BA English Literature and German

Description:

This four-year degree, which includes a year abroad, gives you an excellent knowledge of a wide range of English literary texts, from medieval times to contemporary popular culture, whilst allowing you to choose where you wish to specialise. It also provides a high level of competence in reading, writing and speaking German.

Study Abroad:

Subject to arrangements made in exceptional cases only, all students on this programme spend their third year abroad, as an assistant teacher, on a work placement, or at a university in most cases one with which the University of Reading has an Erasmus exchange agreement:(in Germany) Augsburg, Düsseldorf, Göttingen, Regensburg, Potsdam, Trier, Tübingen, and (in Austria) Graz and Vienna.

Course Structure:

Year 1 introduces you to selected English literary texts from a wide variety of types and periods, and also includes the study of German language and modern German culture.It encourages you to ask fundamental questions about the study of your chosen subjects and to familiarise yourself with a variety of critical and theoretical approaches.The second year provides a choice of options in English Literature that enables you to focus more closely on particular periods, genres or thematic traditions;in German you will study core modules as well as more specialised optional modules.In the third year, which is spent abroad, you will undertake further study in German language and English Literature, including research for a Joint Dissertation on a subject of your own choosing.In the fourth year, where an extensive array of specialised topics is available in both subject areas, you have the opportunity to concentrate or extend your studies according to your interests.You will also complete your Dissertation.

Year 1

English Literature

Languages of Literature
What Kind of Text is This?
Researching the English Essay

German

Compulsory Modules:

EITHER (for students entering with A- or AS- level German or equivalent)
-Advanced German Language
-Icons of Modern Germany
OR (for students entering with GCSE German or equivalent)
-IWLP (Institution-Wide Language Programme) German Level 4
-Icons of Modern Germany (Intermediate)
Or Intensive German language (for complete beginners)
-Icons of Modern Germany (Intermediate)

Optional Module:

The Inner Life of the German Lanuage
Interpreting Historical Documents
Literary Reflections of Historical Events
The German Nazi Past and the Present

As with many other subjects in the Arts & Humanities, you will choose modules from other subjects to make up your credits for this year.

Year 2

English Literature
Optional Modules

3 modules to be chosen from chosen from a list including:
Renaissance Texts and Cultures
Modern Drama
Romantics to Decadents
Modernism
Poetry 1900-1950
Shakespeare
Nineteenth-Century Novel
Communications at Work
Women's Writing
Creative Writing and Critical Practice
Writing America

German

Compulsory Module:

German Language

Optional Modules
4 from a list which typically includes:
Bertolt Brecht and the Drama of Revolt
Words in Action? An Introduction to linguistic pragmatics
East German Cinema
War, Hell and Family: Catastrophe in the Romantic Period
Feminism, Gender & Class in 19th century Germany
The World of Words: German Lexicology
Women and Biography in GDR Literature
Changing Media, Changing Texts

Year 3 (Year Abroad)
Studying at a German or Austrian University
or
Working as a Teaching Assistant at a German or Austrian School
or
Going on a work placement with a German or Austrian Firm

Compulsory Modules:
Language Project
Joint Dissertation preparation
German oral

Final Year
English Literature

Compulsory Modules:
Dissertation combining both subjects

Optional Modules:
2 modules to be chosen from a list of approximately 60 specialist topics, of which the following are typical examples:
Colonial Explorations
Renaissance Women Writing
The Gothic
Crime, Medicine and the Victorians
Children's Literature
Samuel Beckett
Studying Literature Manuscripts
Contemporary Drama

German

Compulsory Modules:

Translation into German and English
or 
German Structure and Composition

Optional Modules:
You choose 2 from a list which might include the following:
Cinema of the Weimar Republic
Migration in Germany
Language in Politics
Nineteenth-century Vienna
Writing the East: Literature of the GDR