BA (Hons) English, Media and Cultural Studies

This module will enable you to analyse the social, cultural and political importance of the mass media in precise ways.  Centrally positioned as leisure resources and tools of citizenship, the media have a major impact on how we understand our world, ourselves and other people.  At the same time, the media cannot be taken as simply offering windows on the world; the image of reality that we get from television, radio, music, press, the internet and film is more accurately understood as a construction whose version of reality is influenced as much by economic, political and aesthetic factors as it is by the world in which we live. This module will introduce you to a range of methods for studying media texts, and their relevance for an understanding of contemporary socio-cultural debates. 

The aim of this module is to provide you with an understanding of the basic strands of literary and cultural theories, such as feminism, Marxism, postcolonial theory, and psychoanalysis. It will allow you to explore and evaluate these theoretical perspectives through practical application to literary texts as well as to other primary sources.

This module introduces you to the study of the institutions that produce our media and the audiences that consume them. We will consider broadcast media institutions and examine the tensions that are created when trying to serve the public interests of citizens and the private interests of shareholders. Current institutional case studies include the BBC and the birth of radio, ITV and the early years of television and the rise of Sky in an era of apparent deregulation. We will then move on to examine what audiences may take from their consumption of media and how we can go about researching them. We will consider a range of topics including early research into media effects, uses and gratifications theory, the encoding/decoding model and ethnographic studies of domestic media consumption.

Professional writers produce content for audiences. On this module you will develop your writing skills to a professional standard to produce an original portfolio of writing, containing a feature, review, news story and podcast. You will also critically reflect upon your work and the influence of your practice on the content you have produced. On the module you will learn about: attribution and referencing; editing and proof-reading; writing to meet a brief; various forms of journalistic practice, e.g. print, online, podcasts. 

This module will introduce you to Liverpool as a global city with a rich literary heritage, tracing the creativity and multiculturalism which has shaped, and continues to shape, our world-famous city. You will read a range of works authored by or about Liverpudlians and consider the historical, social, and geographical contexts for writing in and of the city.

This module introduces you to the study of English literature at undergraduate level, through set texts drawn from different historical periods and covering fundamental literary categories (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama). It will give you a grounding in the key terms that you will need in critical writing, such as form, narrative, character, and irony, and in the skills needed for English studies, including close reading, reading quickly and efficiently, and researching and writing essays.

Public Communication is a work-based learning module about advertising and its role in awareness raising, communicating information and persuasion. We will introduce you to the study of advertising as persuasive communication and you will examine both theoretical and popular responses to advertising as a cultural form and develop critical analytical skills to deconstruct it. We will then move on to the world of Public Information Campaigns (PICs), those not-for-profit campaigns that encourage us to eat healthily, to drive soberly and to engage in sexual activity safely. You will be briefed by a real-world client about a Public Information Campaign they want you to develop. You will then work in campaign teams to design and then pitch a campaign in response to the client brief.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to a range of seventeenth-century writings in their historical and cultural context to enable you to recognise different forms and genres used in the period. This module will also facilitate an understanding the concept of the Early Modern and issues of historical change and continuity.

The module examines a distinct field of communications practice, that of public relations but its not just a module for students with PR in mind as a career option.  Were all familiar with the concept and the language of spin. PR practices have become pervasive: tactics that we see people engaging in all the time, from politicians to reality TV celebrities. This module enables you both to critique what goes on in the name of public relations and also to make creative use of its tools and practices.  Central to the module is the idea of producing effective communication in our case, effective, persuasive writing. We think about how organisations go about doing this: how they cope with challenges that threaten their reputation, and how they take advantage of opportunities to build up their reputation.

Magazines are a popular form of journalism, read by many thousands and often staffed by freelance writers. In this module you will both critically evaluate journalistic practice, in contemporary publications like Vogue, Cosmopolitan and When Saturday Comes, and produce professional standard copy for real-world audiences. The module focuses upon contemporary industry practice with an emphasis on lifestyle and feature journalism. You will examine a range of issues that influence the production and consumption of popular journalism. You will undertake research for your own professional-standard portfolio of original reviews and features which meet the professional demands of real-world publications.

