Critical Approaches 1

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

How do we go about reading and interpreting a literary text? What are we trying to do when we analyse a work of literature: are we trying to establish one correct interpretation? How do we decide that some interpretations are more valuable than others? Do we need to understand the original intentions of the author to understand what something means? Is it necessary to understand the historical or political situation from which a work emerged? Do readers interpret texts differently at different historical moments? Could our interpretations of texts be affected by forces beyond our control, forces such as the workings of language, unconscious desires, class, race, gender, sexuality or nationality? How is it that some texts, Shakespeare's plays, for instance, are highly valued by our culture, while others have been lost or devalued? Who or what decides which literature will survive to be read and studied on English modules?

This module will suggest some ways of answering these large and difficult questions about interpretation, and aims to make you think in new ways about the work you do for your English degree at Sussex. The module is divided up into five parts: two five-week lecture blocks in the autumn, and three four-week blocks in the spring. In the autumn you will study two themes: "The Author/Authority" and "The Word"; in the spring you will study "Class and Culture," "Desire and Pleasure," and "Difference." Throughout the module you will read critical and theoretical essays and literary works that contribute to your understanding of these themes. The module will examine many different aspects of literary theory including new criticism, Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis and queer theory. We will also ask you to reflect on the relationship between the theoretical reading and literature through simultaneously reading several literary texts.

Debates in Media Studies A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

If the emphasis in Introduction to Media Studies 1A and 1B was on how media matters in our social world, in this module the stress is on different theoretical approaches to the study of media and the debates circulating around those approaches. Media can be analysed as ritual, (global) industry, meaning-maker, technology, dreamworld, everyday life, work place, or sensual pleasure machine. Focus can switch from media production and organisation, to analysis of media output, to exploration of consumption and use, to the bigger issue of media in society.

In carving a way through this complexity the module will introduce you to a few key frameworks – for example political economy, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, feminist media theory – and alert you to how differences of approach have emerged depending on the specific medium or cultural form (radio, TV, cinema, internet, newspaper, advertising, music, etc). However, a repeated reference point for the module is the cultural output of media and methods analysis, especially modes of textual analysis.

Questioning the Media A

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces the study of media forms, texts and systems and their contribution to social life. You will begin to explore the breadth of media studies through attention to the ways in which media matter. In what ways, and how significant are the media in the formation of individual identities and in the practices of everyday life? In the more public world, to what extent are media key to providing knowledge and enabling the debate necessary to the practices of democracy? The module enables you to build on your own experiences of media as a consumer and user. But it also encourages critical attention to how the field of media studies has historically been forged: through argument and contestation between different academic approaches and disciplines.

The module ranges across media and genres, engaging with both contemporary and historical material. Topics may include: audience pleasure and identity; representations and power; development of different broadcasting systems; the social impact of the rise of digital media.

Key terms may include: pleasure, identity, representation, semiotics, power, ideology, hegemony, discourse and subject, public service, public sphere, news values, networks, cultural and political citizenship.

Reading Genre 1

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

How do texts locate themselves in literary conventions to develop their own expression and meaning? How do other media such as film transform literary genre? How does genre act to shape a text and a reader's understanding of it? How do we identify and understand genre?

These are some of the questions that we shall approach in these two interlinked modules by focusing on five genres: epic, comedy (in teaching block 1) lyric, tragedy, horror (in teaching block 2). In each instance we shall concentrate on either one or a small number of representative examples, allowing us to widen our understanding of genre while we deepen our acquaintance with key illustrations from it. These two modules may be taken in consort or independently of one another.

A crucial aspect of the module is to develop close reading skills, so seminars and lectures will combine larger ideas about genre (e.g. ideas of imitation; politics of genre; tragic theory) with detailed explorations of examples.

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.

News, Politics and Power A

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module explores media and politics and, more broadly, the media and questions of power. It focuses on current affairs with a stress on news; although other forms of factual content (for instance TV docudrama, web blogs, broadsheet lifestyle spin-offs) are also covered. This module considers the role media can play in producing our understanding of the globalizing world in which we live. It asks how media frames, organises, and contextualises events, both as they take place, and in relation to the collective memories that emerge after the event. It also asks how the media themselves are managed, manipulated, and influenced – variously by governments, media owners, professional newsrooms codes, and/or by public pressure.

You will examine the role the media play in relation to the citizen and the state. It is through the optic of citizenship, particularly in relation to the public sphere, that questions concerning the power of the media are addressed. You will also explore how a wide range of media contribute to the maintenance or erosion of a democratic society and an informed citizenship.

Advertising and Social Change A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

In the context of the rise of consumer culture and the expansion and proliferation of media systems, this module addresses the historical development of advertising. A key theoretical framing is provided by debates about the shift from modernity/fordism to post-modernity/post-fordism, about 'knowledge' industries and the emergence of a 'risk' society.

Themes explored include advertising's relation to social change and its exploration and contribution to social identities. Engaging with contemporary practices, the module also balances attention to how the industry perceives itself with critical perspectives of its place in society. Through case studies and examples, the module offers ways of approaching ad texts and the consumption of advertising as well as ways to understand the changing industry of the 21st century. It offers opportunity to address advertising in the UK and elsewhere.

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 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.

