BA (Hons) English and Journalism

Level One

Crisis and Confidence: Victorian Literature, 1832-1910 - Double Unit
Students reading ‘English Literature 1832 to1910’ will study major and less well-known Victorian And Edwardian texts in the context of a number of themes. This approach enables students to explore historical contexts as well as to engage with the literature of the time within a framework that sees ‘literature’ not as a reflection of society but as an activity within society, an activity that is both the result of and contributing factor to social change. This module covers both semesters.

Introduction to Poetry
New students often find poetry intimidating. In this module we look at what makes poetic language different from ‘normal’ language, at how poets use the sounds and meanings of words, and at how poetry can be used to change and challenge our understanding of the world. Our aim is that students will be able to enjoy poetry more and be able to talk about it with confidence and clarity.

Introduction to Narrative
Narrative – stories – are everywhere in our lives: in books, on TV, in history, the news, in our conversation and in our heads. This module aims to give students an understanding of how stories work. Contemporary British fiction by writers such as Kate Atkinson, Hanif Kureishi, Irvine Welsh, Ian McEwan and Ali Smith will be used to introduce a set of critical concepts for the analysis of narrative fiction.

Media Law 1
Journalism students are required to abide by the law, in terms of newsgathering and research methods, data collection and retention, use of communication networks and publishing and broadcasting material to audiences. This module introduces students to the legal system, to the operation of the courts, and examines the impact of legislation and codes of practice on the work of journalists.

Public Administration 1
This module will study the political and administrative structure of government, local government and EU institutions, evaluating how the legal system operates within the democratic process, which in turn depends on journalists monitoring, interpreting and explaining current affairs to voters and taxpayers.

Journalism Skills - Double Unit
Students will progress through the key journalistic skills of newsgathering, writing, editing and design in the modern mass media world. Using a blend of practice and theory, students will be encouraged to develop a rounded awareness of the media and will produce portfolios of their work. There will be a focus on newsgathering and writing skills which is then reinforced with the use of editing techniques. The way design influences different media will also be analysed.

Level Two

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature - Double Unit
In this double module covering both semesters, students examine novels of the British Empire together with a wide range of postcolonial writings from regions including Africa, India, the Caribbean, Australia and Canada. There is also the opportunity to study representations of Britain through colonial and postcolonial literatures.

Making It New: An Introduction to Literary Modernism
In this module students explore one of the most creative periods in English literature, the early twentieth century when writers like James Joyce, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence were at work. Our aim is to enable students to read and even enjoy these often notoriously difficult texts, to understand what light they throw on literature more widely and to relate them to the contexts in which they were generated

Theory Wars
During the 20th century new theoretical approaches to literature were developed such as structuralism, dialogics, deconstruction, new historicism, feminism, queer and traumatological theory, all of which questioned traditional notions of Literature. This module will look in detail at the new theories and their effects upon the study of literature as an academic discipline.

Media Law 2
This module builds on legal and administrative knowledge gleaned at Level 1, examines how criminal and civil legislation affecting print, online and broadcast journalists has developed, identifies areas of conflict and uncertainty, and requires the student to apply knowledge of legislation and case law to given scenarios including responses to actions in the civil courts.

News Features Reportage
Students will proactively gather news and feature stories employing the full range of research and interview techniques in a newsroom setting. They will also participate in press conferences, press briefings, speech events, magistrates’ court hearings, and council meetings. The emphasis will be on the creation of imaginative and original copy, conforming to professional standards with careful consideration of angle, choice of interviewees, attribution and corroboration of facts.

Public Administration 2
This module focuses on the use (and misuse) of public and private funds by institutions and considers the operation of internal and external checks against corrupt dealings, fraud and false accounting. In the context of the current political and economic climate, students are encouraged to consider whether or not the ‘Fourth Estate’ is in an effective position to challenge corrupt and unethical practices on the part of politicians, bureaucrats and associated business interests. .

Journalism Options
Students choose one from the following list of options:

• Reporting Social and Cultural Diversity (option) - The role of the media as a ‘mirror’ of society means that journalists encounter cross-cultural issues in their newsgathering and news processing functions. This module will prepare students to write stories with cultural sensitivity, care and compassion.

• Ethics and International Human Rights for Journalists (option) - This module highlights the importance of a critical and comparative knowledge of human rights issues to the practice of journalism and aims to develop students’ awareness of the range of ethical issues facing journalists.

• The Origins of Modern Britain (option) - This module examines British society from c1945. It will enable Journalism students to critically consider the historical background to some of the issues which feature in contemporary news agendas and look at the role of the press in recording them.

