English Discipline Courses
Year 2 – Semester 1
English Discipline Courses
Year 2
SEMESTER 1
Double Units
ENGL2005 ROMANTICISM
Semester 1
2 Units
Co-ordinator: Dr Stephen Bygrave
CP value: 30
ECTS value: 15
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Aims and Objectives: This course is an introduction to Romanticism and to
Romantic writing in Britain. It introduces you to a range of fictional, poetic, and
other texts from a period - roughly 1780-1830 - often described as 'Romantic',
developing your ability to interpret these texts in the light of their specific
contexts. The course examines how revolution can be written about, the
effects of the making of a reading public, the extension of authorship to
women and working-class writers, a separation of cultural from political power,
the fetishisation of poetry and the figure of the poet in Romantic aesthetics.
We will examine Romanticism as a cultural phenomenon, asking whether
'Romanticism' in other fields and in other countries can be said to be the
'same' phenomenon as within British writing, whether this is an adequate
description of those writings, and whether 'Romantic ideology' persists into the
present.
Content: We will study canonical Romantic poems by Coleridge, Wordsworth
and Byron, as well as poems by women and by working-class writers, De
Quincey's visionary prose, and two novels: Jane Austen's Persuasion, and
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Learning and Teaching Methods: Texts are taught in roughly chronological
order, broadly alternating sessions on poetry and prose. Lectures provide a
critical and historical context for the detailed discussion of individual texts to
take place in seminars. You will have one double-length lecture and one
double-length seminar per week, except for Weeks 6 and 12, which are set
aside for individual consultations and feedback on essays.
Method of Assessment: The course is assessed by an essay of 3000 words,
a 3000-word course journal edited from entries you have made in preparation
for each class and concentrating on how your response to particular texts
developed as the course progressed (37.5% each), and a final two-hour exam
(25%).
Set texts:
Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology, third edition (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), ISBN: 1405120851£19.99
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Jane Austen, Persuasion (Penguin or World's Classics)
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other
Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818 text, ed. Marilyn Butler (World's Classics 019-282283-7)
ENGL2008 INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING
Semester 1
2 Units
Co-ordinator: To be confirmed
CP Value: 30
ECTS value: 15
Available as an Alternative Subject if spaces are available.
This unit will introduce the practice of 'creative' writing through a study of the
compositional requirements of the contemporary short story. This is very
much a practice-based unit that requires lots of writing, although you will also
be expected to read as widely as possible in contemporary short fiction.
Seminars will be run as workshops: you will be expected to bring along your
own writing and discuss it with the group. It is not necessary to have written
fiction before. We will refer to The Creative Writing Coursebook, ed. Julia Bell
and Paul Magrs, and an anthology of short fiction.
ENGL2010 POSTCOLONIAL TEXTS AND CONTEXTS
Semester 1
2 units
Co-ordinator: Dr. Sujala Singh
CP Value: 30
ECTS Value 15
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes, if space available
Pre-requisite: none
Aims and Objectives: This course introduces you to postcolonial literatures
from Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent. It provides an
introduction to literatures categorised as "other" or "marginal," while
encouraging you to think of the problematic ways in which norms and centres
get defined and instituted. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the course
will encourage you to think of the politics of reading and writing and your own
investment in interpreting literatures of "difference."
Content: The course will set up key debates within postcolonial studies
through the works of theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Edward
Said, Mary Louise Pratt and Edward Kamau Braithwaite among others. These
discussions will provide a framework for reading fiction by writers such as
Sam Selvon, J.M. Coetzee, Maryse Conde, Amitav Ghosh and Erna Brodber.
Learning and Teaching Methods: The course consists of a double lecture
and a double seminar each week. The lectures will set up the historical and
theoretical frameworks crucial for an understanding of the literary text
prescribed for the week. Seminar discussions will then focus on detailed
readings of postcolonial literatures in relation to literary criteria such as genre
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Year 2 – Semester 1
and style, but also the importance of where one reads from and how this
influences the "value" of what one reads.
Method of Assessment: two 3000-word essays, equally weighted at 37.5%,
and one exam (25%) .
ENGL2051 MODERNISM
Semester 1
2 units
Co-ordinator: To be confirmed
CP Value: 30
ECTS Value 15
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes, if space available
Pre-requisite: none
This course will provide an introduction to modernism in literature, examining
the racial and sexual politics of the modernist cultural project. It is a paradox
of literary modernism that the radical innovation and iconoclasm of many
modernist writers was accompanied by a reactionary masculinist (and in some
cases explicitly fascist) politics. Writers referred to in this context (although not
necessarily as part of the set reading) include T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence,
Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. Those writers that countered
this fascist potential within modernism include Franz Kafka, James Joyce,
Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf and these will also be
explored in terms of an alternative libertarian potential within modernism
which countered the fascism of many of its exponents.
Primary texts may include
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
W.B. Yeats, Selected Poetry
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own (1938 and 1929)
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
Battleship Potemkin (dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
Suggested background reading
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (1990)
Robert Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the
Myths of Ezra Pound (1988)
Peter Childs, Modernism (2000)
Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
(1987)
Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (1984)
Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (1985)
Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism (1990)
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Marilyn Reizbaum, James Joyce's Judaic Other (1999)
Christopher Ricks, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988)
Ronald Taylor (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics (1977)
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English Discipline Courses
Year 2 – Semester 1
Year 2
SEMESTER 1
Single Units
ENGL2011 WOMEN, WRITING AND MODERNITY IN BRITAIN 1790-1865
1 Unit | Semester 1
Co-ordinator: Professor Emma Clery
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Aims and Objectives: The course will ask students to consider the
articulation of modernity across and within literary genres as they address the
changing definitions of gender and sexuality, of sensibility and sentiment, of
social hierarchy and race, of marriage, family, nation, public and private,
consumption and production. The course will show how these issues are
related to wider aesthetic shifts, and it will suggest that debates about
subjectivity in women's writing offered not only progressive but also
conservative versions of modernity.
Content: The course provides an opportunity to learn about a particularly vital
and tumultuous period in the history of women's writing and of women's
engagement in the shaping of the modern world. It encompasses the agitation
against slavery, the response to the French Revolution, and to the prolonged
period of war that followed. Throughout, women took a prominent role and it
was in part their assumption of a public voice during these critical debates that
generated the ideas leading to modern feminism, most famously put forward
by Mary Wollstonecraft.
Learning and Teaching methods: One lecture and one seminar per week.
Knowledge and understanding will be developed through your attendance at
lectures, your independent study, and your involvement in seminars. Informal
presentations will allow you to enhance your oral communication skills, to
work as part of a team, and to obtain feedback from the group and the tutor.
Seminar and small group discussions will promote intellectual skills, such as
detailed critical analysis of texts and more wide-ranging consideration of
literary genres, political issues, and theoretical concepts. Assessment in the
form of two essays is designed to encourage you to focus on improving
writing skills, close reading, and the construction of arguments, with
opportunities for discussing essay plans and obtaining feedback. A visit to the
Chawton Library and Study Centre will lead to an understanding of the broad
context of research in women's writing and the use of scholarly archives.
Method of Assessment: 2x2000-word essays, equally weighted.
Reading list:
Primary Texts include: Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of
Femininity, ed. Vivien Jones (London: Routledge, 1990); Romantic Women
Poets: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) OR
Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell,
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Year 2 – Semester 1
2005); Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) ed.
Carol H. Poston (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988); Amelia Opie, Adeline
Mowbray, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L. Johnson, Norton
Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).
ENGL2018 IMAGES OF KNIGHTHOOD
1 Unit | Semester 1
Convenor: Dr Bella Millett
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes, if spare places available
Pre-requisite: none
Aims and Objectives: to introduce you to a wide variety of representations
(both medieval and later) of the knightly ideal; to give you an understanding of
its historical development; and to increase your awareness of the complex
interaction between genre and historical context in the representation of this
ideal.
Content: The course examines a variety of literary (in the broadest sense)
and cinematic representations of chivalry, from the Norman Conquest to the
21st century; its main focus, however, is on the medieval period, with
particular emphasis on C14-C15 Middle English literature. It examines the
ways in which representations of knighthood are modified by the specific
social and cultural context of the works which contain them; and also looks at
some later re-readings, and re-writings, of medieval representations of
knighthood, and the way in which these too are determined by their cultural
and historical context.
