Drama and English Literature first year modules
Compulsory modules
Engaging Performance
Engaging Performance is an introductory module to explore core principles of performance and theatre. It uses a blended teaching approach, interlacing critical discussion and practical exercise-based workshop, in order to encourage students to explore the disciplinary connections between theoretical and practical approaches in Drama. In this manner, it seeks to disturb easy dichotomies of theory and practice and emphasize the many intersections between studio and seminar room.
The module will explore the role and function of the broad concepts of performance (such as body, space, and time). Each of these concepts will be explored across a series of weeks, with readings, viewings and tasks between sessions that seek to highlight the complexities and diversity of each identified theme. The module will encourage collaborative and devising practice centred around these core concepts.
Performance: Theory, Practice and Critique
This modules aims to equip students with a basic understanding of the relationship between theatre, culture, performance and politics. Over the course of the module, students develop an awareness of and the ability to apply different methodological approaches to their own work and the work of others.
Production Skills
The module is a comprehensive introduction to the practical aspects of staging and organising shows and live events. Throughout the module students will be guided through the various production processes involved - encompassing the fields of stage technologies, such as lighting and sound, scenic and costume design, and stage management. Students will also focus on understanding health & safety procedures that need to be considered whilst working on productions / live performance events.
The module aims to give the students a foundational insight into these essential areas of backstage theatre and live events production. Through practical classes and engaging in departmental productions, students will develop a broad range of production skills and a clear understanding of the complexities and timelines involved in staging live events, whilst supported and guided by professional staff.
Studio Practice
This module aims to prepare students as artists, theatre and performance makers by opening up a space for experimentation and enquiry, and building their skills through attention to key principles of performance and theatre (for example: presence, focus, responsiveness/listening, full embodiment, psychophysical impulse).
English in the World
This module encourages students to understand the role of English as it might be applied in the world. Students will be encouraged to understand the ways in which literature teaches us to understand ourselves and others, and our past, present and future, and to recognise how telling stories makes meaning in the world. They will learn the importance of being able to evaluate and rethink these stories, and how reading and rereading literature is important for understanding and making a difference in the world. Lectures and seminars will focus on topics such as ‘Literature and Human Rights’, ‘Literature, Science & the Environment’, ‘Telling Stories: Communities, Nations and the World’, ‘Literature, Medicine & Health’, ‘Everything to Everybody: Literature and Inclusive Heritage’, and ‘Reading Social Media’.
Poetry
The key aim of the module will be to develop skills in close reading, informed by a sampled knowledge of the historical and geographical varieties of verse written in English. Each week’s work will be structured around a key text, or group of texts, which will form the basis of that week’s lectures; in seminars, these key texts will be related to, or contrasted with, a variety of extension texts, some suggested by the module convenor in the form of ‘flat pack’ teaching plans, and others by the seminar leaders’ own interests and enthusiasms. The key texts will be grouped by three themes, each of which will form the basis of three weeks’ work: Love, Loss and Location, allowing the students to shape arguments about change and variety in English verse around an idea of shared attention to related topics. Detailed attention to and development of the skills in close reading, and the conversations between poems that these enable, will be the chief outcome (and pleasure) of the module; its key technical and historical vocabulary will provided by a critical course book such as John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2005), and its primary texts will be drawn from a commercial anthology.
Prose
This module aims to provide an introductory exploration of prose as a medium of art and thought. Through encounters with specimens of prose from across recent history, students will be brought into contact with the ways in which prose writing has been theorised and understood. They will learn different critical approaches to prose and become practiced in conceiving and producing academic prose of their own. The module’s ten weeks are divided into a number of sections, each of which focusses on one of the core texts. Within the sections, each week focuses on a different critical theme, inviting students to familiarise themselves with a range of different ways of reading, and writing about, literature. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with a spectrum of critical theory as well as the specific works in question; they will have encountered prose through various lenses such as history and biography, gender and sexuality, race and politics.
Reading English
This module supports students’ transition to university, and helps them to develop basic skills in ways of reading and approaching literature, using the library, research, working with criticism, planning and writing assessments of different kinds (including close reading, essays, posters, presentations), and making the most of lectures and seminars. Students will be encouraged to understand the practices and principles of studying English literature, key disciplinary debates, and the purposes and pleasures of reading.