Level Three

The Making of English Literature: Georgian Literature, 1710-1832
Students reading 'Literature 1710-1832' study a selection of canonical and less well-known texts from the period, and the historical and cultural context of the texts' production. They will investigate the rise of the novel and the development of poetry from the time of Pope to that of the Romantics along with topics such as satire, realism, sensibility, the Gothic and the sublime. Issues explored include anxieties and conflicts around the notions of class, gender, nation, empire, nature, reason and imagination. This module covers both semesters.

English Options
Students choose either a single option from each semester or a double semester option which covers both.

• Postmodernism: Apocalypse and Genesis 1967-2000 (Semester A option) - This module will explore the nature of the contemporary through analysis of selected literary texts. The initial date, 1967, has been chosen as it marks a point of transition from a post-war world based upon a liberal consensus to a time of radical uncertainty, extreme and experimental forms of expression, the breakdown of notions of realism in all the arts, sciences and philosophy. The Postmodern marks the end of a modern programme which begins in the Renaissance and concludes around the end of World War Two. It is a period of extreme scepticism regarding inherited ways of explaining the world. It is also an age dominated by electronic media and the dissolution of previously held concepts of time and space. Given this, it is not surprising to see previously held assumptions being questioned and reformulated. Literature, alongside the radicalisation of all intellectual concepts, including reason and common-sense, has played a significant role in debating, illustrating, and disseminating these new ways of thinking both in terms of form and content.

• Nineteenth-Century Literature and Exploration (Semester A option) – This module will be primarily concerned with the formulation and transformation of identity in the far reaches of the British Empire. Students will be required to read fictional and nonfictional accounts of exploration of a variety of regions subject to imperial conquest, including India, Africa, the Arctic and potentially other regions. We will be primarily concerned with interactions between explorers and indigenous people as well as accounts of explorers who “went native.” The aim will be to investigate the different types of hybrid identities that can arise in different regions and to ask what similarities exist between them.

• Gothic in Literature and Film (Semester B option) - Monsters and attics, desolate landscapes, imprisonment and pursuit: the gothic genre emerged in the late eighteenth century to depict our darkest fears and desires. Termed ‘the literature of nightmare’ and ‘the dark side of fantasy’, gothic departs from a realistic mode of representation and employs a powerful means of symbolic expression. This course investigates ways in which the genre has explored psychological and political anxieties, including sexual and scientific transgression.

• Women’s Writing & Feminist Theory (Semester A option) - A diverse range of prose, poetry, and drama written by women from the seventeenth century to the contemporary moment is considered alongside key concepts in feminist theory. Writers range from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen to Zora Neale Hurston to Jeanette Winterson. Topics range from the feminine aesthetic and French feminism to feminist utopianism and cyberfeminism.

• Literature, Film & Gender Semester B option) - This unit explores a wide range of gender topics (masculinities, the backlash against feminism, crossdressing, queer theory, and transgendering) through a variety of literary texts and films. Shakespeare, Ibsen, Hardy, and Woolf, are considered alongside more popular fiction by writers, such as Susanna Moore, and films, including Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Mrs Doubtfire, Boys Don’t Cry, and Peeping Tom.

• Contempory Drama (Semester B option) - This is a study of drama and performance from the 1960s to the contemporary moment, and involves a consideration of plays by writers including Peter Handke, Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, and Steven Berkoff. Topics emphasised include political theatre, postmodernism, ‘in-yer-face theatre’, and issues of censorship. This unit is taught through workshops involving both academic discussion and practical work.

• Literature & The Environment (Semester B option) - The first principle of ecological thinking is that other things exist beside humans, and that we are neither so separate from, nor so dominant over, the nonhuman as we tend to think. In this unit we explore what difference it makes to read literature from this perspective. We study literature as part of our complex interaction with our environment, and perhaps, in some ways and on some occasions, as a uniquely valuable one.

• Life Writing (Semester A option) - The module will introduce students to a range of life writing (including biography, autobiography, letters, confessions, memoirs, and poems) from the Romantic period to the contemporary moment. Students will explore the relationship between self and society, private and public, fact and fiction, and think about autobiography as a social, political, and literary practice.

• Cross Cultural Representations (Semester B option) - This unit explores issues of identity and culture through the study of cross cultural representation. Students will examine textual and filmic representations of the encounter between different cultures and compare the production and reception of similar texts in different cultural contexts. Our basic proposition is that, in part, such cultural texts call in to being imagined communities which serve to construct cultural identity.

• Adaptation (Semester A option) - This unit explores the concept, practice and processes by which a finished text is 'rewritten'. Students will examine instances of adaptation, and although the unit will primarily focus on the adaptation of novels into drama and film, other forms such as musical theatre will be discussed. We will examine the move from one medium to another, and study the categories of adaptation and the techniques and methods available to the adaptor.

