You will encounter the canon of great authors, from Shakespeare onwards, but you also study themes like Film, Gender, and Empire. In other words, the degree combines traditional and contemporary aspects of the subject. Buckingham's unique tutorial system makes for highly personalized teaching. If you'd like to try out a tutorial, come along to one of our free taster sessions.
What is Buckingham English?
- It is an encounter with the complexity and beauty of great literature
- It aids you on your journey to becoming a professional-level writer, able to write fluently and well in any context
- Like philosophy, it teaches you to argue and debate your ideas
- As a central liberal arts subject, it is a clear space to address the big questions of meaning and existence
We don't think that formal essays are always the best way of assessing how students understand a subject, so you will find that you have opportunities to write a book review, reportage, poems and short stories, even part of a screenplay. You will learn a number of skills, not least how to write fluently and persuasively. As a result, our graduates go on into a range of careers in media, teaching, publishing, academia, business, and marketing.
This is the 3-year format of the BA degree (UCAS code Q321), which allows you the traditional summer break. Starting each September, there are 3 terms per year, leading to an assessment period in early June. Then the summer is free, before returning for the new academic year in late September. This allows you more time for reading and reflection. For the 2-year format of the degree see BA English Literature | 2 Years, 2 Years (+ 1 term).
Dissertation
In your final year, you are given the opportunity to research, develop, and write a mini-dissertation of 6,000 - 8,000 words. This sounds daunting, but you have six months to complete it, and plenty of guidance from us, so many of our students have found it one of the most rewarding parts of their studies.
Among other outcomes, you should gain from this course:
- In-depth understanding of your chosen field of study.
- Experience of completing an individual piece of research through from conception to final, fully-documented work.
- Understanding of scholarly standards of objectivity, documentation, referencing and citation.
- A more nuanced sense of the complexities of contemporary critical practice.
The final dissertation has to be bound, fully'styled' and sourced (in other words, a professional piece of report writing in every sense), and is your chance to connect together many of the skills you have acquired on the Literature programme here at Buckingham. Subjects presented recently include'The Idea of the Gentleman in Victorian Fiction,''Heroes, Anti-Heroes, and Villains in Gothic Fiction,''Virginia Woolf's prose fiction in the 1920s', and'Sympathy and Alienation in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe'. Your bound dissertation makes an ideal accompaniment to your CV if you are applying for jobs where research and report-writing are important.