Film Analysis: Hollywood Narrative and Style

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Film Analysis 1 explores the diverse uses to which filmmakers put such key techniques of cinematic expression as narrative, cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, sound, performance and special effects. You will explore not simply how such techniques are accomplished (ie the creative choices available to filmmakers) but also the potential they have for generating meaning and pleasure when combined together to produce filmic texts. The module is based around a series of reading assignments, which will be discussed in seminars along with the week's set film and extracts from other films. In particular, Film Analysis 1 examines one of the most influential and most pervasive models of cinema: the classical narrative film produced during the era of the Hollywood studio system (from approximately 1915 to 1960). You will consider several films from this era, as well as films produced subsequently, in the light of influential propositions by David Bordwell and other film scholars regarding the systematic organisation of stylistic and narrative norms within classical Hollywood storytelling.

Introduction to American Studies

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

What is American studies? What makes what we do American studies as opposed to just plain historical or literary studies? This module examines the history and development of the discipline and explores key debates using an archive of seminal essays by leading figures that highlight the key problems and developments in the field.

Issues to be discussed may include:

• an American 'tradition'
• interdisciplinarity
• popular culture
• American ethnicity and race
• masculinity and gender
• media
• environment
• America as 'global village'.

Issues in Film Studies 1B: European Film Cultures

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module is an introduction to the history and study of film and cinema. Through lectures, seminars and screenings, you will explore silent and sound cinema, the concept of mass culture, developing cinematic practices in different countries, and the aesthetic and institutional procedures of various film industries.

Issues in Film Studies 2: Global Film Cultures

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Building on Issues in Film Studies 2, this module continues to examine modes of film making and cinematic contexts from a range of national settings and historical moments. You will both expand your knowledge of different cinematic practices, and deepen your skills of textual and contextual analysis.

The Look of America

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module takes as its premise the notion that ever since the explosion of mass media and mass society in the industrial age, the United States has taken an increasingly dominant place in the global visual imagination. This process reached its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century, and since then America has generated for the world innumerable iconic and hegemonic visual representations of its own cultural narratives.

The task of this module will be to explore and deconstruct some of these visual representations, along with the ideologies and narratives that sustain and refract them. You will begin with an introduction to visual theory, especially as it applies to the American context, and acquire the critical tools necessary for the module. You will then locate the period under scrutiny within a broader visual and cultural 'prehistory', illuminating the roots of the modern world and its visual scene.

After this, you will concentrate on the culture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking a thematic approach, you will examine the issues that emerge over the module of the twentieth century, referring forwards and backwards in order to generate connections where appropriate. The intention here is to introduce you to aspects of visual culture and its criticism, as well as to defamiliarise and explore some of the more familiar American iconography surrounding us.

American Humour

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Humour is probably among the most approachable of ways to introduce first year students to core issues in American Studies, and one of the most telling. Jewish humour, for example, which clearly informs, say, the films of the Marx Brothers, Heller's Catch-22,or the TV comedy of Seinfeld, can teach us much about the history and culture of immigration and assimilation so integral to American identity. Likewise, African-American comedians from the 70s to the 90s exemplify a particular, 'signifying' tradition, in Henry Louis Gates' phrase, as well as providing comment on the politics of the day. Or we might view the relationship between American economy and culture - a grand narrative of the twentieth century - as dramatised in the Fordist dystopias of Chaplin, the Southern Gothic of Flannery O'Connor and the acceleration from post-war boom in Thomas Pynchon to the vision of Wall Street excess in Ellis' American Psycho. In all these cases, humour provides both spectator or readerly pleasure and a form in which a more covert critique takes place, making it an invaluable mode for you to experience and consider key cultural and historical questions.

Incorporating literature, film, TV, live performance and visual art, the module will thus address the social, political and philosophical issues each topic raises and the context from which it has sprung, from the 19th century 'Connecticut wits' to more recent 'gross-out' comedy. By way of materials, an on-line module reader will be made available to YOU composed of a number of readable essays on the theory of humour as well as selected essays more directly relating to each specific topic and/or work. Interdisciplinary in nature, the module will hence encourage you to investigate how ideas about humour can work with other texts to become forms of critical thinking: Bergson's notion of comedic automatism, for example, read alongside accounts of the factory system can illuminate Keaton or Chaplin's cinematic commentary on the fate of the American industrial worker. Through such connections, you will be introduced to influential writers like Bergson and Freud in an accesible fashion and find ways to apply and adapt their ideas in the wider cultural field.