• Southern Accents (Semester A option) - This optional module explores representations of the southern states of America in prose fiction, film, drama and music. In the first section southern stereotypes and ‘resistant’ representations, produced by southerners and others, are examined in relation to social, political and historical contexts. This is followed by a section on African American representations of the south. Finally, a section on music and vernacular traditions explores the influence of the south on American popular music. Students are encouraged to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to examine questions of regional identity in a wide range of texts.

• American Modernism and Modernity (Semester B option)- American prose, poetry, visual art and popular music during the first period of ‘High Modernism’ 1909- 1939 saw a conflict between ‘realist’ and ‘experimental’ forms of representation. The module explores this artistic period with special reference to constructions of ‘American Identity’ and alternative identities as constructed by dissonant and dissenting voices. With regard to the latter, there is an emphasis upon gendered identities (the New Woman/ vamp/flapper and “it” girl), and ethnic identity (the First Harlem Renaissance). Key themes are: reactions to ‘The Great War’; European Influence (especially as evidenced in the visual arts following The Armory Exhibition of 1913); the expatriate experience; the re-emergence of ‘realism’ during the depression.

• Modern Drama (Semester A option) - This module explores a variety of drama texts and practitioners from the 1880s to the 1950s. A study of naturalism as a key movement is followed by an examination of some early twentieth-century Irish plays. We then consider problematic aspects of categorization and practice in a variety of ‘anti-naturalistic’ plays. The module will examine plays both as written texts and in terms of performance practice/potential.

• American Genre and Popular Culture (Double Semester option) – Students will be able to examine changing representations of cultural, political and social issues by examining American drama and film from the 1930s to the present day. This will form the background to a detailed case study of the popular genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, drawing together the themes outlined earlier in the module.

• English Independent Study (Double Semester option) - In this unit, students, having agreed a topic with a tutor, have the opportunity to study in depth an author or topic of their choice. Students have regular, one-to-one meetings with a tutor specialising in their area of interest who offers advice and direction, but primarily this unit encourages independent research and independent thought leading to the production of a 10,000-word dissertation.

Advanced Feature Development
Students will examine and analyse feature formats across a wide range of publications, from general readership newspapers and magazines to specialist and niche journals aimed at the ‘expert’. Students will study the particular attributes needed for specialist feature writing including: authority, expertise, ability to access specialist information, feature ‘spot’ format requirements, etc.

The Business of Journalism
Here students focus on employment opportunities in journalism, featuring the role of freelancers, specialist contributors, in-house journalists, editors/managers and changing patterns of work in the industry. Students will conduct research into recruitment policies, employment opportunities, job application and interview skills and will examine the commercial relationship between the journalist and individual print titles, broadcast or web-based news companies.

Journalism Options
Students can choose to do either *

• Journalism Independent Study (Double module option) - Students undertaking a dissertation in the subject of journalism are able to investigate a topic of their own choice within the field of journalism studies and apply key theoretical concepts to their research. Although staff supervision is provided, students are required to work on their own initiative and provide clear evidence of their ability to collect, select and evaluate relevant information and present it in a clear and logical manner.

Or two from the following:

• International Media Policies (option) - The module will look at media broadcasting structures in the UK and in other countries. It will develop the students’ critical understanding of models of national broadcasting and the implications for media policy and mass media role in society. Furthermore, the module will introduce students to the role of media policy actors including the fundamental contexts of national, cultural and economic systems which inform the development of media policy debate.

• Peace and Conflict Reporting (option) - This module will explore the history of war reporting, examining the evolution of war-making by major Western powers and the ways in which journalists have represented those conflicts. In addition it will consider the reasons why some conflicts are marginalised, ignored altogether or given extensive coverage by the mainstream media.

• Comparative Media History (option) - This module enables students to appreciate trends and changes within all the main media industries; press, radio, TV, cinema, music and the internet on a comparative basis between countries and between platforms. The module offers an opportunity to understand how the media has reached the state it is now in, and what trends are likely to continue in the future.

NB. Students should take the Journalism Independent Study module if they are not doing so in English. However, those who are undertaking an English independent study must take, instead, two single option modules from shown above.

The programme is based in the MHAC building, a purpose built Media base, at the Brayford Pool campus in Lincoln and students on the programme with Journalism benefit from:

• Seven news rooms
• Online news feeds and editing software

There is also the opportunity for students to work on SIREN FM, The Lincoln School of Journalism’s very own Community Radio station which broadcasts to the Lincoln area and further afield via the web and already students have made a significant impact on the station’s output.