Art on Site

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module provides you with the opportunity to learn how to make in-depth studies of objects, across historical time and about particular centres of production. The spring term lectures prepare you for field work to be undertaken as part of the module. This will includes grasping the first principles of the relations that develop between artists and their patrons, the relationship between artistic production and a particular geographical site and the way that meanings can evolve in particular places.

Methods and Approaches to Art History I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Visual culture embraces a wide range of issues and meanings. This module provides an introduction to the study of visual material and the different approaches that scholars have taken in undertaking research into visual culture. Centred on a common module document, the module includes study skills workshops providing instruction on how to use visual analysis effectively, how to read primary and secondary sources critically, and how to synthesise, summarise and reference accurately. The generic skills teaching will arise from the teaching of thematic topics and will consider a range of objects and spaces from a variety of periods and cultures. The module assumes a high level of IT literacy.

Stories of Art I

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module is a 10-week lecture-based module. It aims to introduce you to a wide range of works of visual art across time and across cultures, considering many different kinds of works of art – paintings, sculptures, architecture, prints, drawings, and the so-called decorative and applied arts – and acknowledging that such objects raise a wide range of questions that can be answered in many different ways. The module is based on the principle that there are stories of art, rather than one single story of art.

Stories of Art II

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Texts in Time 1

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

What is literature? How has it changed over time? What is the relationship between writing and the historical moment in which it was produced? How can we read texts to understand the ways in which they comment on and intervene in their particular cultural contexts? How do literary and other kinds of cultural artefacts enable us to reinterpret history and culture? How does the study of texts from other historical periods better enable us to understand our own? These are some of the questions which we will be exploring during the module.

Texts in Time 1 will introduce you to the study of many different kinds of texts - poetry, plays, letters, prose fiction, a novel, as well as visual texts - in their historical and cultural contexts. Following an introductory week, the module is divided into two blocks: the first focusing on the early modern period, and the second on the eighteenth century and Romantic period, from 1700-1820. Each week brings a new text or texts into consideration, but all are connected to the overarching theme of the module: 'Citizens and Strangers'.

Texts in Time 2

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

What is literature? How has it changed over time? What is the relationship between writing and the historical moment in which it was produced? How can we read texts to understand the ways in which they comment on and intervene in their particular cultural contexts? How do literary and other kinds of cultural artefacts enable us to reinterpret history and culture? How does the study of texts from other historical periods better enable us to understand our own? These are some of the questions which we will be exploring during the module.

Texts in Time 2 explores many different kinds of writing (poetry, autobiography, essays, novels) as well as visual texts (film, photography, the graphic novel) in their historical and cultural contexts. For those of you who have already taken Texts in Time 1, this module continues the chronological movement already begun on that module, but it can also be taken as a stand-alone module. Texts in Time 2 is divided into three blocks. The first block addresses texts from the nineteenth century, the second block focuses on 1922, a key moment in Modernism. The final block looks at contemporary writing and culture. Each week brings a new text or texts into consideration, but all are connected within each block to an overarching theme.

Art and the City

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Sites of Art follows on from Stories of Art. The module is concerned with the physical and social contexts for the production and consumption of works of visual art and is built around two geographical case studies, the city of Rome and our local region of Brighton and Sussex.

Methods and Approaches to Art History 2

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

The interrelationship between text and image is one of the critical issues in visual culture from classical antiquity to the present day. From Chinese calligraphy, which blurs the divide between painting and writing, and medieval manuscripts where pictures appear in margins of the text to contemporary advertisements that use graphics and photography, these connections have influenced our attitudes towards images and information. This module asks how objects as diverse as Chinese porcelain or a Dyson vacuum cleaner, a pair of jeans or a designer dress, acquire meaning and value, both in the past and in the present. It raises questions about materials and techniques: how things were made and what form affects how they look. This module takes one or a number of places and periods to explore the way text and image functioned in society and the different interdisciplinary approaches required to study the two together.

Creative Writing in the Renaissance

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module introduces you to education and writing in early modern England. Not only will you explore the ways in which students were taught at school and university in this period, but we will attempt to recreate life in the early modern classroom, with its emphasis on oral and written argument and the need for students to be able to learn the principles of imitation so that they could then reproduce the style and methods of the works they studied.

