Bachelor of Arts - English Literature and Film Studies (Honours)

This joint degree studies storytelling across two media: literary texts and their traditions alongside film history, theory and screen aesthetics, with adaptation and narrative theory forming the natural bridge between them.

The comparative approach is intellectually productive — asking what prose can do that cinema cannot, and vice versa — and it produces graduates fluent in narrative analysis, which is the working currency of development, programming and cultural journalism.

Assessment spans literary essays, film analysis, comparative projects and a final dissertation that may sit on either side or deliberately bridge them, with five entry windows across September and January cycles recorded at the £16,800 arts-faculty fee.

Applicants should note this is an analytical pairing rather than a production one: students write about narrative rather than making it, which suits development, programming, criticism and teaching careers, and does not prepare anyone to operate a camera. That distinction matters because DMU offers production-badged alternatives elsewhere in this sheet, and choosing wrongly wastes three years. For those correctly placed here, script reading is the most accessible industry entry point — production companies pay readers to assess submissions and write coverage, work that literature-trained graduates do exceptionally well and that puts them inside the companies where development careers begin. Students should keep their strongest comparative essay as a writing sample, because development and programming applications routinely request one and generic coursework rarely impresses.

Graduates enter publishing, screen development, programming and content roles at £19,000–£24,000. The honours degree confers Graduate Route rights of 18 months under the rules applying to post-2026 applications, and taught study excludes dependants throughout the course.