Posted on

English Literature & Language (Q300), Email 1

Hello Everyone

Congratulations on your offer of a place to study English Language and Literature (Q300) at Newcastle University! This email comes to you from two lecturers who hope to welcome you to our department this autumn: Cristine Cuskley is a Lecturer in Language and Cognition and James Harriman-Smith is a lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature. 

Everyone at Newcastle University is currently hard at work updating our teaching for the autumn, and module-specific reading lists for you will be available later in the summer. However, in the meantime, we encourage you to delve into some more general material to get you excited about getting started in your studies. To help with this, we have two recommendations for you, one for language and one for literature. 

First, for English language: 

We would like you to listen to an episode of BBC sounds on The Future of English: Dialects and Evolution. They look at varieties of English all over the world – have a listen and think about the differences they discuss. You might then want to read this long article on English dominating the internet and this video on the weirdness of English. What do you think about the future of English? 

Second, for English literature: 

We would like you to make a list of every book you remember having studied in your English (or ‘English Literature’) classes, and then think about what this list might show you.  

  • What do these books have in common?  
  • Are they mainly novels, plays or poems?  
  • When were they written? 
  • What kind of things are they about? 
  • Where do their authors come from?  
  • What class, gender, age (etc.) are those authors?  

Once you have answered these questions, and others of your own devising, the next step is two-fold. First, identify a work of literature that has nothing in common with anything on your list. Perhaps that might be a book of poems by a working-class woman who lived in the eighteenth century and wrote about domestic servitude; perhaps that might be a play written and performed in the last two years. Why not read (or watch) that thing? As you engage with it, think about how you might write about it: can you analyse it like you analysed the texts you studied this year? What else do you feel you need to know? 

We would love to hear what you thought about the future of English, and what you realised about how you’ve been taught English Literature. You can in touch with us about these matters, or anything else, through email or on social media (links below). You can also find even more tips and resources on our Twitter page, or by searching the hashtag #NCLReady. 

Best wishes, 

James Harriman-Smith and Christine Cuskley 

Posted on

English Literature & History (QV31), Email 1

Hello Everyone,

Congratulations on your offer of a place to study English Literature and History (QV31) at Newcastle University! I am a Reader in Modernist Print Culture and Programme Lead on the QV31 degree. My colleagues and I hope to welcome you to our department this autumn.

We will send out reading lists for all our modules in the Autumn once we have updated our teaching to take the latest research into account. For now, we have prepared more general material to help you get ready for university study. This email contains some of that material, and will be followed by others, each one written by a lecturer at Newcastle. If you have any questions about the material in these emails, or want to receive even more, please do get in touch with us through social media or email.

Here are a few things to get you thinking about the study of Literature and History at University level.

FOR LITERATURE

Make a list of every book you remember having studied in your English (or ‘English Literature’) classes, and then think about what this list might show you.

• What do these books have in common?
• Are they mainly novels, plays or poems?
• When were they written?
• What kind of things are they about?
• Where do their authors come from?
• What class, gender, age (etc.) are those authors?

Once you have answered these questions, you might want to think with your history student hat on to reflect on how important knowing something about historical context has been to your appreciation of these texts or might improve your understanding of them. With that in mind, the next step is two-fold. First, identify a work of literature that has nothing in common with anything on your list. Perhaps that might be a book of poems by a working-class woman who lived in the eighteenth century and wrote about domestic servitude; perhaps that might be a play written and performed in the last two years. Why not read (or watch) that thing? As you engage with it, think about how you might write about it: can you analyse it like you analysed the texts you studied this year? What else do you feel you need to know?

FOR HISTORY

My colleague in the School of History, Rachel Hammersley, a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History, has suggested the following readings for how history has a relevance for thinking about the present. This issue has been raised a lot in the past few years as we commemorate 100 years since WW1, as we witness the social and political divisions engendered by Brexit, and as we grapple on a global scale with COVID-19, to mention only a few of the pressing issues that lead us to look to history for context and guidance. Here are some articles to get you thinking about these issues:

What Can History Tell us about epidemics?
On Historians, Politicians and Their Duty to History
And here, a slightly older article from the Guardian on the same topic.