Learning and teaching methods: 1 lecture and one seminar per week, with
additional material on video / DVD. These will be backed up by the course
website, http://www.knighthood.soton.ac.uk/, which is linked to a Blackboard
site used mainly for announcements and course documentation; email (via
Blackboard) will be used to answer student queries, for feedback, and for
circulating regular seminar agendas. The lectures will concentrate on the
broader historical and cultural background of the works discussed; the
seminars will analyse them in detail. One lecture will be replaced by extended
individual feedback sessions on your first essay.
Method of assessment: 2 x 2,000-word essays.
Basic reading: The Song of Roland, tr. Glyn Burgess (Penguin Classics); Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. and trans. W. R. J. Barron (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1974); Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d'Arthur, ed. Helen
Cooper (Oxford UP). For the genuinely poverty-stricken, there are multiple
copies of the first two in the Library (though you may have to share them).
The standard account of the knightly ideal, which you are strongly
recommended -- though not required -- to buy, is Maurice Keen's Chivalry
(Yale University Press). Other texts will be available as photocopies or
through the course website.
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ENGL2029 Drama since WWII
Semester 1
1 Unit
Co-ordinator: Dr Julie Campbell
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Aims and Objectives: The aim of this unit is to give you an understanding of
the dramatic forms and techniques, the performance issues and the socialhistorical contexts of selected examples of modern drama. The unit will also
aim to ensure that you are given the opportunities to acquire the skills
necessary to discuss, research and produce a sustained written analysis of
the above issues. The unit is intended to introduce you to a range of drama,
for stage, TV and film, since the second world war, and to cover major trends
in drama and performance during the period.
Content: The unit begins with two important plays from the post-war period,
both from the realist tradition (Roots and All My Sons). These are both
political plays of very different kinds, and will be compared to the very different
political plays, Top Girls and One for the Road, which both have non-realist
and realist elements. All four plays have a political focus, but are different in
form and effect. Play and Not I are examples of Beckett’s non-realist drama
taken to an even more minimalist degree than his earlier work such as Godot
and Endgame. Albee and Mamet are interesting figures in their relation to
European dramatists, such as Beckett and Pinter; Potter can be described as
the leading TV playwright of the 60s and 70s, while Leigh ranged through
stage and TV, but is now best known for his film work.
Learning and Teaching: The unit will be taught by lecture and seminar;
there will be screenings of the films/TV plays and adaptations. There will also
be a workshop in which we will explore certain acting theories in practice,
Methods of Assessment: there will be two 2,000 word essays (50% each).
Primary texts:
Arthur Miller, All My Sons (1948)
Arnold Wesker, Roots (1959)
Edward Albee, The Zoo Story (1959)
Samuel Beckett, Play (1964), FILM: dir. Anthony Minghella (2000)
Dennis Potter, Brimstone and Treacle (1976), TV play
Samuel Beckett, Not I (1972), stage/TV/film.
Caryl Churchill, Top Girls (1982)
Harold Pinter, One for the Road (1984), stage/TV
David Mamet, American Buffalo (1975), FILM: dir. Michael Corrente (1996)
FILM: Secrets and Lies, dir. Mike Leigh (1996)
Secondary reading:
Bentley, E. The Theory of the Modern Stage (1968)
Brandt, George W. Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on
Drama and Theatre (1999)
Innes, C. Avant garde Theatre: 1892-1992 (1993)
--, Modern British Drama: 1890-1990 (1992)
Styan, J. L. Drama, Stage and Audience (1975)
--, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice Vol 1: Realism and
Naturalism (1981)
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ENGL2034
Title: Themes in Mid-19th –Century American Literature
Semester 1
1 unit
Coordinator: Dr Barry Sloan
CP Value: 15
ECTS Value: 7.5
Available as an alternative subject: Yes, subject to availability.
Aims: You will examine how a selection of key American writers represented
their country, its people and some of the major issues of the day in prose and
poetry published between c1840 and 1884. The unit offers a coherent
introduction to the literature of a particular period and culture, and seeks to set
this within the intellectual and socio-political climate of the time. You will
examine how writers were influenced by and responding to such factors as
their puritan descent, the democratic ideals of the United States,
transcendentalist thought, the issue of slavery, and the impact of the
American Civil War. You will also consider how the literature of these years
has come to be understood as distinctively American.
Learning Outcomes: By the end of your study, you should be aware of a
number of major intellectual, social and political issues which contributed to
the formation of American literature in the mid-nineteenth century. You will be
familiar with selected works by a number of major writers of the period, with
some of the ways in which they relayed their perceptions of America and its
peoples, and with the tensions and divisions which threatened American
idealism. You will also have examined a range of modern critical responses to
the work you have studied in detail.
Learning and Teaching Methods: Lectures will be used to introduce the
individual texts/ writers and the key themes of the unit indicated in the aims
above. In seminars, you will have the chance to focus on and discuss
particular aspects of or specific examples from the set texts and to consider
how certain themes and preoccupations are developed across the period.
There will be a strong emphasis on student participation and contribution.
Method of Assessment: You will do two essays each of two thousand words
chosen from a selection of titles. Each will contribute 50% to the overall
assessment. One of the essays will be on the work of an individual writer,
whereas in the other you will be required to deal with work by two writers,
excluding the subject of your first assignment.
Set Texts: Subject to final confirmation, the set texts will be: RW Emerson,
Self-Reliance and Other Essays; HD Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and other
Essays; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Walt Whitman, a selection
from Leaves of Grass; Herman Melville, Bartleby and Benito Cereno; Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Emily Dickinson, a selection of her
poetry; Henry James, The Europeans; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn.
A useful introduction and background to the unit may be found in the relevant
chapters of Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury’s From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (1991).
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ENGL2046 TERROR AND RESISTANCE IN AFRICAN LITERATURE AND
CULTURE
Semester 1
1 unit
Convenor: Dr Stephen Morton
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as alternative subject: yes (subject to availability of space)
Aims and objectives: This course aims to introduce you to the social,
political and aesthetic dimensions of a range of literary and cultural texts
produced in Africa before and after the period of European colonialism. By
addressing the meanings of terror and resistance in different African contexts,
the course will enable you to identify how formal, stylistic and conceptual
developments in African literature relate to the history of decolonisation and
national independence struggles in the postcolonial world.
Content: With reference to the critical thought of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon,
Achille Mbembe, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, the course will invite you to
examine how a violent system of colonialism was represented in the fiction of
Joseph Conrad, Rider Haggard and Olive Schreiner. The course will then
consider how writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, J.M.
Coetzee, Tsistsi Dangarembga and filmmakers such as Gillo Pontecorvo have
subsequently developed aesthetic and narrative strategies that interrogate
such forms of representation.
Methods of assessment: one 1500-word journal and one 2500-word essay.
ENGLNEW1 Drama and Society in the Age of Shakespeare
Semester 1
1 unit
Convenor: To be confirmed
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as alternative subject: yes (subject to availability of space)
Brief summary of the content of the unit:
12 early modern plays; related critical and historical literature. The content can
be divided into 'primary' literature consisting of plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare,
Dekker, Webster and anonymous playwrights and secondary literature
consisting of critical accounts of these plays together with accounts of their
historical contexts and theories of early modern drama and culture. Students
will be provided with an up to date reading list of material which will be
augmented by additional material which becomes available as the course
proceeds.
The aims of this unit are to:
 Develop your skills in reading early modern dramatic texts
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

Develop your understanding of the historical and cultural context
in which these plays were written
Develop your skills in writing analytical essays about early
modern texts and their contexts.
Having successfully completed the unit, you will be able to demonstrate
knowledge and understanding of:
 The theatrical constituents of early modern drama
 The theatrical context of early modern drama
 The nature of early modern dramatic genres

The scholarly debates over the audience for early modern
theatre

The interpretative models for analysing early modern drama
Having successfully completed the unit, you will also be able to:
 Write an introduction to an early modern play
 Write an analysis of a group of early modern plays in relation to
thematic and cultural questions
 Analyse the theatrical effects of early modern plays
 Understand early modern dramatic language
 Understand the importance of genre and convention in analysing
early modern play texts
 Offer a critique of secondary literature on early modern drama
ENGLNEW2 Twentieth-Century American Drama
Semester 1
1 Unit
Co-ordinator: Dr Julie Campbell
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Aims and Objectives: We will study plays by major dramatists of the period,
and consider in what ways their work is distinctively American, as well as
exploring European influences on their work. We will be considered drama for
the stage and television, as well as film. We will explore the social and
historical context, as well as the dramatic form and effect of each text. Issues
such as the idea of modern tragedy, the American Dream, revising American
mythology, gender and homosexuality will be explored.
