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EN-M002
Researching Literature Today: Academic Practice
This module offers a critical exploration of how literary texts are produced, interpreted, preserved, and circulated, encouraging you to engage with the evolving practices of literary scholarship. We will examine how generative AI technologies are reshaping interpretive practices, knowledge production, and authorship itself. This will include discussion around ethical issues of originality, creativity, and academic integrity. Across the module you will examine the changing role of literary criticism and practices of decolonising the literary canon. You will explore literary prize culture and awards, such as the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and think about ways in which prizes shape literary value, reputation, and market reception. You will also gain hands-on experience with archival and manuscript research learning how to work with primary materials. This is complemented by an investigation into book history and publishing, where we trace the life cycle of texts from production to dissemination and consider how material conditions shape literary value and reception. The module also provides practical training in key scholarly skills and forms part of your development for the Dissertation Module. You will learn how to write effective abstracts, reviews, and research articles suitable for academic publication, and you will develop confidence in presenting literary research. By combining theoretical inquiry with applied research methods, this module prepares you to contribute to current debates in literary studies and equips you with the tools necessary for further academic studies and professional work in and beyond the humanities.
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EN-M003
Words of Power
This team-taught module asks you to explore the relationship of power to language. The course has a number of strands: the question of postcolonial `writing back¿ to power; historical forms of political and cultural resistance and iconoclastic protest in Wales, Britain and America; questions of language, faith and ethical commitment; the philosophical tensions between mind-dependent or mind-independent truth, post-truth and language; the carnivalesque idea of language as double-voiced or `dialogic¿; ideas about art and communication, aesthetic autonomy, political intervention; the rhetorics of persuasion, propaganda and agit-prop; the relationship between monolingualism, language difference and uneven global economics; the ecocritical movement between writing in the world and an environmental sensibility of writing the world; questions of language, gender, agency and affect; styles of communication; intellectual property and the expropriation of language in the age of AI.
You will scrutinise a variety of texts and literary genres: novels, poems, drama; works of literary criticism, theory and philosophy, polemical essays and long-form journalism; digital interventions. You will reach a deeper understanding of the indissoluble relationship ¿
be it benign or malign, creative or repressive ¿ between the expressiveness of the word and the exercise of power. Importantly, taking this course will enhance your awareness of how your own language may be used and abused ¿ an ever more urgent requirement in the digitised workplace.
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ENE1001
Theorising Gothic Texts
This course explores a selection of iconic nineteenth-century and later Gothic novels to investigate the ways that literature invites different readings according to the assumptions we bring to texts and the questions we ask of them. Through different conceptual lenses, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, disability studies, postcolonialism, and gender theory, we discover how notions of Otherness and monstrosity are ideologically constructed, mediated, and contested by innovative intertextual revision and critical (re)interpretations. This course introduces you to working with a range of theoretical frameworks and critical concepts to analyse how literary meaning is produced and transformed. Additionally, we consider how Gothic tropes of difference and Othering reflect both sociocultural anxieties at the time of the texts¿ production and such tropes¿ implications for present-day concerns with inclusivity and social justice.
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ENE1004
Discovering Literature
Discovering Literature is an introductory module designed to provide a broad and engaging foundation in English literary studies. Spanning over a millennium of literary history, from the early medieval period to the present day, this module invites students to explore the richness and diversity of English literature through a chronological and thematic journey. It introduces key texts, authors, and movements that have shaped literary traditions and cultural discourse across time.
The module is structured to guide students through major literary periods, including Old and Middle English literature, the early modern period, Romanticism, nineteenth-century literature, Modernism, Postmodernism, and contemporary writing. Students will encounter a wide range of genres including poetry, drama, prose, and emerging digital forms, and will be introduced to, and encouraged to critique, the literary canon. Discovering Literature equips students with essential critical and technical skills that will underpin their academic development throughout their degree. Students will be introduced to key literary terms, concepts, and analytical methods, including close reading, narrative theory, genre analysis, and critical perspectives including feminism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism.
Discovering Literature lays the intellectual and methodological groundwork for more specialised study in subsequent years and fosters a lifelong engagement with literary culture.
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VC-100
Materiality and Meaning in the Visual Arts
This module introduces visual culture across a range of media, and is designed to help you develop the skills you need to conduct close visual analysis as well as to undertake research and develop your academic writing. We will explore a rich variety of artefacts and discuss how their meaning is constructed and how they might be grouped and exhibited. During workshop sessions, you will have the opportunity to deepen your understanding of some key visual media through practical experimentation, which may include making your own short animation or linocut print. You are also invited to identify your own examples of visual media and bring them in to a collaborative discussion .
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VC-101
Introduction to Visual Culture
Now, more than ever, our world is saturated with images. We create, distribute, and consume images at an unprecedented scale and pace. This module introduces students to the discipline of Visual Culture and equips them with empowering skills of visual interpretation and contextualisation. We begin by thinking about what an image is and what role representations play in our understanding of ourselves and others. You will study a wide range of material including painting, prints, photography, film, video games, social media and architecture. In doing so you will consider how the discipline of Visual Culture connects with the related fields of Film Studies and Art History. Throughout, we question the relationship between looking, knowing, and dynamics of power.
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VC-200
Techniques of Seeing
This module develops and extends ideas encountered in the first-year module, Introduction to Visual Culture by providing historical contextualization of early screen culture. We consider a range of visual devices and entertainment formats and examine different conditions of visuality, their meanings and cultural functions. We will think about nineteenth-century complexities of visuality, image-making, and viewing in relation to twentieth-century and twenty-first century screen practices.
