Film and English

Film and English are disciplines with a great deal to say to each other. Both are fundamentally concerned with how stories are told and what they mean, how form and content interact, and how works of art speak to their historical and cultural moments. English brings centuries of literary tradition, from early poetry through to the contemporary novel, and a set of critical tools developed over long engagement with written texts.

Film brings the visual, temporal, and auditory dimensions of moving image, along with questions specific to the screen: how editing creates meaning, how performance and cinematography work together, how genre shapes expectation and can be subverted.

At Southampton this part-time programme, which includes a year abroad as part of its structure, develops your ability to analyse writing from early poetry to the present-day novel alongside the skills needed to watch Hollywood blockbusters, European art cinema, and world cinema with a genuinely critical eye. You will learn to read literature and film in a range of new contexts, including performance, music, science, philosophy, and more, developing the interdisciplinary habits of mind that make the combination of these subjects particularly rich. The year abroad gives you the opportunity to study at a partner institution and engage with literature and film from a different cultural vantage point.

Throughout your studies you will develop skills in close reading, critical analysis, essay writing, and the ability to construct and defend interpretive arguments about complex texts and films. These capacities are among the most transferable that a humanities education can provide.

Graduates of film and English programmes move into careers in publishing, journalism, media, arts administration, education, screenwriting, research, and the cultural industries more broadly. Many also continue to postgraduate study in film, literature, creative writing, or media studies.