BA Film Studies and English Literature

Key details

BA FILM STUDIES AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

Start Year

2021

Attendance

Full Time

Award

Degree of Bachelor of Arts

UCAS course code

QW36

Entry Requirements

BBB or ABC

This degree brings together two intertwined subject areas. They are both subjects where UEA has an outstanding reputation.

You'll benefit from our world-leading expertise as you explore key writers and traditions in English literature and a global range of cinema.

In your first year you’ll cover all the essentials of both fields of study. In your second and third years you’ll increasingly specialise in the areas you find most engaging.

You’ll choose from creative practice options such as film production or scriptwriting and modules covering diverse topics from the Hollywood studio system to Gothic literature and Shakespeare's England to animation. Or you could look at the process of adapting literature for the screen, bringing your two degree subjects into dynamic dialogue.

Our Film, Television and Media Studies department is recognised as a leading centre for the study of British, Hollywood and Asian cinemas, popular film and television genres and feminist approaches to media. We’re home to the extensive East Anglian Film Archive - a unique resource which you can make use of during your time here. We also have close links with the British Film Institute in London.

About

Explore two of the greatest forms of storytelling with a degree that combines theory and practice. As novels and short stories are increasingly adapted for the screen, the relationship between films and literature has never been more important. On this degree, you’ll explore this relationship through case studies like children’s literature, queer literature, and British and Hollywood cinemas. You’ll discover key writers and traditions in English literature and a global range of cinema.

UEA has been a pioneer and continues to lead in both film studies and English literature, particularly in the area of creative writing. You’ll be taught across both disciplines by world-leading academics and creative practitioners.

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Important Information

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the courses listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the regular review of course programmes. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes, there will normally be prior consultation of students and others. Changes may for example consist of variations to the content and method of delivery of programmes, courses and other services, to discontinue programmes, courses and other services and to merge or combine programmes or courses. The University will endeavour to keep such changes to a minimum, and will inform students.

Assessment for Year 1

You’ll be assessed in individual and group assessment modes from essays to presentations and discussions. Your progress in some theoretical modules will be assessed through creative practice. For example, you might be required to produce a script of your own to explore questions of film history. All of these assessments help strengthen your critical thinking and give you skills that are attractive to future employers.You’ll be assessed in individual and group assessment modes from essays and exams to presentations and discussions. Your progress in some theoretical modules will be assessed through creative practice. For example, you might be required to produce a script of your own to explore questions of film history. All of these assessments help strengthen your critical thinking and give you skills that are attractive to future employers.

Structure

In the first year you‘ll be introduced to the major debates in film studies and English literature. At the same time you’ll develop the key skills needed to analyse a range of media and literary texts using contemporary and historical examples.

Teaching and Learning

Our world-leading academics employ a range of teaching styles. Alongside the more traditional lectures and seminars, you’ll learn through film and television screenings. You’ll also have access to UEA’s Television Studio and Media Suite. Both contain a wide variety of cutting edge media technologies (editing suites, cameras and sound equipment, sound studio and digitisation suite). You’ll have the opportunity to be fully trained to use all of these. You’ll acquire practical skills while deepening your understanding of how the film and television content you’re studying is produced.

You’ll acquire vital skills needed for independent learning throughout your course and have access to dedicated sessions designed to help you make the most of UEA’s state of the art library facilities. Through these sessions and your academic modules, you’ll gain the vital research skills of uncovering resources and critically assessing sources. As you progress through your degree you’ll develop as a self-motivated researcher and independent creative thinker.

In addition to timetabled lecture and seminar slots, each member of staff at UEA holds dedicated office hours where students can come and seek additional advice and guidance on a one-to-one basis. You’ll also be assigned an adviser who can support you through your studies by providing academic and career guidance.

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Assessment for Year 2

Structure

You’ll deepen your knowledge in modules covering topics such as film theory. You’ll also begin the specialisation that continues in the third year. Modules at this stage may cover topics such as adaptation: Shakespeare on stage and screen, Austen and the Brontes, and film and video production.

You’ll also have the chance to take an internship. Previous students have undertaken placements with organisations including local radio stations, television production companies and the East Anglian Film Archive.

Teaching and Learning

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Assessment for Year 3

Structure

You’ll continue to specialise, choosing from modules on a range of areas according to your own interests. Modules may include film and memory and the representation of the past, and genres such as science fiction. In English literature, you can explore areas such as poetry or feminist writing and encounter a range of authors from Shakespeare and Charles Dickens to Ali Smith and Nobel-prize winning UEA graduate Kazuo Ishiguro.

You’ll also develop your research skills in your dissertation module which includes a period of supervised independent study. You’ll have the opportunity to undertake a media practice project, producing creative work (film, TV, audio, print, advertising, digital) in response to an academic problem.

Teaching and Learning

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Assessment for Year 1

Compulsory Modules

FILM HISTORY

Code AMAM4001A

Credits 20

This module provides an introduction to the history of film from 1895 through to the end of the 20th century. The module will outline important developments in European and American film history, which will underpin your future study. The course will help you understand some of the complex processes of historical change (e.g. technological, industrial and socio-political) that transformed cinema during the period. We will situate particular films in the aesthetic and narrative traditions in which the films were originally made and seen, and explore film histories through a critical lens. The module is also designed to familiarize students with a range of objects and methods within the practice of film history and to use these to encourage students to start asking questions about how film history is constructed, and how as scholars we might usefully explore, or ask questions of, the accepted narratives of film history.

READING LITERATURE IN HISTORY

Code LDCL4008A

Credits 20

This is the main introductory module to the study of literature. It aims to help new students to read historically, by offering a range of models of the relationship between literature and history, explored through the study of selected historical and literary moments. The module is taught by a weekly lecture, with an accompanying seminar.

ANALYSING FILM

Code AMAM4009A

Credits 20

The analysis of film form underpins film studies as a discipline, informing aesthetic, theoretical and historical modes of inquiry. You will be introduced to the analysis of film form and film style. It encompasses approaches to the fundamental formal elements of mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and sound. You will also build on these elements of film form to address systems of and approaches to film style including narrative and narration, genre, realism, continuity and classicism, modernism and experimentation. You will also learn how questions of film style are integral to the analysis of representation, for example in relation to modernity, gender and race.

WORLD CINEMAS

Code AMAM4035B

Credits 20

The concept of World Cinema pervades our everyday experiences of film. It is a category of films that can be seen increasingly from cinema listings to the high street. Inherent within the label are debates of resistance, industry, art, technology and aesthetics that have held sway since the dawn of cinema worldwide. In this module you will break down some of these discourses and address the significant cultural, economic and political influences that world cinema has had, and indeed still has, within cinema. There are innumerable cinemas that may be contained within the notion of “world cinema,” but few are more long-lived, or as well-developed, as those we will investigate during this module. Taking the conceptual frameworks of “Middle Eastern,” “European” and “Asian” cinemas as starting points, you will break down the meanings that these regional, national and international definitions of cinema share. You will focus, for example, on the cinemas of Europe, Turkey, Middle East, Japan and America. This tightly focused definition of “world cinemas” is intended to introduce some of the most significant of contemporary world cinemas, while also focusing on those which have had the most influential global histories.

WRITING TEXTS

Code LDCL4020B

Credits 20

In this module theories of literature and experiments in writing will intersect. In weekly lectures and seminar discussions, and through the reading of a carefully curated dossier of essays, you’ll explore important questions about writing and literature. What is the difference between writing and speaking? What is a literary text and how does it differ from non-literary texts? What is the relationship between the act of reading and the act of writing? How is a literary text influenced by other texts? You’ll also become confident in carrying out your own textual experiments and trying out a range of creative rewriting exercises on existing texts. In this you might explore modes of adaptation and translation, try out different ways of writing to constraint, play literary-generative games such as cut-up technique, as well as undertake a variety of textual interventions and experiments. You’ll be encouraged to hack existing literary texts and rewrite them to your own purpose. You’ll take texts apart and put them back together differently. Through specially-designed writing exercises you will gain new insights into a variety of approaches to writing and literature. Your encounters with literary-theoretical texts will likewise cast new light on the writing process and the ways in which the text produced relates to textual theories. By the end of the module you’ll have gained a keen understanding of how texts work. This will make you a better reader and writer. You’ll also become confident in stepping back and thinking about your own writing critically.