You will explore why early modern writers wrote as they did, and what we can learn from understanding how they produced their works. We will also consider how early modern students learned about the law, philosophy, oratory, and history alongside what we think of as literature.

The module will be assessed through a series of short written pieces which will include imitations of letters, speeches and poems, as well as an essay and an oral assessment in the last seminar in which we will attempt to reproduce a Renaissance oral examination.

Period in Art History: Art and Society: Art after 1945

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module examines developments in western art from 1945 to the present, placing them in a variety of social and cultural contexts. It begins with Pop Art and its relation to 1950s consumerism, before charting the rise of conceptual art practices in the context of 1960s counter-culture. It goes on to explore the emergence of post-modernism, and the challenge presented to a predominantly white, male, Eurocentric art establishment by identity politics and feminism in the 1980s. The module concludes by looking at `relational' art practices in the 1990s and 2000s, along with the rise of the art biennial.

Period in Art History: Dutch Art of the 17th Century

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines how the particular characteristics of the northern European schools of 17th-century art have been defined and argued about. The critical tradition has taken sides on a number of issues, namely how far an apparent attention to realism disguises complex meanings, whether religious painting was still important in a post-Reformation society, on the role of optical illusion, and on portraiture and landscape as evocations of the nation-state. All these issues are constantly referred back to a standard of quality and rules for debate set down elsewhere, in Renaissance Italy. The main body of material will be taken from 17th century Dutch painting, but with constant reference to the art of the Spanish Netherlands in order to examine how far the region to the south provided a conduit to the art and criticism of Italy and whether it makes sense to see the two countries as a cultural whole.

Period in Art History: From Picasso to Bacon: Painting and Sculpture 1920-1970

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

Period in Art History: Selling yourself: 18th Century Art and Society

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module considers the production of visual culture in the 18th century within its social contexts. Rather than simply looking at a list of artists, you will consider the visual arts against the backdrop of contemporary social and ideological issues: commerce and luxury, urbanization and the rise of industry, the impact of empire and colonialism.

The approach will be a thematic one, looking at topics such as the representation of labour, the image of the family, the cult of individualism, the representation of war, as well as the more conventional genres of portraiture, landscape or history painting. You will also relate the visual arts to 18th century literary culture: the rise of the novel, georgic and pastoral poetry, and developments in social philosophy.

Period in Art History:Palaces, Churches, Piazzas: Art and Society in Renaissance Italy

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, focusing particularly on its role in constructing and maintaining social relationships. It encompasses a range of Italian urban and courtly centres, exploring how distinctive regional contexts influenced the design, content and location of works of art. Investigating the networks of people involved in commissioning and creating art objects, it explores how viewers engaged with them in civic, sacred and domestic settings. The module considers the traditionally privileged 'art' of the Renaissance - painting and sculpture - in relation to luxury 'arts' - ceramics, glass, metalwork and textiles - to investigate the changing visual and material culture of Italy in this period. Finally, it addresses the term 'Renaissance', examining how this concept has been historically constructed and reinforced.

Period of Literature: 1500-1625

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

In this module you will examine literature from the reigns of Henry VIII to James I. The volume, variety and quality of writing produced in this period are astonishing. The 16th century saw the impact of an unprecedented expansion of England's capital city, which produced a thriving environment for professional writing, prompting the birth of commercial theatre in London and a flourishing book trade.

You will consider how literature came to be produced historically, looking at writing in its cultural setting with the help of visual texts such as paintings and architecture. You will address questions of literary history and theory, form and rhetoric within the network of institutions, practices and beliefs that constitute a culture as a whole. The module does not confine itself to major authors, but involves the consideration of appropriate themes and material drawn from various literary genres - drama, poetry and prose.

Topics explored include the rise of the commercial stage; sexualities and the transvestite stage; writing history; popular pamphlet culture; representations of the body; exploration and early colonialism; the sonnet; erotic writing; devotional writing; the city of London and money; religion; gender; death; representations of monarchy; the political stage; revenge tragedy; witchcraft and the birth of science.

