Reflect on what it means to do criticism in a post-theoretical age. This module asks what happens to literary interpretation after all its many theoretical upheavals – from Marxism and feminism to postcolonialism and queer theory. Is it time to get back to the close reading of literature? Is there still room for pleasure, appreciation and creativity in the practice of criticism? We might question whether literature, in the traditional sense, even exists anymore.

You will pose these questions in relation to a range of traditional and non-traditional texts.

Explore literary criticism as it is now and what it may yet become. You will have the opportunity to consider a whole range of major theoretical and philosophical concepts, such as:

• The body
• Race
• Gender
• Violence
• Ecology
• God
• Time
• Death
• War
• Self
• The animal

You will study a range of fascinating modern thinkers, ranging from Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, through to more recent figures such as Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Fred Moten, Cornel West and Sara Ahmed.

Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish

In this year-long module you will progress to B1/B2 on the CEFR scale and HSK 4/5 for Chinese.

By the end of the year, you’ll be able to understand the main ideas of complex texts on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in fields of specialisation. You will be able to interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity with native speakers, including facilitating intercultural encounters.

You will be exposed to a wide range of authentic materials in the target language, varying in terms of content, format and register aimed at broadening and deepening your understanding of different aspects of modern society, politics and culture, global issues and institutions.

The study of the cultural, social and historical context is embedded in the language learning within overarching themes. You will begin with a focus on issues relating to people, power and places, and move on to exploring centres, peripheries and mobilities.

Please note: Italian is not available for students taking a joint degree with a language and a non-language subject.

French, German, Italian and Spanish

Progress to B2 level on the CEFR scale by the end of the year. You will develop a range of oral, aural, written and reading skills in an integrated way that embraces techniques of linguistic mediation and the plurilingual contexts of each language. By the end of the year, you’ll be able to understand the main ideas of complex texts on both concrete and abstract topics and interact with native speakers in a range of situations. You will be able to produce clear, detailed texts on a wide range of subjects including explaining viewpoints on topical issues.

The study of cultural, social, and historical context is embedded in the language learning within overarching themes. You will begin by exploring social justice and move on to studying cultural translation.

Please note: Italian is not available for students taking a joint degree with a language and a non-language subject.

What we call ‘American Literature’ and how we define America and ‘the American experience’ depends on who is writing and to whom. In this module you will encounter many different voices, many conflicting and contrasting views, a diversity of complex experience and a great range of writing in form and style.

You will explore such questions as: What role do different literary forms play in narrating the self? How does American writing seek to establish a new way of looking at the world? And how and why does literature help shape forms of protest and new critiques of modernity?

Exploring the adaption of literature to film and other media, this module focuses on the adaptation of literary texts to such forms as theatre, graphic novel, film, television, song, and game.

You will be invited to reflect on adaptation as a powerful and complex cultural process, one that interprets literature as well as adapts it.

Throughout the module you will normally complete either a critical essay on adaptation OR a creative project (plus short essay) that enables you to produce your own work of adaptation. This may take many forms -- written, (audio) visual, musical, digital, or three-dimensional and/or take the form of a game, production or performance, etc.

Explore a wide range of literature and drama from the medieval and early modern periods. The module situates medieval and early modern literature in its relevant historical and cultural contexts.

You will develop skills in the close reading of medieval and early modern texts.

Authors studied may include Chaucer, the Gawain poet, Margery Kempe, Mary Wroth, Sir Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe.

Encounter changes in society, culture, and politics in multilingual contexts, across time and across the planet, as well as relevant ideas and analytical terminology, such as ‘world’, ‘global’, and ‘planetary’.

You will approach planetary histories of societies and cultures by exploring the relationship between:

• Culture, language, and power
• Language histories
• Histories of translation and multilingualism
• Cultural encounters
• The global histories of the study of languages

You will draw on a variety of cultural texts, including films, novels, plays, poetry, songs or graphic novels.

You will develop your skills and use of terminology in whole cohort workshops and plenaries. In smaller groups, seminars you will study specific geographical areas, regions, and languages. You will develop the skills you need to study literatures, cultures, and societies and to research and write your final year dissertation or project.

Explore postcolonial literature across a wide historical span. Your study will move from the explosion of new national literatures in the era of decolonisation through to contemporary writing that interrogates the legacies of racism and imperialism in our globalised world.