WRITING ACROSS BORDERS

Code LDCL4021B

Credits 20

How has English crossed geographical, linguistic and social borders? What are the legacies of these movements for the literature we read and the ways we speak? In Writing Across Borders, you’ll study the emergence of modern English from a multilingual medieval society and its colonial expansion to Ireland, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. You’ll investigate the histories of translation, religious mission, education, violence, exploitation and political control that have given rise to the global reach of English as a means of cultural exchange. The module will focus on examples of writers who have responded critically and creatively to these histories, asking how they have used distinctive forms of English to articulate their experience and understanding of their world. It will provide you with a conceptual vocabulary to describe different forms of language such as register, dialect and creole, which you’ll apply to analysis of a range of literary texts that may include songs, religious works, translations, travel writing, plays, novels and poems. You’ll engage with a variety of perspectives on established debates about speech communities, the status of ‘standard’ English and the relation between language and broader narratives of identity. You’ll be encouraged to think about the hybridity of English and the ways that the language you use, read and hear expresses histories and social differences.

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Important Information

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the modules listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the annual monitoring, review and update of modules. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes and their constituent modules, the University will endeavour to consult with students and others. It is also possible that the University may not be able to offer a module for reasons outside of its control, such as the illness of a member of staff. In some cases optional modules can have limited places available and so you may be asked to make additional module choices in the event you do not gain a place on your first choice. Where this is the case, the University will inform students.

Students will take 120 credits across Year 2. 60 credits in the Autumn semester and 60 Credits in the Spring. Students must select 60cr in Film modules and 60cr in Literature modules. Students wishing to enrol on the 60 credit Film and Television Studies Semester Abroad module AMAM5037B in the spring semester, must first seek approval from the Study Abroad Office and International Director. Students must ensure that they take 50% English and 50% Film Studies modules over the course of the year. STUDENTS HAVE TO SELECT ONE FTM MODULE AND THREE LDC ONES.

Assessment for Year 2

Compulsory Modules

FILM THEORY

Code AMAM5030A

Credits 20

This module explores aspects of film theory as it has developed over the last hundred years or so. It encompasses topics including responses to cinema by filmmaker theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein and influential formulations of and debates about realism and film aesthetics associated with writers and critics such as André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim and Bela Bálázs. You’ll study the impact of structuralism, theories of genre, narrative and models of film language; feminist film theory and its emphasis on psychoanalysis; theories of race and representation; cognitive theory; emerging eco-critical approaches; post-structuralist and post-modern film theory. You’ll be taught by lecture, screening and seminar. You’ll work with primary texts - both films and theoretical writings - and have the opportunity to explore in their written work the ways in which film theories can be applied to film texts.

RESEARCHING MEDIA

Code AMAM5025B

Credits 20

The module provides you with the key concepts and methods necessary to devise and execute an independent research project, whether using traditional academic methods or practice based research. As a result, you will cover the key processes involved in devising and focusing a research project, reflexively undertaking the research yourself and writing up your results. In the process, you will be shown how to position your work in relation to an intellectual context; devise the research questions that are practical and realistic; and develop research methods through which to address these questions.

Optional A Modules

(40 credits)

LIVING ON THE HYPHEN: Multi-ethnic American Literatures

Code AMAL5077A

Credits 20

America has long been interpreted as the location of social possibility founded upon a desire to assimilate and negate ethnic 'others'. In this module, you’ll trace and explore the literary responses of distinct 'American' cultures: including Native American; African American; Asian American; and Latin American. Through studying each distinct group of texts, you’ll engage with the specific historical, cultural and political relationships between the US and each author's country of origin or national/cultural history, across the 20th and 21st centuries. You’ll also make connections between these distinct groups of writers, to consider topics such as race and racism, exile, return, family, belonging, identity, language and memory, colonisation, imperialism, slavery, segregation, immigration, and illegality/invisibility, with an emphasis upon contemporary experiences. Via important multi-ethnic writers and texts, you’ll explore what constitutes American literature aesthetically, temporally, geographically, and culturally, evaluate the value of the term ‘multi-ethnic’ and its place within American literary studies, and engage critically with questions of American literature as ‘World literature’. Through seminar based discussions, you’ll develop your ability to evaluate literary texts as contributions to historical revisions and debates, and also as representations of identity, belonging, the nation state, politics, and culture. You will be assessed through coursework, while gaining experience of communicating your ideas via seminar discussion and group presentation, and you’ll have the opportunity to engage in peer to peer assessment practices. On successful completion of the module, you’ll have the knowledge and skills to consider the diversity of American literature and the complexities of American cultural and national identity.

AMERICAN VOICES

Code AMAL5078A

Credits 20

Addressing America as a nation and the experience of being American, Walt Whitman writes in ‘Song of Myself’: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself, I am large and contain multitudes.’ This module explores Whitman’s comments in a selection of 20th-century American writers, and considers the literary and historical contexts of their creative literary practices. You are also encouraged to reflect on your own creative writing. What can you learn from these American writers and how might their innovations enhance your own writing practices? You will encounter a broad range of American writing from Walt Whitman to Conceptual writing. You will focus on how and why American writers have addressed notions of national and individual identity through their creative practices. You will also learn about the formal innovations of American writers in order to understand the concept of ‘voice’ in terms of, for example, expression, representation, protest, and subjectivity. You will learn through seminars and creative writing workshops where you will develop your skills as a writer, reader and editor of your own and other’s work. You will develop as a writer and enhance your understanding of American literature, as critical reader and as creative writer. You will adopt, adapt and appropriate the stylistic and contextual concerns of pioneering American writers covered and articulate the significance of these concerns for your own creative work.

ANIMATION

Code AMAM5024A

Credits 20

Animation has long been one of the most popular and least scrutinised areas of popular media culture. This module seeks to introduce you to animation as a mode of production through examinations of different aesthetics and types of animation from stop motion through to cel and CGI-based examples. It then goes on to discuss some of the debates around animation in relation to case study texts, from animation's audiences to its economics. A range of approaches and methods will therefore be adopted within the module, including methods like political economics, cultural industries, star studies and animation studies itself. The module is taught by seminar and screening and is not a practice module.

THE BUSINESS OF FILM AND TV DRAMA IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Code AMAM5026A

Credits 20

The module provides an intensive introduction to the business of film and television; including the development, financing, production, distribution and exploitation of films and television drama programmes. It is based around a detailed understanding of the film and television value chain, showing how different businesses and creative people work together to create and exploit programmes. It will also cover the process by which scripts or TV programme ideas are written and developed. Emphasis will be placed on UK, European and American Independent film models; and the difference between the independent model and the US studio model. It will examine the effect of Netflix and the rise of digital streaming. It includes a wide range of recent case studies and real-life examples, with companies from Pixar to Working Title. Issues raised will include the impact of new technologies; changing business models; the conflict between commerce and art; entrepreneurship and managing creative people; and the complex and difficult relationships between writers, directors, producers, executives, financiers, and distributors. It is a practical forward-looking course about current and future business practise, which will be a valuable foundation for anyone interested in working in the media, film or television sectors. It will also be valuable to anyone studying film and television programmes and culture, so that they can fully understand the financial and business context in which programmes are created. By the end of the module you will know how films and TV programmes get dreamt up, how they get developed, and how they get financed and distributed. You will learn how the industry actually works.

FILM THEORY

Code AMAM5030A

Credits 20

FILM GENRES

Code AMAM5033A

Credits 20

Film Genres introduces students to the range of theories and methods used to account for the prevalence of genres within filmmaking. We investigate historical changes in how film genres have been approached in order to consider how genres have been made use of by industry, critics and film audiences. Genre theories are explored through a range of case studies drawn from one or more of a range of popular American film genres including the Western, science-fiction, melodrama, romantic comedy, the road movie, the buddy movie, film noir, the gangster film, the war film and action/adventure film. In exploring concepts and case studies relating to film genres the module aims to demonstrate the richness of film genre and its continuing relevance as a mode of analysis.

AUDIENCES AND RECEPTION STUDIES

Code AMAM5035A

Credits 20

In this module you will be introduced to the key theoretical frameworks and approaches within the tradition of reception studies. It will offer you a critical exploration of the main debates and studies that have shaped the field, exploring both historical and contemporary contexts of media reception. In particular, you will consider the transcultural circulation of media, and the issues that arise when film, television and other media transfer between cultures with significantly different values and modes of reception. You will also be encouraged to critically evaluate existing reception studies, being equipped with the tools necessary to undertake your own small-scale reception study.

