Undergraduate Study in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre
Studies
Organisation of degree courses
In your first year
(as in your second and final years), you take
four modules. The first year serves as an introduction to the area of study
in which you will specialise for the remainder of your time as an
undergraduate at Essex. For many of our Literature degree schemes (either
single honours or joint honours), you will take a first-year course that
serves as an
Introduction to Literature, a course on
The Enlightenment (a
period of critical enquiry that reached its high-point in the eighteenth
century and helped establish the foundations for our modern society), and
two other courses: an Introduction to Writing Skills and an Introduction to
Close Reading Skills
If you plan to take BA Film Studies and Literature, one of these
other courses will be an
Introduction to Film. Similarly, if you intend taking BA Drama
or BA Drama and Literature, you will take an
Introduction to Drama course. Creative Writing modules include
Introduction to Creative Writing and Introduction to Rhetoric.
See here for
full list of degree courses on offer in the Department.
In your second year, you follow a series of core modules that lay the
foundations for your particular scheme. For English Literature this means
second-year modules in Early Modern Literature (of the period 1300-1750) and
Versions of Modernity (from 1750 to 1940). For English and United States
Literature, the module on Twentieth-Century United States Literature is taken
instead of one of these two modules. You will also take a module called
Approaches to Text. The single honours and joint degrees involving Film
Studies, Drama, and Creative Writing have
specific second-year modules dedicated to their respective schemes such as
Models of Misrule, Tragedy, Gender in Performance, Narrative and Film and
Creative Writing. Other joint
degrees have different requirements, involving the study of modules in other departments.
See here for
full list of degree courses on offer in the Department.
Third-year modules are chosen from a wide variety on offer. These range from
a study of Shakespeare and other dramatists in The History Play to
Postcolonial Literature, from English Novels and their settings to
Transformations of the Fairytale. Drama modules include European Naturalism
and After, Contemporary Theatre, Writing for the Theatre, Twentieth-Century
Theatre. Film Studies offers Culture, Film and Ideology, Hollywood
Directors and Creative Writing modules include Writing Science Fiction and
Oulipo and the the Limits of Writing.
See here for
full list of degree courses on offer in the Department.
We also operate an exchange scheme with universities in Denmark, France,
Finland, Greece and Italy (the
ERASMUS programme),
which students entering the second year can apply to follow. The nine month
course of study, from October to June, spent studying abroad, carries full
recognition as a student's assessment for that year and counts towards a final
degree result. You may wish to consult our
Study Abroad Office to find
out about studying for a year in other countries.
In place of one of your third-year modules, whether you are taking a
Literature, a Drama, a Film Studies or a Creative Writing degree, there is
also the option of applying to undertake an
independent study project on a
topic of your own choice This piece of research is an ideal way for students
intending to proceed to postgraduate study to acquire some of the skills necessary at that
level. Titles of independent study projects in the last two years have
included:
- Jenny Joseph's "Persephone": a Rewriting of the Fertility Myth;
- Cinema and Computer Games: the Merging of Two Mediums
- How Do Films Use Music and To What Effect?
- The German Expressionist Film: the Domestication of an Avant-Garde
- The Man Who Lived Underground: A Critical Re-evaluation of
the Contribution of Richard Wright to the African-American Literary Project
- To what extent is Harold Pinter influenced by The Theatre of The Absurd?
- Vinegar Tom and the importance of local history
- Is the word the beginning of the Theatre of Cruelty?
- A exploration in the effective use of 'nothing' in the dramatic work of
Samuel Beckett