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English is one of the most diverse, stimulating and challenging disciplines offered at university. The
subject cultivates your sensitivity towards language and addresses a number of provocative questions.
What makes some books literature and others not? What can we learn from writing of the past? Does
studying how language works in texts help us understand contemporary culture? How does gender
impact on reading and writing practices?
The Swansea English Department is a friendly and supportive working environment. Our students also
participate in numerous extracurricular cultural activities held in the department itself, the Taliesin Arts
Centre on campus and in the Dylan Thomas Arts Centre in the City.
Visiting speakers and writers read from their work; there are theatre trips and events organised by
the student English Society. The Swansea Review is edited in the Department, which publishes critical
essays and creative work. Budding poets, novelists and journalists can develop their skills with the
help of distinguished writers, attached to the department as Royal Literary Fellows.
Schemes of study
BA English and Joint Honours Schemes
In the first year, prospective Honours students of English follow
four foundation modules: Tragic Drama; Lyric Poetry; Theories
and Monsters (critical case studies of Frankenstein and Dracula);
and Transforming Fictions (intertextual comparisons of pairs of
novels). You also choose between one or more of the following
options: two linguistic modules (Studying the English Language
and Introduction to the Study of Language), a module on
Modern European Fiction in translation, and options in
Medieval and Gender Studies.
If you want to learn a language or keep up your interest in
another subject, then you can plan to take an ‘elective’ module
of 20 credits within the School of Arts in each year of your
English degree. At Levels 2 and 3 you continue to follow
compulsory lecture courses, covering literary periods from the
Renaissance to the present day and exploring critical theory. A
significant part of your degree course is made up of optional
seminar topics chosen from an extremely wide range, from
Chaucer to Californian counter-culture. If you like, you can tailor
your degree to follow through a special interest, for example, in
linguistics, American literature, gender or Romanticism.
The ethos of the Department is to combine teaching and
research, so you will always be taught by experts working
and publishing in the field. Particular strengths are contemporary
writing, especially poetry, Welsh writing in English, Creative
Writing, and modern critical approaches inspired, for example,
by theories of gender, psychoanalysis, or the politics of identity. |
Education 
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