Foundation Year Humanities and Arts

30 credits

Introducing ways in which written texts are reimagined, adapted and transformed by creative artists, including writers, theatre makers, choreographers and film directors, this module explores in both theory and practice the relationship between page and stage, word and image. In doing so, it enables you to explore creative imagination at its most radical and relevant.

How and why do television dramas such as Sherlock and Elementary create dramatic interventions into established narratives? How has innovative, controversial and experimental work, made by contemporary playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, debbie tucker green and Sarah Kane, drawn on classic texts to challenge and alter our perceptions of the world? What does The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter's creative appropriation of various fairy tales, reveal about this genre and by extension what does Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves tell us, both about Carter's stories and the tales that informed them?

Questions such as these, addressed in a series of interrelated case studies, will enable you to examine the practices and negotiations involved in work of transition and appropriation. You will develop skills in textual analysis required for writing effective argumentative essays that engage with diverse literary and cultural materials. In addition, the module will harness and develop your creative skills: through a series of workshops you will work on short creative writing and group performance projects that respond to the texts and contexts introduced on the module.

30 credits

Throughout time, people have drawn on history and on ideas to explore, question and record the experience of being human.

This module provides an introduction to the study of that experience, in all its variety. It considers how people, events and ideas, past and present, shape our thinking about society, politics, race, gender, art, culture - and life. It enables students to learn how knowledge and awareness of the past is formed and shaped; how it changes and yet in some ways also remains the same. Students debate and reflect critically on the nature of historical knowledge and how 'history' may differ from 'the past', and they consider the ways in which contemporary cultures and societies are shaped by histories of ideas.

The module draws on a rich store of experience, knowledge and expertise relating to history, philosophy and the history of ideas. It asks students to consider how history relates to memory and how history is used and mis-used. History is personal and communal. It is national, international and global. How are all those histories linked? How did people in the past experience things in terms of equality and inequality, in terms of gender, sexuality and race? Why and how was that experience documented, if at all? What can we learn from it?

Artists, writers, historians, philosophers, musicians, filmmakers and journalists: all have responded to those and other questions. For this module we introduce students to a range of texts and other representations, using history and the history of ideas to explore and debate what it means to be human. 

30 credits

This module is designed to introduce students to the themes, ideas and frameworks central to the study of the Humanities and the Arts, within the foundation year and in preparation for undergraduate level. Topics covered will vary year-to-year, but will include the study of a diverse range of texts, methods and debates and the development of the core academic skills required for the studies of the Humanities and the Arts, including critical thinking, reading and writing; analysis and argument development; essay writing, planning and drafting; enhancing self-confidence and academic voice; and library and digital literacy skills. There will also be the opportunity to discuss the 'value' of studying the Humanities and the Arts (financial, moral, personal, other), which will allow students to connect the practical skills they are acquiring to a larger conceptual sense of why they might study the Humanities and the Arts and how this connects to the relevance (or difficulty) of such study in the context of their own lives.

30 credits

This module introduces you to media communication and will explore a range of texts on a variety of subjects and forms, for varying audiences and purposes across a range of popular media genres and specific texts. You will look at texts from a variety of genres and forms. You will learn ways of classifying these texts and how to describe significant features using concepts from media analysis. You will demonstrate your new knowledge in an assessed presentation.

You will also explore the importance of the audience, aka the reader or listener, for effective media communication in different contexts. Through considering and critically analysing the structure, style content of articles published on websites, in newspapers and magazines you will begin to develop an understanding of how journalism is directed at specific readerships.

You will also learn the practical conventions, contexts and functions of written journalism. You will study how to: originate ideas, undertake journalistic research, interview, organise your material, write well, develop your presentation skills and adhere to house style.