This booklet introduces you to the rich variety of programmes on offer within the School of English at the University of Sussex. It is organised by subject area within the School, and will give you some details of each programme and a flavour of the kinds of courses on offer through your three years of study. We hope it will encourage you to want to know more, and lead you to explore our website:

www.sussex.ac.uk/english

as well as to come along to one of our Open Days, where you will have the opportunity to talk to members of faculty and see the campus.

See the prospectus pages for English at:www.sussex.ac.uk/english /prospectivestudents

�

The School of English at Sussex

Can we imagine ourselves or the world without language?Prof. Tom Healy, Head of the School of English

The School of English at the University of Sussex combines an illustrious history with a commitment to innovation and interdisciplinarity that places it at the forefront of our disciplines. We are a flagship School within the University, set in the stunning South Downs National Park only minutes away from Brighton, one of Britain’s most cosmopolitan cities.

Our programmes cover the whole range of English Studies, from Medieval and Renaissance Literature to contemporary Avant Garde poetry, incorporating the study of Drama, American Literature and English Language. The School, students and faculty, share a commitment to explore and understand the ways in which language and texts create and shape our world. The School comprises around 40 distinguished members of faculty, many recognised internationally for the quality of their teaching and research, together with a lively student body. We focus upon high quality, small group teaching and flexibility in both curriculum and assessment – the size of our faculty allows us to offer an exciting level of choice but also support and advice for each individual student. The result is a unique programme that can be tailored to your own interests, in an inspirational atmosphere in which to study.

Our degrees are inventive and challenging, and invite cross-disciplinary study. We are privileged to attract correspondingly curious, intelligent and engaged students, and strive to help them fulfil their academic potential. Our students come from a wide variety of backgrounds and ages, and from all over the United Kingdom as well as Europe and North America. They leave us with fiercely independent creative and critical minds, and a deep understanding of the history and future of English.

Our recent graduates have gone on to careers in media and film, the arts, teaching, journalism, publishing, information technology and business, with many staying on for postgraduate study.

What we do

We offer single honours degrees in English Literature (Q303) and English Language (Q302), and joint honours combinations of both with the addition of Drama.

We pride ourselves on the essential interconnectionof our teaching and research at both undergraduateand postgraduate levels and we are a recognised international centre of excellence for both teaching and research. This is reflected in the number of thriving research-led activities within the School.

These currently includeCentre for Early Modern StudiesCentre for Literature and PhilosophyCentre for Modernist StudiesCentre for the Study of Sexual DissidenceCentre for Visual FieldsCentre for Colonial and Postcolonial StudiesResearch on Language and Linguistics SeminarAmerican Studies Seminar

The School also runs The English Colloquium, a unique weekly workshop of ideas inclusively involving faculty, graduate and undergraduate students.

In addition Drama has strong ties with several cutting edge theatre companies both in the UK and abroad. Links to all our Centres, and a great deal more information about the School can be found on the School of English website:

www.sussex.ac.uk/english.

Home of the School of English Arts B Seating under the Arches�

�

Students from within the School also play asignificant role in the University as a whole.Aside from running their own English Society,which encourages poetry readings, talks andstudy groups, they also feature prominently inthe running of the Sussex Student Union and thecampus newspaper, The Badger. The studentDrama Society (SUDS) and the Musical TheatreSociety (SMUTS) are also led by students fromthe School of English.

The School is closely involved in events locally,from connections to local archives to theestablishment of a festival of contemporarypoetry, from ties with local publishers toparticipation in the internationally renownedBrighton Arts Festival and the creation of theinaugural First Fictions Festival in �0��, aliterary event designed to celebrate first works bynew and established authors. We are a lively School, welcoming yet challenging.

Photo: James Joyce Statue in Zurich by Robert Scarth 2003

Sussex regularly is cited as one of the �00 leading universities in the World. Our success is recognised by good university guides and the National Student Survey:

The National Student Survey affirms English, American Studies and Drama as achieving over 90% student satisfaction with our teaching.

The Guardian University Guide 2012Sussex English places 8th in the UK, American Studies is 6th and Drama ranks �0th.

The Complete University Guide 2011-12English is placed ��th in the UK, American Studies is �rd, and Drama 8th.

The Sunday Times University Guide 2012 places English Studies at �� and Performance Studies at ��.

How you learn

Across the Year The Sussex academic year from �0�� is divided into two ��-week teaching terms, each followed by an assessment period.