BRINGING LITERATURE AND HISTORY TOGETHER

While in your first year, you will be studying the subjects separately, your work at Stage 2 and 3 will ask you to think across subjects in an interdisciplinary way. It is never too early to start thinking in this way and I encourage you, in your first year, to keep the following kinds of questions in the back of your mind as you are studying: How is historical context relevant to the study of this work/this literary period and how is this context important for understanding how literary texts convey meaning? How might a literary text or an analytical or theoretical approach I have learned in literature be applied to a historical text or topic to provide new insights?

My colleagues and I would love to hear what you discover this way. These tasks are intended to make you think in general terms about what constitutes ‘English Literature’ (and what does not seem to) and why History is relevant to thinking through our current moment. You can get in touch with us through email or social media.

Alternatively, you can find even more tips and resources on our Twitter page, or by searching the hashtag #NCLReady.

Best wishes,

Kirsten MacLeod

Posted on

English Literature & Creative Writing (QW38), Email 1

Hello Everyone,

Congratulations on your offer of a place to study English Literature and Creative Writing (QW38) at Newcastle University! I am the Subject Head for Creative Writing and my colleagues and I hope to welcome you to our department this autumn.

We will send out reading lists for all our modules in the Autumn once we have updated our teaching to take our latest reading and research into account. For now, I have asked some of my colleagues to suggest some books and exercises that may help you learn more about the craft of creative writing.

First the books, which should be available through your local library. Preti Taneja told me Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird would be helpful to anyone who wants to write creative prose in general. She found Alexander Chee’s How to write an Autobiographical Novel very useful too. Sinéad Morrissey is an advocate of Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry. Tina Gharavi said she thought Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat was an excellent resource for budding screenplay writers. And now the exercises. Tara Bergin would like you to try the following task, which asks you to make a poem by following instructions, rather than waiting for inspiration to strike.

First, get a pen/ pencil and paper. Now write down the following:
• Two colours you like and why
• Two words you like and why
• Something you’re afraid of and why
• Something that makes you laugh and why
• Something you want (but don’t say why).

Now, using only this information, in any order, compose a short poem. Next, type it up, adjusting as you see fit. Give it a title.

If you want to experiment further, see what happens to your poems if you change the perspective (e.g. change it from the first person (I’) to the second person (‘You’).

Rachel Hewitt invites you to start thinking about non-fiction prose by reading the article ‘Chalk and Bone’ by Sinéad Gleeson.

Ask yourself:
• What sort of stories could be told by writing about the body and its experiences?
• Is language adequate to describe physical experiences?
• If you can’t find the right words, why might that be?
• Why might you want to write about the body?

As you’ll see from reading this essay, Gleeson doesn’t always spell out the emotions that are linked to her physical experiences. She doesn’t directly tell us how she felt emotionally about her experience of living in her body. She shows us her bodily experiences – and leaves us to work out how we feel about them – instead of telling us. Can you do something similar? Try to focus on what happened, instead of the emotions that it conjured up. And, as an experiment, try to do this without using any metaphors or similes.

I hope you found these exercises useful. Please do not worry if you found them challenging; we do not expect you to have studied creative writing before. For most of you it will be a completely new subject, even if you have done some creative writing on your own. Our recommendations should simply give something for you to think about over the summer.

If you have any questions about the material in these emails, please do get in touch with us through email. Alternatively, you can find even more tips and resources on our Twitter page, or by searching the hashtag #NCLReady.

Best wishes,

Lars Iyer

Reader in Creative Writing
Subject Head, Creative Writing

Posted on

English Language & Linguistics, Email 1

Hello Everyone

Congratulations on your offer of a place to study at Newcastle University! My name is Christine Cuskley and I’m a Lecturer in Language and Cognition here at Newcastle, where we hope to welcome you this autumn.

Lecturers and professors here in English Language and Linguistics are hard at work updating our teaching programme for the autumn – more specific reading lists for your modules will be available later in the summer. However, in the meantime, we encourage you delve into some more general – and even entertaining – material to get you excited about getting started in your studies.