This module focuses on the emergence of a modernist movement in Europe and America at the beginning of the 20th century and lasting until the decades after the close of the Second World War. You will be introduced to the literature, culture and politics of modernity through an engagement with a variety of modernist texts.

This module enables you to develop a critical vocabulary to enhance your understanding of poetry. You will be introduced to a range of poetry from different periods, in different forms and from different cultural locations. Alongside this, you will learn to identify the aesthetic qualities of different poetic traditions.

This module will introduce you to the field of postcolonial studies through a selection of literary and critical works. It will introduce the debates on the relationship between art, politics and culture at the heart of postcolonial literary criticism.

From Spotify to podcasting, the rise of digital media technologies has seemingly led to an ever-expanding range of ways to engage with popular culture. This module questions how far these developments have led to transformations in our experiences of popular cultural texts. For example, how is engaging with a podcast different to listening to radio? In what ways has YouTube transformed our consumption of music videos? Paying particular attention to popular music, the module explores the implications of the mediation of music across a range of technological forms, including: radio, podcasting, video games, television, narrative and documentary film, YouTube and social media.

In this module, you will develop an understanding of the manifestations of Romanticism in nineteenth-century literature to assess the cultural afterlife and importance of Romanticism and its modes. You will explore the connections between politics, social history, and literary culture in Britain during a period of social instability and intense and rapid changes in many areas of life at home and abroad.

The aim of this module is to analyse a wide variety of short writing from the post-Second World War era to develop skills of close reading and textual analysis. You will also explore the relationship between short writing and modernity/contemporary culture.

Within this module, you will extend your familiarity with a range of Victorian texts including novels, poetry and essays. You will explore how the Victorian age was characterized by rapidly developing scientific discourses and popular interest in them and understand how contemporary understanding of genre and cultural prestige were inherited from the Victorian period.

This module promotes independent learning activities to give you an opportunity to pursue their own research-informed projects. This module promotes key skills relating to Level 5 work identifying a set of aims or key questions exploring a body of published literature relevant to the project, and effectively communicating information, arguments and analysis.

The aim is to provide students with an additional year of study at an approved overseas partner that will complement their programme at LJMU. This is an additional year of full-time study at an approved higher education institution. The modules to be studied must be agreed in advance, and must be appropriate for the student's programme of study. Assuming successful completion of this year, mark-bearing credit will be awarded by the Faculty Recognition Group. The grade conversion scale to be used will be made available in advance of the year abroad.

The aim is to provide student with a semester of study at an approved overseas partner that will replace one semester of their LJMU programme at level 5.This is a semester of full-time study at an approved higher education institution which will replace one semester of level 5 study at LJMU. The modules to be studies must be agreed in advance, and must be an appropriate substitute for the modules being replaced. Assuming successful completion of this semester, mark bearing credit will be awarded by the Faculty Recognition Group. The grade conversion scale to be used will be made available in advance of the year abroad.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to the diversity of auto/biographical writing. It will equip you with the critical vocabulary and analytical tools to explore and analyse modern life-writing. You will understand key critical topics relating to life-writing, including the relations of subjectivity and form; the intersections of gender, race, class and embodiment; the role of memory and nostalgia; narrative strategies of confession and secrecy.

This module examines slavery from a long historical interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. It will analyse a range of 'slave texts' such as autobiographies, novels about slavery, abolitionist poetry, and contemporary film, to interrogate the diverse ways in which slavery has been represented historically, and contemporary debates around that history.

This module will develop your understanding of the relationships between gender, sexuality, and literature. Building on the feminist theory you will encounter in your first year, you will explore literature’s role in the developments of the sexual politics and gender norms of Western society and culture since the nineteenth century and up to the present day.

This module focuses on post-1948 literature about ethnic diversity in Britain. You will explore a tradition of writing by and about post-colonial migrants and their British-born children, including works of prose, poetry, and drama, and read these texts in relation to contemporary debates about multiculturalism, race and (anti-)racism, and British identity and society.