How you learnCourses in the School of English are taught through a combination of lectures, seminars and workshops. Students of English Literature and English Language will begin their first year with core courses based around the twinning of lectures and seminars. As your degree progresses, more teaching is concentrated in small group seminars and more choice is offered, allowing you to shape your degree according to your particular interests and to develop your oral and presentation skills, and your ability to work in groups. In Drama, theory and practice complement each other, and practical elements of the programme are explored in workshops based in dedicated rehearsal spaces, leading to major performance projects in the second and third years.

Assessment includes coursework, ranging from short essays to dissertations, presentations, performances (for Drama) and unseen exams. Longer pieces of written work in your final year reflect your ability to study independently and devise your own topics. As the degree progresses, your marks will also carry greater weight – you will have to pass your first year, but only work done in years two and three count towards your final degree result.

Engraving of an unknown Jacobean Man 1623�

�

Study ResourcesThe School has dedicated administrative staff to help with student enquiries and spaces to meet and work. Aside from the numerous computer clusters around the campus, key resources are the Library and the campus bookshop. The Library stocks over 800,000 books, receives more than �,�00 periodicals from all over the world, and subscribes to a remarkable collection of databases for student use. It is also home to the Mass Observation Archive which our Drama students have used for recent and highly successful performance projects on Animating the Archive. The library has an international reputation and is used by scholars from around the world.

Study AbroadThe University also offers the chance to study abroad as part of your degree. Sussex maintains successful student exchanges with over �0 universities in North America and over 90 universities in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Study abroad can be taken for periods ranging from one term to a full year, with the courses you choose counting towards your Sussex Degree.

For further information on these schemes, contact the Sussex International and Study Abroad Office:

T: +��(0)��7� 678���e: International@sussex.ac.ukwww.sussex.ac.uk/International

Photo: by kind permission of Elizabeth Carls, Blue Valentine Press

BA in English Literature

Our distinctive degree fuses a continuing commitment to innovation with the best of our history. We aim to provoke, to challenge, and to inspire. Studying English at Sussex involves being introduced to a range of recent – and often controversial – critical approaches, alongside the opportunity to study the entire range of the discipline, from Anglo-Saxon epic to avant-garde poetry and creative writing, from the works of Jane Austen to those of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

What does it mean to study English? How has the role of literature in society changed over time? What is the relationship between literature and other cultural forms, including film, photography and the visual arts? By creatively engaging with these and many other topics you will acquire a thorough grounding in the field becoming an independent thinker, able to articulate your ideas

with intellectual rigour and clarity. Further details are given below, and descriptions of these courses can also be found on the University prospectus pages.

TeachingWe will help you to develop the intellectual and practical skills to learn independently, to write expressively and clearly, and to communicate what you have learnt to others. You will gain these through various methods of teaching (including small group seminars and practical workshops as well as more formal lectures) and types of assessment (including coursework, portfolios, dissertations and unseen exams). These skills will help prepare you for a range of possible career paths.

The Single Honours English Degree at Sussex is defined by its range and flexibility. We offer a range of options throughout the degree both within and outside of the School of English, plus many specialist options in the final year. We also offer a Joint Honours Degree in numerous possible combinations.

Home of the School of English, Arts B Arches, Pond and Lawn

6

The First YearAs a foundational year, the first year is designed to introduce you to the possibilities of English. Teaching is based around the twinning of lectures and seminars for each course with additional workshops. There are two core courses that run through the year, plus elective options within and beyond the School of English. The first year must be passed to continue, but your marks do not count towards your final degree classification.

Core CoursesTexts in Time and Critical Approaches.

OptionsReading Genre or two Electives (these include courses from Drama, American Studies, Art History, Cultural Studies, English Language, Music, Film, Intellectual History, Media, Modern Languages and Philosophy).

The Second YearHere you are offered a greater range of choice taking � courses in the Autumn term and a further � in the Spring term. The teaching emphasis is on small group seminars along with tutorial sessions. The second year counts towards 40% of your final degree result.

Core Courses The Novel in the Autumn term; Period of English Literature: a choice of ��00-�6��; �6��-�7�0; �7�0-�880; or �880-�9�0 in the Spring Term.

OptionsThere are more than �� options normally available thoughout the year. For example: 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. Alternatively two elective courses can be taken from outside of the school.

The Third YearThis is the culmination of the English degree at Sussex, in which the seminar remains the key teaching method along with tutorials that help guide the independent research that you engage with. There is a wide choice of courses and the assessments are of greater length. The third year counts for 60% of the final degree mark.

Core CoursesIn the Autumn Term you will choose one of an array of inter-related courses, on recent and contemporary writing. In the Spring term you will chose the second of your Period of English Literature Courses from the array of: ��00-�6��; �6��-�7�0; �7�0-�880; or �880-�9�0.

OptionsIn the Autumn term you select a Special Author course focussed on one particular writer’s output, such as Marlowe, Wordsworth, Dickens, Hardy, Woolf, Beckett, Rushdie, or Ishiguro.