Period of Literature: 1625-1750

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines the literary production of the period from the autocratic reign of the Stuart king Charles I to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. At its centre lies the regicide of Charles I in January 1649 - an event T. S. Eliot argued still divided British political society 300 years later. Even now it is a matter of some controversy to refer to the period between 1642 and 1649 as a rebellion or as the English Revolution, and between 1649 and 1660 as the Commonwealth or else as the Interregnum. However it is described, the extraordinary 125 years covered by this module have some claim to be the decisive period in the creation of what we think of as modern politics.

It is also a period of astonishing literary creativity. This is true both in terms of the volume, variety and quality of writing produced, and in terms of radical innovations in styles, in readerships, and in media. This module will include the study of a wide range of poetry, prose and play-texts. At the same time, it will involve trying to understand how this writing came to be produced historically. In particular, it will be concerned with the social life of texts, placing literary artifacts within the network of institutions, practices and beliefs that constitute a culture as a whole.

Period of Literature: 1750-1880

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

The module, taught in seminars supported by a weekly lecture series, will address a selection of authors and themes prominent between 1750 and 1880. The actual content will vary from year to year depending on the expertise of those available to teach it in any given year.

Authors to be studied will be selected from but not necessarily confined to: Johnson, Gray, Sterne, Goldsmith, Blake, Lewis, Austen, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, De Quincey, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Ruskin, Dickens, Gaskell, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, W.M. Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

Themes to be considered may includ sentimentalism and sensibility; slavery and empire; Romantic aesthetics and Romantic poetry; theories of the sublime and the imagination; the Gothic; responses to the French Revolution and the oppression of women; images of women; the condition of England question; progress and evolution; art and society; mind and spirit: the inner life; and culture in crisis

Period of Literature: 1860-1945

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

On this module you will study one of the truly momentous and troubling periods of British and world history. Imperialist conflict, the growth of nationalism, war, migration, feminism and the struggle for women's suffrage, the development of consumerism and of new forms of economic organisation, the emergence of anarchism, socialism, communism and fascism, the creation of the mass press, the radio and cinema: these are some of the contextual forces out of which emerged some of the most challenging, demanding, fascinating, rich and bewildering works of literature in English.

You will examine the links between modernity and modern/modernist literature in a range of texts, genres and authors. You will investigate notions of the avant-garde and the experimental in writing, and explore the ways in which literary texts participated in and responded to the revolutionary intellectual changes that marked this period, from Darwinism to psychoanalysis. Some of the topics we will investigate include: the consequences of science and technology (modernisation, urbanisation, sub-urbanisation); definitions and re-definitions of Englishness; the invention of traditions; the critique of modernity; the fate of liberalism; the impact of photography, the mass media and new forms of communication from the telephone to the motor car.

Primitivism at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Representation and the Body

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module will explore representations of the body in painting, photography and - in particular - in poetry, from the Renaissance to the modern period. It will focus on the interrelationships between the body and the poetic-text-as-body, the body and the political body, the body and power, the body and violence, the western and the non-western body, the body and disease, the body and gender, the body and the unconscious, the body and social and urban space, and the body and desire.

Topics covered include: the Renaissance body; body and science; the body and the foreign; the migrant body; Victorian poetry and photography; the body and the city; the body and modernism; the body and gender; the body, war, death and remembrance; and the body and fascism. While the focus of the module will be on English and American poetic texts, and European painting, film and photography, the module will have an interdisciplinary range, encouraging discussions about the relationship of the written word to the culture of images, icons and iconography. 

Sense and Sexuality: Women and Writing in the Eighteenth Century

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the representation of women and the construction of female sexuality and feeling in a wide range of 18th-century writing. Addressing fictional and non-fictional writing by both women and men in novels, medical works, advice books for women and erotic literature, the module explores contemporary debates about the place of women in society, (including personal conduct), and the place of sexuality (both socially-sanctioned and otherwise). A central concern will be attitudes to female feeling, from sexual passion to sensibility, and the ways in which feeling of various kinds enables conformity to, or critical interrogation of, a larger social and cultural order. Attention will also be paid to the relationship between bodies and passion, the social disciplining of feeling, and the relationship between emotion and gender. Your focus on literary works will be supplemented with a range of additional sources that will enable you to contextualise the novels and poems and link them into contemporary debates and attitudes.