GUIDED STUDY

Code AMAM5040A

Credits 20

This module allows students to work on a specialist area in Film, TV or Media Studies under the guidance of a member of staff with relevant expertise. The module enables students to develop and extended their knowledge and understanding of the contexts, approaches, practices, theories and debates connected with a specific topic or field of study. The module also develops students to develop their critical and analytical skills. The module can allow staff and students to explore a particular area of interest in depth and can therefore permit opportunities for the interrelationship between teaching and research. In addition, the module has a key role in public-facing, outreach and widening participation work: it allows staff-led groups of students to gain accreditation for specific projects such as, for example, being involved in cultural activities such as festivals, academic projects such as symposia, schools outreach activities, practice projects such as radio station broadcasts, heritage or charity-sector initiatives and other commissioned projects. Assessment of the module reflects group and individual learning activity. It is a module that can effectively support interdisciplinary work. Despite the diversity of potential content, the module adheres to a uniform structure: 1. Contexts: The social, political, cultural and/or theoretical backdrop to the subject under investigation. 2. Approaches: Introduction and analysis of a range of methodologies and theoretical and/or creative applications to demonstrate the potential approaches that can be used in the subject. 3. Practice or Theory Project: The student's practical or theoretical work within the topic.

DOCUMENTARY

Code AMAM5045A

Credits 20

This module will introduce you to key issues in documentary history, theory and practice. You will engage with definitional and generic debates; historical forms and founders; different modes of documentary; ethical issues; and social and political uses. We will draw upon a range of national and media contexts and give you the opportunity to engage with a range of theories, archival materials, documentary styles and ethical debates within your written and practical work. At the end of module you will produce a documentary shaped by the traditions and theories you have studied, employing a range of archive film and television footage sourced from the East Anglian Film Archive.

POPULAR MUSIC

Code AMAM5046A

Credits 20

For many people, popular music provides the soundtrack to their lives. It is intimately bound up with their sense of themselves, their attitudes and values, their friendships and social lives, their dreams and fantasies. But what can we learn about the power and place of popular music by studying it from an academic perspective? Throughout this module you will discover the range of approaches brought to popular music’s sounds, images, meanings, audiences and production through the perspectives of media studies, cultural studies and sociology. In examining songs and videos, fans, industry and performance, you’ll be encouraged to communicate your ideas in seminars and written work, engaging with key concepts and theories which will give you the tools to carry out your own research on popular music. We’ll begin with a consideration of the ‘popular’ of pop, before critically engaging with historical perspectives on popular music, tracing this through to the development of a fully-fledged ‘popular music studies’. Along the way, you’ll uncover approaches to analysing popular music’s texts, their production and the ways in which audiences and fans relate to them in the formation and expression of identities. You’ll also be encouraged to reflect on popular music’s relationship with other media (such as television, music writing and the internet), its role in everyday life, questions of representation, politics and power, and the contemporary relevance of terms such as ‘scene’, ‘subculture’ and ‘genre’. Having considered the study of popular music in this way, you will put your knowledge into practice by developing and conducting your own research project into an aspect of popular music audiences and/or culture of your choice.

THEORISING TELEVISION

Code AMAM5047A

Credits 20

This module explores some of the key ways in which television has been theorised, conceptualised and debated. You are offered insight into how the discipline of Television Studies has developed, as well as how television itself has developed - in terms of social roles, political functions and aesthetic form. The medium will be explored as a textual entity, a social activity (i.e. the focus on audiences and viewing), and a political agent (ideology and power). Part of our intention is to focus on how the specificities of television have been understood.

WRITING THE AMERICAN SCRIPT

Code AMAM5051A

Credits 20

For much of the twentieth century, the screenplay was synonymous with Hollywood, the Studio System, and “The Movies”: films as brash and bold as booming American power, written by screenwriting giants, such as Preston Sturges, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Billy Wilder, Anita Loos and Paddy Chayfsky. But much of what we love about more recent American film-making has been the work of writers outside the mainstream: John Cassavetes, Joan Micklin Silver, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Lee, Nora Ephron, Quentin Tarantino, and the like. Throughout, American screenwriting has produced work as dynamic and expansive as the nation itself. In this module you will move through the high points of American scriptwriting, using scripts, texts, and creative pastiche to develop an understanding of the form. Your work may be assessed through a mix of creative and critical work, writing exercises and a complete short script. In broadly the first half of the semester you will use pastiche and other techniques to develop basic screenwriting skills. The remainder of the term will be devoted to developing and workshopping an original script. You will be introduced to the basic dramaturgy of cinematic storytelling, screenwriting form and format, and skills in pitching and story development. This module will therefore help you develop your creative capacity, your communication skills, and will help broaden your commercial awareness.

TELEVISION STUDIO PRODUCTION

Code AMAP5122A

Credits 20

This module introduces students to television studio production, using the resources of the campus television studio. You will learn basic skills of both live and recorded studio production (including directing, vision and sound mixing, camera-work, lighting, floor management and editing), using practice-based training. You will produce a short television programme, researching the appropriate genre characteristics, style and narrative to create the final work. The live broadcast will be accompanied by written reports that critically analyse and evaluate the production process and the finished product. PLEASE NOTE - This module needs a minimum of 12 students enrolled to run; if that enrolment is not met, the module may be withdrawn.

FILM AND VIDEO PRODUCTION

Code AMAP5123A

Credits 20

Film is frequently described as a ‘director’s medium’, while simultaneously defined as a ‘collaborative effort’. How is that possible? How do the director, cinematographer, designer and editor work together to create the suspense, romance, or comedy that we expect from our favourite films? What does the film director actually do? What are the choices that see one director lauded as an ‘auteur’ and another derided as a ‘hack’? Why does a cinematographer choose the specific lighting, framing and camera style for a scene? How does the director work with a script and coax performances out of the actors? What prompts the editor to use one angle, rather than another? This module attempts to answer these questions, as it introduces you to the practical application of film and television grammar and explores the fundamental questions of cinematic and televisual storytelling. A series of filmmaking exercises give you the chance to experiment with elements of camera and blocking, the use of sound, and multiple editing options. Other exercises look at script as a dramatic text and introduce basic techniques of working with actors. The final project asks you to work with professional script material to produce a video scene study. The module encourages students to understand the choices and decision-making processes involved in filmmaking, and the pros and cons involved in any creative decision.

AMERICAN MUSIC

Code AMAS5023A

Credits 20

The first book published in the New World was a hymn book. Music, sacred and profane, has been at the centre of American lives ever since. Distinctive American musical styles still dominate the globe, as they have done for decades. But how did American music develop into the genres that we recognise today? How did uniquely American sounds catch the ear of listeners all over the world? You will gain a thorough understanding of the development of American music. You will focus on a number of distinctive musical traditions - from minstrelsy to blues, jazz, and country; from rock and roll to hip hop - and consider the way that they have shaped popular music today. Throughout the course, you will encounter a rich variety of music and an extraordinary range of characters, from the most famous entertainers in modern culture, to the obscure, the forgotten and the neglected. Whilst exploring the development of American music, you will also examine the ways in which its growth tells a larger story about the history of America and its people. In particular, it will give you a different perspective on the issue of race in American life. Through seminar discussion, written coursework, and group presentations, you will develop your analytical and critical abilities - whether that means your ability to think about the significance of a song and its meaning for a particular historical moment, or the way that the shifting meaning of a genre of music can tell us many things about its wider social and cultural context.

LGBT AND BEYOND: SEXUAL CULTURES, QUEER IDENTITIES, AND THE POLITICS OF DESIRE

Code HUM-5007A

Credits 20

How do notions of gender and sexuality shape culture, and how are in turn our understanding and experiences of gender and sexuality shaped by cultural production? How important are other times, places and identifications – associated with class, race, ethnicity – to these understandings and experiences? And to what extent can a film, an image, a testimony, or a place capture such complexity? Addressing these questions from an interdisciplinary approach, the aim of the module is to explore the ways in which gender and sexuality are constituted through a broad array of experiences, practices, and cultural products. The module focuses on issues raised in classical and contemporary research in history, politics, media, cultural studies and visual cultures such as: representation and cultural production; subjectivity; identity; identification; bodies and embodiment; performance and performativity; among others. Overall, by exploring theory in conjunction with queer cultural production that explores questions of power, identity, and desire across different racial, national, and cultural landscapes, the module aims to problematise how gender and sexuality are not stable identities or classifications but are instead processes involving normalisations, hierarchies and relations of domination that can be challenged, troubled and/or queered.

CREATIVE WRITING: INTRODUCTION (AUT)

Code LDCC5005A

Credits 20

Have you ever wondered what it means to write creatively? Or how you might articulate what Zadie Smith calls ‘your way of being in the world’? Together we’ll address these questions. You’ll explore the work of some of the finest writers in the world, while also receiving clear guidance on how you might bring shape to the promptings of your imagination. This module will get you writing prose fiction and/or poetry. While there is no single, authorised way to write, there are things worth knowing about. You’ll discover some of these things in class; others you’ll pick up through being alert to what you have read and the way in which it functions. The most important thing, however, is to discover your own way of doing things. What drives you to capture a certain moment, or tell a certain story in a certain way? That’s what we'll be aiming for. Along the way you’ll develop an understanding of the craft of writing – the technical nuts & bolts – while acquiring the disciplines necessary to being a writer - observation, drafting, and submitting to deadlines. You'll be guided through a series of themes and concepts that go to the heart of creative writing, from voice and structure, to imagery and form. You'll generate material throughout the course, both through guided exercises and private study. Very often you'll be asked to write about ‘what you know’, drawing on notebooks, memory, family stories, your sensory impressions. In prose you will go on to look at such things as character, dialogue, point-of-view, ‘showing’ versus ‘telling’, plotting, etc. In poetry, there will be an exploration of the possibilities of pattern and form, sound, voice, imagery, and rhythm. By the end of the course you’ll have developed a body of work to call your own and a sense of what it means and what it takes to write seriously.