Content: We will begin with plays by Glaspell and O’Neill, two very important
figures in terms of the creation of a ‘serious’ American theatre; Miller and
Williams consolidated the status of theatre, and can both be seen to be
attempting, as did O’Neill, to create a specifically American version of modern
tragic drama. Albee and Mamet are two dramatists who showed a real
interest in European dramatists, such as Beckett and Pinter, alongside
O’Neill, Miller and Williams, creating a very modern and at times shocking
new dramatic style. Kushner brought the issue of AIDs to the stage;
Jarmusch revised the western film, while Mendes, as a British theatre director,
tackled the American Dream from a new and fresh perspective. Haas’s The
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Music of Chance is a film adaptation of the Paul Auster novel of that name,
and can be discussed in terms of the success of the adaptation, as well as
how well it stands alone, and the issues it raises concerning alienation,
freedom and the desire to belong.
Learning and Teaching Methods: The unit will consist of a weekly lecture
and seminar. Students will be expected to give at least one unassessed
presentation in a seminar in addition to assessed work. There will be some
screenings of films, and film and TV adaptations.
Method of Assessment: Two 2,000 word essays (50% each).
Primary Texts:
Susan Glaspell, Trifles (1916)
Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape (1921)
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949)
Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)
David Mamet, The Shawl (1985), TV play
Tony Kushner, Angels in America (1992)
FILM: Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch (1995)
FILM: The Music of Chance, dir. Philip Haas, 1993)
FILM: American Beauty, dir. Sam Mendes (1999)
Secondary Reading:
Gerald Berkowitz, American drama of the Twentieth Century. London:
Longman,
1992.
Christopher Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American
Drama,
2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, 3.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
FILM2006 INTRODUCTION TO FILM STUDIES
Semester 1
1 Unit
Co-ordinators:
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Rationale: This lecture only course is designed for students who are not
enrolled on the combined honours Film Studies degree. It is a co-requisite
course for further study on film courses in years 2 and 3. (This course can be
taken at the same time as a second-year film course with a FILM code) The
course introduces you to the basic principles of film form, narrative, style and
methodologies of film criticism. It does this by focusing on what is generally
called the 'classical' mode of filmmaking, popular Hollywood cinema from
1930-1960. The emphasis on this period in the history of Hollywood provides
a foundation for the study of more specialised units which take as their basis
the debates and issues raised by the significant influence of Hollywood forms
and styles of filmmaking.
Aims and objectives: The course will focus on films that were produced by
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the Hollywood system between 1930 and 1960 but will also reference films
from other national institutions and movements. As well as giving you the
confidence and language needed to read a film, this course will also introduce
the key issues and debates of film history and theory. Whilst the main aim of
the course is to develop a language for film analysis, the films screened will
also be studied as intriguing and important texts in their own right.
As stated above, the first five weeks will be concerned with the basics of film
language and techniques of textual analysis. The following weeks will focus
on issues of representation and genre, authorship, stars, spectatorship and
audiences. Throughout the course important issues of film theory and history
will be threaded through our work.
Assessment: This is a lecture-only course and requires significant selfdirected work. The first five weeks of the course is concerned with the
language of film analysis. Each of these five weeks will cover a basic element
of narrative film (i.e. narrative, editing, cinematography, mise en scène, sound
and editing) You will be examined by a course journal (2000 words) which will
constitute 50% of your final mark. The journal will consist of a commentary on
each week's topic and a sample analysis of a scene in one film. The second
part of the course will cover the salient theories in Film Studies (ie genre,
authorship, spectatorship and reception) You will be required to write one
2000- word essay incorporating your skills of film text analysis and your
understanding of one or more of these theories. This will constitute 50% of
your final mark. Essay Questions for this second assignment will be available
in week 2 so that you may begin exploring possible options.
Essay deadlines: Journal (2000 words) week 7; Essay (2000 words) week
12 (equally weighted at 50%).
Screenings: We will screen one film per week and in most weeks we have
included a second film that you are required to view in your own time. These
are available in the Avenue campus for viewing. Some students buy their own
copies or rent them from video shops such as Blockbuster or Videotheque in
Bedford Place (look in the 'Classics' section). You are encouraged to watch
and critically analyse as many films from the period outside of those screened
on the course as possible, and to bring examples from your wider viewing into
class discussion and your essay writing. This will give you a better feel for the
changes, and anomalies in style and production in this crucial period in
Hollywood cinema history. Channel Four and BBC often run films from this
period, so keep an eye on the schedules. There is also a range of these films
in the Avenue campus available for viewing. This kind of 'viewing around'
allows you to practise skills fostered by the course itself.
Preliminary reading:
Basic texts:
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: an Introduction (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1993).
Pam Cook (ed.), The Cinema Book (London: BFI, 1985).
These texts will form the basic reading for the course as a whole. You are
strongly advised to invest in your own copy of both of them.
Other readings are taken from a variety of sources, and are available in the
Short Loan Avenue Campus Library (either on shelves, or in Mike Hammond's
tutor box: only a few copies of articles allowed in tutor boxes, so get hold of
them early!). Most are chosen from these basic texts:
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David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (Routledge, 1985)
John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, TV, Video (Routledge, 1993)
Richard Maltby and Ian Craven, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995)
Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, Leo Braudy (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings (Oxford: OUP, 1992)
Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, vol. 2 (University of California Press,
1985).
A clear and useful glossary/keywords book is:
John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, The Oxford Guide to Film Studies
(Oxford: OUP, 1998).
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Year 2
SEMESTER 2
Double Units
ENGL2007 ON READING: THE READER IN C20 AMERICAN LITERATURE
Semester 2
2 units
Co-ordinator: Dr Nicky Marsh
CP Value: 30
ECTS Value: 15
Available as Alternative Subject: yes, subject to availability of spaces.
Aims: This course examines C20 American literature by foregrounding
controversies about the meaning of reading. It establishes the central
theoretical and cultural debates around reading that have been popularized in
the last twenty years, and then seeks to suggest the ways in which these
paradigms have developed more recently as new models of reading have
begun to emerge. The course will build upon the level 1 courses Narrative and
Culture and Critical Theory and will also prepare studentes for the other
American literature and theory courses in level 2 and 3.
Content: the first four weeks of the course examine the central theoretical
concepts for studying reading, and examines some of the seminal novels of
twentieth-century American literature through them. Weeks 6, 7, and 8
explore the development of American cultural studies, exploring debates
around resistant and complicit readings, the importance and formation of
community, the role of political identity in reading. These weeks will also
examine how the assumptions in both cultural studies and identity politics
have developed in recent decades through the influence of queer theory and
by new models of consumption and reception. The final weeks of the course
are concerned with exploring the innovatory models of reading and practice
developed in contemporary poetics. This will include an analysis of the
physical text and the new reading models demanded by the growing e-poetry
phenomenon.
Learning and Teaching Methods: A double lecture and double seminar
weekly. The seminars will involve both small- and large-group work and
presentations. Seminar discussions will also be supported by an electronic
discussion list.
Methods of assessment: 1 x critical comprehension (25%), 1 x 2-hour exam
(25%), 1 x 4k essay (50%).
Preliminary reading:
James, Henry, The Aspern Papers
Wright, Richard, Native Son, 1940 (London: Vintage, new edn. 2000)
It would also be a good idea to look at the following theoretical texts, although
all specific essays will be supplied in a course handbook:
Bennet, Andrew, ed., Readers and Reading (London/New York: Longman,
1995)
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Year 2 – Semester 2
Mailloux, Steven, Interpretative Conventions: The Reader in the Study of
American Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1982)
Mills, Sara, Gendering the Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1994)
ENGL2009 SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORIES AND COMEDIES
Co-ordinator: To be confirmed
Semester 2 | Unit value 2 | CP value 30 | ECTS value 15
Aims and objectives: To study two groups of Shakespeare's plays in terms
of their genres, combining detailed analytical reading of the texts with an
awareness of their cultural and historical contexts, and a critique of those
contexts from our (inevitably) contemporary point of view.
Content: A selection of texts in each group will be considered, the concern
being depth rather than comprehensiveness. Students will need to study
these texts in considerable detail, while at the same time building up general
cultural contexts within which to understand them. With the comedies, some
attention will be paid to how comedy as a genre was theorised from classical
antiquity to the Renaissance. Major questions raised by Shakespearian
comedy, such as those of social identity, sexuality, and gender relations will
be considered, in plays such as The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and
The Taming of the Shrew. The history plays will be studied in relation to
questions posed about the nature of ‘history', especially to debates about the
meaning of the historical process dramatised within the plays themselves,
most notably the sequence running from Richard II to Henry V. Links such as
the comic dimension in the history plays will be explored.