You’ll read exciting major writers who defined the emergence of African, South Asian and Caribbean literature in English in the middle of the twentieth century. You’ll also encounter today’s new voices, grappling with the afterlives of empire.

Cutting through all our thinking will be the question of how literature serves, in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s phrase, as a means of 'decolonising the mind'.

The years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) saw great social, political and cultural transformation. Changing social conditions, extraordinary scientific breakthroughs and the emergence of new technologies all altered the ways in which Victorians thought about themselves and their environment. The literature of the period responded resourcefully to the turbulent circumstances from which it emerged.

In this module, you will examine a wide range of Victorian writing, including novels, short fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose and will explore and interrogate all the complexities of the Victorian age.

Develop key techniques for writing fiction and hone the skills you need to write short stories and/or novels.

Through workshops, discussions, set reading from a range of contemporary writers and generative writing prompts, you’ll develop confidence in creating character, worldbuilding, establishing narrative voice, experimenting with point of view and constructing engaging structures and plot.

You will draw on a range of techniques according to your own interests. In your reflective essay you will consider the various ways short fiction and the novel uniquely deploy these techniques.

Beginning Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish

Suitable for complete beginners up to GCSE.

Take your chosen language from beginners' level and, over the academic year, reach a high A2 level on the CEFR scale for the European Languages, and HSK 2/3 for Chinese.

By the end of the year, you’ll be able to engage with everyday life situations such as describing your environment, express preferences and discuss past events or future plans in simple terms.

In seminars you will cover a range of oral, aural, written, and reading skills in an integrated way that embraces techniques of linguistic mediation and the plurilingual contexts of each language. The study of the cultural, social and historical context is embedded in the language learning, under the umbrella themes: Discovering Languages and Cultures and Locating the Global.

You will begin by focusing on linguistic discovery, invention and growth and move on to locating language-specific places, landscapes, and communities. You will also be introduced to key translation techniques.

Please note: Italian is not available for students taking a joint degree with a language and a non-language subject.

Spanning the linguistic and cultural contexts of France, Germany, Spain, and the Sinophone world, this module explores how language functions as a primary site of identity formation, political contestation, and cultural power. You will explore various topics, such as:

• Language standardisation and stigma
• Minority and regional languages
• Multilingualism and migration
• Linguistic nationalism
• Colonial and postcolonial language politics
• The relationship between language, class, and social reproduction

Through sociolinguistics, cultural theory, and the analysis of film and literature, you will investigate:

• The ways in which language policies reflect and reproduce relations of power, and how their human costs and exclusions are narrated from the point of view of language users in film and literature
• How literary texts and films represent linguistic variation, regional difference, and cultural belonging through visual and narrative strategies
• The relationship between linguistic prestige and social inequality, and how minority voices are marginalised or amplified
• How colonial and migratory histories have shaped the linguistic landscapes of France, Germany, Spain, and the Sinophone world, and how individuals within those landscapes receive and negotiate that inheritance
• The ways in which regional and minority languages (Alsatian, Catalan, Galician, and others) are negotiating their place within, and against, the dominant language policies of their respective national contexts
• How diasporic and multilingual communities navigate questions of linguistic identity and belonging, as lived experience and as artistic subject matter
• What the comparative study of language politics across different cultural contexts reveals about power, resistance, and cultural survival

This module equips you with the skill set to analyse films from the UK, Europe, Latin America and China in their socio-historical contexts through core themes, typically migration, the environment, artificial intelligence and gender. You will make use of the ‘language of film’ (cinematic techniques and genre conventions) to explore migration, for example, through sociological concepts of human movement, the role of documentary in representing beneficial and detrimental approaches to the environment, the concept of ‘artificial culture’ through the blurring of human/non-human boundaries in film, and the relationships between masculinities and different forms of violence on screen.

In the process, the following questions, among others, are addressed:

• How do films deal with the complexity of topics relevant to modern society such as migration, the environment, artificial intelligence and gender?
• Do films which deal with these topics entertain viewers, instruct them, or both?
• How might the aims of these films be obstructed or enhanced?
• What role do production limitations and opportunities have to play?
• In what ways are cinematic techniques instrumental in our interpretations of those topics?
• How relevant are genre conventions and expectations to our readings of such films?
• What can be learned from both traditional and radical forms of cinema?
• What can we learn by applying lenses such as structural violence, community-formation and the gendered gaze?