THE WRITING OF JOURNALISM (AUT)

Code LDCC5013A

Credits 20

What kinds of writing skills produce great journalism? This question is essential to creating powerful journalism and it’s a central concern of this module. The Writing of Journalism enables you to develop a critical awareness of the skills and structures involved in creating effective journalism. You’ll consider a range of journalistic forms and find out how best to nurture and develop your own writing. You'll have the opportunity to explore the ways in which journalistic writing works – its contexts, its demands, and its inventiveness. This will enable us to approach journalism as a discourse with its own conventions, practices, and ideologies. This module is concerned with journalism as a practice, and a genre. As such, it involves discussion, peer-workshops, and practical experience of reading and writing news and feature articles. In addition to writing your own journalism, you will examine journalistic writing and critical work concerning the craft, in order to probe and challenge your own ideas and assumptions about the practice and production of this writing form. Rather than see the practice of journalism and the critical study of journalism as distinct activities, this module aims to engage you as critical readers and writers whose work is informed by both contexts. In so doing, you’ll gain a greater understanding of the demands and conventions of journalistic writing, develop and sharpen your own work, and gain the discursive flexibility which will allow you to navigate the writing of journalism today.

PERFORMANCE SKILLS: THE ACTOR AND THE TEXT

Code LDCD5016A

Credits 20

What is the actor’s relationship with the text? If the spoken word is a window into a character’s inner world what does the actor need to do to bring that inner landscape to life? This creatively challenging Module will give the developing actor a tangible set of tools with which to approach the text. Whether it be verse or prose the module aims to bring the spoken word to life not just through the voice but through the whole body. We will get inside the words in order to experience their visceral nature, in order to release their energy so as to understand why certain words have been chosen over others, why certain rhythms and sounds create particular kinds of character. The Module will encourage connection and spontaneity in the performer whist marrying this vitality with rigorous text analysis. We are aiming to create pro-active performers who are in charge of their own craft and can bring a character to life through a vocal, textual and psychophysical approach. The Module will be an exciting journey towards finding autonomy and artistic intuition in the art of interpreting Dramatic texts. The main methods of study will be through: (1) individual performance of poems and speeches, (2) scene classes and duologues (3) character study of roles in a variety of plays.

DEVISED PERFORMANCE

Code LDCD5053A

Credits 20

In this course, we will explore the concept of devised performance, in all of its various manifestations, and examine methods to develop devised theatre in the rehearsal room. Exploring the use of non-dramatic texts, thematic structures, storytelling, found text and abstract imagery, this class allows you to study and put into practice the devising techniques of companies such as the Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Complicite, Kneehigh and SITI Company. You will study and practice elements of narrative and dramatic structure, as well as physical performance skills and acting; you will similarly experiment with a range of techniques used to generate material for performance outside of the traditional genre of the playwright's theatre .

THE DIRECTOR, THE ACTOR AND THE SCRIPT

Code LDCD5055A

Credits 20

What is the director's job? How best does the actor work with the director? How does the language of the one translate into a practicable understanding in the other? How much shared vocabulary is profitable to their dynamic? In this module you will explore the convergence and divergence of skillset and function in this most intimate of collaborations; we will seek to strip to their fundamentals the mechanics of the director-actor relationship, and then offer tools with which both director and actor can work, in ongoing exercise and scene studies. You will gain a solid understanding of scene structure and analysis; integrate new acting tools; learn a healthy mutual respect for one another's function, and learn to navigate some of the subtleties in the communication between actor and director. This module is aimed at students who are seriously interested in furthering their command of practical work and you must be equally willing to both act and direct. Please be aware that the three practical modules open to you in this semester, are all quite demanding in their own right. You are advised to enrol in no more than one of the following two modules alongside this one: Experiments in Performance, Devised Performance. Enrolling for all three is not officially disallowed, but the competition for your time and attention between these modules increases continuously throughout the semester.

CRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE

Code LDCL5031A

Credits 20

This is a module you will find helpful throughout your degree, informing and perhaps changing the way you read and analyse literature, film and other cultural forms. Across the twelve weeks, you’ll not only engage with the rich, complex and provocative work of literary critics and theorists – including deconstructive, feminist, post-colonial and queer theorists – but also of some of the thinkers and writers who have influenced them: such as Marx, Freud and Saussure. You will therefore encounter some of the most important and exciting thinkers of the modern period, acquiring an understanding of developments in linguistics, economics, psychoanalysis and philosophy, and tracing the ways in which these overlap with, and inform, literary and cultural study.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5041A

Credits 20

In this module you will explore how words open out onto worlds in eighteenth-century literature. The first half of the module focuses on texts in which people, real or imagined, move out into the world. The writers in the first half will include authors such as Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and Olaudah Equiano. We will see how new ideas about what it meant to be human emerged from these travels and examine the intertwinement of eighteenth-century literature with exploration, empire, and enslavement. While the first half of the module focuses on the wider world, the second half of the module focuses on the inner world of the mind and moves our focus from prose to poetry. Writers in the second half of the module include writers such as Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Ann Yearsley, and Phillis Wheatley. In this part of the module, we will see how writers represent the workings of the mind using the resources of literary form, trace connections between the mind and its immediate environment, and move back and forth between the mind and the world as a whole. By taking this module, you’ll gain an awareness of the experimental and exploratory energies behind so much of the literature the eighteenth-century produced. You’ll also gain sharpened analytical and research skills that will help you see significant textual patterns in texts and trace connections between literary texts and the larger world in which they move. This module will help sharpen your skills using especially resonant words as ways of understanding texts and exploring their entanglements in the wider eighteenth-century world. Assessment will be by summative portfolio with a 1,000 word essay on a particular word in a text which you submit first as a formative, get feedback on, and revise and submit as a component of a final summative portfolio. You will also write a 2,000 word essay in response to a conceptual question that will be submitted as part of the final summative portfolio.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING: RENAISSANCE AND REVOLUTION (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5042A

Credits 20

In this module, you’ll discover a huge variety of writing from one of Britain's most exciting and turbulent periods of cultural, political and intellectual transformation: the seventeenth century. We begin by exploring how English literature was formed out of its encounters with classical texts and how women established a place for their writing within English literary culture for the first time. In the centre of the module, we discover how seventeenth-century people wrote about their encounters with other cultures, whether as travellers to the Ottoman Empire (which stretched across the Middle East), or as colonists meeting Native Americans in Massachusetts. In the module's latter section, we ask how literature was transformed by the tumultuous upheavals of the English civil war and the execution of the monarch, events which have sent shockwaves through the centuries which still resonate today. The modules’ themes come together in the study of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, one of the first novels and a pioneering work of women’s writing, which tells the terrible story of an African prince who was enslaved in Surinam. Authors we study include famous figures such as Ben Jonson and John Milton (including a look at his masterpiece, Paradise Lost), as well as many lesser-known writers, including women such as Lucy Hutchinson and Hester Pulter, or the astonishing Turkish travel writer, Evliya Çelebi. The module works through lectures, which establish larger questions we might ask of the week's material, and seminars, in which we read passages of texts together closely.

MODERNISM

Code LDCL5045A

Credits 20

The modernist movement transformed literature and the arts worldwide in the early part of the 20th century, peaking in the period between 1918 and 1939. Although the term modernism was rarely used by authors in this period, in the period after World War II it became the usual term to describe a group of writers, responding to one another, whose work is characterised by radical experiments with language and form, which aimed to do justice to a range of many subjects such as the mysteries of consciousness and the unconscious, gender, sexuality, and desire, violence and democracy, the primitive and the mechanical. We will be reading a range of authors, including such long-canonised figures as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, HD, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, but expanding the modernist canon in the light of recent scholarship to other more recently revived authors such as Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, and Jean Rhys. We will trace some of the origins of modernism in earlier literary movements such as Symbolism, Imagism, Aestheticism, and Impressionism, and explore its kinship with foreign literary movements such as Dada and Surrealism. Modernism invented modern methods of criticism and we will be placing a particular emphasis on the close reading of poetry and poetic prose. A study of modernism is essential for understanding all 20th century literature and this module is highly recommended for any students wishing to take any modules in 20th-century literature.