American Identities

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

American Literature to 1890: Part I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module will introduce you to the major trends and texts of colonial America from the Iroquois Indians and Christopher Columbus through to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. These are not simply 'authors,' in the modern sense, writing 'great books' but diverse voices whose class, gender, race, nationality and religious persuasion influence the sense they make of America, and of themselves, in their writing. For example, some texts articulate ancient native traditions and myths without the benefit of a written tradition, while others are trying to come to terms in literary ways with experiences of migration to an unknown and wild place, captivity by the Indians, conflict, and slavery. Questions of national identity and the role that literature plays in constructing and communicating an 'American experience' are therefore central to the module.

We will look at the writing of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, beginning with Native American accounts of creation, the travel journals of Columbus, and an account of the conquest of the Aztec empire. American literature in this early period does not come in the usual forms of fiction, poetry, and drama that we are used to studying in European literature, nor is all of it written in English. We will be reading a variety of forms, such as Native American stories, accounts of conquest in South America and settlement in the English colonies, Puritan sermons, autobiography, political tracts, captivity narratives, poetry, and letterssome in translation, others in their original English. While these texts are not all recognisably what you might think of as 'literature,' they are the founding documents and genres of the Americas and their influence is felt in American culture to the present day.

American Literature to 1890: Part II

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

American Literature to 1890 II introduces you to the major trends and texts of a multi-ethnic America from Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper to Emily Dickinson and Henry James. These are not simply 'authors', in the modern sense, writing 'great books', but diverse voices constructed by class, gender, race, nationality and religious persuasion. Some texts articulate ancient native traditions and myths, others come to terms in writing with experiences of migration, captivity, conflict, and slavery. Central to the module are questions of national identity, and the role that literature plays in both constructing and communicating an 'American experience'.

Historical Controversy

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to the study of history through the critical reading of a key historical text. In this way you will gain an understanding of the complexity of the historical record and an appreciation for a range of problems associated with the interpretation of evidence. You will also be encouraged to think about the discipline of history and the nature of historical enquiry. Through a study of how historians have formulated and deployed their arguments, you will begin to learn to deploy ideas and to shape your own historical arguments.

Modern America

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The early years of the twenty-first century have witnessed the United States achieve unsurpassed global economic and cultural power. This module assesses the dramatic developments that have shaped the U.S. during the twentieth century, often described as the 'American century'. We will explore the transformations in American political and social life as the U.S. achieved economic supremacy, and extended this power on the world stage. As the nation increased its influence abroad, of course, it underwent a parallel series of turbulent changes at home. Hence we will also consider an America seen through the critical (and sometimes not-so-critical) lenses of writers, artists, commentators and filmmakers as they articulate the tensions and anxieties of modern U.S. life. The module addresses many social contradictions. The `Roaring Twenties, for example, was a period of consumerism and cultural experimentation that also gave rise to religious fundamentalism and Prohibition. Similarly, while the United States government in the 1950s was trying to `keep the world safe for democracy' in the face of communist expansion, it abused the constitutional liberties of its own citizens during the McCarthy witch-hunts. Although the country as a whole attained unprecedented levels of affluence in these years, poverty remained a persistent problem, and Americans continued to struggle with the repression of women, political dissidents and racial minorities. A crisis in American liberalism accompanied this proliferation of social and political protest, primarily due to American involvement in the Vietnam War. We will seek to understand how this war shaped protest politics, altered the relationship between Americans and the liberal state, and led to the Conservative resurgence in the 1980s. These events shattered the consensus belief in a modern America. We will evaluate what it then meant to live in a post-modern America, and how people adapted the conditions of post-modernity to cope with new and recurrent crises of difference, inequality, and insecurity. Through lectures that focus on the historical, literary and more broadly cultural aspects of the modern United States, you will learn to recognise the importance of cross- and interdisciplinary work as they pursue the dynamic relationship between cultural forms and social, political and economic realities.