 

Senses of the Self

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The module takes as its starting point a common assumption that one of the roots of modern identity lies in a reconfiguration of ideas concerning subjectivity and the self in the 16th and 17th centuries. This assumption has aroused a great deal of debate in recent years. The whole area of study has been renewed and transformed by the application of new theoretical approaches (from feminism, psychoanalysis, or textuality) to the study of the past and the interpenetration of the past in the present.

During the module you will study a broad range of texts (from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the 14th century to Swift's Gulliver's Travels in the 18th), in order to investigate changes in the construction of personal and sexual identity through history. The module contains both canonical and non-canonical texts, including some European authors studied in translation. Issues covered will range from philosophy to pornography, mythology to autobiography, and medicine to travel literature.

Staging the Renaissance: Shakespeare

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module considers a range of Shakespeare's plays (comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies and romances) from different stages of his career, analysing the playwright's stagecraft, his use of language, and his reworking of traditional forms for the
commercial stage. Although you will explore some recent adaptations for stage and screen, you wil focus particularly on the plays as produced in their original historical and cultural contexts.

The module will familiarise you with Renaissance drama's negotiation of contested social and political issues at the turn of the 17th century. You will investigate the social processes of the theatre - notably the playhouses used by Shakespeare's company (the Theatre, the Globe and Blackfriars) - and focus on the interplay of Shakespearean texts and their performance in the production of meaning.

The Novel

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the complex history of the novel as a form, from the 17th century to the modern period. The aim of the module is to describe the development of different traditions of novel writing, examine innovations to the novel as a form made since the 17th century, place the English novel in the context of the European novel, and introduce you to a range of important discussions about the novel as a genre, its audiences, its cultural functions and its relation to the social world. Novelists discussed will include Aphra Behn, Madame de Lafayette, Daniel Defoe, Johann Goethe, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. At the end of the module, you will be able to  understand and apply the concept of genre in literary analysis; think creatively and critically about the ways in which specific generic conventions have been used in the novels you are reading; and synthesise formal, cultural and historical levels of analysis.

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

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Travel, Landscape and the Imagination in Medieval Literature

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

English Research Colloquium

0 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 3

Art in Context: Art and Politics in Britain 1979-the present

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module examines the place of politics in recent British art. Starting with Thatcher's Britain, we will look at a number of critical art practices in the 1980s, including those associated with the New Colour Photography and Black Art movements. We will go on to address the self-professed entrepreneurialism of 'young British art' against the backdrop of Thatcherism and the recession of the early 1990s. We will explore the co-option of the young British artists (yBas) as part of New Labour mythology, and the impact of globalisation upon the perceived `Britishness' of British art. The module concludes with the re-emergence of political art in the past ten years, made in response to the Iraq War and to the current government's cuts to public spending.

Art in Context: A Great and Golden Age:Byzantium 843-1204

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module deals with art of the Byzantine Empire between 843 and 1204 AD, from the end of iconoclasm to the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. You will examine the role of images in Byzantium after iconoclasm and considers their use in both religious and secular contexts and in a variety of media. You will also be introduced to a range of Byzantine writings about art and explore Byzantine attitudes to their own artworks.

Art in Context: Inhuman Bondage: the Image of Slavery 1750-1850

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module will focus on the impact of slavery and the slave trade on western visual culture, until recently a subject little considered in art-historical scholarship. You will consider not only the iconography of slavery and the representation of enslaved Africans and slave plantations, but also how the ideologies of slavery infused the commercial society that was the context for artistic production, asking to what extent  art and aesthetics directly or indirectly were implicated in the slave trade. Of central concern will be the role of visual imagery in the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade in the late 18th century.

You will look at a wide variety of visual culture, not just works of 'fine' art, but also prints, textiles, applied and decorative arts, and furniture, to assess the significance of this conventionally overlooked, but important and problematic subject.

