Anyone studied Eng Lit with History?

[esor]

Hi, I think I may just have pre-uni jitters.

I have been accepted at uni for this September for English Literature course. Am returning to full time education after a very long stay away and have just completed or rather have nearly completed an Access to Higher Education course.

My question is that I have really enjoyed the history part of the course and my uni offers a course where you study lit with the historical background to put the text into context. Would i be diluting my English literature degree and would it be worth it? I have really enjoyed the variety of my access course and have studied seven different subjects and will I find it hard just to study one? I am not sure what I want to do at the end of the course, but English Literature has always been a passion but when I saw the course it really caught my interest.

I did English Literature. And I'll give you a word of caution. I loved my course, I really did. But it left me with a hell of a lot of free time, I htink I had 2 seminars and 2 lectures a week. And ultimately, it's a degree that qualifies you for everyhting and nothing.
If you're serious about going back to uni, would you consider a more vocational course? I was too young and optimistic(!) to think about my job prospects after graduation. It turns out, in the real world, my (very good) degree isn't worth the paper it's written on.
But that's the doom and gloom over. I woudl have found a history module really interesting actually, and I'd go for it, you can always change modules if you don't like it.

No do it - the history that is!!

I graduated last year (very mature student lol) and I did English and Creative Writing to start. Dropped the creative writing like a hot brick - what a load of cobblers that was. Nothing like you'd imagine.

I enjoyed the course mostly but it was the historical element that I absolutely loved. For example in my Shakespeare module I answered questions on the Elizabethan Theatres rather than any of the plays in my exam. We did Victorian Women writers, and again it was the historical aspects I loved - what life was like for Victorian women, same with Romantic poetry - loved all the stuff about the French Revolution etc. etc.

A lot on my course were doing English History joint, and I soooo wish I'd done it. I tried to switch when I dropped the Creative Writing, but unfortunately the lectures were all the wrong times for me - two kids, working etc. I'd worked my timetable around the English classes and it was too late.

If you have an interest in history (and tbh for me it was the most interesting part of the course) then go for it! I hate to say it but English lit degrees are filled up with a lot of tat. I ended up doing all kinds of weird modules - like theory - Roland Barthes, Kristeva and all that bollocks (sorry but I hated it), psychoanalysis (yep on an English degree - couldn't understand a word of it and barely scraped through), female subversiveness (sounds good, but it was rubbish). If there's any language element on your course (which may well be compulsory in the first year, unless you have a real aptitude for it, I'd avoid that as well when it comes to module choices, unless you want to learn all about adjective nouns and reflexive pronouns and all that stuff. Again, I hated it.

If I could go back with the knowledge I've got now there's no way I would have done an English lit single honours. For every module I enjoyed, there were two that I hated.

Just my experience I hasten to add, and yours may be completely different.

Good luck with it anyway!

Oh thank you both for such honest and informative replies. I found on this access course that some of the English Literature did bore me and I thought it was just the environment I was in. I have been to uni open day and I have seen some of the modules and there are some already on there that I know will render me bored stiff. Will contact uni tomorrow and see what I will have to do to switch. Thanks again

Just reading Hurley's post - it may be different from Uni to Uni, course to course, but as of last year ... if you're going full time then you'll have four lectures/seminars per week, so it's 8 hours contact time, but you'll get a hell of a lot of homework to do. On my degree we had a book to read for every module, so that was four books a week. You have to do four modules per semester - 8 per year, then your dissertation at the end.

Sometimes you can be lucky and have two of your choices on the same day, or if you're unlucky and they are all on different days, then you end up going into Uni four days a week which is a bit of a pain.

As for the reading - you have two assignments per term (either essay or exam for each module), so what I did was pick out the books I was going to write about at the beginning of the term, and I only read those. With my lifestyle it would have been impossible for me to read them all. It meant I had to blag it a bit in seminars (we once had a quiz on a book I hadn't read but other than that, it didn't have a detrimental effect and I managed to scrape a first by the skin of my teeth.

It's definitely worth it, despite the fact that you'll probably have a large workload. I'll be starting my final year next year and I have 42 books (primary lit.) to read.

In your first year, you'll probably have around 20 books to read, but having a historical (and probably social and political) perspective, will aid your understanding of the texts. Good luck