Learning and teaching methods: Each week there will be a double lecture
and a double seminar period. The lectures will suggest general contexts in
which the plays can be viewed, and demonstrate ways of analysing the texts
and of identifying important issues within them - work which will be carried
much further by students in the seminar discussions. Both lectures and
seminars will be punctuated by extracts from productions on video, used to
raise questions of interpretation. Interpretative skills will be tested in 1000
word analytical exercises based on specific texts, preceding the longer essays
focused on wider topics and groups of plays.
Method of assessment: 2 x 1000 word exercises, 2 x 2000 word essays, 2hour exam.
ENGLNEW3 THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
Semester 2
2 units
Co-ordinator: tbc
CP Value: 30
ECTS Value: 15
Available as Alternative Subject: yes, subject to availability of spaces.
Pre-requisite: none
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Aims and objectives: This unit will study the novels of the Victorian period.
We will explore diverse genres of the novel, including the ‘condition of
England’ novel of the 1840s, the realist fiction of George Eliot, sensation
fiction and the development of detective fiction in the late nineteenth-century.
We will think about the ways Victorian novels are plotted, and the impact of
changing ideas about development and progress. We will also consider the
changing conditions of production of the novel and its relationship to
journalism and popular culture. Overarching themes will include the novel and
the city, subjectivity, class and social conflict, gender, and empire.
Content: Students will read a range of nineteenth-century texts including
novels by Dickens, Gaskell, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Wilkie
Collins and Conan Doyle as well as selected contextual materials. This course
will involve reading VERY long novels so you are advised to read as much as
you can over the vacation.
Learning and teaching methods: One double-length lecture and one
double-length seminar. The lectures will outline the social, political, and
cultural context in which the texts under discussion were published, and
detailed discussion of the texts will take place in seminars.
Methods of assessment: 2 x 1000 word exercises (25%), 2 x 2000 word
essays (50%), 2-hour exam (25%)
ENGLNEW4 WRITING & CULTURE IN POST-WAR BRITAIN
Semester 2
2 units
Co-ordinator: Professor Clare Hanson
CP Value: 30
ECTS Value: 15
Available as Alternative Subject: yes, subject to availability of spaces.
Post-war Writing
This unit will examine literature of the period 1945-1970, a period which has
often been neglected, falling as it does between the ‘moments’ of Modernism
and Post-modernism. This was a period of considerable social upheaval in
Britain, particularly in relation to issues of class (with increased social mobility
through education) and of race (with post-war immigration and emigration,
from and to the ex-colonies). It was also the period of the Cold War and of
advances in science and technology which included the development of evermore sophisticated nuclear weapons. In this unit we will consider the ways in
which literary texts participated in the (re)construction of the cultural horizons
of the period. We will focus on two key texts of cultural commentary, Michael
Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy and Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of
Literacy and will also take account of the contemporary debate between C. P.
Snow and F. R. Leavis on the ‘two cultures’ of science and the humanities.
Using these texts as provisional guides, we will explore the ways in which
writers such as Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing, Alan Sillitoe, Sam Selvon, John
Osborne and Muriel Spark engaged with –and in part shaped – the post-war
landscape.
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Year 2 – Semester 2
Year 2
SEMESTER 2
Single Units
ENGL2006 RESEARCH SKILLS
Semester 2
1 Unit
Co-ordinator: Dr Karen Seymour
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Aims: The aim of this unit is to provide you with the skills and the confidence
to undertake a dissertation in your third year. Objectives: Having
successfully completed this unit, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge
and understanding of the nature and characteristics of a good research
project; the skills necessary to complete a dissertation in Level 3; and the
academic style and presentation required for an extended piece of writing.
Content: The unit will include lectures on:- defining an object for literary
research; exploring methodological questions in literary studies; problems of
historiography; methods of critical interpretation; research in the literary
archives; writing up research projects; and negotiating the Library and
electronic sources of information. Learning and Teaching Methods:
Lectures will be used to introduce you to the key research skills necessary for
the successful completion of a dissertation in Level 3; the skills are also
developed practically by independent collaborative work in small groups.
Method of Assessment (subject to approval): 1 group project involving the
production of a small web-based magazine or journal (40%); 1 individual
annotated bibliography (20%) and 1 individual research proposal (40%).
ENGL 2027 Children’s Literature
Semester 2
1 Unit
Convenor: Dr Karen Seymour
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Aims and objectives: To familiarise you with some of the themes and ideas
explored in a selection of literature for children from the nineteenth century to
the present and extend your understanding of the development of the genre
by providing a cultural-historic background and considering the texts in the
light of some literary theories.
Content: The course will include a selection of novels to highlight significant
issues of form and content in children’s writing. We will be looking at fiction
from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, which
is one of the most influential periods of writing for children, including Lewis
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Year 2 – Semester 2
Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, as well as mid twentieth-century works and a
contemporary author of your choice. Typical issues you will examine will
include: representations of childhood and parental figures; gender and
identity; the role of fantasy.
Teaching methods: lectures, seminars, and individual discussion of students'
work.
Method of assessment: 2 x 2,000-word essays, 50% each
Preliminary reading: Dennis Butt (ed.), Stories and Society: Children’s
Literature in its Context (Macmillan, 1992), Peter Hunt, An Introduction to
Children’s Literature (Penguin, 1999), Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, Louisa May Alcott,
Little Women, Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
ENGL2032 IRISH LITERATURE
Semester 2
1 Unit
Co-ordinator: Dr David Glover
CP Value: 15
ECTS Value 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Aims and Objectives: To trace the main lines of development of modern
Irish literature from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the early 1950s;
to provide a critical understanding of the relationship between some of the
major literary works of this period and their cultural and political contexts.
Content: Through a varied range of texts - drama, poetry, novels, and short
stories - the course examines the Irish literary revival and its aftermath against
the background of the struggle for Irish independence and the creation of a
new kind of Irish state, paying particular attention to the importance of Irish
theatre, particularly as this was promoted by the poet and playwright W.B.
Yeats's involvement in Dublin's Abbey Theatre. Other writers covered include
Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Sean
O'Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien and Brendan
Behan, and there is a focus upon the Irish contribution to European
modernism, especially through the exploration of themes of emigration, exile
and return.
Learning and Teaching methods: The course is taught by lectures and
seminars in which we will reconstruct the cultural and political situation that
gave rise to an extraordinarily rich profusion of literary texts (including no
fewer than 3 Nobel Prize winners). Each lecture will provide an account of the
broad historical setting within which an individual writer was originally read,
and will raise questions of form and meaning in relation to her or his writings
as a whole, including later readings. The lectures are arranged chronologically
to help to give a sense of the links between these authors and their influences
upon each other. In the seminars we will be looking in detail at selected
examples of the authors' work, concentrating on their style and their meaning,
as well as considering some of the main critical approaches to these texts.
Method of Assessment: Assessment is by 2 x 2,000 word essays (50%
each). There will also be seminar presentations which, though not formally
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Year 2 – Semester 2
assessed, are compulsory and are designed to encourage students to test out
ideas in group discussion.
ENGLNEW5 IMAGES OF WOMEN, 1880-1940
Semester 2
1 Unit
Convenor: Dr Karen Seymour
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Aims and objectives: To enable you to develop awareness, understanding
and knowledge of images of women in literary and psychoanalytical texts from
1880-1940 and to provide you with opportunities to draw upon theoretical,
critical and reading skills in the specific areas of gender, subjectivity, sexuality,
and mental pathology.
Content: On this course you will study a number of fictional works as well as
psychoanalytical texts paying specific attention to changing images of women
in differing historical and cultural contexts in the US and Europe between
1880 and 1940. Themes such as female subjectivity, racial identity and
female sexuality will be consolidated and developed through detailed textual
and theoretical analysis. In addition, you will be analysing developments in
medical discourse on gender and mental pathology, e.g. hysteria,
underpinned by Freudian, contemporary feminist and psychoanalytic theory.
The primary literature studied will include: Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, The
Yellow Wallpaper, Kate Chopin, The Awakening, Virginia Woolf, A Room of
One’s Own and Mrs Dalloway, Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, Zora Neale
Hurston, Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God, Sigmund
Freud, Dora.
Teaching methods: lectures, seminars, and individual discussion of students'
work.
