English at Sussex

Why English? Why Sussex?

• Imagination; creativity; thinking; knowledge

• Critical reading• Understanding of cultural

and literary history• Literature, reading and

imagining – creating, re-creating - the world

• Creativity and expression • Meaning and value

BA English year 1

• Texts in Time

• Critical Approaches

• Reading Genre (or elective options)

Texts in Time

• Texts in Time• What is literature? How has it changed over time? What is the relationship between

writing and the historical moment in which it was produced? How can we read texts to understand the ways in which they comment on and intervene in their particular cultural contexts? How do literary and other kinds of cultural artefacts enable us to reinterpret history and culture? How does the study of texts from other historical periods better enable us to understand our own? These are some of the questions which we will be exploring during the course.

Texts in Time 2 explores many different kinds of writing (poetry, autobiography, essays, novels) as well as visual texts (film, photography, the graphic novel) in their historical and cultural contexts. For those of you who have already taken Texts in Time 1, this course continues the chronological movement already begun on that course. Texts in Time 2 is divided into three blocks, delivered over the spring and summer terms. The first block (spring, weeks 3-6) addresses texts from the nineteenth century, the second block (weeks 7-10) focuses on 1922, a key moment in Modernism. The final block (summer term, weeks 1-4) looks at contemporary writing and culture. Each week brings a new text or texts into con Each week brings a new text or texts into consideration, but all are connected within each block to an overarching theme.

Critical ApproachesHow do we go about reading and interpreting a literary text?

Do readers interpret texts differently at different historical and cultural moments?

Could our interpretations of texts be affected by forces beyond our control, forces such as the workings of language, unconscious desires, class, race, gender, sexuality or nationality?

How is it that some texts, Shakespeare's plays, for instance, are highly valued by our culture, while others have been lost or devalued?

Who or what decides which literature will survive to be read and studied on English courses?

Reading Genre

What is genre?

How do texts use literary convention to exploit genre – to develop, change, challenge, readers’ expectations of genre?

How does genre act to shape a text and a reader's understanding of it?

How does genre help us to understand the relation between literature and the ‘reading community’?

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Sussex English

• Critical inquiry• Interdisciplinarity• Textual Politics and Literary Theory• Creative and Critical Writing• Excellent students and discipline-leading

faculty• Broad, flexible, exciting curriculum that

offers both scholarly range and research led expertise

BA English year 2• Autumn term:• The Novel• Plus one English option• Plus one elective option • Spring/Summer: • Period of English Literature (1500-1625; 1625-1750; 1750-1880;

1880-1940• Plus one English option• Plus one elective option • Options include: ‘Staging the Renaissance; Writing and the Great

War; Tragedy; The Art of Short Fiction; European Film and Literature; Reading Postcolonial Texts; Sense and Sexuality; The 18th Century Novel

BA English year 3

• Autumn term:• Period of English Literature (1500-1625; 1625-1750; 1750-1880;

1880-1940)• Special Author option (choices include Marlowe, Wordsworth,

Beckett, Dickens, Hardy, Woolf, Rushdie, Ishiguro)• Spring/Summer: • Modern and Contemporary Options (choices include Twenty-First

Century Literature; Literature and the Environment; Late Modernism; Literature and Film)

• Special Subject option (choices include Renaissance and Restoration Theatre, The Uncanny, Irish Writing After Joyce, Islam and Literature, Utopias and Dystopias, The Literatures of Africa, Avant Garde Cinema

Teaching and assessment

• Teaching in small groups, lectures and academic advising sessions.

• A range of assessment modes that are geared towards the course being assessed. These include short essays, oral presentations, longer essays, dissertations, take away papers, portfolios and unseen exams.

After the degree

• 70% of recent graduates in a graduate job (employability in a recent survey matched Sussex with Bristol, only behind Kings College London and Cambridge).

• Destinations include journalism, teaching, information industries.

• High percentage of students go on to further study, and then onto careers in academia and other professions.

The Studio at CharlestonStephen Tomlin's original plaster bust of Virginia Woolf made in 1931