The course aims to widen and strengthen your knowledge of literature, to provide you with stimulating and enjoyable class discussions, and to help you develop your own critical and explorative written responses to the wonderful texts we will read together.
Each of the two Diploma courses may be taken as a stand-alone programme over one year, or combined into an Undergraduate Diploma of Higher Education in English Literature, equivalent to one year of full-time study.
What will I be studying?
The course is taught through a mixture of informal lectures and seminars, practical sessions and discussion.
Unit 1: Transformation or destruction?: Adaptation and Literature (Dr Jenny Bavidge)
(4 day-schools - Saturday 1 October, Saturday 29 October, Saturday 12 November and Saturday 3 December 2016)
This unit will focus on the adaptation of literary works into film and other forms, examining questions of genre, authorship and form along the way. We will debate what is at stake in the adaptation of literary works into other formats and with reference to literary works by authors including Shakespeare, Emily Bronte and Lewis Carroll, and filmic works by directors including Stanley Kubrick, Andrea Arnold and Jane Campion, students will be introduced to theories of adaptation and will also be taught some key elements of film analysis and theory alongside more familiar methods of literary criticism.
Unit 2: Visions of Eden: Milton and his Contemporaries (Dr Stephen Logan)
(4 day-schools - Sunday 15 January, Saturday 28 January, Saturday 18 February and Saturday 11 March 2017)
This unit will look at a range of widely-varying major writers in poetry and prose, encompassing the religious debates that characterise much 17th-century writing. The focus throughout will be on how each writer manifests his particular concerns in the minutiae of form and style. Among the genres addressed will be epic poetry (Milton's Paradise Lost), religious allegory (Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress), the pastoral lyric (Marvell) and political-religious satire (Dryden).
Unit 3: Sun, Sea and Text: Literatures of Expatriation (Dr Edward Allen)
(4 day-schools - Saturday 29 April, Saturday 20 May, Saturday 3 June and Saturday 17 June 2017)
This unit will focus on matters of place, identity, and the spirit of discovery in a range of 19th- and 20th-century works. We will travel each session to a particular literary setting – Venice, Alexandria, Corfu, Chandrapore – questioning what it once meant to travel and settle in the age of empire, and to give in (or not) to the ambiguous attractions of expat culture. We will spend time reading authors such as E. M. Forster, Daphne du Maurier, Lawrence Durrell, and Virginia Woolf, as well as exploring a range of prose writing, from Baedekers and travel journals to short stories and novels. Students will be introduced to theories of gender and postcolonialism, and to modes of literary analysis that befit the colourful history of travel writing.
What can I go on to do?
If you wish, you can develop your studies in this subject by progressing to a second Undergraduate Diploma in English Literature or the Undergraduate Advanced Diploma in English Literature.
Credit awarded by the Institute may also be transferred into the degree programmes of other higher education providers. However the volume of credit and the curriculum which can be transferred into degree programmes varies from institution to institution and is always at the discretion of the receiving institution.
