English Literature with Media Studies BA (Hons)

The module introduces candidates to the interesting challenges that ICT presents today and covers many anchor points that may serve as a bridge to their interests and lifestyles.

It also means you understand the value of scholarships, allowing you to move on to postgraduate programs at the University of Portsmouth.

You'll develop academic writing skills and critically analyse texts and images.

Present your analysis to deepen self-awareness and understand diverse perspectives in a global context.

The module will explore the judiciary and other legal practitioners, including judgments, law reporting, and sentencing, as well as barristers and solicitors. You'll gain an understanding of local courts such as magistrates, county, and crown courts, and delve into legal research techniques focusing on the language and discourse of statute and common law.

You'll develop a core understanding of politics and international relations.

You'll appreciate how these fields intersect and impact each other, gaining insights into the connections between people, their environment, and societal practices. Additionally, you'll be introduced to technological innovations and examine how they are applied in society from a sociological perspective.

This module will help you appreciate the inter-disciplinary connection between people and their environment.

It also develops an understanding of how people, politics, and place are interconnected, including an introduction to criminology and the sociological analysis of urban crime.

You'll demonstrate your understanding of key legal knowledge and skills by successfully completing this module, preparing you for further study and application in the field of law.

This module equips you with the tools to conduct qualitative and quantitative research, evaluate arguments and evidence, assess source credibility, and present well-structured, reasoned arguments both verbally and in writing.

You’ll investigate ideas of the body as ‘natural’ by examining its role in culturally constructed ideas of gender, race and sexuality.

You’ll explore how the body can be seen as the site of both conformity and resistance, identification and otherness.

Get an introduction to theoretical approaches to reading the body in literature, such as gender theory and posthumanism, as well as key terms and concepts, including queer, abject and grotesque.

You’ll complete the module viewing the body as a lightning rod for questions of belonging, power and social change.

Immerse yourself in world literature classics and modern texts written in English or translated from other languages. Analyse stories that address shared human concerns like environment, power, ethnicity and gender.

You’ll discover how reading diverse voices fosters a spirit of intellectual curiosity, and discuss and debate literature’s role in an increasingly connected world.

In this module, you'll dive into theories and debates challenging assumptions about artistic quality.

Through key texts spanning from the 19th century to the present day, you'll uncover the contextual forces and power structures influencing critics.

You’ll shed new light on popular fictions' literary functions and cultural impacts, and sharpen critical thinking skills to form educated opinions on what compelling storytelling means to different communities.

Through diverse works, you’ll develop your ideas and apply new concepts, including narrative theory that helps you understand how stories are constructed, and can spark your own literary creativity.

You’ll take part in lectures and group discussions to debate genres and conventions. You’ll nurture your critical awareness, research skills, and essay management, preparing you to examine life’s mysteries through storytelling.

This module will also set you up with all of the referencing skills you'll need to navigate the rest of your degree.

You'll explore fundamental assumptions about what it is to read, write and interpret texts, using select literary texts to examine the links between literature and theory, and to produce increasingly critical and complex readings.

This module will help you get to grips with concepts and ideas that will be crucial to your study of literature throughout your degree.

You’ll analyse diverse literary prizes – from the Booker to the Women’s Prize and beyond – and debate the complex criteria applied in judging literary value.

This module gives you access to the commercial world of literary publishing and prizes, offering you the chance to develop professional skills and plenty of opportunity for literary analysis

You’ll use case studies and exercises to see how research develops from initial ideas to finished works.

You’ll review resources and arguments to improve your research skills, and work with other students to refine your dissertation proposal through feedback and peer review.

This module will also help enhance your employability skills through bespoke activities and assessment.

You'll analyse key crime writing texts from detective fiction to philosophical writings on crime and punishment, considering the way they represent criminals, the police, the ethics of the death penalty, as well as historical contexts and theoretical approaches.

This module invites you on an investigative journey through the ethics, identities and politics underpinning tales of crime.

You’ll discover how literature draws on our modern anxieties around climate change, as well as our conflicted relationship with nature, and helps us address these issues.

By investigating the methods and motivations behind ecocritical approaches in literature, you’ll consider the ways in which ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and postcolonial ecocriticism can be used to focus on issues of ecocrisis, environmental justice, sovereignty and power.

There’s also a strong focus on gender, identity, the body, and the relationship between humans and environmental others.

You’ll look at diverse genres that shed light on historical moments such as slavery, post-colonialism, suffrage, second wave feminism and post-feminism.

You’ll analyse how transnational and gender identities are constructed and expressed in a global context, honing skills for contextual literary analysis alongside independent research.

By examining case studies from different time periods, you'll learn about the techniques used in various countries to control the flow of information.

You’ll trace the development of film, TV, and digital media, grasping historical impacts and the concept of spectatorship. Look into expert analyses to explore how interactive technologies shape audiences and people. You’ll contextually analyse screen entertainment as an industry, considering economic factors and passive vs active engagement. Through a mix of practical and theoretical work, your projects will showcase your in-depth understanding of the subject. You’ll also evaluate online materials to support your findings.