Method of assessment: 2 x 2,000-word essays, 50% each
Preliminary reading: Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of
Psychoanalysis (CUP, 1996), Showalter, Elaine, Hystories: Hysteria, Gender
and Culture (Picador, 1998), J. Breuer and S. Freud, Studies in Hysteria
(1895)
ENGLNEW6 ASPECTS OF VICTORIAN CULTURE
Semester 2
1 unit
Convenor: To be confirmed
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Aims
The aims of this unit are to:
 Examine ways in which Victorian culture both reflected and articulated
some of the major issues of the period
 Situate that examination firmly with the historical and cultural contexts
 Engage with a variety of different types of Victorian writing
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English Discipline Courses
Year 2 – Semester 2

Engage with modern critical interpretations of Victorian culture
Objectives (planned learning outcomes)
Knowledge and understanding
Having successfully completed the unit, you will be able to demonstrate
knowledge and understanding of:




A number of major social and cultural issues in the Victorian period
A variety of responses from Victorian writers to these issues
A selection of modern critical interpretations of those writings
Some of the ways in which contemporary tensions and
contradictions were reflected in Victorian culture
Cognitive (thinking) skills
Having successfully completed the unit, you will be able to:



Critically evaluate and analyse a range of primary and secondary
material
Lucidly discuss the ideological assumptions underpinning a writer’s
representation of contemporary issues
Make connections between social and cultural criticisms
Key transferable skills
Having successfully completed the unit, you will be able to:



Articulate complex cultural and social issues orally and in writing
Debate a wide range of recent critical interpretations of specific writings
Evaluate a variety of literary techniques and conventions
Brief summary of the content o the unit
You will examine ways in which Victorian culture both reflected and articulated
some of the major intellectual, social, religious, political and gender issues of
the period. Such issues might include the impact of industrialisation and the
growth of city life; the cultural impact of middle-class economic dominance;
the influence of contemporary scientific thought and understanding and its
effect upon religious belief; the position of women and the emergence of
feminist demands; perceptions of the British Empire; and nostalgia for a ‘lost’
or ‘disappearing’ past.
Teaching and learning activities
Teaching methods include



20
Lectures to introduce major issues and the writers and thinkers
particularly identified with them
Seminars to focus on further and deeper exploration of specific aspects
of topics
Opportunities for individual tutorials
English Discipline Courses
Year 2 – Semester 2
Learning activities include



Participation in class and group discussions
An individual oral presentation
Identification of an appropriate topic for an assessed essay,
followed by research and development of your ideas
FILM2002 EARLY AND SILENT CINEMA (1895-1929)
Semester 2
1 Unit
Co-ordinator: Dr Mike Hammond
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Pre- or co-requisite: FILM1001 or FILM2006
Aims and Objectives: The aim of the course is to introduce you to the
approaches to the study of early and silent film by bringing together an
understanding of the economic and aesthetic developments of cinema with
their historical and cultural contexts. The course develops skills in research
and analysis through the study of film texts and primary source material in
local and national archives.
Content: The subject of Early Cinema is a lively one and is a particular branch
of Film Studies that has been a significant force in recent film and media
scholarship. No longer the preserve of archivists, this subject has made an
impact on cultural studies, social history, studies in aesthetics, reception
studies and histories of technology. This course is an exploration of the main
issues and debates that surround the study of film between the period 18951929. In the first part of the course the focus is on the early period 1895-1912
and the move from novelty to narrative. The second part is organised around
the development of the feature, the changing exhibition practices and the rise
of the Hollywood industry from 1912- 1920 with a particular focus on the
cultural and historical context of exhibition and reception in Britain. The third
part of the course utilises case studies of three films to explore the
intertwining nature of the aesthetics and politics of the Hollywood silent films
of the Twenties.
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English Discipline Courses
Year 3 – Semester 1
Year 3
SEMESTER 1
Double Units
ENGL3003 RAKES AND LIBERTINES
Semester 1
2 Units
Co-ordinator: Stephen Bending
CP value: 30
ECTS value: 15
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Aims and Objectives: The course aims to introduce students to a range of
writing which engages with the figure of the libertine from the Restoration to
the Romantic period, and to explore changing ideas of sexuality and their
relationship with cultural authority and social convention.
Content: Libertinism is defined by more than sex, but, with its emphasis on
the senses and the need to follow one's natural desires, it's a good place to
start. Drawing on a Hobbesian account of desire as self-interest and nature as
a state of war, libertinism's championing of the senses is also a means of
exploring ideas of domination, relativism and individualism, of class status and
the role of women in society. The course will explore the changing ways in
which rake narratives are used to express tensions in eighteenth-century
society as they appear in early women's writing, the newly forming genre of
the novel, and reworkings of the Don Juan myth. The course will draw on a
range of genres from the philosophy of Hobbes to the Restoration comedies
of Behn, Etherege and Shadwell, and from the sentimental and gothic fiction
of Samuel Richardson and Ann Radcliffe, to the poetry of Rochester and
Byron, the letters of Lord Chesterfield, and Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni.
Learning and Teaching Methods: The course consists of a double lecture
and a double seminar each week. Lectures introduce students to broad issues
and suggest methods of approaching individual texts. Each seminar will be
run by two/three students acting as tutor for the week: they will consult with
the convenor before the seminar and then have responsibility for setting the
agenda and maintaining a dialogue with other members of the seminar group.
Students will learn to foster focused conversation, engage with alternative
perspectives from their own, and create an environment in which all members
of the seminar group are able to participate.
Method of Assessment: Examination (25%) , 2 x 3000-word essays (37.5%
each)
Course reading: go to the course website at
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~sdb2/rakes.html.
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English Discipline Courses
Year 3 – Semester 1
ENGL3010 MEDIEVAL DRAMA
Semester 1
2 units
Convenor: Dr John McGavin
CP value: 30
ECTS value: 15
Available as alternative subject: yes (subject to availability of space)
Aims and objectives: The aims of this unit are to ensure an enjoyable
introduction to the major dramatic genres of the period; enable you to acquire
those critical methods appropriate to theatre in this period; to encourage you
to explore theatre as multi-dimensional event rather than simply as text; and
to enable you to understand the power, significance, and long life of this
dramatic tradition.
By the end of the course you should have knowledge and understanding of
the different genres, historical development, and social significance of
medieval drama; the diverse ways in which theatre communicates meaning
and creates effect; the adjustments which the modern reader has to make to
appreciate this unusual and distant material, and the popular knowledge and
belief systems on which the dramatists relied.
Content: In this course you will get the opportunity to study one of the most
dynamic areas of late-medieval and early-modern culture, its theatre in the
200 years before Shakespeare. This has been a major area of international
critical study in recent years. The plays will come from different parts of the
country, and different genres. One of the most striking features of all this
material is its combining of stylistic, theatrical, emotional, and tonal forces
which we might think incompatible with each other, and even incongruous
with the subject-matter. These plays demand to be seen as 'events', not just
texts.
Using a single anthology of drama, you will look at plays from the English
'mystery cycle' tradition of town plays (still popularly revived in places like
York and Chester), the late-fifteenth-century morality tradition prominent in
East Anglia and on the continent (Everyman was originally a Dutch play), and
the political, humanist, and moral interludes from the halls and court culture of
the sixteenth century, a tradition which culminated in the Scottish Satyre of
the Thrie Estaitis (1552).
Learning and Teaching Methods: Lectures (including visiting lectures);
tutor- and student-organized 'walk-throughs' of scenes; tutor-led seminar
discussion; audio-visual presentation (e.g. videos and slide shows); seminar
discussion; internet and library research; preliminary research of past play
activity in your local area. The course will use Blackboard as support.
Method of assessment: Method of assessment: by combination of essays
totalling not more than
6,000 words (75%), and one 2-hour open-book exam (25%) (in which you will
have your textbook).
Preparatory work/reading: Before beginning this course, all students should
investigate their local area (with guidance from the convenor) to see whether
any medieval or early-modern play activity is recorded. They should also
investigate the following internet sites, and the many links which they offer:
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English Discipline Courses
Year 3 – Semester 1
http://www.epas.utoronto.ca/~reed/reed.html
http://www.links2go.net/topic/Medieval_Drama/ (which can be accessed from
the preceding site)
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~plspls/
The class textbook is Greg Walker, ed., Medieval Drama: an anthology
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). In preparation you could do worse than simply read
the introductory material to each section of the anthology.
