English

Why study BA English at Goldsmiths

Bold, flexible, and richly diverse – our BA English degree will take you on a thrilling intellectual and imaginative journey. Our students are passionate about literature and willing to read against the grain. With Goldsmiths English, you'll develop your critical and creative voice, enabling you to speak back to the world with rigour and insight.

• We ask big questions. We challenge you to read literature in all its cultural, artistic, and political contexts and you will engage in debates about what it means to be human across time.

• We are diverse. You will travel across histories, cultures and languages, and explore evolving genres such as epic, tragedy and the novel. You will learn about the history of British literature, explore theoretical approaches such as feminism and postcolonialism, and investigate literary engagements with the Transatlantic slave trade, climate change, and political activism. You will be able to study American literature, Black British literature, Caribbean writing and indigenous literatures.

• We are critical and creative. Our staff undertake cutting edge research in the fields of gender studies; environmental humanities; Caribbean literature; linguistics; Shakespeare studies; American studies, translation studies; contemporary literature; life writing; Decadence; trauma studies; critical theory; modernism; visual culture; Romantic and Victorian literature; and the novel. Home to the Goldsmiths Prize and the Goldsmiths Writers' Centre, the Centre for Comparative Literature, the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies, and the Decadence Research Centre, Goldsmiths English is at the forefront of critical and creative practice.

• We are relevant. Our research-led teaching is informed by current debates about canon formation, decolonisation, the role of the arts in cultural and political life and the politics of the archive.

• We help you succeed. We will help you to grow and develop as a critical thinker and writer. You will have the opportunity to submit drafts of your work for in-term feedback and attend 1-2-1 Effective Academic Writing sessions.

• Our alumni include the multi award winning poet, novelist, playwright and musician, Kae Tempest; the poet, Granta and Fitzcarraldo editor, and Eric Gregory Award winner, Rachael Allen; the novelist Aria Aber, author of Good Girl; the founder of Gal-dem Magazine and Guardian and New York Times writer, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff; and Felix Petty, Head of Content at Kaleidscope and Capsule magazines, and former Executive Editor at i-D Magazine.

Course Modules

Year 1
Core modules will introduce you to a wide range of genres and historical literatures, this will provide important groundwork that will inform your later module choices.

You will study canonical literary texts alongside voices outside the cultural mainstream.

Writers typically studied range from Shakespeare, Chaucer and Homer to Bernardine Evaristo, James Baldwin and Maggie Nelson.

Questions of gender, class, race and ethnicity will form an integral part of your syllabus.

We take an expansive view of the literary and students study a range of genres and critical approaches including the novel, poetry, drama, fairy tale, life writing, the short story, speculative fiction, the graphic novel, postcolonialism, historicism, aesthetics and structuralism.

Our approach to learning, teaching and research is probing, inventive and rigorous. As a small and friendly community, first-year students soon get to know many of our core academic staff.
In your first year, you will take the following compulsory modules:

• Explorations in Literature

• Approaches to Text

• Genre

• Contemporary Creative Industries

• Critical Writing

Year 2

In the second year, full-time students take these compulsory modules:
Reading the Past

Revolutions in Writing and Society

Special Topics in English

The Goldsmiths Project

Special Topics in English

Within this module, you will choose and study from a selection of specialist topics in literary studies. Indicative topics include American Gothic; Aesthetics; Homer and Contemporary Literature; Shakespeare(s): Then and Now; Language and Society; and Post-1945 Poetry.

Optional Modules

You will also choose optional modules worth 30 credits from a list provided by Literary and Creative Studies. These vary from year to year, but may include the following:

Work Placement (English)

The Goldsmiths Elective

Weird Fictions

The Work Placement

You can choose to take a work placement module as one of your option modules in your second year. This allows you to undertake a work placement which will benefit your studies, your skillset and your CV.

Students have previously been placed with Penguin; the Poetry Library, Southbank Centre; Macmillan publishers; Wandsworth Council; the London Magazine; the Museum of London; Prototype Publishing; the homeless charity HARP; and leading international poetry magazine Poetry London which is in-house at Goldsmiths English and has two placements available every year.

Goldsmiths Elective

The Elective allows students to take a module outside of English, provided by a different Subject Area of Goldsmiths. Or students may wish to take the current English Elective in Weird Fictions.

Year 3
In your final year, you will take four compulsory modules:

• Challenging World Literature: Diversity and Difference

• Modern and Contemporary Literatures

• Research Topics in English

• Creative Critical Project

Research Topics in English

Within this module, you will choose from a selection of specialist topics in literary studies. Indicative topics include Caribbean Women Writers; Decadence; Shakespeare’s Sisters (Women’s Writing: 1920s to the Present); Language and Society; Contemporary Indigenous American Literatures and Cultures; and American Crime Fiction.

Creative and Critical Project

This allows you to undertake structured seminar-based research in an area of literary studies in the first term. In the second term you will devise, research and produce an independent project based on your chosen area. This project can take the form of an extended research essay or other media and formats (e.g., creative writing, an exhibit, a podcast, a zine, a webpage). Indicative areas of research include Literary London; Discourse Analysis (Language, Culture Politics); Writing Lives; American Literature and Culture; and Women’s Writing.

Please note that due to staff research commitments not all of these modules may be available every year.