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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Adaptation: Filming Fiction

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

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 3

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'.

Hollywood Comedian Comedy

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

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 3

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

Race and Ethnicity in Popular Cinema 1

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Sexualities and the Cinema

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

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).

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 Musical

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

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 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.

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.

Viewing Women

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

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.

Ways of Seeing: Early Modern Drama and Visual Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3