Roots of America

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module provides a foundational survey of the history, literature, and culture of the United States (and the colonies which preceded it) to 1900. It begins with the Columbian encounter in 1492, when two worlds were brought into sharp conflict with each other and continues through English settlement and colonisation in the seventeenth century to growth, expansion and the articulation of a specific American identity by the middle of the eighteenth century. It assesses the creation of the American nation through war with Britain and through the imaginative construction of a new political relationship between people and government.

We will then proceeed to political and cultural formations in the nineteenth-century republic. You will focus on why the newly formed nation should ultimately falter on the issue of slavery and why the concept of the United States and the 'Union' became such contested terms. We will examine how contested visions of America's future and its 'manifest destiny' cohered and divided the citizenry, and ultimately ask, as Abraham Lincoln so aptly put it in 1855, 'can we, as a nation, continue together permanently--forever-half slave, and half free' Our attention subsequently turns to the mammoth transformations to American life unleashed by the Civil War and Reconstruction; events, historian James McPherson calls the 'Second American Revolution.' Among the many topics, we will examine the emergence of a modern activist central government committed, albeit temporarily, to constitutional protected civil rights; we will address how Americans, in both North and South, understood the meaning of Union and nation after the carnage of Civil War; and how industrialists, immigrants, and union activists attempted to shape and influence the rapid growth of American urban life in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Finally, we will consider the plight of black Americans as the promises of emancipation gave way to racial segregation in the South and the rise of the urban ghetto in the North.

You will be required to approach these topics from both a historical and a literary perspective, paying particular attention to formative texts - the writings of John Smith, John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton (among others) will be examined as a distinct American literary culture evolves in the nineteenth century. That culture--like all social values in the years preceding Civil War--would split in the North-South divide of the 1850s, but in the final lectures of the module, students will examine how literary works would ultimately bolster resurgent American nationalism in the decades following the War. You will also be encouraged to think about the imaginative formulation of American identity and American character through representations of such matters in film.

Film Theory

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines a range of different approaches to film studies including semiotics, narratology,psychoanalysis, reception studies in debate with spectatorship theory, post-modern theory and postcolonial theory.

American Cinema B

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

An awareness of how Hollywood cinema was shaped, how it acquired its position of dominance, and the forms and aesthetic conventions that characterise it, is essential to an understanding of cinema more generally. Accordingly, this module will focus on the formation of Hollywood in the 1910s through to the post-World War 2 era, with particular emphasis placed on the development of the 'studio system' and Hollywood's 'golden age' of the 1920s to 1950. You will view a range of representative Hollywood films made during the period and analyse them in relation to the industry and its practices. You will also situate Hollywood cinema within the political and social life of the United States in the period.

American Cities: New Orleans

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

American Cities: New York

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

From New Amsterdam to 9/11 and beyond, New York has always been iconic. We experience the Big Apple through the sounds and sights that came before us: the movies, the music, the literature, the songs. But what goes on behind these images of ceaseless activity and glamour? Now the hub of global finace, New York was also a haven for immigrants, with Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty sitting right there in its harbour. Because of its diversity of population and ever-changing urban development, we will in this module be looking at the city from many perspectives, and find that to study its history and culture is to discover that the city that never sleeps never ceases to pose questions either.

American Literature Since 1890: Part I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module will introduce significant and canonical texts by American writers produced since 1890 and throughout the first part of the twentieth century. By analysing the working of class, gender and race in these texts we will explore many of the social and cultural issues associated with the evolution of American modernity and American modernist aesthetics. We will observe the different ways in which writers tackle or avoid important economic and social questions of the period. We will examine how important socio-economic developments such as the rise of industrialisation and urbanisation, war, consumer culture, the question of women's rights and ideas of national identity shape the stylistic and thematic fabric of these works.

American Literature Since 1890: Part II

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module will introduce significant and canonical texts by American writers produced since 1945. By analysing the working of class, gender and race in these texts we will explore many of the social and cultural issues associated with the American modernity and American post-modernist aesthetics. We will observe the different ways in which writers tackle or avoid important economic and social questions of the period.