This module helps to gain a deeper understanding of poetic form and how it relates to musical form. It also helps to understand how politics and poetics inform lyrics. You will also gain knowledge of how gender, race, intertextuality, and acculturation processes can influence musical production.

This module covers a range of working-class literary traditions and genres from the nineteenth century to the present. You will examine the relationship between literary form and social class, consider how working-class writers have appropriated and developed particular genres, and explore the intersections between class and other markers of identity.

Building on your encounters with key strands of critical theory in your first year, this module offers you the opportunity to further explore contemporary theoretical concepts and ideas, including postmodernism, posthumanism, gender and queer theory, and critical race theory.

This module will extend your understanding of contemporary women's fiction and its relationship to feminist theory, politics, and practice. You will be equipped with an advanced understanding of the complexity and diversity of the history of feminism and feminist theory from the 1960s to the present day.

This module will give you an opportunity to pursue your own intellectual interests to undertake an independent academic study, working on your own initiative and building strong time management skills.

The aim of this module is to analyse domestic space as an important aspect of contemporary culture, to familiarize you with a range of disciplinary and philosophical traditions which have focused upon domestic space.

This module is about becoming an excellent writer who can produce content suited to the digital environment. This environment can vary hugely, including writing for personal and professional purposes, on behalf of organisations, and as produced by a range of individuals, from global celebrities to ordinary people blogging from their bedrooms. We will critically and creatively explore notions of voice, originality, community, and the desire to share, and examine how audiences are attracted to content in an increasingly competitive attention economy.  The module involves tasks where you will be analysing, producing, and editing writing suitable for a range of careers and audiences.

This module will extend your knowledge of the diversity and range of British writing in the twenty-first century in order to explore key events that shape literary culture in Britain today.

You will learn important critical and theoretical views relating to racial formations, racial identities, and racism in American history to develop cultural and historical understanding of the dynamics of race in post-war America.

The EMCS Dissertation is one of the core directed modules which you must choose for your Level 6 Portfolio. The module requires you to undertake a sustained piece of academic analysis from Media and Cultural Studies and/or English and present this in a proper academic form. This allows you to achieve a thorough understanding of theoretical and methodological issues relevant to your chosen subject of study. 

This module will reinforce the ability to critically analyse texts in close detail to examine a range of Shakespeare's plays in the context of their original cultural production.

Terrorism and Modern Literature will establish terrorism as a significant and persistent literary, political and cultural preoccupation in modern literature (1880s to present), and examine key instances in which the language and concept of terror is at issue.

This module aims to equip you to explore, interpret, and analyse representations of diversity and diverse identities in the media. The module will present a range of themes and topics alongside case studies of media and cultural texts that represent and mediate key issues in contemporary culture to enable students to critically engage with diverse representations in media, culture and communication texts. Case studies will be used to explore key themes and issues. These currently include: representations of democracy in the UK/US; reporting conflict(s); representing Pride & LGBTQIA Communities; femininities & masculinities; the Black Lives Matter movement; #MeToo and gender power relations; disability and migration.

This module will examine the genre of Gothic fiction as it has developed over two centuries to explore the cultural, historical and intellectual contexts that shape the moment of its production.

This module seeks to explore social and digital media theory and practice. We will examine the rise of new platforms an+C985:C1597d forms of storytelling and then examine the stories that they frame and narrate about various groups and individuals. We will engage in some social and digital media practice which will critically interrogate its own construction and challenge modes of representation commonly found in popular social and digital media spaces. We will explore social and digital media through a range of case studies, including: Hashtag activism; Game streaming; Fan commentaries; Instagram influencer marketing; ephemeral media forms: TikTok and Snapchat; online sports talk and the political economy of Twitter.

This module will introduce the concept of 'world literature' through a selection of texts from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries in relation to the rise and expansion of a global modernity. You will examine on-going critical debates around key areas of research in the global humanities: a singular modernity, the politics of translation, the periphery and the world system.

