English Single Honours vs. English TSM

Muggwoffin

Hey everyone. I currently have English with Spanish at the top of my CAO with English single honours as my second choice. The problem is, however, that I'm really caught over whether or not to stick single honours above TSM. I love Spanish, yet love English more, I wouldn't want to miss out on parts of the single honours course I would find interesting.

So what I'm really asking is; what are the advantages and dis-advantages to doing TSM English over Single Honours? I've went through the other thread and it didn't really answer my question plus the website doesn't quite differentiate between the two. Any help would be greatly appreciated

Curlyhatescurls

Hi, I have just finished first year in Single Honours English so I can't give you anything from the perspective of a TSM student. I can tell you though that you do 6 modules per term, if you did TSM you would only be doing three english modules. So you miss out on half of our course. Also, imo the TSM students always seem to miss out on the more fun and interesting modules, for example in first term we did 'The Novel', and 'The Gods in Literature' something which the TSM students didn't get to do, if you really love english and you want to take it seriously than you should really consider doing single honours. You can always do Spanish as part of the Broad Curriculum and take classes outside of college.

zam

If you start doing TSM and find that you want to switch, you can move from the TSM course into English before the end of October. And vice versa.

aas

http://www.tcd.ie/English/undergraduate/freshman/
http://www.tcd.ie/English/undergraduate/sophister/

Liquorice

Hello again Muggwoffin, hope you got the booklists.

I always knew English would be my minor, but even for TSMs who majored in English, they never felt like they were missing very much. The most important part of the course was learning the critical skills which could be applied across the board to all modules; except for cultural and historical ideas specific to a particular course there was little (not including the actual texts) you would learn in one than you could not learn in another. Indeed, you would probably be able to apply the general critical skills learned from English to your literary modules in Spanish.

The biggest difference between TSM and single honours (apart from total immersion I guess), and one which may be a deciding factor, is that you do very little poetry and drama in Freshman TSM, whereas there are (were?) dedicated modules in Freshman single honours.

aranciata

I'm very, very interested in the SH course. Where can I find the booklists?
Any help is much appreciated!

Curlyhatescurls

Oh yes, Liquorice is correct, we did a module called 'Stages of Theatre' which covered theatre over a broad range in history (from Greek tragedies up to anti-illusionist theatre) and another module completely dedicated to poetry (wide range of poems, the lectures focused on poetry types- villanelles, sonnets, free verse etc. The tutorials were so much fun, we talked about poetry and read it and got to do presentations on anything related to poetry, there were presentations on poems from Lord of the Rings, slam poetry etc, so interesting! The last few poetry lectures were actual poetry readings from our lecturers who are poets. These were my two favorite modules this year too!