ENGL3037 VICTORIAN POETRY
Semester 1
2 units
Convenor: Dr Lucy Hartley
CP value: 30
ECTS value: 15
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Aims and objectives:
1. to introduce you to the broad range of Victorian poetry and investigate its
cultural and theoretical paradigms
2. to examine the central concepts and arguments of two distinct traditions of
poetry: on the one hand, a conservative form exemplified by Tennyson and on
the other, a democratic, radical form represented by Browning
3. a) to explore the common ground and contrasts between these two general
traditions of poetry; and b) to encourage sustained critical analysis of the
underlying themes and issues in a number of poems by specific writers
(identified below).
Content: this course will study the connection between Victorian poetry and
changing theories of language and knowledge. It will be structured around the
work of two major poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning,
examining the distinct poetic traditions that they establish and exploring how
they influence subsequent discussions of cultural, formal, and linguistic
meaning by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, in
particular. We will ask questions such as: to what extent do developments in
theories of language reinforce or challenge the expressive and
representational modes of early early Victorian poetry? How important are
changes in religion and politics for the emergence of new aesthetic theories in
later Victorian poetry?
Asessment methods: 2x3000 word essays (equally weighted, 37.5%each)
and 1x2000-word examination (25%)
24
English Discipline Courses
Year 3 – Semester 1
Year 3
SEMESTER 1
Single Units
ENGL3008 BRITISH CULTURE IN THE 1980s
Semester 1
1 Unit
Co-ordinator: Dr Nicky Marsh
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Aims and Objectives: The course aims to familiarise students with the
cultural, political, and social changes that Britain underwent in the 1980s.
It specifically focuses upon the ways in which narratives of nation, race, class,
gender, and sexuality were being placed under a variety of pressures. The
course encourages students to read texts both within and across genres, and
by focusing on issues such as representation, publication, funding and
audience it also aims to make students aware of the ways in which 'culture'
operated as an arena of political contestation in this period
Content: The course draws upon the work of British cultural theorists, such
as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, who developed a theoretical vocabulary for
understanding the complex paradigm shifts that characterised the decade.
These theoretical positions are read alongside a wide range of primary and
secondary material, including films, documentaries, novels, poems, situation
comedies, and articles from the popular press.
Learning and Teaching methods: The course consists of lectures providing
an historical and political account of the period alongside readings of specific
texts. The course is also taught via seminars, that will provide students with
the opportunity to discuss issues arising from the reading.
Method of Assessment: 2 x 2000 word essays (50% each).
Preliminary Reading: This course contains only two longish texts: Salman
Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Martin Amis' London Fields. I recommend
that you read at least the first of these before starting the course.
ENGL3015 FANTASY FILM AND FICTION
Semester 1
1 Unit
Co-ordinator: Dr Linda Williams
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Course description: This course is concerned with fantasy film and fiction,
involving analysis of a range of fantasy, science-fiction, Gothic and horror
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English Discipline Courses
Year 3 – Semester 1
texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, alongside psychoanalytic
and cultural theories of fantasy, identity, and genre. It will be organized
around a number of discrete blocks of two and three weeks, focusing on
Gothic 'classics', feminist fairy tales, musicals, Utopian literature, and more
general writing and images specifically concerned with the body and sexual
identity, as well as psychoanalytic theories of the gaze, the uncanny, and
identification. NOTE: this course includes study of some modern horror films.
Students may find some of the images from these films upsetting, and should
be aware of the course content in advance.
Aims of the course: Partly building upon the Introduction to Film secondyear course, this course will foster comparative and interdisciplinary skills in
working with literature and film together, as well as focusing theoretical issues
raised earlier in the degree (for instance, in the first-year Narrative and
Culture and Critical Theory courses).
Assessment methods: 2 x 2000-word essays (50% each).
Course reading: Read Bram Stoker's Dracula for Week 1.
ENGL3016 ENGLISH DISSERTATION
Semesters 1&2
2 Units
Co-ordinator: To be confirmed (supervisors: all academic staff)
Prerequisite: ENGL2006 Research Skills
CP value: 2 x 15
ECTS value: 2 x 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: no
Aims and Objectives: A dissertation allows students to undertake
independent research, with guidance from a supervisor, to produce an indepth, scholarly study of an aspect of literature which particularly interests
them. It can also form a good basis for those who hope to go on to study at
post-graduate level.
Content: The choice of topic will already have been established during the
Research Skills course at Level 2.
Learning and Teaching Methods: The dissertation is written across two
semesters, and the final written-up piece of work is roughly twice the length of
most long essays submitted as part of the English course. Consequently,
writing a dissertation gives students the opportunity to study a subject in much
greater depth than is usual, and to develop ideas and build up a research
dossier over a longer period. The project encourages students to develop
independent research methods, to work to deadlines in conjunction with their
supervisor, and to structure an argument across a more extensive wordlength. Students will have five 30-minute sessions over the course of the final
year with their supervisor.
Method of Assessment: a 2000-word piece and an annotated bibliography
must be submitted by Monday of Week 10 in the first semester; a draft of the
dissertation should reach the supervisor by Monday of Week 5 of the second
semester, and the completed dissertation must be handed in on the deadline
given in the 2005-2006 English Handbook.
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English Discipline Courses
Year 3 – Semester 1
ENGL3040 SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY
Semester 1
1 Unit
Convenor: To be confirmed
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Aims and objectives: the course aims to acquaint students with the variety
of English poetry in one of its most creative eras. It will introduce you to i) a
range of poetic genres which become influential if not normative in the
subsequent history of English poetry, ii) the cultural impact of the great
historical crisis of the mid-seventeenth century as that was manifested in the
history of poetry, and iii) some aspects of the relation between literary culture
and social and political culture.
Content: This course will be based on the recent collection edited by Robert
Cummings, Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, Blackwell
Annotated Anthologies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). It will focus on customarily
acknowledged major poets of the period from Donne, Jonson and Herbert to
Milton, Marvell and Dryden, while also attending to other writers represented
in the collection, such as women poets who have more recently attracted
notice. The approach will be partly historical and partly thematic (looking at
topics such as the relation between 'profane' and 'sacred' poetry, the 'country
house' genre, poets' ideas about the nature of poetry, etc).
Teaching methods: lectures (constructing historical outlines and introducing
broad issues) ii) seminars (close reading and discussion of poetic texts) iii)
individual discussion of students' work.
Method of assessment: 2 x 2,000-word essays, 50% each
Preliminary reading: Isabel Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in English
Renaissance Poetry, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 1994). For the course
textbook, see under 'Content' above.
ENGLNEW 7 JEWISH FICTIONS
1 Unit | Semester 1
Convenor: Dr Nadia Valman
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes, subject to availability
Pre-requisite: none
Aims and objectives: What is Jewish identity? Different writers have defined
it as religious, racial, ethical, national or cultural, and many have grappled with
its changing meanings in the modern world. The diverse, elusive nature of
'Jewishness' has given rise to some of the most fascinating texts of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which we will be studying in this course.
We will examine a range of images, genres and narrative strategies for
representing Jews and Jewishness, as well as the particular historical and
cultural contexts in which they were produced, in order to consider the various
meanings attached to the figure of the 'Jew' in relation to key social, cultural
and political debates of the modern period. The course will give you an idea of
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the wide range of responses to and interpretations of the notion of
'Jewishness' in modern culture.
Content: We will be reading the work of a number of Jewish novelists, from
immigrant writers of the early twentieth century to contemporary Jewish
fiction. Additional weekly reading, including the material for Week 1, will be in
the course booklet. This booklet includes a detailed week-by-week reading list
of primary materials and a range of secondary texts for further reading which
utilises the unique facilities offered by the Parkes Library.
Learning and teaching Methods: The course is taught chronologically,
moving from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty first century. There
will be one 1-hour lecture and one 1-hour seminar per week. Lectures will
provide you with historical and cultural contexts for reading the texts and
discuss strategies for interpreting them. Close analysis of the novels will take
place in seminars where you will have the opportunity to lead discussion.
Methods of Assessment: 1 x 2000-word essay, 1 x 2000-word reflective
reading journal (50% each)
Set texts to buy include:
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (Picador)
Arthur Miller, Focus (Methuen)
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (Bloomsbury)
Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky's Room (Granta)
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Year 3
SEMESTER 2
Double Units
ENGL3004 Writing the Novel
Semester 2
2 Units
Co-ordinator: To be confirmed
CP value: 30
ECTS value: 15
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Pre-requisite: none
This unit will offer a practice-based introduction to the process of writing a
novel. Topics covered will include planning, research, structure, plot,
character, point of view and style. Throughout the unit you will be developing
and writing the first chapter of a novel of your own devising (and an
accompanying synopsis), while sharing your drafts with a seminar workshop.