By the end, you’ll have a well-rounded understanding of screen culture. You can use this to pursue many careers, from media programming to content creation.

You’ll dig into the cultural context of violence in Shakespeare's age, analysing how poetry and performance play on complex dynamics of authority, resistance and ideology.

Through Shakespeare’s works, you’ll develop your own perspectives on the role of war and peace in sixteenth-century English culture.

With a minimum 80-hour commitment, you’ll apply what you’ve learned so far on your degree to real-world professional settings within our community of local businesses, social enterprises, and third-sector organisations.

You’ll have support from interactive workshops, tutorials, and guest speaker events, encouraging you to set achievable professional goals and evolve your professional identity.

You’ll analyse American texts against the backdrop of intellectual, social and political change, evaluating how writers grappled with emerging ideas around national identity, race, gender and more.

By honing skills for contextual analysis and independent thought, you’ll form your own interpretations of iconic works that reflect the American experience.

On this module, you’ll explore philosophical ideas around spaces and places in texts from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.

You’ll learn how to interpret spatial narratives through your evaluation of interior and exterior spaces, town and country, rooms and landscape.

You’ll analyse how creative works draw on wider cultural anxieties around industrialisation, race, class, and evolving gender roles.

Engage with theories and research suited to the subject. Analyse seminal comic book texts, considering the interplay of production elements and audience reception.

You’ll look at how some media stories use more than one platform, like books, films, games, and more. Discover how transmedia has changed over time and how to make your own stories more immersive and interactive. You’ll work with others to create and present your own transmedia project.

This module will help you become a skilled transmedia storyteller, ready for the industry. You’ll also improve your teamwork and research skills by collaborating with others. Most of all, your creativity will bloom as you immerse yourself in the future of interactive storytelling.

The learning objectives of this module are to be confirmed.

You'll develop a research project which can take many forms, depending on the aims and focus of the dissertation. As an extended project requiring significant levels of critical engagement with subject knowledge, independent research and initiative, ethical research practice, and project management, this module enhances many key areas of knowledge and critical skills.

This real-world, project-based module lets you address an identified need or gap by designing an innovative product, service or resource.

With support from university staff and external partners, you'll demonstrate critical thinking, ethical awareness and project management abilities.

Your final project and presentation will showcase your employability and capacity for high-impact solutions.

You'll explore diverse literary perspectives on the Holocaust, from first-hand accounts to contemporary post-memory texts.

Through critical reading and innovative creative projects both in groups and on your own, you'll grapple with the ethics of memorialisation and the role of cultural memory.

You'll trace the social anxieties and ideological structures conveyed in literary depictions of vampires, monsters and more as you explore every dark corner of this remarkable genre.

You'll develop and apply critical theories unveiling Gothic representation of identities, revolutions, environments and more, and express your ideas creatively through an essay or podcast.

On this module, you’ll analyse constructions of masculinity across US culture, interrogating literary and cinematic stereotypes.

You’ll work in groups to compare key theories and concepts, and consider how ideas of masculinity relate to other cultural and social constructs such as gender, nationality, race, class and sexuality.

Research from diverse lenses to build a questioning, reflective grasp of celebrity's principles and boundaries. Hone skills in independent thought, analysis, and articulation of ideas. Use presentations to illustrate arguments around the societal role of fame.

Through theoretical perspectives and case studies, you'll analyse the roles of journalists, politicians, and policymakers in informing or misinforming the public.

You'll critically examine representations of appetite, consumption and the body across literary and historical texts from the era.

Debate themes like hunger and self-starvation, gluttony and excess, even vampirism and cannibalism.

Through close reading and contextual analysis, you'll uncover what writings on food can tell us about how the Victorians viewed issues such as gender, race, class, nation and sexuality.

You'll investigate diverse definitions and famous examples of the genre from across the globe, honing advanced textual analysis skills.

Through lively debates, you'll explore magical realism's relationship with history, culture and narrative form, focusing on issues including postcoloniality, the limits of realism, postmodern narratorial techniques, historiography and transculturation.

You'll learn about the job application process from the perspective of both candidates and recruiters, thinking about what employers look for in graduates and how you can optimise your own professional profile.

Through mock interviews and assessments, you'll hone your skills and learn how to communicate your achievements and career goals, ready to take the next step after you graduate.

You’ll get an introduction to the role and representation of time in contemporary fiction, as well as to philosophies of time and temporality.

You’ll also consider the role of time in narrative - what time is and how it underpins and affects narrative structures.

Topics you'll cover may include the present; temporal direction, time, gender and sexuality, reading and readers, contemporary times, and endings and end times.

Use theory and history to see how literature, film, TV, new media, and journalism present technology, scientists, and science’s place in our world. You’ll learn to tell real science from fiction by evaluating their cultural settings. This will help you see how media shapes our understanding of science.

By looking at many examples and carefully thinking about them, you’ll discover how important it is to communicate science creatively.

You'll examine how comedy interacts with culture, society and industry, comparing scholarly perspectives and blending primary and secondary research, to articulate your ideas in writing.

Preparing you to apply insights to your own work, this module offers invaluable tools to think deeply about the art of comedy.