History Short Period: American History 1877-2000

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module probes the social, political and economic development of the United States since the end of Reconstruction. It is organised on a broadly chronological basis with primary stress on key topics such as the emergence of racial segregation in the South, the construction of a modern, industrial society, the emergence of the United States as a Great Power, progressive reform, the economic crisis of the 1930s, the American experience in World War II and the ensuing Cold War, the civil rights and New Left movements of the 1960s, and the concomitant rise of conservativism. Notable themes include the growth of federal power, the steady erosion of localism, the development of a corporate-dominated consumer society, the limitations of modern liberalism and the political influence of American religion. The module introduces you to landmark political change such as the failure of Populism and the changing Republican party constituency in the South as well as important legal rulings such as Brown v Board of Education and Roe v Wade. A close analysis of the New Deal, a transformational moment in twentieth-century US history, frames an extended assessment of the rise and fall of the so-called New Deal order. In addition the module familiarises you with critical historiographical debates over the role of American labour, the impact of war on American society and culture, and the growth of the imperial presidency. Although the focus is primarily on domestic events and structural trends, the United States' growing engagement with the wider world receives full attention.

Locating Cinema: British Cinema A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The module begins by examining critical approaches to a history of British cinema and the dominant ways in which this cinema and its characteristics have been understood. It then moves to an examination of British cinema from the 1920s to 1980, beginning with the factors which shaped it, in particular the debates about the social and cultural importance of a specifically British cinema against the background of the massive influence of Hollywood, and the representations of 'Britishness' that this produced. The later weeks of the module examine in more detail British cinema's attempts to deal with the various forms of 'otherness' that it has sought both to define and to contain in the changing cultural and political climate of the post-war years, and with the different 'British cinemas' that this produced.

Locating Cinema: Cuban Cinema A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module offers a historical, critical, and theoretical survey of Cuban cinema. You will look at the specific political, social, economic, technological, and aesthetic factors that have influenced the shape and character of imaging practices in Cuba since the arrival of cinematography on the island in 1897. Key topics may include: pre-classical (1897-1919) and classical eras (1920-1960) in Cuba, whose imaging practices are often ignored or overshadowed by the cinema of the Cuban Revolution; pre-revolutionary and revolutionary cinema, ; the 'other' island films, created by exiled Cubans; and films articulating the experience of the Cuban diaspora, particularly in terms of Cuban-North American culture. The module also addresses contemporary issues and practices in the shadow of profound technological, economic and political changes, including the co-productions of globalisation/digitalisation.

Locating Cinema: French Cinema A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module will examine a range of films produced in France from World War I to the present day. It will move between popular cinema and the art film and review a number of national styles and genres, such as the moment of the Nouvelle Vague (the New Wave) including Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard; the lyrical social documentary of Jean Vigo; policier detective dramas such as Pepe le Moko, the musical, including Jacque Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and the horror film Les Diaboliques. A series of directors will be studied, including Claude Chabrol, Rene Clair, Alain Resnais, Roger Vadim, Luis Bunuel, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Jean Luc Godard. There will be close readings of specified films, as well as an examination of them in terms of their larger social and cultural meanings.

Pulp Culture: American Popular Literature

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Popular literature is often overlooked in favour of what is considered more highbrow literary culture, yet an understanding of the cultural history of a nation necessitates an examination of what was popular as well as what became canonical.

This module enables an examination of a variety of mass-produced popular American literatures from the 18th and 19th centuries through to the 20th, from early magazines and comics, dime novels, Westerns and juvenile or sentimental literature, to 'hardboiled' crime fiction, self-help books and 'middlebrow' bestsellers of the 20th century. You will look at the relationship between 'high' and 'low' fiction, as well as examining how the mode of production affected the literature produced at the time. You will also explore both the writing styles that developed as well as the reception and cultural circulation of texts. Included in this will be a consideration of the way that issues of gender, class and race in America affected the discourses of the popular narratives that we will be looking at and how we can understand the society that they emerged from more fully as a result of looking at them.

Short Period: American History 1877-2000

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

The African American Experience

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines the rich history of African Americans in the United States, from 1863 to the present. One of your main objectives will be to contextualise and analyse the debates, disagreements, and downright fights that African Americans have had among themselves between emancipation and the beginnings of the modern Civil Rights Movement, thus establishing a deep historical understanding of the ongoing freedom struggle in the late 20th- and early 21st centuries.

You will critique arguments over the proper relationship of blacks to the US government, over racial and class identities, and over diverse tactics and strategies for the advancement of the race. In addition, the lectures will interrogate the connections between African American history and its broader, more diffuse, cultural mythology.  Full attention is given not only to well-known black leaders - such as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King - but also to less celebrated figures such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker.