Art in Context: Michelangelo and Raphael: Art of the Papal Court in the 15th and 16th centuries

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

In Rome at the beginning of the 16th century Popes Julius II and Leo X, their courtiers and followers commissioned buildings, paintings and sculpture that politically argued the power of the Papacy and artistically sought to rival the achievements of the ancients.  You will examine some of the major projects of the time, looking at the intellectual rationale for these works and their relationship to the contemporary discoveries of the fabric of the ancient city.

Art in Context: Paris the Crucible of Modernism 1900-20

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module concentrates on a single decade in one centre of art production: Paris during the forging of Modernism. You will track the careers of particular artists, critics, composers and writers in detail and examine appropriate critical and analytical frames of references for them in relation to the social and cultural history of the period.

Among those figures who to be examined are Henri Matisse, Claude Debussy, George Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Andre Derain and Giorgio de Chirico.

Capital Culture: Money, Commerce and Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Global Subjects: Caribbean and Diaspora Fictions

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

On this module you explore Caribbean writing in the context of the long and diverse history of travel and migration that has been a defining feature of the region, from Columbus' arrival in the 'New World' in 1492 to the present day. The Caribbean is a region characterized by a violent and turbulent history; as the editors of Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture argue, "there is probably no other region in the world that has been so radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean."

The module will introduce you to the history that has made the Caribbean such a volatile and tensely-hybrid cultural context, including: white settlement, the decimation of indigenous peoples, enslavement of Africans, indentureship of Indians (and others) through to more recent migrations to Britain and North America. Focusing on a range of genres (poetry, novels, memoir, travel and music), the module will offer comparative readings of narratives of leave-taking, sea-crossings and arrival and the debates about identity, belonging, home and homeland that these generate. You will focus on the global networks, starting with the slave trade, that have connected the Caribbean to Europe, Africa and North America and will explore the cultural and historical continuities of economic exploitation of the region's natural resources (including gold, sugar, cocoa, coffee, sun-sea-sand and labour in the sex, service, culture and tourist industries).

The selected texts allow exploration of the traffic in ideas and culture that have travelled in these circuits of trade and have made Caribbean subjects appear innately cosmopolitan. The texts that this module focuses on suggest a longer history as well as a more fraught idea of the Caribbean subject as the archetypally 'global subject'.

Irish Writing after Joyce

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module follows some developments in anglophone Irish literature during the 20th century, paying particular attention to the influence of James Joyce on his contemporaries and on later writers. It concentrates on the ways in which Irish writing has been central to modernist and postcolonial projects. Topics may include parochialism, regionalism, bilingualism, neutrality, partition, sexuality, violence, commemoration and diaspora. You will discuss the emergence of distinctly Irish responses to the challenges of literary forms to 20th-century experience. You should gain an understanding of the development of literary culture in a small nation whose oral traditions and poetic traditions were established in an apparently vanishing language, while the majority of the people spoke and read English. You should learn enough about Irish history, politics and culture in the 20th century to provide an adequate context for understanding how writers such as Joyce, Bowen, Beckett, Heaney and Muldoon emerged from a culture both vexed and enriched by certain conflicts and heritages.

Islam, Literature and the 'West'

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

In both domestic and international contemporary politics, few issues are more urgent than the widely perceived clash between the ideologies of western European capitalism and Islamic radicalism. This module offers you the opportunity to examine in detail the shifting terms in which the encounter between a Christian west and an Islamic east has been conducted in predominantly English literatures, from the rhetoric of the early crusades to the present day. Covering a broad range of texts and genres, and including some journalism and film, emphasis will be placed upon: concepts of holy war; Islam on the early modern English stage; the emerging study of the ‘orient’ in the 17th century and the first English Qur’an; Enlightenment fantasies of the East and Muhammad; the romantics and the East; the Rushdie affair; and more recent developments of this encounter both before and after  11 September 2001.

