English Literature
Entry requirements
A level
Specific subjects/grades required for entry: English Literature at grade A or English - Language & Literature at grade A. Specific subjects excluded for entry: General Studies and Critical Thinking. Information: Applicants taking Science A-levels that include a practical component will be required to take and pass this as a condition of entry. This refers only to English A Levels.
Access to HE Diploma
We require 60 credits with a minimum of 45 credits at level 3 (or equivalent). Applicants may be required to meet additional subject-specific requirements for particular courses at Durham. Subject specific A-levels (or equivalent) may be required.
Cambridge International Pre-U Certificate - Principal
To include English Literature
International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme
To include 6, 6, 6 from Higher Level subjects to include English Literature or English Language and Literature.
Leaving Certificate - Higher Level (Ireland) (first awarded in 2017)
To include English Grade H2
OCR Cambridge Technical Extended Diploma
Subject specific A-levels (or equivalent) may be required.
Pearson BTEC Level 3 National Extended Diploma (first teaching from September 2016)
Subject specific A-levels (or equivalent) may be required.
Scottish Advanced Higher
Specific subjects/grades required for entry: English at grade A.
Scottish Higher
We will normally make offers based on Advanced Highers. If an applicant has not been able to take 3 Advanced Highers, offers may be made with a combination of Advanced Highers and Highers, or on a number of Highers.
At Durham we welcome applications from students of outstanding achievement and potential from all educational backgrounds. We will consider applicants studying T level qualifications for entry to many of our courses. Where a course requires subject specific knowledge and this is not covered within the T level being studied, you may need to supplement your T level studies with a suitable qualification to meet this requirement, for example at A level. Where this is needed this will be clearly stated in our entry requirements. Detailed entry requirements can be found on individual course entries on our courses database (https://www.durham.ac.uk/study/).
UCAS Tariff
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About this course
Not only does English Studies provide a thorough grounding in the ‘great tradition’ of English literature – from Chaucer and Shakespeare through to plays, poems and novels written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – and in literary theory, but it also offers a wide range of imaginative and research-led modules.
The comprehensive syllabus combines traditional areas of literary study with new and developing areas of the discipline. It aims to develop your conceptual abilities and analytical skills by exposing you to a variety of literary-critical approaches. This will promote and develop the clarity and persuasiveness of your argument and expression, enabling you to develop, to a high degree of competence, a range of skills which are both subject-specific and transferable.
You can also apply to add a placement year or a year abroad to your degree; this would increase the course from three years to four.
The first year will focus on advancing skills of critical analysis and argument you have already acquired at A level. This includes close reading and analysis of texts, such as the awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and of the affective power of language, alongside the introduction of more advanced concepts and theories relating to literature.
In the second year, you will build on the knowledge and skills developed in your first year by broadening the range of literary texts and periods with which you will engage. You will study a substantial number of authors, topics and texts and gain awareness of the range and variety of approaches to literary study.
The final year includes a dissertation on a subject of your choice related to English literature. The dissertation involves guided research on a self-formulated question, the gathering and processing of relevant information and materials, and results in a work of sustained argumentative and analytic power.
Modules
Year 1
Core modules:
Introduction to Drama introduces the work of, and critical debate about, a wide historical range of drama and dramatists writing in English, typically covering work from all or most of the following areas: the medieval, early modern, Restoration and Augustan, Romantic, Victorian, and twentieth and twenty-first century: post-medieval dramatists to be covered might include, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Behn, Gay, Shelley, Wilde, Shaw, Beckett, Kushner and Butterworth.
Introduction to the Novel introduces ways of reading English novels and various contexts for studying them. You will be familiarised with strategies for engaging with fictional texts formally as well as historically, by situating the novels studied in their distinctive cultural environments while also being taught the ways in which novelistic form and technique have changed over time.
Introduction to Poetry introduces a wide range of poems by poets writing in English from the early modern to the contemporary periods including some American poetry. You will develop your understanding of traditional major verse forms, modes of organisation and genres (e.g. blank verse, the couplet, the stanza, lyric, elegy, sonnet, epic, pastoral, ode, open form).
Examples of optional modules:
Romance and the Literature of Chivalry; Epic and Literature of Legend; Ancient Worlds and English Literature.
Year 2
Core modules:
Shakespeare introduces a broad range of Shakespeare’s work, and enables you to analyse in detail a selection of works from different periods of Shakespeare’s oeuvre and in different genres. The module seeks to foster an awareness of the kinds of scholarly, critical and theatrical issues which Shakespeare’s work has generated from the seventeenth century to the present.
Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism introduces the presuppositions and principles of literary criticism and issues of knowledge, value and ideology arising from the practice of reading. You will develop an independent critical sense in your own practice of reading, contextualised against the history of theory and criticism.
Examples of optional modules:
Chaucer; Old English; Old Norse; Old French; Renaissance Literature; Literature of the Modern Period; American Poetry; Postcolonial and World Literatures; Modern Poetry; Contemporary US Fiction and the Question of Genre; Writing Women: Gendering Literature, c.800-1600; Shakespeare’s History Plays; The Brontës.
Year 3 (Year 4 if undertaking a placement year or year abroad)
Core module:
The final year includes a Dissertation involving guided research on a self-formulated topic, author or genre. The dissertation is based upon the gathering and processing of relevant information and materials, and results in work of sustained argumentative and analytic power.
Examples of optional modules:
Restoration and 18th Century Literature; Old English; Old French; American Fiction; Post-War Fiction and Poetry; Literature, Cinema and Neuroscience; US Cold War Literature and Culture; Shakespeare on Film; WB Yeats; Creative Writing Poetry; Seamus Heaney.
Assessment methods
Most modules will be assessed by essays and end-of-year examinations. In the third year you will write a 12,000-word dissertation on a subject of your choice related to English Literature.
Tuition fees
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The Uni
Durham City
College allocation pending
English Studies
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