Time and Place: 1861: The Coming of the American Civil War

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Transatlantic Rhetoric: Public Speech and Anglo-American Writing 1750-1900

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

American Mandatory Year Abroad - American Studies

120 credits
Undergraduate academic year, Year 3

Adaptation: Filming Fiction

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

This module examines film adaptations of fiction from the silent period to the present day. A diverse range of film texts will be considered, along with critical and theoretical perspectives on adaptation, authorship and intertextuality. The module focuses on film adaptations of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century novels, short stories and picture books, including works by Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Mann, Raymond Carver and Maurice Sendak. We will consider the significance of the idea of fidelity for the reception and theorisation of film adaptation. The module will approach adaptation as both an industrial mode of commercial production and a creative mode of critical interpretation. Cinematic strategies deployed to reproduce literary devices will be analysed in order to think about adaptation's value for theories of medium specificity. The module will also examine the politics of cross-cultural adaptation by looking at Indian and African films based on European source texts. Directors studied during the course include: Roger Corman, David Lean, Max Ophuls, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Claire Denis and Spike Jonze.

Alternative Cinemas

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

America in the 21st Century

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

American Culture and Consumption

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Documentary America: Non-Fiction Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

The study of American fiction often precludes an examination of some of the best writing and forms of self-representation that America has produced: political and photo-essays, social science publications, journalism, reportage, and documentary films. On this module you examine the development of iconic non-fictional literature and other forms of visual representation (such as film and photography) from the 19th and 20th centuries.

You will look at the style, content and circulation of non-fictional forms and examine their relationship within wider discourses of cultural, social and political representation in America. You will also consider the ways that these forms intersect with the development of modernist and postmodernist literature in the US more broadly. For this module you will have to read from a broad selection of materials that do not necessarily fit into conventional literary genres, and you will be watching a number of realist and neo-realist American documentaries. You will analyse why writers and artists have chosen to represent events in the way that they do and the wider cultural impact of those forms.

History Special Dissertation

30 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 4

Hollywood Comedian Comedy

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

Comedian-comedy has been one of the most persistent genres of popular Hollywood cinema since the silent era, but until recently it has received little serious critical attention. This module will consider a range of individual performers and the diverse historical, cinematic and extra-cinematic contexts in which they worked. Drawing upon a range of critical and theoretical paradigms, the module will examine the key fictional and extra-fictional features of the genre; the relations between performance, gags and narrative; the shifting relationships between comedy in film and other media (such as vaudeville and television); and the representation of class, gender, ethnicity and race. Films studied may include comedies featuring such performers as Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Jerry Lewis, Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy.

Hollywood Industry and Imaginary

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Immigrant America

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

Race and Ethnicity in Popular Cinema 1

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Recent American Writing

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

The period spanning the late twentieth century to the present has been a rich one for American writing and has seen the emergence of many types of experimentalism and indeed conservatism, at times subsumed under the rubric of the "postmodern." This module explores a range of texts from the mid-80s to the contemporary period to examine how writers have responded to the challenge of America's recent history - its various emergencies and crises, from the consequences of the Vietnam War, the end of Fordist economics, shifts in global migrancy, to the attacks of 9/11 and beyond. It asks whether the label "postmodern" - developed as a concept over the same period - is helpful to describe the ways in which writers have managed literature's traditional concerns with class, gender, ethnicity, capital, the family, the past. It also examines diasporic and "peripheral" literatures like those of the Caribbean as American-ness becomes an increasingly dominant and hegemonic shaper of cultural identity. America's relation to the wider "globalized" world is considered too. All these questions are addressed through close readings and appropriate theoretical commentaries.

Sexualities and the Cinema

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

This module centres on the critical study of sexualities and how they are represented in a range of film texts. Through screenings, seminars and self directed study, you will consider in detail and depth, the ways in which sexualities have been both theorised and represented in film. Debates considered in the module may include: the politics of sexual identification; the idea of sexual 'perversity'; sexual stereotyping (especially of lesbians and gays); and the critical concept of 'queer' in theory, identity politics and cinematic genre (queer cinema).

Single Author Study

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

In addition to studying primary texts by your chosen author, you will be expected to use appropriate critical and theoretical material. There will be a series of individual and group sessions across the Spring term leading to the completion of a lengthy self-directed dissertation on the chosen author.