FROM PUSHKIN TO CHEKHOV: NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN FICTION

Code LDCL5048A

Credits 20

‘Russia is old; her literature is new. Russian history goes back to the ninth century; Russian literature, so far as it interests the world, begins in the nineteenth…. Russian literature is the voice of a giant, waking from a long sleep, and becoming articulate. … And what he has said has been well worth the thousand years of waiting.’ What has nineteenth century Russian literature said that the world has waited so long to hear? This is a question you will begin to answer as you read some of the age’s great authors, such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. You’ll gain insight into what makes this writing distinctive and an awareness of the political, social and cultural conditions that created it. You’ll discover why it was so important to other European writers and learn about the intriguing literary relationship between Russia and the West. You’ll start by familiarising yourself with some of the historical background, concentrating on the ‘westernisation’ of Russia, a process begun by Peter the Great and made visible in the construction of the city of St Petersburg. At the beginning of the module you’ll be given some key themes and questions to think about; these will help you to focus your reading during the coming weeks. You’ll learn through seminars and independent study and research. You’ll be assessed on one essay, which can be developed from a class presentation. By the end of the module you’ll have read some of the great nineteenth century Russian writers and gained an understanding of the political, historical and social background of their work. You’ll have discovered why these novels had such a profound impact in Western Europe and how they were instrumental in the development of the Modernist movement in Britain. You’ll have gained a wider literary perspective and reading in translation will have made you think in new ways about your own language too.

I AM

Code LDCL5054A

Credits 20

I Am aims to help you develop insights about yourself, your reading and your writing. You will explore ideas and approaches concerning the self, being and identity in a supportive environment; engaging with a broad range of material including literature and literary criticism, personal essays, journal writing and digital content. You will be encouraged to experiment with various creative, critical and essay writing forms too, and you will keep a private journal as a means of trialling your ideas and honing your skills. Reflecting on yourself from different points of view will help put you in touch with unexpected ideas and material. It will enrich your thinking and your writing. The module will also encourage you along a process of reflexivity, helping you to think about how and where to direct your discoveries. A heightened level of self-awareness will undoubtedly help you maintain a healthy sense of who you are and will support you in making informed decisions about your future. The module also responds to growing demands to decolonise curriculums. It invites you to bring the totality of your experience into a flexible curriculum, and to explore not only what you know, but where you know from.

MEDIEVAL WRITING (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5063A

Credits 20

To read medieval writing is to encounter otherness, to engage with a culture (really a variety of cultures) that at times seems familiar, recognizable, yet which repeatedly reminds us of its difference and distance from us. When a huge and intimidating green knight enters King Arthur’s court at Camelot and issues his challenge, he is disturbing not because he is entirely alien, but because he is alike enough to unsettle the court’s sense of identity. The fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most complex and challenging works of literature ever written, might serve as a metaphor for our experience of medieval writing, and of the language in which it is written: Middle English. It is strangely familiar. Yet through the experience of otherness we find our multiple identities, and in studying Medieval Writing you will (re)discover the genres and modes that have shaped our literary histories: lyric, comedy, tragedy, romance, allegory, satire, historiography, autobiography and fantasy, to name but a few. The module is configured along the themes of ‘pilgrimage, travellers and exiles’, which allows us to understand the diverse forms of interaction — real and imagined — between European and non-European cultures: military, religious, and mercantile exchanges, for example. You will discover a culture of dazzling intellectual richness and variety that will dispel any lazily pejorative modern clichés about the term ‘medieval’. And you will be given the tools to make those discoveries – in addition to learning how to read Middle English, you will learn about the materiality of medieval texts (e.g. how to understand manuscripts), and of the historical coordinates of those texts: the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, religious persecution, the feudal system and its decline. Whether it’s the cosmopolitan intellectual brilliance of Chaucer, the fantastic realities of Arthurian romance, the autobiography of Margery Kempe, the travel writing of Sir John Mandeville, or the ethical dilemmas posed by the Gawain-poet, Medieval Writing has something for you.

PUBLISHING (AUT)

Code LDCL5064A

Credits 20

Have you ever wondered how books are chosen for publication, or do you want to set up a literary magazine? This module address conceptual as well as practical aspects of the publishing of texts, including discussions around readership the meaning of editorship and what constitutes an editorial policy. You will be taught how to set up, run and market your own publication (such as a magazine, a book, a fanzine), to consider the principles of good design, and will learn the rudiments of finance, scheduling and copyright law. You'll begin with an introduction to the concepts behind cover and page design, and an opportunity to put your new knowledge into practice by designing and writing copy for a book jacket. You go on to present and develop an idea for a short publication and, via discussion, class exercises and private research, learn to write or select, then edit, material for it. You will engage with the processes involved in its hypothetical production and learn to identify and address its readership. You'll also benefit from taught sessions on Adobe Indesign software in our Media Suite to enable you to design your publication at a simple, basic level. As you study you'll gain experience in communicating your ideas to a class and in tutorial, as well as through word and image in your formative work and portfolio.

LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY

Code LDCL5072A

Credits 20

This module will offer a series of different approaches to the question of how Literature and Philosophy can speak to each other as academic disciplines, demonstrating the breadth and diversity of the two fields, as well as acquainting students with the research in literary criticism and philosophy currently being pursued at UEA. As well as examining the ways in which literature can illuminate and trouble philosophical argument, it will explore literature and 'the literary' as a topic for philosophical analysis, and the kinds of thinking such a topic would demand. Setting literature and philosophy into dialogue in this way will engender a more capacious understanding of the particular philosophical issues, and literary techniques, under discussion. The course will allow students to develop an awareness of the limits and advantages of various modes of literary and philosophical expression, and to foster more sophisticated skills in both literary and philosophical criticism. The module will be made up of a lecture circus, with two weeks given to each lecturer on a particular topic related to their current research (there will be five in all, including a lecture from the module convener, plus two from Philosophy and two from Literature, Drama and Creative Writing). The seminars will discuss issues arising from these lectures, working with texts set by the lecturer.

THE SHORT STORY (AUT)

Code LDCL5074A

Credits 20

What is a short story? What do short story writers have to say? What about short story critics and theorists? Is the short story a narrative in miniature? Or is there more to a short story than simply being 'short'? And why are critics so concerned with whether the short story is alive or dead? These are the kind of questions this module will investigate by asking you to think as a short story reader, theorist, critic and writer. Reading will be drawn from short story writers - and writing about the short story - roughly spanning the 19th century to the present, and from a range of cultural contexts. Our interest will not be to establish a history of the short story, but instead to explore the range of thematic preoccupations, changing definitions, and critical debates surrounding the form, including its political and ideological perspectives. You will have the opportunity to respond to these questions in critical and/or creative forms of assessment. Writers studied might include Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, Julio Cortazar, Anton Chekov, Ali Smith and Ryunosuke Aqutagawa. This list is suggestive only.

THE WRITING OF HISTORY

Code LDCL5077A

Credits 20

What makes a good history essay? What makes a good literary critical essay? How are they different? How do the disciplines of History and English Literature approach argument and evidence, narration and description? What are the generic, formal and stylistic expectations that govern academic writing in each of these disciplines? Some version of these questions will have occurred to any student attempting to meet the assessment criteria in a university degree. They are perhaps particularly pressing for students studying both literature and history, where somewhat different approaches are required by each discipline. This module brings historians, literary critics and creative writers into a multi-disciplinary conversation designed to explore the tensions as well as the continuities between history and literary studies. By asking faculty members from the two schools to investigate similar territory from contrasting perspectives, you will explore how very similar subjects and sources can be treated differently by different disciplines (and by different methodological orientations within those disciplines). Historians, literary critics and creative writers will give guest lectures that describe and analyse their research process and writing practice. There will also be some more theoretically driven weeks where the work of key philosophers and theorists of history and literature will be read and discussed. You are encouraged to reflect on your own approach to the writing of history and literary criticism and will have the opportunity to learn reflexive writing. The summative assessment asks you to analyse a source text using the resources of both disciplines, and then to write a reflexive essay positioning your own approach in relation to other historians and critics studied on the module.

GENDER AND POWER

Code PPLM5002A

Credits 20

Providing a conceptual overview of feminist research approaches, this module examines contemporary gender and power relations. You will examine both the formal and informal power structures that shape the experience of gender. Bringing together the fields of media and sociology, politics and cultural studies, you will explore the relationship between feminist theory and activism.

