This module will introduce students to the questions and arguments, events and vocabularies that shape study in our discipline and which will come up again and again throughout your undergraduate degree. It has two aims: i) to ensure that when you undertake your own research and read technical books and journals in your field that you will find the language less daunting (i.e. you’ll have a good understanding of what “hegemony,” “intersectionality,” “postmodernism,” or “historicism” mean and why they might be important) and ii) to help you to build and use your own vocabulary for discussing art, identity, culture, and politics. The module will focus on theoretical texts and the ways in which writers have tried to describe the effects of culture and society, but it will also emphasise how these ways of thinking have specifically used literary, filmic, and other artistic texts as subjects, examples, and evidence. For as long as artworks have been studied there have been critics and theoreticians who have tried to explore and explain their effects: how and why does a text make us feel this way? What role does art play in shaping society? What role does society play in shaping art? What makes something a novel, or a poem, or beautiful? Can we learn more about a time or place by exploring the works produced then or there? Can we learn something about what it means to be a human being from the texts that we read and watch and play? What does art and culture do to me?Topics may include:
Psychoanalysis
Feminism and Queer Theory
Marxism and Materialism
Postcolonialism
Reader Response Theory
Disability Studies
Digital Studies
Poetics, Aesthetics, and Narratology
Animal Studies
Ecocriticism
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
Demonstrate an understanding of and ability to use a range of significant theoretical terms;
Demonstrate a basic knowledge of some of the debates in contemporary research in the Humanities;
Demonstrate an understanding of how theoretical insights can assist in their writing across their degree;
Demonstrate an awareness of the applicability of theory to literary study.