There are some great podcasts about language and linguistics that you should check out – you could have a listen while taking your favourite walk or milling around the house! Dive into this great, exhaustive list of podcasts related to language and linguistics.

This list is so big that you may not know where to start – one good jumping off point is this episode of the podcast Lingthusiasm about the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The IPA is an important tool used in linguistics to describe the sounds in the world’s languages. The podcast delves into what the IPA is for, and digs deeper into the history of how it was developed. In your first year, you’ll learn lots more about how we study sounds in language – including how to understand and use the IPA. If the podcast piques your interest, you check out this interactive online IPA chart, or challenge yourself with this quick exercise from the UK Linguistics Olympiad.

You’ll also be delving into the study of language variation and change – how languages vary across space and time. Check out this episode of BBC sounds on The Future of English: Dialects and Evolution. They look at varieties of English all over the world – have a listen and think about the differences they discuss. What do you think about the future of English?

Let us know if you find any favourites among those podcasts, either by email or by social media. Alternatively, you can find even more tips and resources on our Twitter page, or by searching the hashtag #NCLReady.

Best,
Christine Cuskley
Lecturer in Language and Cognition

Posted on

English Literature (Q306) Offer Holder, Email 1

Hello Everyone

Congratulations on your offer of a place to study English Literature (Q306) at Newcastle University! I am the undergraduate admissions director for English and a lecturer in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. My colleagues and I hope to welcome you to our department this autumn, where I will be teaching our ‘Close Reading’ and ‘Transformations’ modules to students.

We will send out reading lists for all our modules in the Autumn once we have updated our teaching to take the latest research into account. For now, we have prepared some more general material to help you get ready for university study. This email contains some of that material, and will be followed by others, each one written by a lecturer at Newcastle and tailored to this strange, unprecedented time that you and we find ourselves in. If you have any questions about the material in these emails, or want to receive even more, please do get in touch with us through social media or email.

So what do I have to recommend to you today? I have a task that will lead to some new reading. First, the task:

I would like you to make a list of every book you remember having studied in your English (or ‘English Literature’) classes, and then think about what this list might show you.

• What do these books have in common?
• Are they mainly novels, plays or poems?
• When were they written?
• What kind of things are they about?
• Where do their authors come from?
• What class, gender, age (etc.) are those authors?

Once you have answered these questions, and others of your own devising, the next step is two-fold. First, identify a work of literature that has nothing in common with anything on your list. Perhaps that might be a book of poems by a working-class woman who lived in the eighteenth century and wrote about domestic servitude; perhaps that might be a play written and performed in the last two years. Why not read (or watch) that thing? As you engage with it, think about how you might write about it: can you analyse it like you analysed the texts you studied this year? What else do you feel you need to know?

My colleagues and I would love to hear what you discover this way. This task is intended to make you think in general terms about what constitutes ‘English Literature’ (and what does not seem to) and connects to larger theories about what we call ‘canonicity’. You can get in touch with us through email or social media.

Alternatively, you can find even more tips and resources on our Twitter page, or by searching the hashtag #NCLReady.

Best wishes,
James Harriman-Smith
Lecturer in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
Undergraduate Admissions Director

Posted on

Are you #NCLReady?

With many students having ended their school studies in an impromptu fashion, we know many of you will be looking for ways to prepare for university.

We will be sending out Reading Lists for all our modules in the Autumn once we’ve updated our teaching to take the latest research into account. So for now we’re preparing more general material to support you in your preparations for university. Here is what we have in store…

1. We’re sending out emails to all our Offer Holders with summer reading suggestions and tasks. These will be written by academics who hope to welcome you in the Autumn, and will be tailored to the programmes you’ve applied to.

2. We’re using #NCLReady on Twitter to signpost you to further free resources, interesting articles and more.

3. We’re planning some more blog posts – just like this one, but with even more content.

We’d love to hear how you find the tasks and resources so do let us know! Follow the blog. Follow our social media channels. Keep an eye on your emails. But most of all, keep safe and enjoy your summer.