DIGITAL MEDIA AND SOCIETY

Code PPLM5053A

Credits 20

For better or worse, digital technologies are hyped at having revolutionised society. This module will provide you with an introduction to the ways in which the internet and other digital technologies are (and are not) affecting society from theoretical and empirical perspectives, and how society shapes technology. Topics covered include: the evolution of the internet; the network society ; regulating new media; the radical internet and terrorism; social networking, blogs and interactivity; culture and identity in the digital age; and how the internet affects politics and the media.

Optional B Modules

(40 credits)

VISUALISING RACE IN THE USA

Code AMAH5057B

Credits 20

Using still photographs, this module will explore how representations of race are produced and circulate in the USA. The main focus will be on Indigenous Americans and African Americans, along with other racialized groups. The module aims to introduce students to strategies and techniques for exploring and analysing photographs and, more specifically, using the visual record to study and illuminate the racial history of the USA. Viewed here as sites of historical evidence, photographic portraits, family albums, monuments, anthropological illustrations, lynching postcards, advertisements, food packaging, fashion photos, are just some of the images that we will read and evaluate. We will explore how visual texts can contribute to our understanding of race (often inseparable from nationhood, class, sexuality, identity) in the USA. The invention of photography changed ways of looking and seeing, from the nineteenth century up to the present day. Opening sessions will focus on ways of reading visual texts. Students will gain skills and techniques to enable them to recruit photographs as evidence, for work in this and future modules. Most of the semester will be devoted to analysing how photographic images both reflect and contribute to constructions of race in the USA. [No previous experience of working with images is necessary. A grounding in American history would be beneficial.

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION

Code AMAL5079B

Credits 20

Writers who want to address the contemporary scene confront a dilemma: as soon as you try to capture it on the page, you’ve already fallen behind the present moment. You’ll explore how contemporary American writers nonetheless respond to this challenge. You’ll consider the issues they identify as pressing in American culture, as well as the literary strategies used to explore those issues. As you progress in the module, you’ll acquire understanding of a number of important concepts associated with contemporary American fiction, such as postmodernism, metafiction, identity, globalisation, and memory. When you’ve completed the module, you’ll be familiar with a number of literary and cultural debates relating to contemporary American culture, and have detailed knowledge of some of the most exciting writers working today. You’ll be able to explain why it is difficult to define, and write about, the ‘contemporary.’ And in the course of your assessed work and seminar discussions, you will develop your communication, writing, and research skills.

CHILDREN'S TELEVISION

Code AMAM5002B

Credits 20

Children’s television is dynamic, diverse and often controversial. In this module, we examine how television has constructed childhood and how children have, in their turn, shaped television. One of the particular challenges with children’s television is that it is usually made by adults for children. As society has shifted over time, therefore, children’s television programming becomes caught up in debates about who and what children are; about how (much) they should watch; and, about what they should (not) be allowed to see. Because childhood is a highly debated cultural and social category, there is a large and growing body of scholarship on the topic of children’s television. We use these theoretical and methodological maps to investigate the past and present of children’s television, including things like: cultural studies, media ethnography, genre studies, gender studies and production studies. We look at a range of topics that may include: Saturday Morning Television, children’s variety shows, animation, children’s broadcasting, children’s satellite channels, censorship, consumerism, pressure groups and gender.

THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIO SYSTEM

Code AMAM5042B

Credits 20

Is there really 'no business like show business'? This module will develop your understanding of how silent-era, classical and post-classical Hollywood has developed as an industry, balancing the twin demands of creativity and commerce. Our aim is to encourage you to analyse how Hollywood works as an industry, the kind of films it produces, and the ways in which they are consumed by domestic and global audiences. You will engage with a variety of Hollywood films and be introduced to a range of theories and approaches for analysing how they are produced and consumed.

WRITING THE AMERICAN SCRIPT

Code AMAM5052B

Credits 20

Writing the American Screenplay: Hollywood and Beyond For much of the twentieth century, the screenplay was synonymous with Hollywood, the Studio System, and “The Movies”; films as brash and bold as booming American power, written by screenwriting giants, such as Preston Sturges, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Billy Wilder, Anita Loos and Paddy Chayfsky. But much of what we love about more recent American film-making has been the work of writers outside the mainstream: John Cassavetes, Joan Micklin Silver, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Lee, Nora Ephron, Quentin Tarantino, and the like. Throughout, American screenwriting has produced work as dynamic and expansive as the nation itself. In this module you will move through the high points of American scriptwriting, using scripts, texts, and creative pastiche to develop an understanding of the form. Your work may be assessed through a mix of creative and critical work, writing exercises and a complete short script. In broadly the first half of the semester you will use pastiche and other techniques to develop basic screenwriting skills. The remainder of the term will be devoted to developing and workshopping an original script. You will be introduced to the basic dramaturgy of cinematic storytelling, screenwriting form and format, and skills in pitching and story development. This module will therefore help you develop your creative capacity, your communication skills, and will help broaden your commercial awareness. Students who achieve a mark of 68%+ either in this module or Adaptation and Transmedia Storytelling are eligible to enrol on Creative Writing: Scriptwriting in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at Level 6.

LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA

Code AMAM5053B

Credits 20

This module is designed to provide students with an understanding of the history and structure of the cinema industries, practices and people of Latin America. Combining film and cultural studies modes of inquiry this module will examine different approaches to film style and theme in this region, as well as looking at the social and cultural role of cinema and its importance as an area of economic and political activity. Covering a range of relevant theories and concepts, the module will provide students with a critical understanding of the key issues at stake in how films are made, circulated and received by audiences, both within relevant national borders and beyond. An indicative weekly outline is as follows: • History and socio-cultural context of Latin America (including legacies of colonialism and religion; what/where is ‘Latin America’ ) • National cinema theories and perspectives • Genres in Latin American cinema • ‘New’ Latin American cinema and ‘Third Cinema’ theory of the 1950s and ‘60s • Indigenous filmmaking and representations of indigeneity • Gender in Latin American cinema • Representations of economic deprivation in Latin American cinema • Censorship and government regulation • Role of co-productions, film festivals and awards (including issues to consider around the reception of sub-titled films) • Focus: Perú (Barrow) • Focus: México and/or Colombia (Aveyard) The proposed weekly structure for the module is as follows: • 2 hour film screening • 1 hour lecture • 1 hour seminar

TELEVISION STUDIO PRODUCTION

Code AMAP5119B

Credits 20

This module introduces you to television studio production, using the resources of the campus television studio. You will learn basic skills of both live and recorded studio production (including directing, vision and sound mixing, camera-work, lighting, floor management and editing), using practice-based training. You will produce a short television programme, researching the appropriate genre characteristics, style and narrative to create the final work. The live broadcast will be accompanied by written reports analysing and evaluating the production process and the finished product. PLEASE NOTE - This module needs a minimum of 12 students enrolled to run; if that enrolment is not met, the module may be withdrawn.

FILM AND VIDEO PRODUCTION

Code AMAP5125B

Credits 20

THEY CAME FROM OUTER-THE-CLOSET: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND PANIC IN AMERICAN FILM

Code AMAS5020B

Credits 20

With a main focus on the 20th century, we will explore key moments of change or crisis in the century and consider the ways the panic caused by such changes is distinctly gendered and/or sexualised. We will concurrently examine gender and sexual resistance to dominant ideas of American identity and the subsequent creation and/or promotion of liberationist discourses and alternative communities. Film will provide the focus for this cultural study, and the module will range widely over a number of different genres including the western, sci-fi, detective and LGBT themed works.

BREAKING NEWS! AMERICAN JOURNALISM: HISTORY AND PRACTICE

Code AMAS5049B

Credits 20

How do we know what is real and what is fake? Previous generations, we are told, could reliably turn to “the news”—but is that really true? From the very beginning, American news was always synonymous with low scandal, scurrilous rumour, and fakery. And yet, there is no doubt that there have been crucial moments when journalists and journalism have gone beyond merely reporting events, to shape the public imagination. “The news” has always manipulated as much as informed its audiences, and in this module you will learn about how this in turn has shaped American life. In learning about the history of journalism and its cultural impact in America in the wider global context, you will have the opportunity to gain an understanding of the art of journalism, both critically and in practice. You will engage with questions surrounding print, broadcast and digital media—looking back to the past, reflecting on the present, and looking forward into the future of journalism. You will consider the ways in which marginalised peoples have sought to assert their voices through news media, by seizing the means by which our public understanding of reality is produced. The work will involve critical readings, engagement with primary source materials, seminar discussions, presentations, and critical writing with creative practice. You will have the opportunity to refine your communication skills, and especially the art of writing in different modes for different audiences.