 

 

Queer Literatures

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

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

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

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: Alfred Hitchcock

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module will examine the work of one of the most prolific and certainly the most prolifically written-about director in the history of cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, a director whose career spans the history of cinema in the twentieth century, and whose influence can be traced not only in other filmmaking practices, but also in literature, the visual arts, and cultural theory. "Hitchcockian" is a designation that is invoked with as much frequency as "Shakespearean" or "Jamesian"; the term suggests not only the style of a specific body of work, but also of the work it has influenced, in many media. Hitchcock has proved to be not only the most durably engrossing of filmmakers, but also the one through whose work successive waves of critical and theoretical thinking have articulated themselves. Hitchcock and his work are central not only to how we understand the history of cinema, but also the (overlapping and intertwined) histories of authorship and genre, writing, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Hitchcock is, thus, one of the great organising figures for the intellectual and aesthetic production of the twentieth century: it would be hard to think about the century without him. The module will offer you not only the chance to study, broadly and deeply, the work of one of the twentieth century's central authorial figures, but it will also allow you to deepen and complicate your interests in various critical and theoretical paradigms and methods. The module will move chronologically across Hitchcock's career, but will also be organised conceptually around a sequence of theoretical problems. The module will conclude by looking beyond Hitchcock's work to the problem of the 'Hitchcockian'.

Special Author: Christopher Marlowe

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Variously demonised and celebrated as an atheist, sodomite, spy, poetic innovator and dramatic phenomenon, ­ and violently killed at the age of 29, ­ Christopher Marlowe and his work still have the power in the twenty first century to shock and surprise .

This module offers the opportunity to explore Marlowe's extraordinary poetry and drama, from his remarkable debut on the professional stage with Tamburlaine, through his invention of the English history play with Edward II, to his development of Ovidian narrative verse and the lyric in English (and their erotic possibilities).

You will explore the career of this poet and playwright - this "most enigmatic genius of the English literary Renaissance" - paying particular attention to the contexts, content and form of his work.

Special Author: Dickens

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module will explore a range of Dickens's work from his early writing to his final uncompleted novel, and will include discussion of his journalism and short stories as well as the well-known novels. We will look at the development of his career as the most successful and popular novelist of his generation, who used his writing to investigate and actively participate in a wide range of contemporary issues and debates about society and the self between the 1830s and 1870. These include the nature of modern society - particularly the city - and the relationships between social classes and between the underworld and dominant forms of power; the family as both a social institution and a psychological space; the representation of childhood and femininity; notions of identity, and the relationship between 'normal' and 'abnormal', conscious and unconscious mental states.

We will explore Dickens use and transformation of particular genres and conventions - fairly tales, ghost stories, gothic fiction, detective fiction and grotesque and documentary realism - discussing how his shifting narrative forms and methods relate to the social and psychological themes of his work.

Special Author: Herman Melville

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Special Author: James Joyce

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Special Author: Jane Austen

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module approaches Austen's novels from three distinct perspectives. First, it contextualises them in terms of the 18th-century literature that Austen read, and frequently alludes to. (Likely authors include Cowper, Burney, Edgeworth and Radcliffe.) In addition, the module considers the impact of Austen's fiction on subsequent readers, evident most powerfully in the phenomenon of the Janeites. This module uses literary critical and popular cultural versions of Austen to reflect both on the evolution of Austen's canonical status, and on the part that fantasies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class have played in her reception. Finally, since Austen's novels have provided fodder for innumerable film versions, the module will examine the 'Austen' constructed for us by a selection of recent film and TV adaptations. Although Austen's fiction will be at the heart of the module, you will be expected to read a significant body of additional literature.

Special Author: John Ashbery

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

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 Author: Mary Wollstonecraft

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Special Author: Salman Rushdie

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Rushdie is a complex and challenging writer whose work not only intersects with, but actively influences and informs, a range of cultural and literary debates. Indeed, because his novels, stories and essays have consistently challenged the boundaries of culture, they have tended to generate polarised and often partisan critical responses. On this module, you will venture into the highly contested field of Rushdie criticism by evaluating his key literary texts using a variety of reading strategies and theoretical methodologies. For example, you will explore postmodernist debates on the construction of history and identity as well as postcolonial concerns with race, hybridity and political power. You will address core issues such as intertextuality, cinematic montage and narrative authority. And you will engage with wider cultural concerns relating to representation, performativity and documentation. These diverse critical perspectives will provide you with a sound knowledge of the social, cultural and political influences informing Rushdie’s work, and give you the analytical tools to develop your own lines of enquiry.