In the Spring term you choose a special subject option ranging from Renaissance and Restoration Theatre, The Uncanny, and Irish writing after Joyce to Islam and Literature, The Literatures of Africa or Avant Garde Cinema.

7

Letters from Gordon Craig, Arnold Daghani

English Language at Sussex

The structure of human languages reveals much about what it means to be human. Is there anything special about the structure of English?

We go from being languageless infants to being experts in the use of a complex system of sounds, words, and rules. Children learn their mother tongue so easily and without explicit instruction, yet it is so hard to learn a second language later in life, which we will probably never speak with the same fluency as our first language.

Like every other English speaker, you are already an expert on the English Language. So why study it? The problem is you probably don’t know what you know – or what you don’t know. That’s the thing about language, it’s a human phenomenon that comes as naturally to us as walking or humming a tune or recognizing faces and just as hard to explain in terms of how we do it, how we learned

to do it, and why we do it the way that we do.At Sussex, the study of English Language involves all aspects of the language: its structure, its history, its use and how it exists in our individual minds, in our society, and cross-culturally.

Here are some of the questions we like to think about:

What do the ways in which we use English tell us about what it means to be members of an English-speaking culture? What does it mean to be an ‘English speaker’ in these days of globalization? How is it that we mean more than we say – and that others can understand the things we meant but didn’t say? How is language used to persuade, to vilify, to forge bonds between us?

English has changed much since the days of Beowulf. You can hear English changing now. The words that you use and that accent with which you say them has shifted even over the last few years. How did you get that accent? Why do languages change given that change makes effective communication so much harder?

8

You can study English Language either as a Single Honours degree, or as a Joint Honours degree with English Literature or English Language Teaching.The following lists the courses you take as a Single Honours student. For Joint Degrees, the core courses might differ on the English Language part of your degree and you would take no electives.

The First YearAs a foundational year, the first year introduces you to the English language through grammar, pronunciation, meaning, and discourse, allowing you to acquire the tools and the terminology needed to describe language properly, from grammatical terms to the mysterious squiggles of phonetic transcription. The first year must be passed to continue, but your marks do not count towards your final degree classification.

Core Courses Approaches to Meaning, Approaches to Pronunciation, Approaches to Grammar, Investigating Language in Context.

Options You take two elective courses in the first year. The course options come from Drama, American Studies, Art History, Cultural Studies, English Literature, Music, Film, Intellectual History, Media, Modern Languages and Philosophy. You are encouraged to consider taking a modern language for your elective courses, since knowledge of other languages can bring extra insight to the study of English.

The Second YearIn the second year, you have the opportunity to apply the theoretical knowledge gained in the first year courses to areas of English in use. The second year counts towards �0% of your final degree result.

Core Courses Social Variation in English, Approaches to Discourse, Regional Variation in English, History of English I and II, Child Language Acquisition.

Options You continue to take one elective course per term in the second year.

The Third YearIn the third year we offer a range of options at the cutting edge of linguistic inquiry. In addition, you will embark on an individual research project, culminating in your final year dissertation. The third year counts towards 60% of your final degree result.

Core Course Research Project.

Options You can take courses such as: Communication Analysis; Linguistic Typology; Discourse in Public Life; Grammar; Pragmatics; and Historical Linguistics.

9

BA in Drama and English

Drama Studies offers you an exciting mix of critical thinking, creative writing and performance practice. Available as a Joint Honours degree with English Literature, Film Studies or a modern language, it provides a range of courses that explore canonical plays, avant-garde performance, theatre theories and contemporary practice. Performance in its broader sense is studied as a range of political, social and culturally transformative practices. Students make regular theatre trips to London and work with a range of professional artists.

ResourcesPractical work takes place in the Debating Chamber, a fully equipped, flexible performance venue, in InQbate, a unique, technology rich creative space reconfigurable for practical and multi-media teaching and performance, and in the Silverstone Studio for workshops and smaller scale productions. From �0��, Drama students will make use of the

newly refurbished Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts, located on campus. The ACCA will provide large-scale performance, teaching, research and workshop spaces to promote exciting new creative work across the arts.

The study of Drama at Sussex helps you develop the intellectual and practical skills to learn independently, to write expressively, and to communicate what you have learnt to others. You learn through small-group seminars and practical workshops. Types of assessment include coursework, portfolios, independent research projects and practical performance.

Teaching and Learning in Drama

�0

��

The First YearAs a foundational year, the first year is designed to introduce you to critical and practical approaches in the analysis of theatre theory, texts and performance. Teaching is in a combination of seminars and practical workshops. There are two core courses each term. You must achieve a pass mark for your first year in order to progress but your marks do not count towards your final degree classification.