Spend an academic year abroad engaging with the communities of the relevant language (s) studied. This can be at a partner university, working in industry, with an NGO or other charitable projects, in an entrepreneurial activity or teaching English as a foreign language. A combination of activities is also possible.

If you have educational needs, you may complete the year with online work or placement based in the UK if the work utilises the language you are studying.

You design your Global Engagement Year during your second year, supported by a series of workshops and one-to-one sessions with a pre-departure supervisor. Once abroad, you will remain in contact with the supervisor and produce a reflective portfolio in the language(s) studied as you progress.

Chinese, French, German and Spanish

Build on the language competencies and expertise you have gained during the Global Engagement Year and progress to C1/C2 on the CEFR level for the European languages or HSK 6/7 for Chinese.

By the end of the year, you will be able to understand and produce a wide range of complex, longer texts, recognise implicit meaning and show controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.

You will be able to express yourself spontaneously, flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes. You will cover areas such as future threats to specified language communities, opportunities to advocate and promote languages, and adaptation to changes to living languages, such as shifts in formal and informal communication and preservation or borrowing from other languages.

The study of the cultural, social and historical context is embedded in the study of the language under umbrella themes. You will begin by exploring routes, origins and tongues and then move on to studying bodies.

The final-year Dissertation is your opportunity to devise, research and explore a topic of your own choice through a programme of directed independent study. You will be helped to begin your thinking at the end of your second year and then, through your final year, you will develop your research, thinking and writing, as you build toward a substantial, self-directed project.

Almost anything is possible; for example, you could choose to explore famous literary names or themes, or research obscure figures and unusual topics. You might draw on the University Library’s special collections, or venture way beyond Lancaster to develop your research. Perhaps you will be inspired by the medievalism of historic Lancaster or the Romanticism of nearby Lake District or be drawn to the far textual shores of the digital world.

You can focus your work towards a professional career or build towards postgraduate study at master’s level. Finally, you can opt to write in classic literary critical styles or push the boundaries of literary study in new and startling ways.

Study the work of four giants of nineteenth-century British fiction: Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë.

Focusing on questions of class, gender, power, environment and artistic technique, you will explore the tensions between Austen and the Brontes (south vs north, Regency vs Victorian, realism vs Gothic) and trace the imaginative continuities between them.

What is the contemporary? When did the present cultural moment start and how might it end. How do writers respond to the challenge, excitement, pressure and novelty of the ‘now’? And how is imaginative writing faring in the digital age?

You will consider these questions in relation to the work of such major authors as Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Colson Whitehead

Both the Gothic and science fiction emerged in response to the 18th century ‘age of reason’ and the Western world’s investment in logic and progress. The Gothic explores the terrors of the past and its return while science fiction imagines alternative futures; in doing so, both voice the concerns of the present.

You will study both classic literary texts and contemporary film and other media. Exploring what the Gothic and science fiction each do, rather than what they each are, you will consider how these genres address some of the most pressing questions facing contemporary Western culture.

Examining a wide range of texts and authors from early periods to the age of the climate crisis, this module will explore the many and various ways in which the non-human world is celebrated, championed and exploited by the literary imagination.

You will explore questions such as:

• What do we mean by the ‘the environment’?
• What experiences, meanings and values do we take from, or discover in our surroundings?
• How have writers characterised the environment and in what ways might the literary imagination be significant for contemporary environmental concerns?

The early 20th century explosion of literary experimentation known as Modernism was a movement informed by the catastrophe of the First World War, the convulsion that was the Russian Revolution and a host of dramatic developments in art, music, cinema, philosophy, theology, politics and science.

Alongside reading the literature of the time you will also consider various related artistic movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Vorticism. Authors covered typically include T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and W. B. Yeats.

Study key texts and contexts from a short but remarkably intense period of literary history. Encompassing the work of writers such as Wordsworth, Blake, Keats and Shelley, you will explore the role of nature, the imagination and the sublime. You will also consider the emergence of the Gothic tradition and examine the interactions between literary and politics in a turbulent era of revolution and change.

Ben Jonson claimed of Shakespeare ‘he was not of an age but for all time.’ This module, however, examines Shakespearean drama and poetry in its own time and as a platform in which early modern debates about agency and government, family and national identity, were put into play. The stage was and is a place in which questions of gender, class and race, gain immediacy through the bodies and voices of actors.

By examining texts from across Shakespeare’s career, you will explore their power to shape thoughts and feelings in both their own age and in ours. You will consider how, in the past and in the present, Shakespeare’s texts exploit the emotional and political possibilities of poetry and drama.

