of critical theory in your first year, this module offers you the opportunity to further explore contemporary theoretical concepts and ideas, including postmodernism, posthumanism, gender and queer theory, and critical race theory.