ARTS AND HUMANITIES PLACEMENT MODULE

Code HUM-5004B

Credits 20

This module will provide you with the opportunity work within a creative/cultural/charity/ heritage/media or other appropriate organisation in order to apply the skills you are developing through your degree to the working world and to develop your knowledge of employment sectors within which you may wish to work in the future. The module emphasises industry experience, sector awareness and personal development through a structured reflective learning experience. Having sourced and secured your own placement (with support from Careers Central), you work within your host organisation undertaking tasks that will help you to gain a better understanding of professional practices within your chosen sector. Taught sessions enable you to acquire knowledge of both the industries in which you are placed as well as focusing on personal and professional development germane to the sector. Your assessment tasks will provide you with an opportunity to critically reflect on the creative and cultural sector in which you have worked as well as providing opportunities to undertake presentations, gather evidence, and articulate your newly acquired skills and experiences.

VIDEOGAMES: THEORY, PRACTICE, AND RECEPTION

Code HUM-5008B

Credits 20

This module offers students the opportunity to develop a comprehensive understanding of the cultural, political, and economic contexts of the videogames industry, and the techniques and principles used in game design. The module will give an overview of the key academic debates from video game history from production to reception, considering the current state of the industry, issues of representation in games, and study of games culture within a broader context. The module will provide students with the opportunity to play and critique a variety of games hardware and software. In addition, the module provides an understanding of hardware platforms and software tools used in the creation of videogames, making use of UEA's Media Suite to offer a practice-based component to aid in the understanding of the principles behind games development. Students will be able to learn entry level games design practices. No previous experience of coding or games development is required to undertake the module, just an interest in the subject.

CREATIVE WRITING: INTRODUCTION (SPR)

Code LDCC5004B

Credits 20

THE WRITING OF JOURNALISM (SPR)

Code LDCC5014B

Credits 20

POLITICAL THEATRE

Code LDCD5025B

Credits 20

How can theatre change the world? You'll attempt to find out by examining the use of theatre and performance by theatre artists and activists to challenge power and create the possibility of change. You’ll look at political theatre in the USA, South America, South Africa, and Europe in the 20th century and beyond; week by week you will encounter plays, writers, performers, and theorists and build up your own toolkit of political theatre. You’ll also create short plays and performance works, and take part in forum theatre, dance, stagings, and events which will enhance your political and theatrical understanding. You will be assessed through writing a short play, a sustained comparative essay, and an original performance work. Themes studied might include feminism, LGBTQ theatre, anti-racism, and Marxism. You will debate, create, and study and emerge having found your own voice as a political theatre-maker.

PRACTICAL FILM MAKING AND PERFORMANCE

Code LDCD5054B

Credits 20

You will, primarily, undertake practical film-making activities in which you will begin to explore the craft of screen-writing, directing, shooting, and editing through the process of making your own short films. In each assigned task you will take on a variety of different roles in order to attain a basic understanding of different aspects of the medium. This will help you get a sense of what area of production you feel most drawn to and may want to pursue after completing the Module. As well as gaining hands on experience of the film process you will also be given the opportunity to experiment with performance in order to discover acting styles appropriate for the camera.

EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Code LDCL5033B

Credits 20

In this module, you’ll examine examples of twentieth-century European writing (all read in translation). Rather than (merely) place writers in their national contexts, you’ll deal with topics, issues and formal experiments that complicate, sometimes transcend, national boundaries. In fact you’ll interrogate what 'European' might mean in relation to literature - where are the borders? Are continental Europeans fundamentally 'other'? And if so, how does this otherness manifest itself aesthetically, thematically, tonally and formally? You'll look at how writers from different countries frequently challenge the conventions of genre and the conventions of reading and interpreting. Among a range of important innovations (or continuities), you may explore varieties of 'European' modernism, postmodernism, the absurd, fantasy, noir, and other genres. You’ll also ask how European writers have responded to the challenges, upheavals and catastrophes of the twentieth century and how they deal with the ethnic, religious and cultural diversity of Europe.

ROMANTICISM 1780-1840

Code LDCL5034B

Credits 20

1780-1840 was the Age of Revolution and Romanticism, often regarded as a revolutionary style of writing. It was the age of the American and French Revolution and the Wars they entailed, the age of slavery and rebellion, of empire and conquest. You may think of Romantic writing as mainly nature poetry, primarily work by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. But the signs of a ‘Romantic’ sensibility can also be found in a much broader constituency of writing: the novel, letter writing, the essay, political and aesthetic theory, and social commentary. In this module you’ll be introduced to some of the most exciting Romantic period writing, including poetry, fiction and non-fictional prose from the Age of Revolution. You’ll also explore key period artistic and literary concepts such as the sublime, beautiful, picturesque, the Hellenic, and pastoral, and you’ll analyse the many ways in which the writers of the period exploited concepts of landscape. You’ll look at issues such as the Supernatural and Dreaming. Your understanding of Romantic writing will be enhanced by an analysis of aesthetics, politics, and of the work of women writers. During the course you’ll explore poetry by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, as well as Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1816) and Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818; 1831). You may also consider writings by less familiar poets, such as John Clare, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, as well as prose works by Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft and others. You’ll look at how writing is gendered in the period and the implications of this for both male and female writers. You’ll be taught through a mixture of one-hour weekly lectures and two-hour weekly seminars, as well as self-directed study. You’ll gain experience in communicating your ideas in tutorials, as well as through written work and presentations. You’ll be assessed through two formative pieces (a close reading and a project bibliography) and one summative piece on a project chosen by yourself in discussion with your seminar tutors.

READING AND WRITING IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5062B

Credits 20

In this module we will study some of the most important poetry and prose of the English Renaissance, including masterpieces by Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, as well as Shakespeare's early narrative poetry (not covered on the Shakespeare module). We will be studying these writers in a unique way. Behind this great outpouring of Elizabethan writing lay a vibrant literary culture which valued rhetoric, argument, elaborate and often playful self-presentation, and which insisted that good reading helped you to develop an individual style as a writer. In response to your reading of Renaissance literature, you will put the tenets of this culture into practice, building up over the course of the module a collection of short pieces of writing in prose (or sometimes, if you wish, poetry). When reading Sidney's ground breaking 'Defence of Poetry', for instance, you might draw on his rhetorical and argumentative techniques to write your own defence of any modern art form of your choice. Or when looking at the way Thomas Nashe plays with the form of his printed books you might have the opportunity to experiment with innovative ways of presenting your own writing to its readers. Revised versions of these short pieces of writing, built up across the module, constitute your summative assessment. This module allows you to think critically in genres other than conventional academic essays, and in doing so aims to foster connections between critical and creative writing. You will have the chance to develop more confidence and self-awareness as a writer and critic through studying some of the greatest English literature.

PUBLISHING (SPR)

Code LDCL5065B

Credits 20

VICTORIAN WRITING

Code LDCL5067B

Credits 20

This module aims to equip you with a knowledge of writing from across the Victorian period, in a variety of modes (fiction, poetry, science, journalism, criticism, nonsense). We will examine authors such as George Eliot, Tennyson, Dickens, Darwin, Charlotte Bronte, and the Brownings. You will thus develop an awareness of how different kinds of writing in the period draw on, influence, and contest with each other. Likewise, you will acquire a sense for the cultural, political and socio-economic contexts of 19th-century writing, and some of the material contexts in which that writing took place (serial publication, popular readership, periodical writing, public controversy).

CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Code LDCL5069B

Credits 20

What is the state of the art of the novel at present? And what are some of the distinguishing preoccupations and characteristics of the contemporary novel? This module seeks to consider these questions with a view to developing an understanding of the condition of the novel today. The module focuses on fiction published in the UK and Ireland in the last ten years, with a particular focus on more inventive writing. We’ll read a small set of contemporary novels, the content and form of each of which will exemplify some of the possibilities for fiction in the present day. We’ll consider the relation between the contemporary novel and the contemporary moment – for example, our concerns regarding the environment, identity, nationhood, and history – and think also about what it might mean to be or to call oneself contemporary: to be together with one’s own time. The list of authors chosen for the module changes regularly, as you would expect. Recently, it has included the likes of Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Deborah Levy and Kamila Shamsie. You’ll consider a range of ways of conceiving and interpreting the contemporary novel, and discuss these ways with your peers. There is no consensus about what does or should constitute a canon of contemporary fiction, although there is a growing critical literature on the subject, some of which we’ll read. It will be our job, in lectures and in seminars, to think carefully about what novels published in the last ten years offer the best argument for the continued viability of the novel itself as a contemporary art form.

