English with Integrated Foundation Year

Our Integrated Foundation Year for Arts and Humanities will take you through a carefully-designed programme to help you to progress confidently onto your undergraduate degree.

Arts and Humanities subjects, like English, provide key ways of understanding our complex world, its histories, and current debates facing contemporary society. Identity, political and social conflict, our interaction with new digital and genetic technologies, our stewardship of the environment are all issues where the voice of creative and critical thinking are key. Literary texts, films, plays and digital games offer important ways in which societies have debated - and continue to represent - their values and their futures.

The Foundation Year provides progressive structures in which you are able to gain knowledge and understanding of approaches to humanities study and your chosen degree subject.  All Foundation Year students take ‘Global Perspectives’, then four subject-based courses provide approaches to the study of arts and humanities subjects, giving you critical skills to explore a range of literary, visual, and cultural forms, including plays, films, and digital media.

Once you have completed your Foundation year, you progress onto the full degree programme, BA English.

BA English allows you to choose from a diverse and extensive range of modules, covering works across time, cultures, genres and geographies. Offering more than 40 modules from across a thousand years of English, American and global literature, English at Royal Holloway is a particularly wide-ranging subject which allows you to develop your passions, debate cutting-edge ideas, and to pursue, if you wish, your own creative writing.

The flexibility of this course encourages discovery: from the Knights of the Round Table to contemporary literature on global questions like migration or the environment, you will encounter many new literary worlds and new ways of understanding familiar ones. Most importantly, you will discover your own voice as a writer in an environment which places particular value on independence of mind and intellectual creativity. Alongside expertise in all the major literary periods which ensures that our students are informed by deep knowledge, the English department prides itself on educational expertise, offering small group teaching, a ‘transition’ programme when you join us and individual attention, to ensure that our students are confident, happy and successful academically.

Studying at one of the UK's most dynamic English departments allows you to develop a strong understanding of key periods, genres, authors, and critical concepts. After a first year which gives you firm foundations, you can choose from a huge range of options both innovative and traditional: for example, Drama and Witchcraft, Sensation Fiction, World War I Poetry, Science Fiction, Children's Literature, African-American Literature, the Girl in the Book, Queer History as well as courses on the Medieval period, Shakespeare and the Renaissance, Eighteenth-century and Victorian literatures, Modernism and Postmodernism. In your third year, you can write a dissertation on a specialist subject of your own choice.

You will be taught by nationally and internationally known scholars who write prize-winning books, talk or write in the national media, or advise cultural bodies like Liberty or the Charles Dickens Museum. Outside the vibrant community of the English department, you can take courses in other departments, and even opt to study abroad for a year.

Course Modules

Core Modules

Foundation Year

• Cultures of Thinking

• Culture and Memory

• Society on Screen

• Textual Cultures

• Foundation Year English

Year 1

• Encountering Medieval Literature: From Beowulf to Chaucer

• Critical Foundations: Thinking As A Critic

• Literature and Crisis

• Shakespeare

• Reorienting the Novel

• Introduction to Poetry

Year 2

• All modules are optional

Year 3

• All modules are optional

Optional Modules

Below is a taster of some of the exciting optional modules that students on the course could choose from during this academic year. Please be aware these do change over time, and optional modules may be withdrawn or new ones added.

Year 1

• All modules are core

Year 2

• Middle English Poetry

• Medieval Dream and Vision

• Strange Fictions: Romance in the Middle Ages

• Renaissance Literature

• Intensive Shakespeare: Comedy, History, Tragedy

• Drama and Witchcraft

• Early Modern Bodies

• Literature after the Conquest: 1066-1340

• Victorian Literature

• Romanticisms

• Creative Writing: Structure and Style

• Literature of the Fin de Siècle, 1883-1903

• Contemporary Debates in Literary and Critical Theory

• Modernisms

• Literature and the Digital

Year 3

• Ideas in Contemporary Fiction

• On Murder

• Advanced Shakespeare: The Problem Plays

• Literature and Philosophy

• Brexit, Literature and Discipline of English

• James Joyce: Revolutions of the Word

• Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

• Reading Like a Victorian

• First World War Literature

• The Girl in the Book

• Children's Literature

• The Post-Colonial Novel

• Poetic Practice

• Violence, Sex and Magic in Medieval Literature

• Visual and Verbal in the Long Nineteenth Century

• The New York Schools: Poetry, Painting, Composition

• Literature, the Digital and the Creative Industries

• The 1930s British Fiction and the Road to War

• Special Author: Chaucer

• Special Author: Charles Dickens

• Special Author: Herman Melville

• Reading the Waste Land

• Creative Writing Special Focus (Term 1)

• English Dissertation

https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/studying-here/undergraduate/english/english-with-integrated-foundation-year/

In your Foundation Year, teaching methods include a mixture of lectures, seminars, workshops, individual tutorials, and supervisory sessions. Outside of the classroom you’ll undertake guided independent reading and study. You will also be assigned a Personal Tutor, who’ll be with you for the duration of your degree, and will have regular scheduled sessions to support learning and the development of study skills. Assessments are varied; quizzes, short written exercises, essays, examinations, poster preparation and presentation, blog/vlogs, short digital films, dissertations and personal development plans. In addition the Foundation Year offers a full range of skills-based training and also the opportunity to take a micro-placement to enhance your employability.

Once you progress onto your full degree course, you’ll contine to be taught through a combination of lectures and seminars, and participate in study groups, essay consultations and guided independent study. In your first year, you will also work in small groups of just four or five students focusing on study skills such as close reading, essay writing and presentation and self-editing. As you progress through your degree, these tutorials focus on your own personal development, for instance working on your CV. Private study and preparation remain essential parts of every course, and you will have access to many online resources and the university’s comprehensive e-learning facility, Moodle.

You will also take a study skills course during your first year, designed to equip you with and enhance the writing skills you will need to be successful in your degree. This course does not count towards your final degree award but you are required to pass it to progress to your second year.

All undergraduate degree courses at Royal Holloway are based on the course unit system. This system provides an effective and flexible approach to study, while ensuring that our degrees have a coherent and developmental structure.

We use a variety of assessment methods, including long and short essays, formal examinations at the end of each year, online tests and exercises, presentations, commentaries and portfolios of creative work.