Special Author(s): Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and the Postcolonial Caribbean

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

This module introduces you to the literature of the Caribbean and its diaspora and to some key cultural debates in Caribbean, postcolonial and feminist literary discourses through reading the work of Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid, two of the most prominent women writers from the Caribbean. The module addresses issues such as race and literary constructions of the nation; authenticity, orality and questions of voice; gender, sexuality and resistance; home and belonging; servants and madams; life writing; reception and literary reputations; questions of literary belonging and cultural identity; and writing and authorship after colonialism. The selection of texts includes: Jean Rhys's, Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark, Tigers Are Better Looking, and Smile Please and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, Mr Potter, and Talk Story.

Special Author: Herman Melville

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Special Author: John Ashbery

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Starting with American poet John Ashbery's first book 'Some Trees' and working our way through Ashbery's major experiments in form ('The Tennis Court Oath', collaborative books including 'The Vermont Notebook' and 'A Nest Of Ninnies', and his epic 'Flow Chart'), participants in this module will learn not just a great deal about Ashbery's poetry, but about the post-war American avant-garde more generally speaking. Our understanding of Ashbery's work will be informed by reading into his central role in Abstract Expressionism (as art critic for 'Art News', as collaborator with relevant artists, and as a writer who produced a number of important poetic ekphrases); his friendship and collaborations with Beat Generation figures; his exchanges with Pop Art and the Warhol scene; his engagement with experimental cinema practitioners; and, more recently, his emergence as an important voice in queer writing.

Along the way, module participants will delight in Ashbery's complex blend of dismodules that embrace the narrative, the "personal," the metaphysical, and even mystical. We will focus lovingly on individual lines and stanzas of Ashbery's poetry. We will make measured assessments of the poet's work as generally brilliant if at times problematic. We will refuse (for the most part) to adhere to any one of the 'party lines' we associate with Ashbery criticism, even as we learn from them. By the end of the module, we will understand the historical and literary contexts of Ashbery's work, as we will be motivated to return to his poetry anew, curious, and alert.

Special Subject: The American Civil War in Historical Memory

30 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 4

The ongoing Sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War in the United States highlights the continuing capacity of that sanguinary conflict to generate controversy in the present. This module provides you with a detailed examination of the war's impact on generations of Americans since 1865. It focuses specifically on the construction of southern white, African American and official unionist memories of the Civil War. These three key strains of historical memory evolved in the late nineteenth century under the press of postbellum reconciliation between North and South and the concomitant growth of a segregated society. They took a variety forms, notably the potent and profoundly racist 'Lost Cause' memory of the Confederate cause which underpinned the Jim Crow South for more than half a century, a marginalised African-American 'counter-memory' which sought to keep alive remembrance of emancipation and black military service in the armed forces of the United States, and an official national memory which depicted the Civil War as a tragic brothers' war which nevertheless had the effect of unifying and strengthening the United States in preparation for its emergence on the world stage as a Great Power.

The module will focus on the impersonal social and economic forces at work in the construction of these distinctive and frequently intertwined memories as well as the inherently political activities of different groups involved in the memory-making process. These groups include southern white women who founded the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the veterans themselves who contributed significantly to sectional reconciliation, novelists, poets and historians of all kinds, filmmakers and dramatists, and politicians with a wide range of vested interests. The module will introduce you to a broad range of illustrative 'texts' in order to familiarise you with the diverse manifestations of Civil War memory -- not only writings by Ulysses S. Grant, Carl Sandburg, and Douglas Southall Freeman but also monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, movies like Gone With the Wind and Glory, and commemorative events including the ill-fated centennial of the 1960s which was moulded by both the Cold War and the modern civil rights movement.

In many respects the module functions as a detailed case study in historical memory, a concept of growing interest to historians and one that has already generated a rich secondary literature. You will be encouraged to engage closely with this broader literature in order to make cross-national comparisons and to apply at least a modicum of theory to the primary and secondary texts at their disposal.

Special Subject: The Civil Rights Movement

30 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 4

You will assess the triumphs and tragedies of the movement for racial equality in the United States during the decades that followed the Second World War. You will begin by looking at the broader societal forces that created the context for the movement, including the decline of the agricultural economy of the American South, the migration of millions of African Americans from rural to urban communities, and the impact of the Second World War. You will analyse the movement from the perspective not only of its leaders but also grassroots activists and evaluate the intellectual and institutional forces that shaped movement activism, especially the role of Christianity. In assessing the civil rights conflicts of the post-war decades, you will also study the ideology and tactics of white racists who opposed reform.

