English Literature and Film

The first part of this module develops critical understandings of film and cinema to a more advanced level by exploring different theories that have been important in Film Studies. In the second part, the module centres on the independent research of primary and secondary sources in order to develop methodological approaches to film, thereby enabling students to pursue their own areas of study so as to provide preparation for the Extended Independent Study (Dissertation).

This study ranges across two – perhaps arguably three – generations of Romantic writers and artists in the ‘long Romantic century’ from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This epoch is approached for the interest of its works and materials in their own terms as well as constituting a sort of forcing ground for theories and methods in literary studies linked to that form of modernity which springs to life from truly epochal transformations – the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and, in the arts and sciences, the ‘end of patronage’. Navigation of this terrain is by means of reference to both canonical and non-canonical texts in English poetry. The material is multi-generic, too, so that both prose fiction and non-fiction find their place here as well: with Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, William Hazlitt and others. The general problem of canon formation is indeed engaged in this work through the virtual case study that is the changing face of Romantic literature in academic study today.

In Term one, this module focuses on the period between 1910 and the late 1950s, when a darkening world view ushered in by the First World War and plunged further into shadow with the rise of C20 fascism, witnessed the birth of ‘modernism’. The modernists produced work unlike any other age, work often regarded as ‘difficult’, with narrative innovations including the ‘stream of consciousness’. Following some context, the module considers these innovations via a range of literary and cultural texts, including poetry, plays, novels and cinema. In Term two, we turn to the ‘postmodern’ age, from its beginnings in the 1960s through to its heyday in the 1980s to, finally, the so-called ‘new sincerity’ of the 21st century. We will explore how postmodern texts reject grand narratives, embrace the multiple, mobile and fragmentary nature of contemporary life, and thus resist easy categorization. This module, then, explores the complexity of postmodernism through its (often contested) relationship to ‘modernism’. 

British and European Cinema - This module will offer case studies of British and European Cinema. In Term 1, the former area will be examined by drawing on understandings of class, gender and ethnicity to investigate the representation of national identity and examine areas such as comedy, Hammer horror, the ‘heritage film’, adaptations of British ‘classics’, the ‘Brit-Grit’ genre and the British ‘Rom-Com’. The case study of European Cinema focuses on contemporary film to explore concepts of national cinema, ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’, national identity and areas such as ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’, memory and trauma, the role of the auteur and the function of popular genres.

Hollywood - ‘Hollywood’ examines Hollywood film from the 1920s to the contemporary period through the study of trends and shifts in production, exhibition, and consumption. The initial focus will be upon the emergence of the studio system, particularly its industrial processes (including ‘continuity style’, genre filmmaking, star systems, and censorship). Issues such as class, race, gender and ideology will also be explored. The emphasis will then shift to the transformations in Hollywood that occurred after WWII. This phase will address developments such as the Paramount Decree, the emergence of the New Hollywood during the 1960s-70s, the rise of the modern blockbuster in the 1980s-90s, and ‘Indiewood’. The final section considers Hollywood since 2000, including issues such as the ‘digital turn’, franchise filmmaking, representation concerns, and various challenges facing contemporary Hollywood. Throughout, the module will use notable films to illustrate trends, shifts in style, social and political changes, and industrial developments.

The dissertation is a piece of written work of 8-10,000 words. It offers students the opportunity to undertake a sustained and detailed investigation of a particular aspect of film and literature, although the focus can emphasise one of these areas, to utilise and develop further a range of research skills and techniques previously introduced and developed on the BA (Hons) English and Literature and Film programme. Subject areas and titles are determined through negotiation with a designated supervisor with whom the student will have regular tutorials to discuss and check the progress of the project.

Society from 1800 to the present might be argued to have been marked by fantastic advances in concepts about what technology can do and concomitantly, writers might be argued to have created fantasies that explored other worlds that were both more fantastic and more technological, or less technical and sometimes barbaric, to explain current developments to readers who were confused or alienated by the social changes they encountered. What these stories have in common is that though the other worlds are apparently beyond experience, the philosophies that underlie them explore (among many other things) real world debates about the religious and the scientific, the nature of conflict, and aspects of health and wellbeing.  Fantasy fiction also spawned other media forms like comics, art, film, games and graphic fictions. This module will also question and discuss how literary these “new media” versions of other world fantasies might be.