ENGL3007 HOLOCAUST LITERATURE
Semester 2
2 Units
Co-ordinator: To be confirmed
CP value: 30
ECTS value: 15
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
This course will examine some of the most important testimony, fiction and poetry
which represents the horrors of the Second World War known as the Holocaust. It
will bring together memoirs of camp survivors, written from a range of
perspectives, with a variety of filmic, literary and experimental texts (such as
graphic novels) produced, in response to the Holocaust, from the 1940s to the
present day. It will focus on the limits of representation, memory and trauma, and
the aestheticisation of horror. The course aims to introduce you to some of the
most important texts about the Holocaust and to examine theoretical issues
concerning the role of cultural representations in relation to the history of
genocide.
Primary texts may include
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Year 3 – Semester 2
Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1951)
Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After (1965-70)
Lawrence Langer, Art from the Ashes (1995)
Primo Levi, If This is a Man (1947/1960)
Schindler's List (USA, dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993)
Jorge Semprun, The Cattle Truck (1964)
Art Spiegelman, Maus: Volumes I and II (1986 & 1992)
Elie Wiesel, Night (1960)
Suggested background reading
Omar Bartov, Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and
Representation (1997)
Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, Between Witness and Testimony:
the Holocaust and the Limits of Representation (2001)
Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004)
Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
‘Final Solution’ (1992)
Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1997)
Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (1996)
Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (1987)
James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the
Consequences of Interpretation (1988)
ENGL3039 GLOBALIZATION IN THEORY, LITERATURE, AND VISUAL
CULTURE
Semester 2
2 Units
Co-ordinator: To be confirmed
CP value: 30
ECTS value: 15
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Aims and objectives: This course will examine the complex relationships
between the contested term of globalization and literary and visual culture.
Content: Focusing on the critical and cultural theory of Fredric Jameson,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Saskia Sassen, Bruce Robbins, Arjun
Appadurai, and David Harvey, we will consider how cultural texts such as
Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories, Brian Jungen's
Prototypes for New Understanding, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, and David Riker's
The City have variously articulated the global circulation of people, money,
and information. We will then proceed to question the role that literary
narratives such as Nuruddin Farah's Gifts and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Genocide in
Rwanda plays in the representation of the global South.
Learning and Teaching Methods: Lecture and seminar
Methods of assessment: by one essay (45%), an ongoing group project
(30%), and a 2-hour exam (25%).
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Globalisation in Theory, Literature and Visual Culture
Provisional Reading List
Literary and Visual texts (Items marked with an asterisk can be
purchased for summer reading)
Bharati Mukherjee The Middleman and Other Stories*
David Riker (dir.) The City
Brian Jungen Prototypes for New Understanding (Art work)
Thomas King One Good Story That One (Photocopy)
Monica Ali Brick Lane*
Nuruddin Farah Gifts*
Ken Saro-Wiwa Genocide in Africa
Theoretical Texts
You should also try to read some, all or fewer of these to prepare for the
course.
Arjun Appadurai Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)*
Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds.) The Cultures of Globalization
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)*
Fredric Jameson Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1990)
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,
2000)*
Saskia Sassen Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility
of People and Money (New York: The New Press, 1998)
Manfred B. Steger Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003)*
George Yudice The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)*
ENGL3041 Adventures in the Literary Marketplace
2 Units / Semester 2
Co-ordinator: Professor Emma Clery
CP value: 30
ECTS value: 15
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes, subject to availability
Aims and Objectives: This course will enable you to approach literature in a
new way, by dealing with books as material objects and investigating the
ways in which the history of their production and consumption help to
determine their significance. The course will be particularly valuable for
students considering postgraduate study, or a career in publishing, but it
would benefit anyone who wants to learn how to use a scholarly library more
fully and try their hand at producing original research of lasting value.
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Content: The historical frame is the long eighteenth century, a period of
revolutionary change in print culture during which the modern commercial
system of publishing was established. This era saw a great increase in
literacy and expansion of the reading public, a transition from patronage to
commerce as the basis for writing and circulating texts, transformation of the
mechanisms for printing and publishing towards mass production, and change
in the very concept of the author. These general themes, and key concepts in
book history, will be discussed in relation to commentary from the period on
the changing face of literary production, with a close focus on two of the most
striking and popular print phenomena of the time: the Gothic craze of the late
eighteenth century, and the fashion for poetry generated by Byron in the
1810s. In addition you will pursue original research on a work from the rare
books collection at Chawton House Library, involving bibliographical
detective-work and critical interpretation.
Learning and Teaching Methods: The course consists of a double lecture
and a double seminar each week. Lectures introduce historical context and
methods for approaching the texts. Three seminars will take place in the rare
books collection at either the Hartley Library or Chawton House Library; some
seminars will focus on set texts, others on preparation for assessment, and
will include presentations on work-in-progress.
Method of Assessment: 1x2000 word portfolio of information on the
authorship, publisher, and format of a chosen work (25%), 1xportfolio
including 1000-word history of reception and 3000-word critical essay (50%),
1x2-hour exam (25%). All coursework of the required standard will be
published (with your permission) as part of the Chawton House Library
website as a permanent resource for future scholars.
Preliminary Reading: A course handbook including photocopies of key
essays and primary material will be available for purchase before the summer
break. Set texts are: Ann Radcliffe, The Italian (1796), ed. Robert Miles
(Penguin, 2000), an edition which includes contemporary reviews; Byron, The
Giaour (1813) and The Corsair (1814), and poems from Felicia Hemans,
Records of Woman (1828), included in the course handbook.
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Year 3
SEMESTER 2
Single Units
ENGL3002 GENDER AND NATIONALISM
Semester 2
1 Unit
Co-ordinator: Dr Sujala Singh
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Aims and Objectives: The aim of this course is to make students aware that
gender always matters irrespective of whether one is a man or a woman
reading a text written about men or women. The specific focus will be on
demonstrating the complexity of these issues in the context of gender, empire
and literary representations.
Content: Students will read material (historical, anthropological, literary) that
highlights the importance of gender in constructing and consolidating notions
of national identity (for example in Britain or India). Examples from both
popular and "high" culture will be provided to both confirm and subvert such
formulations.
Learning and Teaching Methods: The course consists of a single lecture
and a single seminar each week. Lectures will set up socio-historical contexts
as well as provide critical literary reference points for understanding the
uneasy relationship between gender and nationalism. Seminars will focus on
discussions of literary texts, and their production and consumption in relation
to the politics of gender.
Method of Assessment: 2 x 2000 word essays (50% each).
ENGL3016 ENGLISH DISSERTATION
Semesters 1&2
2 Units
Co-ordinator: To be confirmed (supervisors: all academic staff)
Prerequisite: ENGL2006 Research Skills
CP value: 2 x 15
ECTS value: 2 x 7.5
Available as an Alternative Subject: no
Aims and Objectives: A dissertation allows students to undertake
independent research, with guidance from a supervisor, to produce an indepth, scholarly study of an aspect of literature which particularly interests
them. It can also form a good basis for those who hope to go on to study at
post-graduate level.
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Content: The choice of topic will already have been established during the
Research Skills course at Level 2.
Learning and Teaching Methods: The dissertation is written across two
semesters, and the final written-up piece of work is roughly twice the length of
most long essays submitted as part of the English course. Consequently,
writing a dissertation gives students the opportunity to study a subject in much
greater depth than is usual, and to develop ideas and build up a research
dossier over a longer period. The project encourages students to develop
independent research methods, to work to deadlines in conjunction with their
supervisor, and to structure an argument across a more extensive wordlength. Students will have five 30-minute sessions over the course of the final
year with their supervisor.
Method of Assessment: a 2000-word piece and an annotated bibliography
must be submitted by Monday of Week 10 in the first semester; a draft of the
dissertation should reach the supervisor by Monday of Week 5 of the second
semester, and the completed dissertation must be handed in on the deadline
given in the 2005-2006 English Handbook.
Code: ENGL3027 Writing Modern Ireland
Semester 2
1 Unit
Unit Co-ordinator: Dr Barry Sloan
CP Value: 15
ECTS Value: 7.5
Available as alternative subject: Yes, subject to availability.