The assessment of this module normally concludes with either an essay OR a creative engagement (e.g. reading, performance, artwork) plus critical reflection.

What is critical theory? Why is it one of the most controversial areas of contemporary culture today? And to what extent do theoretical ideas about power, race, gender and identity change the way we think about the world?

On this module you will explore a range of classic and contemporary themes, trends and topics in critical theory from the 1960s to the present. You’ll take a deep dive into key thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze and Agamben and key concepts like biopolitics, globalisation and animal studies.

Undertake an extended, in-depth individual project that will typically taking one of the following formats: a discursive dissertation; a translation dissertation; or dissertation by practice.

Indicative topics for discursive dissertations:

• The role of languages and cultures in tackling global challenges
• Language and technology, or future language pedagogies
• Futures of translation and interpreting

Indicative topics for translation dissertations:

• Conventional or creative translation project with critical translator’s commentary. Theories and practices may include eco-translation, AI and machine translation, or creative-critical translation

Examples for the “by practice” route:

• A policy report based on working with minority language communities in the local area
• Creative work: creative writing in the target language or multilingually; a short film; an installation, etc.
• A portfolio of teaching materials

You will be given feedback and supported through work-in-progress workshops.

What happens when radically different forms of art meet? How do these fused forms change our understanding of the world? We will draw on material from different periods and continents, to explore works of art where, for example, film meets history, poetry meets philosophy, fine art meets sociology, religion meets fiction, and theatre meets politics.

What do we mean by 'dictatorship' in the 20th and 21st centuries? You will explore distinctions between totalitarianism and authoritarianism, single party rule, military and personalist dictatorships, for example. We will discuss the political, social and ideological conditions that enable dictators to come to power, consider the structures they put in place to establish and maintain their rule, and reflect on why so many dictators have clung onto power for so long.

This module addresses questions, such as:

• How have dictators represented their political projects to the people?
• What is the importance of rhetoric to the dictator?
• What kind of language have they used?
• What is the role of 'official literature' in representing the regime to the people?

You will read extracts from speeches, political tracts and literary material produced by dictators in order to explore the relationship between discourse and power. The module will also consider how writers, poets and film makers have critiqued dictatorship in their cultural production:

• What narrative strategies do cultural producers use to express their opposition to a dictator while writing under the control of the regime?
• What is the power of writing?
• How does writing from a position of exile change the way in which writers critique dictatorship?
• Does the writing of and author reproduce the same structures they are trying to counter?
• Does the writer, therefore, assume the role of a dictator?

In this module you will explore the relationships between sciences and cultures in an experimental “laboratory” environment, spanning scientific and humanistic knowledge in diverse linguistic and cultural settings across the world.

Topics covered include Spirits and Matter, Neoshamanism, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Futures, Transformations in Medical Science, Hospitals, Healthcare, Witchcraft, Cosmologies, Technocracies etc.

Sources come from multiple genres, such as speculative fiction, graphic novels, film, philosophical essays, and online talks. Focusing on diverse humanities perspectives and renderings of scientific goods and harms, this module asks intriguing questions relevant to the twenty-first century human condition:

• How do sciences and cultures interact, assemble and co-create in the world, and how do such co-creations shape and transform the world?
• How can we imagine the future of the relationship between sciences and cultures, and what is our role as interdisciplinary arts, humanities and social sciences scholars in imagining this relationship?
• How do diverse works explore the relationship between sciences and cultures?
• In what ways do cultural ideas and practices inspire new modes of engagement with science and technology?
• What unseen matters (e.g. microbes, particles) and horrors can science fiction render visible and comprehensible?
• Where is AI taking humanity: unexplored territories and are we the robots of a post-human future?
• What are the ways in which contemporary philosophy, literature and film dialogue and co-innovate with biomedical science, changing how we think and delivering real impact in healthcare?
• In what ways can contemporary technocracies be informed by ancient and new cultural traditions to ensure that the societies of the future forefront human-centred wellbeing?
• What are some of the diverse ways in which sciences and cultures, spirits and materials have interacted, co-created, and transformed in tandem across different contexts?
• In what ways can the humanities productively appropriate and reposition techniques and approaches from the sciences, and vice versa?
• What conditions facilitate the creation of new “formulas” that blend/explode/remould scientific and cultural ideas, norms, practices?