Special Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Special Author: Virginia Woolf

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module concentrates on the work of one of the best-known and most widely-read women writers of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf. Most students will already have encountered Woolf's work in your Year 2 modules; it is also very likely that you will come to the module with some knowledge of Woolf's life and that of her friends and family. This module will deepen your knowledge and understanding of Woolf's work, both in its historical context and in terms of the kind of conceptual and theoretical questions that her work raises. The module is designed to challenge what you think you already know about Woolf, and the kinds of preconceptions that readers often bring to Woolf and her work, and whether those are positive or negative. You think you may know who Virginia Woolf was, or what she wrote, but what about Virginia Stephen? What would happen if you stopped reading Woolf as a modernist and a woman writer? What other conceptual or historical frames could illuminate her work in new ways? What does Woolf have to do with the development of cinema, or the history of photography and the visual arts?

These are some of the questions that the module will address and encourage you to pursue through independent study. At the end of the module, you will: have read most of Woolf's novels and sampled some of her writing in other genres; have familiarised yourself with the history of the reception of that work; have learnt to challenge your own preconceptions about her work and its historical and conceptual contexts; and have learnt how to devise, structure, pursue and realise an independent research project, following detailed advice from your module tutor.

Spectacular Imaginings: Renaissance and Restoration Theatre

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module studies Renaissance and Restoration drama in its historical and sociocultural contexts. Organised thematically, it considers how political events such as the build up to the English civil wars, the revolution itself and then the restoration of the monarchy, impacted on the late 16th- and 17th-century stage. Among the topics explored will be unruly sexualities; violence and eloquence; political pornography; staging London; the court masque; and domestic tragedy. A selection of drama from the following playwrights will feature on the module: Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood, Ford, Massinger, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, Beaumont, Fletcher, Cary, Wycherley, and Behn.

Technologies of Capture: Photography and Nineteenth Century Literature

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

The Literatures of Africa

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module will sample the literary and intellectual work of a range of African authors.  Current debates about African identity, postcolonialism, homosexuality, the 'Black Atlantic' and African cultural history are studied alongside the primary texts, and emphasis is placed on the different political and cultural contexts of the material. We look at the ways in which the selected authors construct a locale in their texts to explore geographical and cultural difference, as well as questions of sexual, economic and political power. Other topics to be studied include nationalism and cultural identity; writing the body; oral cultures and art forms; cultural flows; representations of migration, displacement and diaspora; and the literature of post-Apartheid South Africa. Canonical novels from Africa, such as Ngugi wa Thiongo's The River Between and Bessie Head's A Question of Power are studied alongside poems and novels by new African writers and black British writers. Taken together, the authors on this module reveal the multiple, dynamic languages and styles of modern African writers.

The Uncanny

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

The uncanny is difficult to define: it is mysterious, eerie, at once strange and familiar. It offers especially productive possibilities for exploring issues of identity and liminality, boundaries and interdisciplinarity. This module will engage with the uncanny across a wide range of texts and contexts, from literature (novels, short stories, drama and poetry) to film. Discussion focuses on a number of linked topics, including repetition, doubles, strange coincidences, animism, live burial, telepathy, death and laughter. The module aims to develop your engagement with the notion of the uncanny across a broad range of texts; to develop your reading and critical analysis skills; and to enhance your capacity for critical reflection on your experience of the familiar and the strange, the ordinary and the extra-ordinary.

Topic in Art History: Architecture and Interiors

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module examines the relationship between changes in architectural style and practice, and the concept of the interior in the European and American world from the 15th century to the present. How are the concepts of outside and inside related through architecture and how does architecture organise the interior in particular ways? The module takes a historical and social path, but you will be encouraged to build on this through dissertation and presentation.

Topic in Art History: Art and Empire

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module consists of an in-depth consideration of the visual arts in relation to imperialism. It will thus pick up on Edward Said's important intervention in proposing a critical relation between 'culture and imperialism'. This module will look at the ways in which the visual arts were influenced and informed by the material processes and ideologies of empire – from imperial/colonial war to architectural settlement. It will consider not just how artists reacted, referred to and exploited empire in their work (by, for example, taking the opportunity to cultivate new markets in newly colonised territories), but how empire was represented to domestic audiences and informed visual and aesthetic dismodule.