Aims: This unit will equip you with the necessary historical and cultural
contexts within which to read modern Irish literature, and will enable you to
explore how Irish writing since the late 1960s has reflected the major
upheavals and changes that have taken place in Irish society since then. In
particular, you will examine how selected writers have contributed to evolving
perceptions of Irishness and of Irish identity in the period; consider the impact
of the Northern Irish ‘troubles’ on Irish writers and writing; examine the
challenges laid down by Irish women writers to inherited religious, gender and
cultural roles and ideals; explore how modern Irish writers have addressed
problematic aspects of Irish history; and evaluate the status and significance
of modern Irish writers and writing.
Objectives: When you have completed the unit, you will be familiar with
selected works by a number of distinguished modern Irish writers in the three
major genres, and will be aware of the significance of the cultural, historical
and political contexts within which they have been working. In particular, you
will have an appreciation of the contribution that particular writers have made
to cultural and political debates in contemporary Ireland, both north and south
of the border. You will be able to apply your knowledge and understanding to
discuss and write about specific issues within and aspects of modern Irish
writing, and will have an appreciation of the place of Irish writing within the
larger field of literature in English.
Learning and Teaching Methods: Lectures will be used to introduce writers
and texts and to foreground particular themes and issues. The seminars,
which will assume a high level of student preparation and participation, will
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Year 3 – Semester 2
provide opportunities to explore specific aspects of texts and to develop ideas
introduced in the lectures.
Method of Assessment: You will be required to do one 4000 word essay
which constitutes 100% of the assessment. It must deal with work by three of
the writers you studied on the unit and make use of appropriate contextual
material and critical responses. No titles will be set, but your topic must be
formally agreed with the tutor with whom you must consult. You will be
required to complete a coursework proposal form which must signed off by
the tutor before you begin your work.
Set Texts: Subject to final confirmation, these will be: selected poems by
Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Michael Longley and
Paul Muldoon; Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa; Marina Carr, The Mai; John
McGahern, Amongst Women; Sebastian Barry, A Long, Long Way.
A useful introductory study is Neil Corcoran’s After Yeats and Joyce: Reading
Modern Irish Literature (1997).
ENGL3030 ON THE ROAD
Semester 2
1 Unit
Co-ordinator:Dr Julie Campbell
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Aims and Objectives: The aim is of this unit is to explore the road and its
significance in twentieth-century American literature and film. The journey
has a central, iconic position in American literature and film, as it does in
American history. We will consider the way in which movement shapes the
text, alongside the contextual issues that the texts we will study can be related
to, taking on board the cultural and aesthetic shifts that happened during the
period.
Content: We will consider immigration and inner migration in texts such as
Accordian Crimes, The Grapes of Wrath, Pnin and The Tortilla Curtain,
alongside the idea of the journey as a quest for the American Dream or as an
escape from the present situation, or often, significantly, as a complex
amalgam of both. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a quest for treasure and an
escape from jail, based on Homer’s Odyssey, but also taking its title from a
film proposal in Preston Sturges’ film Sullivan’s Travels (1941). Jack
Kerouac’s seminal novel provides the title of the unit and will allow for some
interesting contrasts and comparisons with other treatments of the theme of
journey and movement, such as Badlands, set in 1959, Gilbert Grape which
contrasts the stasis of small town life with the lure of the road, and Lynch’s
intriguing and mysterious reworking of the classic road theme in Lost
Highway.
Learning and Teaching Methods: The unit consists of lectures and
seminars. There will be screenings of the films to be studied.
Method of Assessment: Two 2,000 word essays (50% each).
Primary Texts:
Annie Proulx, Accordion Crimes (1997)
FILM: O Brother, Where Art Thou? dir. Coen Brothers (2000)
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English Discipline Courses
Year 3 – Semester 2
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957)
FILM: Badlands, dir. Terrence Melick (1973)
Paul Auster, Moon Palace (1990)
FILM: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? dir. Lasse Halström (1993)
T. C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
FILM: Lost Highway, dir. David Lynch (1997)
Secondary Reading:
D. K. Adams, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. London: The Historical
Association, 1979.
Cologne-Brooks, Sammels and Timms (eds.), Writing and America, 1996.
Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream, 2000.
ENGL3038 EXPERIMENTS IN WRITING
Semester 2
1 unit
Co-ordinator: To be confirmed
CP value: 15
ECTS Value: 7.5
Aims and objectives: To extend your skills and understanding of the range
of techniques available to the writer in a variety of genres.
Content. You will probably have learned how to write a short story following
fairly conventional methods. This unit will give you the chance to create a text
that goes beyond this. It will introduce you to a wide range of innovative
practices developed by prose writers and poets over the past century who
have experimented with the textual strategies on which most literature is
founded. You will try setting yourself tight compositional constraints and
removing them altogether, using chance, or visual elements, or sound, as the
primary instigation for composition. This experimental approach will also look
at the components of narrative, and test what happens when they are
removed or tranformed. Your goal will be to produce a piece of writing that
demonstrates an understanding of the possibilities of innovation, and
achieves a coherent, meaningful result. Some texts are written for oral
performance, and we will use the group as an audience to test different
performance tactics. We will also investigate the potential impact of digital
processing and internet distribution on compositional practice. There are
several key sources on the web. Ubuweb at http://www.ubu.com has a large
archive of innovative texts from the past century. The online magazine Jacket
at http://jacketmagazine.com is one of the best sources of texts and
discussions of new writing. How2 is a good source of new women's writing at
http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/stadler_center/how2 and also has a
magazine archive. Useful books for reading in advance include the following:
Julia Bell and Paul Magrs, The Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan,
2003)
John D'Agata, The Next American Essay (Graywolf Press, 2003)
Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, Poems for the Millennium, Volume Two:
Postwar to Millennium (University of California Press, 1998).
Method of assessment: 4,000 words equivalent (to be advised).
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English Discipline Courses
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FILM3006 AMERICAN CINEMA SINCE 1965
Semester 2
1 unit
Co-ordinators: Dr Linda Williams and Dr Mike Hammond
CP value: 15
ECTS value: 7.5
Available as an alternative subject: yes (subject to availability of spaces)
Pre-requisite: Film course in Year 2
Aims and objectives: This course is designed to build on other film courses
(and the skills developed in them) already in place in the curriculum. It
encourages students to research and develop ways of writing about recent
film history, and to read film in relation to American history. It is one of the two
core courses in the Film Combined Honours final-year curriculum, building on
earlier work in Year 1 on Hollywood, and in Year 2 on Genre and Early
Cinema. This unit provides the opportunity for the more complex research and
analysis which is appropriate to final-year study. It is also available as an
option to English students, who are required to have taken a second-year film
unit before progressing to this course. All students must have studied film
before taking this unit; Socrates students must demonstrate that they have
taken a film unit at their home institution before they will be allowed to enrol
for the course. These requirements are to ensure progression in the
curriculum, and to encourage the improvement of established close reading
and film theory skills.
Content: the course offers a history of American cinema since 1965, covering
the decline of the Hollywood studio system and the moment, from 1968 to
1975, when a new wave of directors produced a number of key films
sometimes known as constituting the Hollywood art-house period, through the
rise of the blockbuster in the mid-1970s, to the reinvigorated New Hollywood
of the 80s and 90s. It explores whether this can be called the Hollywood postclassical period, the inter-relationship of studio and independent cinema, and
historical issues such as changes in marketing and exhibition practices, and
how the film industry survived the rise of television and exploited the rise of
new home viewing technologies such as video, DVD, and laserdisc.
Learning and teaching methods: The course is taught through a
combination of lectures, screenings, and seminars. In seminars you will be
expected to contribute to discussion, and to participate in class presentations,
which, when written up, will form part of the course assessment. You are
encouraged to work actively with clips and visual materials such as still and
publicity documents in your presentations, and will have responsibility for
leading the class discussion in the first half of a double teaching slot,
preparing visual materials and handouts and guiding debate. The written-up
account will discuss the issues and films in question in a given week, but will
also focus on methodology used in organizing and accessing research
materials, and how you deployed these to encourage debate in class. This will
encourage you to be organized well in advance of the class, to marshal your
materials in a structured way, to think about how to communicate issues to a
group of peers in an accessible manner which encourages understanding and
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Year 3 – Semester 2
lively debate, and to keep strictly to time. More generally, you will continue to
develop research techniques using the individual video play-back facilities and
video library which are provided in the Avenue Campus Library. We will
expect you to access secondary materials such as publicity and marketing
documents, reviews and interviews, and perhaps some reception/exhibition
materials, and make critical use of these in your classwork and writing.
Method of assessment: 1 x 3,000-word essay (70%), 1 x 1,000-word writtenup class presentation (30%).
38