You will learn how the domestic struggle for civil rights was based in a broader global framework and assess how international events impacted on American race relations. One of the narrative threads woven throughout the module is the influence, both positive and negative, of the Cold War on the black freedom struggle. In the short term, the rise of domestic anti-communism had an adverse effect on civil rights protest since white supremacists used popular fears of political subversion to accuse movement activists of being 'un-American'. Nonetheless, in the longer term Cold War politics impelled positive change. You will also study the influence of other international forces such as the decolonisation of African and Asian nations and the emergence of the United Nations.

Through your study of the civil rights movement, you will address a number of issues that relate to your broader critical understanding of history. In addition to sharpening your ability to engage with historiographical debate, you will tackle such issues as political agency, the strengths and limitations of state power, and the commemoration of controversial events in collective historical memory. You will also be encouraged to hone your skills in the interpretation of a wide range of primary sources, including speeches, publicity material and newsreel footage. You will have access to the extensive electronic primary sources available through the university library, including the Chicago Defender and African American Newspapers Collection.

The Musical

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

This module will examine the musical, tracing the hegemonic Hollywood genre to its roots in European vaudeville, cabaret culture, stage musicals and operas. It will also explore musicals that may seek to defy or respond to Hollywoodcentric, Eurocentric and heterosexist conceptions of genre. The module is divided into two sections. The first section will analyse the Hollywood musical of the studio era, by examining both the stylistic features and historical context of some of its different sub-genres; the show/backstage musical, the fairy tale musical and the folk musical. It may also explore the diverse ways in which the studio era musical as entertainment may work ideologically in relation to issues of race, ethnicity and sexuality.

The second section of the module will focus on the musical as it has developed beyond Hollywood (and beyond the conceptual framework of Hollywood). Topics may include; the subcultural musical, the animated musical (arguably, the most common form of the contemporary musical in both its mainstream (Disney) and counter mainstream forms (South Park)) and may conclude with a consideration of the future of the musical in terms of gender, age and physicality.

The United States in the World: in-depth Analysis

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 4

As the 21st century begins, the United States is still the world's only superpower: no other nation possesses comparable military and economic power or has interests that reach the entire globe. To understand the place and power of the US in the contemporary world, it is vital to understand how its geopolitical strategies function, militarily and economically. Yet because US power is also secured through cultural and discursive strategies, it is equally important to analyse how US cultural/discursive products and processes participate in the construction of the US in all the varied ways it imagines itself. The aim of this module is to analyse how US cultural/discursive strategies participate in imagining the US in the world, either by being embedded within traditional geopolitical strategies or by sitting alongside them. Rather than taking an historical approach, the module is organised around specific theoretical and cultural/discursive themes and practices. These include architectural theory and the building of embassies abroad, design theory and designing the nation through everyday objects, film theory and screening the nation through popular film, remediation theory and virtually remediating the nation, entertainmentality theory and exhibiting the nation in museums, performance/performativity theory and re-enacting the nation though historical re-enactments as well as song, and advertising theory and advertising the nation to US citizens. Along the way, significant foreign and domestic policy debates from Cold War politics to the War on Terror to the US domestic War on Illegal Immigration will be considered through political, cultural, and discursive theories (eg Said's notion of orientalism, Foucault's notion of governmentality, Butler's notion of performativity, and Ranciere's notion of the birth of the nation).

Viewing Women

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 4

Early work on the relation of women to film considered woman's 'to-be-looked-at-ness', examining representations of women as objects of the male gaze, constructions 'cut to the measure of [male] desire' (Laura Mulvey). You will consider the female spectator, positioned by particular film and television genres (melodrama, the 'woman's film', and soap opera). More recently, attention has shifted to women as social audiences and producers of meanings, differing from one another and constructing from texts their own meanings and pleasures. This module traces these developing and interacting strands of research, considering questions around the location of meaning, the relationship between text and context, and the usefulness of different strands of feminist research in enabling us to understand film texts and their representations and positioning of women. It considers a range of popular and feminist film texts and their viewers.