The MA in Literature, Film and Visual Culture is designed for the growing number of postgraduates with intellectual interests cutting across the disciplines of English, Media, Film and Image Studies. The programme explores the convergence between literature and visual culture from the late 18th century to the present, and addresses the theoretical as well as the historical interconnections between literary and visual representation. Through different approaches to the study of writing, image and visuality, individual course options encourage students to think flexibly across conceptual frameworks, and offer a fresh understanding of the theoretical exchanges between visual and textual analysis.

Programme Details
Full-time students take two optional courses in each of the first two terms (Autumn and Spring), before undertaking their dissertation in the Summer term. Each course is examined by a 5000-word term-paper; the dissertation (20,000 words in length and double-weighted) is submitted at the beginning of September.
Part-time students spread the MA over two years. They take one optional course at a time, in the Autumn and Spring terms. During the Summer term of their first year they undertake supervised reading towards their dissertation, and they work towards the dissertation, again under supervision, during the Summer term of their second year.
 

Psychoanalysis and the Image: Dr Vicky Lebeau

Beginning with Freud's encounters with hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital in the 1880s, this course turns to psychoanalysis - in particular, its approaches to wish and illusion, sexuality and shock - as a powerful way of thinking about the idea of the image, and the politics of vision, in contemporary cultural life. We will read a selection of texts in psychoanalysis - Freud, Lacan, Winnicott - that will help us to explore ideas of violence and spectacle, sexuality and power, identity and hatred; equally, students will be asked to engage with a selection of visual and literary texts that will enable us to reflect on psychoanalytic understandings of vision and visuality. Students will be encouraged to develop their skills in interdisciplinary textual analysis across the range of material covered on the course while having the opportunity to focus their study on psychoanalysis as a theory of culture and representation.

Photography and Fiction in the 20^th Century: Dr Elena Gualtieri

This course analyses the representations of photography offered by some major modernist texts, both critical/theoretical and literary. It is not a course on photography as such, but rather an exploration of the cultural meaning of photography in the first half of the twentieth century. Its aim is to analyse the ways in which modernist texts use photographs and photographic metaphors to articulate their problematic relationship to temporality, narrative and history. By concentrating on the photograph as a fictional or theoretical construct which is embedded in language, this course will therefore offer the opportunity to examine the question of how to 'read' photographs and to investigate the interaction between modernist language and photographic images.

Image and Text: Professor Lindsay Smith

Concentrating on the intersections between visual and verbal cultures in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this course works upon spaces between established disciplines. It explores the intricate and often complex inter-relationships of visual images and texts (poetry, non-fictional prose, and fiction). We begin with discourses of the sublime and the picturesque as explored in philosophical, literary and art historical discourses. Subsequent topics include: the discourse of the grotesque in John Ruskin and William Morris, Victorian poetry and scientific discourse, Pre-Raphaelitism and the agency of the eye, Victorian photography: history and theory, discourses of childhood in Victorian literature (Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, J.M. Barrie), discourses of childhood in Victorian painting and photography, and 'symbolism' and the 'supernatural.' We use visual material throughout, (largely painting and photography). An art historical background, though useful, is by no means necessary. 

Queer Visual Culture, 1969 to the Present: Dr John David Rhodes

This course examines the enormous energy and variety of visual art, filmmaking, propaganda, monuments, literature and other work produced by queer-identified artists and activists in the last forty years. The course begins with work produced after the Stonewall riots of 1969, a historical marker for the study of GLBTQ subjectivity, politics, and artistic practice. The course ranges across the visual culture of the early gay and lesbian political liberation movements, paying special attention to discourses of 'visibility' that so characterised these movements and their practices. Such discourses make clear the crucial link between queer identity and vision and visuality. The queer body's 'appearance' on the historical stage will, in this course, be taken seriously as just that: an appearance, or, in Jacques Ranciere's terms, a 'redistribution of the sensible'. From a study of the art, propaganda, and ephemera of the early gay and lesbian liberation movement, the course will move on to consider cinematic representations, museum and gallery-based artistic practice, graphic novels, performance art, the visual culture of the AIDS protest movement (ACT-UP) and AIDS memorialisation, queer experimental video, and other modes of production. Movements, artists, practitioners to be studied may include: Andy Warhol, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gilbert and George, Isaac Julien, David Wojnarowicz, Queer Nation, ACT-UP, Todd Haynes, Nayland Blake, Richard Hawkins, Lyle Ashton Harris, Su Friedrich, Sadie Benning, the Lesbian Avengers, the Radical Faeries, Kiki and Herb, Alison Bechdel, Guy Davenport, and others.