Sound, Culture & Society

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

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

TV: Fictions and Entertainments A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module focuses on the textual and contextual study of television's key fiction and entertainment genres – soap operas, sitcoms and other styles of comedy, game shows, lifestyle television, daytime television, and music television, among others. You will explore the defining generic characteristics of those televisual categories, their representational strategies, their ideological implications, their particular pleasures and their relationship with audiences. The primary focus will be on British television, although comparative material from other broadcasting contexts will be used where appropriate for comparative purposes. Most of the primary material will be drawn from current or recent television, but you will also investigate the history of popular television genres in order to understand their evolution.

English Research Colloquium

0 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 3

Capital Culture: Money, Commerce and Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Class and Popular Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

While constructions of gender, sexuality, 'race' and ethnicity in popular media and culture have been subjected to increasing academic scrutiny in the last decade or so, class has been largely left off the agenda. This module attempts to redress this neglect. It centres on theorisations of class in the cultural sphere, and on a series of debates over the representation of class in a range of examples from popular culture.

You will consider both strategies of 'othering' groups such as the working class and underclass, and also representations of the 'invisible', taken for granted norm of middle-class identity. Topics covered may include: emotions and class - shame, hate, and envy; news, television reality shows and television drama; and embodiment, education, aspiration and respectability.

Comedy and Cultural Belonging

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Comedy is, above all, a cultural form that invites its audiences to feel that they belong – to a social community, a class, a locality, a nation, a subculture, a gender, a sexual identity, an ethnic group, a community of interest, or a complex intersection of several of these. This module explores the relationship between comedy and belonging by considering a number of conceptual fields, such as: theories of the comedic; questions of identity formation; notions of representation and stereotyping; structures of power and resistance; the sexual politics of jokes; concepts of carnival and excess; the idea of a 'national sense of humour'; the use of comic strategies by 'minority' groups; the complexities of camp; and the role of class in cultural consumption. The initial focus would be on 20th-century British popular comedy, and the comic texts and practitioners studied might include Alan Bennett, Mike Leigh, Victoria Wood, the music hall tradition, the Ealing comedies, the Carry On films, Morecambe and Wise, The League of Gentlemen and The Royle Family.

Consuming Passions

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module explores consumption practices within specific cultural and historical contexts. It introduces you to processes through which objects are made sense of and appropriated by people in their everyday life. At the same time, the module explores consumption as a basic human activity through which people engage and understand their position in the world. It will locate historical and culture-specific consumption practices within wider processes of identity creation and social differentiation. Finally, consumption will be discussed in the context of the development of consumer cultures and globalisation.

Documentary, Reality TV and 'Real Lives'

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

During this documentary module you'll analyse documentary production in its historical and cultural context and focuses on new developments in documentary production, reality TV formats, feature documentary and alternative documentary production. In addition we'll address emerging documentary production in the developing world.

The module covers foundational thinking in documentary; theorisations of different modes of documentary; reality TV; debates over documentary's truth claims; the boundary between documentary and fiction; dramatisation and reconstructions; and international independent documentary production.

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'.

Globalisation and Communication

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module studies the role of the media (broadly understood to include all forms of telecommunications, the internet and computers, print and televisual journalism, and all forms of visual media) in the era of globalisation. You will investigate what the notion of globalisation actually refers to in various registers of discourse and theory, focusing on the relation between globalisation in the political-economic sense and globalisation in the cultural sense. The module then addresses the specific role of the various media in initiating, consolidating and sustaining both the idea and the practice of globalisation. It concludes by considering the merits and demerits of the process of globalisation in the arena of culture.

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.

Media, Publics and Protest

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Social media have been at the heart of recent forms of protest both at home and abroad. This module aims to enable you to develop a critical understanding of the relationship between media, publics and protest. It will provide you with a conceptual framework and historical contextualisation with which to approach a key question in media studies - the construction of publics and counterpublics, and the relationship of media to democracy and democratic practice. The module begins by introducing a set of theoretical approaches to thinking about the public sphere; in the latter part of the course, you will be enabled collectively and independently to identify and research particular case studies, whether that be the role media play in revolution or political transition, in protests, demonstrations, petitions or riots, in hacktivism or culture jamming, or in cultural forms like satire and alternative media.

Music, Media and Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module explores the relationship between music and media of all kinds, and questions the ideological structures underpinning the consumption of music in western society. The module focuses on the relationship between musical production and media technologies (the microphone, phonograph, radio and film), the changing role and place of music in society - understood through an analysis of media technologies, the meaning and nature of music and media reception in society, and the political economy of the music industry.

Queer Literatures

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Social Media and Critical Practice

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Social media has become the way of framing much internet and mobile media and the implications of this turn are important. We use social media platforms in our everyday life and they have become influential in journalism, promotional culture, education and across the media industries. However, their pervasiveness and significance goes unchallenged and largely celebrated through the language of participation, communication and freedom. This module aims to stand back from the everyday ubiquity of these forms to question and analyse them by using them critically and creatively.

The module examines a range of social media platforms by engaging and using them and by equipping students to critically analyse this. We look at the promise and perils of these new forms, the histories of their emergence, their institutional and structural shape and power, and the politics, economics, aesthetics and pleasures attached to them.

Students will engage social media platforms to create a small practical project and interrogate this engagement through an extended critique of use and practice.

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.

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