In the second Term, students will engage with utopian and dystopian texts – the line between which is often blurry – across a range of cultural forms. Focusing primarily on literary responses to these ‘grand’ themes, we will also consider other forms such as film, television, and videogames.

Film Studies optional modules: 

Animation - The module will consider the history of animation from early cinema through to contemporary computer-animated blockbusters, taking in traditional cel animation in studies of individual studio styles in the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood cartoons, avant-garde animation, animation and Art, anime, digital animation and the rise of contemporary studios such as Pixar, Dreamworks, Studio Ghibli and Aardman. Theoretical perspectives on realism, narration, gender, consumption and the function of film will be explored to analyse animation’s place within a history of moving images. Questions of representation and reception will also be addressed enabling a focus on how animation has used and challenged a range of stereotypes.

Gothic and Horror Film - This module explores gothic and horror film by reference to specific texts, and their broader cultural and historical contexts. It examines the flexibility of the horror genre and how it has adapted to industrial, social, political and cultural change. Charting the genre from the 1930s to contemporary horror cinema across different national cinema traditions, it considers the importance of the ‘other’, the ‘uncanny’, ideology, genre, the body and representations of gender, sexuality and ethnicity. It examines shifting Gothic traditions drawing on a range of theoretical modes of thought, such as postcolonial criticism, feminism and psychoanalysis. Framed by a broad discussion on the arts, mythology, politics, psychoanalysis and religion, the module stimulates new ways of thinking through and beyond disciplinary boundaries, unpacking levels of transgression or social conformity, and providing a valuable framework: 1) to pinpoint specifically filmic concerns with Gothic horror motifs and themes and 2) to locate a ‘cinematic Gothic’.

English optional modules:

Literature and Film - This module uses the relationship between American literature and film as fertile ground to consider two central ideas about the scope and function of American culture. Firstly, the idea that American culture promises to provide access to some extra-social realm, often called 'authentic,' visionary, or transformative but that this often sits in tension with its commodified nature and secondly that: American culture plays an important role in struggles over identity - as potentially liberating and transformative, or as constraining and reinforcing hierarchies of power.

The module also uses extensive examples from the movies of Alfred Hitchcock to illustrate the processes involved in adapting literature into film while applying these lessons to readings of key American texts through the 20th and 21st centuries. These texts allow for a period driven examination of American ideas about identity against relevant cultural and socio-political events to encourage students to pay particularly close attention to both modes and moments of production.

Consuming Pleasures - This work addresses the development in tandem of consumer culture and an erotics of literature through amorous fiction. Historically, it takes up with the eclipse of shopping arcades with the rise of department stores, notably in Paris (‘capital’, in Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘of the nineteenth century’). But if the early French department stores are in fact modelled on London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, it is worth cross-referencing the spread at roughly the same time of serial fiction, earlier trailblazed by Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and, later, the Victorian penny dreadfuls. This is to note a critical inter- twining of consumer culture and amorous fiction in modernity’s signature blurring of phantasy and reality – in, that is, the ‘pornography of representation’ (Susanne Kappeler’s phrase). Here, consumer culture texts and forms of amorous fiction are interleaved, correspondingly, to analyse the symbolic reciprocal action of each on the other, a key exchange. Among the references, therefore, are Émile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames – The Ladies’ Paradise – as the first ever department store novel and Sophie Kinsella’s later contribution to chick lit, Confessions of a Shopaholic, as well as selections from Mariella Frostrup and Jamie Maclean’s 2016 Desire anthology, featuring amorous fiction from the Marquis de Sade to Anaïs Nin to Angela Carter. Please note: there is frequent explicit material in the amorous fiction in this study, necessarily to locate this work at the sharp end of research into a crossover world of commodity poetics and consuming pleasures.