BA (Hons) Media and English Literature Bachelor's degree at York St John University

Explore theories and concepts relating to analytical interpretation of media. Introduction to major issues relating media to social and cultural contexts. Assessment and evaluation of approaches to critical and analytical investigation.

Become more confident studying literature at degree level. Engage with a range of texts written before the 19th century, considering various forms including prose, drama, poetry, and autobiographical writing. Consider how literature and history can be brought together.

Explore social, political, cultural, and historical values in literary study. Consider how literary texts address important issues, major events, and social changes. Diverse range of texts from turn of 19th century to present day, including canonical and neglected works by marginalised authors. Topics include gender, class, war, empire, racialisation, form and genre.

Consider representations of economic, social and cultural power and ways they connect with forms of identity. Discuss how identities are formed and shift. Explore how sex, gender, sexuality, disability, race and ethnicity relate to power. Analyse representation in novels, films, novellas, and graphic novels.

Build skills needed for higher education, specifically researching and analysing media. Skills include: researching, referencing, critical thinking, academic writing, presenting, group work.

Learn basics of academic writing and research at university level. Drawing on classic and contemporary short stories and poems, develop skills in: using library catalogue, choosing secondary sources, planning essays, developing arguments, close reading texts.

Think critically about how media informs, intersects and engages with concepts of identity. Engage with contemporary discussion and debate surrounding identity including race, gender, nationality, age. Evaluate theoretical, historical and socio-political influences and implications of contemporary mediated identities.

Introduction to media ecology, understanding media as anything through which meaning or communication takes place. Explore deep history of media and allied technologies including writing, printing and painting. Examine how traditional, new and emergent technologies influence relationship with information and culture, social organisation, aesthetic practice and political structures.

Interrogate the purpose of Literature as degree and subject. Show value of literary study to understanding and navigating issues around gendered, classed, and racialised nature of work. Provides opportunities for external placements, career planning, and work-related learning. Reflect on and articulate key skills and strengths including mock interviews. Guest speakers share experiences and introduce career pathways in publishing, teaching, journalism, and civil service.

Engage with vocational elements of working with media and explore entrepreneurial potential. Work in groups to produce creative portfolio and pitch idea to panel, which could be a magazine, film festival, or exhibition. Take into account marketing and advertising, business cases, product development, and effective communication of ideas.

Engage in debates about production, reception and contexts of media and cultural products that have caused controversy. Discuss taste and reception of text in different traditional, new and emergent media. Introduce terminology of aesthetic discussion and dispute including propaganda, artistic licence, canonical status, acceptability, pornography, censorship.

Consider various forms and uses of music within cultural production, focusing on evolutions as indicators of cultural change. Explore possibilities for social, political and cultural exploration offered by study of music. Consider use within counter-cultural production, innovation, reception, distribution, protest and socio-cultural moments. Discuss concepts and theories surrounding authorship, activism, mode of production, meaning and representation.

Become familiar with important critical debates surrounding visual culture. Appreciate vital relationship between word and image from traditional illustration through contemporary internet culture. Investigate how visual strategies can be used to communicate complex ideas.

Develop research skills in preparation for independent research project in final year. Focus on selected science fiction primary texts and related theoretical, philosophical, inter-textual and historical secondary material. Develop academic skills through research. Major discussions include race, the environment, relationship between human and machine, and what it is to be human.

Consider different ways books and films tell stories and what happens to literature and literary characters when translated onto screen. Introduce theory, methods and conventions behind adaptation. Examine specific examples of film adaptation and choose to experiment creatively on own adaptation project.

Consider relationship between American literature and physical and symbolic spaces of its settings. Explore concepts of space and setting in American culture and their relevance dating back to events such as declaration of independence, founding of civic spaces, and Californian gold rush. Explore relationship between American socio-economic history and development of specifically American literary tradition.

Consider whether literary texts can be meaningfully approached outside historical contexts. Question whether text can mean anything to anybody or if there are objective ways of understanding them. Engage with fundamental questions in literary studies. Equip with theoretical background and skills to offer insightful readings of any text irrespective of when and where published.

Explore ways new forms of news and entertainment in eighteenth century revealed unstable boundaries between truth and fiction, leading to emergence of literary forms typifying later periods such as the novel. Print provided forum for writers to express concern over different forms of power debated in terms of empire, political and religious authority, personal identity and responsibility. Consider how literature deals with questions of personal liberty, love, sexuality and desire.