Topic in Art History: Art and its Literary Context

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module takes an interdisciplinary perspective on the links between visual and literary imaginations. Depending on the tutor, the module may look at any one of a variety of periods from the medieval to the 21st century. A typical module may focus on the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, in one of the great capitals of Modernist experimentation - London. The presence of international artists and writers such as Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Ezra Pound and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska will be examined, as well as the distinctive developments in painting and writing around the Bloomsbury Group, the Vorticists, the Camden Town Group and the London Surrealists.

Topic in Art History: Commemorative Art

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module considers the visual culture of the death ritual and, in particular, examines how monumental art seeks to represent and sustain the memory of the deceased. The module moves freely between different cultures and periods, working towards the final dissertation and the assessed presentation, responding both to your individual interest and to the availability of primary and secondary material. In particular, you will be encouraged to consider the many and varied (but little-studied) resources in those subject areas which are available in local and national collections. The module starts with a consideration of a number of relevant theories: genres and hierarchies within art-historical discourse; the roles of mourning and commemoration within the contexts of theology and sociology; and, varied anthropological accounts. Case studies will include: war memorials and other public memorials; the church monument; the engraved headstone and other tomb-markers; monuments to princes and other rulers; mourning costume; the organising, representation and recording of funeral; coffins and their furniture; and cenotaphs and other empty tombs.

Topic in Art History: From Decorative Arts to Material Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module considers the traditional categorisations of the arts into 'fine' and 'decorative' and how this distinction has characterised scholarly approaches to them. Art history's recent engagement with methodologies from the field of material culture has revived interest in objects that had been relegated to the ranks of 'applied art', revealing original contexts and functions that had previously been overlooked. You will explore how the relationship between different art forms was conceived in the past, investigate the range of methods used by art historians to study art objects, and consider how these categories have informed their display in museums.

Topic in Art History: Photography in Context

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

The module provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the place of photography in American and Western European culture from the medium's invention in the 1830s to the present. It pays particular attention to the relationship between photography as art and its applications within mass culture. We consider the different contexts in which photographs are encountered and how these affect issues of status and meaning, along with the impact of technological changes upon the production and dissemination of photographic images. We also examine how historic photographic traditions have been extended and disrupted by more recent practices.

Topic in Art History: Representing Women

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module looks at attitudes to women as represented in art within an extended time period. It considers how concepts of gender and gender roles remain constant or change over time, and at how art and texts come together to form a composite picture of women's cultural status. It will also explore how feminist methodologies may or may not be of value in examining images.

Utopias and Dystopias

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module explores the production of utopian and dystopian fictions from the sixteenth century (Thomas More's publication in 1516 of Utopia) to the present day. It examines the production of utopian images and thought in a number of specific cultural and historical contexts. These include the sixteenth century context in which More originally developed the concept of utopia; the production in the eighteenth century of utopian and dystopian responses to the enlightenment (particularly those of Swift and Voltaire); the nineteenth century utopian tradition in the US (Hawthorne, Thoreau); the explosion of utopian thinking at the end of the nineteenth century (with writers such as Bellamy, Wells and Morris); the relationship between modernism and utopia (particularly in relation to Woolf and Kafka); the growth of dystopian responses to modernity in the nineteen thirties and forties (Orwell, Huxley); the importance of utopian thinking in relation to feminism, from Sarah Scott to Wollstonecraft to Shelley to Atwood; and the shifting role of utopian and dystopian thinking in marshalling the political possibilities of literature from the sixties to the present day (from Beckett to Cormac McCarthy).

Throughout this wide ranging module, we will focus closely on a number of central questions. How far is it possible for literary works to imagine a better or a perfect world? How far is it possible for such imaginings to effect actual social change? Are utopian fantasies politically regressive, an opiate to distract us from material social inequality? What is the role of dystopian thinking? Does dystopian fiction contradict utopian thought forms, or can dystopian writing produce utopian possibilities? What is the relationship between utopian thinking and hope? Is there a theological dimension to utopian thought? What is the relation between science and utopia? In addressing these questions, the module will offer a means of thinking broadly but rigorously about the role of literature in transforming social conditions, and making the world a better place.

Ways of Seeing: Early Modern Drama and Visual Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3