Undergraduate Study in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies

Organisation of degree courses

In your first year (as in your second and final years), you take four modules. The first year serves as an introduction to the area of study in which you will specialise for the remainder of your time as an undergraduate at Essex. For many of our Literature degree schemes (either single honours or joint honours), you will take a first-year course that serves as an Introduction to Literature, a course on The Enlightenment (a period of critical enquiry that reached its high-point in the eighteenth century and helped establish the foundations for our modern society), and two other courses: an Introduction to Writing Skills and an Introduction to Close Reading Skills

If you plan to take BA Film Studies and Literature, one of these other courses will be an Introduction to Film. Similarly, if you intend taking BA Drama or BA Drama and Literature, you will take an Introduction to Drama course. Creative Writing modules include Introduction to Creative Writing and Introduction to Rhetoric. See here for full list of degree courses on offer in the Department.

In your second year, you follow a series of core modules that lay the foundations for your particular scheme. For English Literature this means second-year modules in Early Modern Literature (of the period 1300-1750) and Versions of Modernity (from 1750 to 1940). For English and United States Literature, the module on Twentieth-Century United States Literature is taken instead of one of these two modules. You will also take a module called Approaches to Text. The single honours and joint degrees involving Film Studies, Drama, and Creative Writing have specific second-year modules dedicated to their respective schemes such as Models of Misrule, Tragedy, Gender in Performance, Narrative and Film and Creative Writing. Other joint degrees have different requirements, involving the study of modules in other departments. See here for full list of degree courses on offer in the Department.

Third-year modules are chosen from a wide variety on offer. These range from a study of Shakespeare and other dramatists in The History Play to Postcolonial Literature, from English Novels and their settings to Transformations of the Fairytale. Drama modules include European Naturalism and After, Contemporary Theatre, Writing for the Theatre, Twentieth-Century Theatre. Film Studies offers Culture, Film and Ideology, Hollywood Directors and Creative Writing modules include Writing Science Fiction and Oulipo and the the Limits of Writing. See here for full list of degree courses on offer in the Department.

Independent Study Project

In place of one of your third-year modules, whether you are taking a Literature, a Drama, a Film Studies or a Creative Writing degree, there is also the option of applying to undertake an independent study project on a topic of your own choice This piece of research is an ideal way for students intending to proceed to postgraduate study to acquire some of the skills necessary at that level. Titles of independent study projects in the last two years have included:

Jenny Joseph's "Persephone": a Rewriting of the Fertility Myth;
Cinema and Computer Games: the Merging of Two Mediums
How Do Films Use Music and To What Effect?
The German Expressionist Film: the Domestication of an Avant-Garde
The Man Who Lived Underground: A Critical Re-evaluation of the Contribution of Richard Wright to the African-American Literary Project
To what extent is Harold Pinter influenced by The Theatre of The Absurd?
Vinegar Tom and the importance of local history
Is the word the beginning of the Theatre of Cruelty?
A exploration in the effective use of 'nothing' in the dramatic work of Samuel Beckett

Study Abroad

We also operate an exchange scheme with universities in Denmark, France, Finland, Greece and Italy (the ERASMUS programme), which students entering the second year can apply to follow. The nine month course of study, from October to June, spent studying abroad, carries full recognition as a student's assessment for that year and counts towards a final degree result. You may wish to consult our Study Abroad Office to find out about studying for a year in other countries.

Languages for All

As a University of Essex student, you can also study a language alongside your course for free as part of the Languages for All scheme.