IELTS 7.0, with no component below 6.0
Our BA Art and English Literature degree lets you engage in substantial practical work in the studio, develop your understanding of ideas and theories in contemporary art, and explore English literature from every era and across the globe.
You will see how debates across the creative arts are reflected in dynamic ways across the two subjects.
Join a lively community at Reading School of Art. You can explore a vast range of media, experiment with emerging art forms and develop as an artist. You will complement your practical art with modules in contemporary art theory and the history of art. The studios are busy places with events, screenings, performances and exhibitions regularly taking place. You will receive a dedicated space, accessible 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, and a studio tutor to help develop your individual and professional practice.
Trips to museums and art galleries help prompt thoughts on how art is displayed and received. You will gain professional experience by taking part in your own exhibitions, public art commissions and events. Your teaching staff are artists, curators and researchers of international standing and will encourage regular exhibitions and open debate.
In your English literature modules, you will read more of authors and genres that you may already know (from tragedy to Gothic, from Shakespeare and Dickens to Plath and Beckett). But you will also encounter aspects of literary studies that may be less familiar to you, from children’s literature to publishing studies and the history of the book. Our academics have published research on everything from medieval poetry to contemporary Caribbean and American fiction.
As you progress through your degree, your module choices become more diverse and specialised: you can do archive work on Studying Manuscripts, or look at the politics of literature in Class Matters. Everyone in the English Department, from new lecturers to professors, teaches at every level of the degree: this gives you the benefit of our expertise and makes you part of the conversation about our research and its impact outside the classroom.
We place a strong emphasis on small-group learning within a friendly and supportive environment. In your first and second years, you will have a mix of lectures (which can be quite large) and seminars (which will never have more than 16 people).
Placements and collaborations are actively encouraged throughout this joint degree, and there is also the option to experience life in another country by studying abroad. Throughout your course you will receive advice and guidance in career development.
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Year 1
Core modules include:
Art studio
Reading objects, writing images
Genre and context
Poetry in English
Please note that all modules are subject to change.
Year 2
Core modules include:
Art studio including career management skills
Optional modules include:
Critical collaborative methods
Aesthetic and anti-aesthetic
Visual thinking and material writing
International study visit
Introduction to old English
Lyric voices
Renaissance texts and cultures
Chaucer and medieval narrative
Contemporary art and theory
Early modern theatre practice
Formations of modernism
Restoration to revolution
The Romantic Period
Modernism in poetry and fiction
Victorian literature
Contemporary fiction
Writing America
Writing and revising
Restoration to revolution: 1660-1789
Shakespeare
Writing genre, identity
Writing, genre and the market
The business of books
Please note that all modules are subject to change.
Year 3
Core modules include:
Art studio
Optional modules include:
Image action text
Affect, aesthetics and the event
Utopias and other worlds
Landscape and memory
Independent study
Family romances: genealogy, identity, and imposture in the nineteenth-century novel
Holocaust testimony: memory, trauma and representation
Restoration literary culture: drama and poetry, 1660-1700
'Eyes on the prize': literature of the US Civil Rights Movement
American poetry: Bishop to Dove
Black British fiction
Children's literature
City of death and desire: Henry James and Venice
Class matters
Classical and Renaissance tragedy
Colonial explorations
Contemporary American fiction
Decadence and degeneration: literature of the 1890s
Dickens
Editing the Renaissance
Fiction and ethnicity in post-war Britain and America
Hitchcock
Holocaust fiction
Irish poetry after Yeats
James Joyce
John Milton: poet of the English Republic
Literature and the railway
Margaret Atwood
Modern epic
Modern Scottish fiction: from Jean Brodie to Trainspotting
Modern and contemporary British poetry
Nigerian prose literature: from Achebe to Adichie
Nineteenth-century American fiction
Packaging literature
Psychoanalysis and text
Samuel Beckett
Science in culture
Shakespeare on film
The eighteenth-century novel: sex and sensibility
The writer's workshop: studying manuscripts
Victorian and Edwardian children's fantasy
Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury
What is the contemporary?
Writing global justice
Writing women: nineteenth-century poetry
Please note that all modules are subject to change.
Year 4
Core modules include:
Art studio
English dissertation
Please note that all modules are subject to change.
As well as the practical experience gained on this degree our students also graduate with a range of transferable skills, such as self-motivation, time management and strategic thinking. You will enter the job market as a self-confident graduate with well-developed skills in oral communication, research and writing, together with a high level of cultural literacy and critical sophistication.
Overall, 93% of our art graduates are in work or further study within six months of graduating (Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey, 2016–17). Many of our graduates develop successful careers as artists, writers and curators. These include a number of famous alumni, such as Turner Prize-nominated artists, and PhD students who are award-winning artists and curators at influential museums.
Others have found employment in galleries, education, art therapy and film and video production. Our graduates have excelled in fields as diverse as law, business administration, web design, teaching and journalism. Recent employers include Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, Christies, Microsoft, the BBC, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Manolo Blahnik.
Health Insurance_fee:£300/year