Within this module you will have the opportunity to develop critical, analytical and evaluative skills appropriate to the textual study of screen media. You will begin to identify and critically evaluate the discursive roots of given examples drawn from screen media. This will further provide you the opportunity to develop a critical understanding of screen media narratives and their historical contexts.

This module highlights the relationships between politicians and the media and the role of the media as a primary space for political agenda setting. The module will look at the political structures in Britain, including what devolution has meant for people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It will encourage you to engage closely with the political economy of the news media in Britain and the role that it plays in political communication. It will address the historically often jingoistic and patriotic nature of the English-based national news media and how that led to the grotesque caricatures of other nationalities and identities from the 19th century onwards. This ultimately led to the Euro-sceptic tradition in British newspapers which developed from the 1980s, just a decade after Britain had entered Europe, to the heated media and public debates leading up to Britain’s exit from the European Union following the Brexit referendum of 2016.

This module will enable you to identify and develop transferable skills relevant to the enhancement of employability. You will foster initiative through an evaluative approach to the assessment of work experience or career planning in the context of academic career planning. This will require you to produce a sustained and evidenced piece of critical reflection.

This module examines shifting identities and the intersections of class, sexuality, gender and regionality in British literature of the interwar years. It moves across popular, middlebrow and experimental fiction and looks at poetry, non-fiction and magazine publishing as a means of examining the changing cultural formations of the period.

This module will establish violence as a significant and persistent literary, political and cultural preoccupation in nineteenth-century literature (1800-1900), and examine key works in which the issues of class, empire and gender were explored by authors of this period in relation to conflict and crisis.

This module explores how Victorian writers responded to environmental changes. It examines key historical and intellectual developments shaping debates about the natural world in the Victorian period; you consider links between the historical past and current modes of environmentalism.

This module explores the representation of the mind and mental states in literary texts, with a focus on madness and unconventional states of mind. It introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of literature alongside psycho-sciences, including psychoanalytic literary criticism, the history of psychiatry, medical-model psychology, and cognitive literary studies. Students will question established discourses and modes of representing madness and the mind in contemporary culture, challenging scientific and medical authority. 

This module enhances students' understanding of non-fiction travel literature, encouraging nuanced interpretations and effective long-form writing. It explores travel narratives' reflection of encounters with otherness, reassessment of the familiar, and their link to human identity and the non-human world. Indicative texts range from Mary Wollstonecraft to Robert Macfarlane, spanning from the late-eighteenth to the early 21st century.

This module delves into contemporary literature, covering fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and explores current debates in the English-speaking publishing world. It emphasizes how production circumstances shape contemporary texts and encourages reflection on the writer's role in modern society. Topics include women's history in the era of #Me Too, climate fiction, diversity in publishing, gender identity, freedom of speech, 'cancel culture,' and pandemic writing. Students will engage with works by various authors such as Hallie Rubenhold, Reni Eddo-Lodge, and Akwaeke Emezi.

This module focuses on modern fiction focused on the urgent environmental crises with which we are now obliged to reckon. Some of the issues you will engage with on this module include climate, the environment as a concept, the non-human, and the alternative approaches to nature represented in indigenous narrative systems.

This module explores writing by and about African Americans from the mid-twentieth century to the present; you will consider how Black writers and artists have contested racial injustices, articulated new identities, and identified grounds for solidarity and alliance.

This module focuses on recent works of transnational fiction that have been adapted for the screen. Drawing on literary studies, film studies, adaptation studies, and postcolonial studies, you will examine novels about migrants alongside their film adaptations, considered as ‘migrants’ from page to screen.

This module poses the question: why is popular fiction popular, and how does it maintain that popularity across a range of narrative media, including books, films, TV, comics and even games?  This module offers you the opportunity to analyse storytelling across a variety of commercial narrative media forms.  We currently examine two case studies - the genres of detective fiction and the thriller and consider how they adapt to changing cultural climates from the 19th century to the present day. We also analyse the production and consumption of popular fiction within the context of creative, economic and institutional imperatives, to see how publishers, film companies, and other makers and distributors of media predict and fail to predict - what will be popular.