Core Courses Autumn Term: Reading Theatre Texts; Making Theatre.

Spring Term: Theories of Drama; Staging Text.

The Second YearYou focus on analysing theatre texts and examining in detail the work of international companies. This prepares you for a course that examines contemporary playwriting, in which you produce your own pieces of creative writing for theatre, and the full-scale performance project combining research, critical reflection and a public production of your work. Teaching remains a mix of seminars and practical workshops, with some courses integrating both modes. The second year counts towards 40% of your final degree result.

Core Courses Autumn Term: Modern and Postmodern Drama; Approaches to Contemporary PerformanceSpring Term: Writing for the Theatre; Second Year Performance Project. The Third YearThe emphasis is on specialised courses exploring theatre and performance practice in detail, as well as the development of your independent research skills. The degree culminates with the Final Year Performance Project, a full-scale public theatre production combining practical, critical and research work to a high level. The third year counts for 60% of the final degree mark.

Core Courses Spring Term: Final Year Performance Project.

Options Autumn Term: Performing the Body; Making Theatre Politically; Theatre Performance and Ethics; Postdramatic Theatre.

Spring Term: One of the following: Independent Research Project, Early Modern Drama and Contemporary Performance.

American Studies in the School of English

American Studies is the interdisciplinary study of the literature, history and culture of the Americas.

The University of Sussex enjoys a prestigiousreputation for excellent research and teaching inAmerican Studies, in which a distinct degree programme is available. With the School of English opportunities exist for all students to study American literature from colonial times to the present day. Courses include:

American Literature to 1890 American Literature to �890 will introduce you to the important texts of America from the Iroquois Indians and Christopher Columbus through to Emily Dickinson and Henry James. These are not simply ‘authors,’ in the modern sense, writing ‘great books’ – though some of them have done that too! – but diverse voices whose class, gender, race, nationality and religious persuasion influence the sense they make of America, and themselves, in their writing.

American Literature since 1890 This course will introduce significant and canonical texts by American writers produced since �890 and throughout the first part of the twentieth century, notably exploring many of the social and cultural issues associated with the evolution of modernity and American modernist aesthetics.

Single Author StudyThe Single Author course gives you an examines in some depth the work, or part of the work, of one American author of your choosing, approved by the tutor for the course.

Recent American WritingThe twenty-year period we consider sees the emergence of many types of experimentalism at times subsumed under the rubric of the ‘postmodern’. We shall explore a range of different texts, mainly fiction but also some poetry, in an attempt to see how writers have responded to the challenge of America’s recent history from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror.

Year AbroadIf you are studying American Studies and English Literature, you can spend your third year at one of over forty top-rated US and Canadian partner universities, enabling you to specialise in a diverse range of literary and cultural studies. Whether you are interested in creative writing, African American culture, American modernism, Chicano or Native American literary studies, the year abroad offers a unique and unsurpassed experience. You can consult the Year Abroad pages for more information.

Poet Zora Neale Hurston in Belle Glade, Fla.,1935 (LOC)

��

The Sussex Library

BA Degrees in the School of English

Information on each of the degrees below and the possible combination of subjects you can choose to study, entry level requirements, fees and funding, can be found on the prospectus web pages for The School of English.

BA in English Literature American Studies and English Drama Studies and English English English Language and Literature English and Art History English and Film Studies English and History English and Media Studies Philosophy and English

BA in Drama Drama Studies and English Drama Studies and Film Studies Drama Studies and French Drama Studies and Italian Drama Studies and Spanish

BA in English Language English Language English Language and English Language Teaching English Language and Literature

A quiet spot in the newly refurbished Sussex Library

�6

�7

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather ascornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean –neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can makewords mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to bemaster – that’s all.”

(Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6)

Arts B Arches

For information about the School of English at Sussexplease contact:

School of EnglishArts B133University of SussexFalmer, Brighton. BN1 9QNT: 01273 877303e: english@sussex.ac.ukwww.sussex.ac.uk/english

For information on undergraduate admissions,please contact:

Undergraduate AdmissionsSussex House,University of SussexFalmer, Brighton. BN1 9RQT: 01273 876787e: ug.enquiries@sussex.ac.ukwww.sussex.ac.uk

Photo credits:Front Cover image Animating the Archive and Drama Studies pages – Dr. Sara Jane BailesInside Cover, English literature, Back Inside Cover, – Tim HuitsonEnglish Language – Elisabeth Carls, Blue Valentine PressJames Joyce – Robert Scarf 2003 Creative CommonsAmerican Studies Zora Neale Hurston – US Library of Congress