Postmodernism and Contemporary Literature: Professor Richard Murphy

The course will offer an advanced survey of postmodernism in contemporary US and European literature, including recent theoretical discussions surrounding postmodernism and the important continuities to modernism. In defining postmodernism the course will look also beyond literature and take into account the wider cultural context of contemporary film, art and visual culture, mapping out the interrelationships between realism, modernism and the avant-garde. This discussion will be broadened through an exploration of the recent theoretical work of Jameson, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Zizek, with the aim of exploring the usefulness of the term 'postmodernism' as a means of approaching contemporary literature generally.

The Visual Culture of Romanticism: Dr Sophie Thomas

The Romantic period (roughly 1780-1830) tends to fall outside, or rather before, the primary field of visual culture studies, since it predates the development of photography and the cinema. The period gave rise, however, to an extraordinary array of popular spectacles dependent on evolving visual technology. This course explores the visual culture of Romanticism first by investigating these developments and their impact on paradigms for viewing predominant in the late 18^th century. It also examines the relationship between the visual media of the period and the treatment of the visual in canonical Romantic texts by such writers as Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge and Shelley. Topics for discussion include popular spectacles, exhibitions, the theatre, travel, poetry about paintings, and poetry about the natural world. We address figurative as well as more literal interconnections between the visual and the imaginary. The material of the course is primarily literary, but there is scope for projects of an art historical nature.

NB: Not all courses can be offered each year. Please check with the programme convenor for updated information.

Alternative optional courses

With the approval of the Programme Convenor you may substitute other options for the above, from other MA programmes (such as Film Studies, Critical Theory, or the MA in Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change from MA in English Literature).

Summer term

During the summer term students work under supervision on a dissertation of up to 20,000 words on a topic they choose and agree with their supervisor. Part-time students are expected to begin background reading for the dissertation in their first summer term.

Assessment

The MA is assessed by a 5000 word term paper for each of the four courses, which is written in the vacation following the end of the course, together with the 20,000 word dissertation, which is submitted towards the end of the summer vacation.

Admission requirements

Students should have at least an upper second honours degree in a related discipline. Overseas applicants who apply after 31 March should submit a sample of their written work with their application.

MPhil and DPhil study

The University offers individual supervision leading to an MPhil or DPhil in English Literature.

Associated faculty and research interests

The following faculty are particularly associated with the programme:

Elena Gualtieri, Senior Lecturer in English, researches the relationship between writing and photography as one of the defining traits of modernist culture and of modernity more in general. Her publications include numerous articles on literature and photography, a study of the use of visual forms in Woolf's historiography, Virginia Woolf's Essays: Sketching the Past (London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin's, 2000), and an investigation of the artistic collaboration between the US photographer Paul Strand and the Italian writer and scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, Paul Strand Cesare Zavattini: Lettere e Immagini (Bologna: Bora, 2006). She is currently writing a book on photography and the philosophy of time in the works of Proust, Musil, Kracauer, Woolf, and other prominent modernist writers. E.Gualtieri@sussex.ac.uk.

Vicky Lebeau is Reader in English, and her research interests include psychoanalysis and visual culture, childhood, sexuality and representation. She has published widely on psychoanalysis and modern culture, including Lost Angels: psychoanalysis and cinema (1995), Psychoanalysis and cinema: play of shadows (2002) and Childhood and cinema (forthcoming 2007). Most recently, she has contributed to a number of journals and books on the topics of psychoanalysis, childhood and racism, including 'Another Child of Violence' in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (ed. Max Silverman) and 'The Unwelcome Child: Elizabeth Eckford and Hannah Arendt' in The Journal of Visual Culture. V.A.Lebeau@sussex.ac.uk.

Richard Murphy is Professor of Comparative Literature and Film, and holds the Chair in German. His research focuses on the interdisciplinary connections between literature, film and visual culture, particularly in the fields of modernism, postmodernism and the avant-garde. Recently he has published and lectured widely on a variety of topics including: Expressionism, literature and film in Weimar; modernist cinema; Dogme 95 and postmodern cinema; Reception aesthetics and film viewing; Zizek and the 'Post-theory' debates; Forked-tales and parallel narratives in film and literature; Dada, Duchamps and the avant-garde in contemporary culture; W.G.Sebald. He is the author of Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge UP, 1999). r.murphy@sussex.ac.uk.

Lindsay Smith is Professor of English and has research interests in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aesthetics, literature and visual culture. She is the author of Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry, and The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth-Century Photography. She is currently writing books on Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin. L.J.Smith@sussex.ac.uk.

Sophie Thomas, Senior Lecturer in English, researches the relationship between Romantic period literature and visual culture. She also works on critical and aesthetic theory, particularly in connection with the fragments, ruins, and museum collections. Her publications include numerous articles on these topics, and she is the author of Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (Routledge, 2008). S.H.L.Thomas@sussex.ac.uk.

Further information

For further information on the MA, MPhil or DPhil programmes, please contact the Programme Convenor, Sophie Thomas, email s.h.l.thomas@sussex.ac.uk, tel. +44 (0)1273 606755 ext. 2095