SHAKESPEARE (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5070B

Credits 20

The aim of this lecture-seminar module is to help you become a better reader of Shakespearean drama. Shakespeare is now so universally known and read that it is easy to forget that he wrote at a specific historical moment for specific audiences, actors and theatrical spaces. What happens to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays when we read them within the context of theatrical performance? This is what our module enables you to do -- and in doing so, it aims to give you fresh, new ways to interpret Shakespearean language and theatricality. Lectures equip you with methods and contexts for reading Shakespeare's plays; seminars give you the chance to put these into practice through close, attentive readings of his plays. Each week we study a different play in detail. The summative assessment asks you to put what you've been learning into practice by writing a critical analysis of more than one play using some of the module's methods.

READING AND WRITING CONTEMPORARY POETRY

Code LDCL5073B

Credits 20

Using the reading and study of poetry from the post-war context up to the present day, you'll consider some of the concerns of poetry including voice, form/structure and the 'poetry of witness'. You'll also look at contemporary visual art to consider correspondences between the arts. The poets studied will be drawn principally from an Anglo-American tradition and may include such writers as Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carol Ann Duffy, Carolyn Forché, Patience Agbabi and Hannah Silva among others. Formative work includes creating a mini-anthology of contemporary poetry and there will be the chance to discuss poems you've written or read. You'll be able to write creatively and/or critically for assessment.

MEDIA, GLOBALISATION AND CULTURE

Code PPLM5003B

Credits 20

What role do media and communication play in processes of globalisation? How is an ever more global media creating cultural change? In this module you will explore the cultural implications of global media and culture by investigating audience practices and media representations. It begins by introducing the main theoretical approaches to mediated globalisation, before examining how these work in practice. Indicative topics include the power of global branding, global celebrity culture, global publics and local audiences, transnational cultures, and representations of migration.

THE MEDIA AND IDENTITY

Code PPLM5042B

Credits 20

How do the media shape how we see ourselves? Or indeed how others see us? In a world of social media, self-branding and the increasing importance of mediated forms of identity, on this module you will explore critical ways of thinking about the relationship between culture, media and the self. Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches in the field of media and cultural studies, this module asks you to use research methods from autoethnography to content analysis to explore both their own identities and the way in which identities more broadly are formulated through contemporary media culture. Through discussing the representation of identity in media content, as well as issues of media production, regulation and consumption, you will critically reflect upon the relationship between media culture and social power and consider how social and technological changes impact on the ways in which identity is experienced in everyday life. On successful completion of this module, you should be able, at threshold level, to critically reflect upon the ways in which media texts construct social identity and should be able to discuss the relationship between media and identity with awareness for social, institutional and technological factors that shape both media production and consumption. Assessment is by group presentation and independent research project.

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Important Information

Students will take 120 credits (4 modules) across Year 3. 60 credits in Semester 1 and 60 credits in Semester 2. Students must select 60cr in Film modules and 60cr in Literature modules. Students to take ONE Dissertation Module. Students must ensure that they take 50% English and 50% Film Studies modules over the course of the year. STUDENTS CHOOSE ONE OF THE TWO DISSERTATION MODULES.

Assessment for Year 3

Compulsory Modules

FILM, TELEVISION AND MEDIA STUDIES: DISSERTATION (AUTUMN)

Code AMAM6079A

Credits 30

This module provides the opportunity to work on an independently-researched dissertation on an aspect of Film, Television and/or Media Studies; you will choose and negotiate the topic of your choice to gain approval. You are able to choose whether you do the dissertation module in the Autumn or the Spring Semester of your final year, whichever fits in better with your schedule of modules. You need not relate directly to material taught in previous modules, although it is expected that dissertations will draw on and reflect upon perspectives and methodologies introduced earlier in the degree course.

FILM, TELEVISION AND MEDIA STUDIES DISSERTATION (SPRING)

Code AMAM6080B

Credits 30

Optional A Modules

(30-60 credits)

EXPLODED FORMS: 1960s AMERICAN FICTION

Code AMAL6054A

Credits 30

America in the 1960s is marked by great optimism and conversely an extreme sense of foreboding over the absurd conditions of life. Picking up the threads of the transatlantic discussions between continental philosophy and American fiction making, we will explore the connection between American society, literature and experimentation in the 1960s leaning back into the time immediately following World War II to provide context. Authors studied may include Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Ishmael Reed, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Hunter S Thompson, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Robert Coover and more.

UNDERSTANDING FESTIVALS

Code AMAM6001A

Credits 30

This module looks at the development of the music since the 1950s, with specific focus on questions relating to: • History of popular music festivals from 1950s on • Theorising festival: utopia, carnivalesque, free festivals and ‘protestival’, marketplace and sponsorship, festivalisation, mundanity, experience economy, decolonisation and music. • Representations, screenings and mediations: classic film and festival template (Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959), Woodstock (1970), Gimme Shelter (1970)), pirate radio, daily newsletters, programmes and ephemera, 360 media arrangements (BBC Glastonbury and The Proms), social media • Working in (cultural) festivals: industry guest speakers (2 slots).

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT ON SCREEN

Code AMAM6002A

Credits 30

Module Description (This module is about) This module explores the ways in which cinema and television have engaged with discourses of crime and punishment across the history of the two mediums. It will look at the ways in which screen cultures have circulated and contested historical understandings of crime, criminality and justice, but also ongoing debates regarding cinema and television’s influence on the propagation and perception of criminal behaviour. The module will explore a range of film and television genres that focus on crime, investigation and the penal system, and that have incorporated scientific and technological innovations with regard to surveillance and detection, including: gangster films, police procedurals, delinquency films, true crime, prison dramas, crime appeal programmes, superhero movies, and forensic crime dramas. We also map the ways in which these genres have responded to different historical, national and social contexts, and explore the ways in which a range of converging identities (gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, generational identity) have influenced these contradictory depictions and discourses. This interdisciplinary module will explore the relationship between media history, theory and representation, drawing upon theories from fields including film studies, television studies, cultural studies, gender studies, sociology, criminology, psychology, and science and technology studies.

CONTEMPORARY SCREEN DISTRIBUTION AND EXHIBITION

Code AMAM6025A

Credits 30

This module is designed to provide students with an understanding of the structure and workings of the independent and local screen sector in the UK. The module will look at different approaches to distribution and public exhibition of screen content and audience development, including commercial exhibition, community cinema and film festivals. Covering a range of relevant theories and concepts, the module will provide students with a critical understanding of the key issues at stake in how screen content is circulated and accessed by audiences. Key themes will include the influence of industry regulation (by government and industry), impacts of public funding, professional work practices, content diversity and social inclusion. The module will incorporate significant contributions from industry professionals that I have been working with as part of the Rural Cinema Impact Project. A number of these partners have confirmed their willingness to be part of the teaching programme in 2019/20 including Sarah-Jane Meredith, Audience Fund Manager British Film Institute; Robert Livingston, Director Regional Screen Scotland; Christoph Warrack, CEO and Founder, Open Cinema (a national network of film clubs for excluded or marginalised people); Michael Pierce, CEO and Founder Scalarama (national film festival for independent and cult cinema); and Duncan Carson, Marketing and Communication Manager Independent Cinema Office (national body for promoting independent cinema in the UK). It is proposed to involve the students in this module in the organisation and hosting of a short film festival in Norfolk. Access to venues and audiences will be provided through Creative Arts East (CAE), a long term partner in the Rural Cinema Impact Project. CAE has over 50 screening venues across Norfolk, many which are relatively close to Norwich and the UEA campus.

MANAGING CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

Code AMAM6040A

Credits 30

What is the effect of leadership on creativity and innovation in media business today? Managing creativity and innovation is increasingly important for all companies in the current fast-changing business landscape. Digital disruption and new business models have made a huge impact on many businesses, including the media industry. The aims of this module are to introduce you to a critical and practical understanding of the nature of managing creative people in a business context; and the leadership and business strategies of organisations to encourage different types of innovation, with a focus on media companies.

JAPANESE FILM: NATIONAL CINEMA AND BEYOND

Code AMAM6087A

Credits 30

This module aims to introduce you to approaches to cinema as it relates to national, transnational and global discourses. Japanese cinema forms the focus of the module, largely because it has been at the forefront of non-Anglo/American cinematic discourses since the earliest periods of “world” cinema history. Investigating Japanese cinema case study films will allow you to pose a variety of important questions in relation to the history, techniques and culture of cinema as it is consumed around the world. The module is divided into three sections, roughly historically. In the first section you will examine the golden age of Japanese cinema through the works of filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. You will explore the history of Japan’s national film industry, its canonisation, the beginnings of international Japanese cinema, and some of the aesthetic innovations of Japan’s cinematic “Golden Age”. The second section examines Japanese genre cinema. By focusing on some of Japan’s famous filmmakers and franchises, including Godzilla, you will explore Japanese film through an inter- or transnational lens. You will also consider other important questions; for example, why is it that some film genres travel and others do not? The final part of the module will consider contemporary Japanese cinema through transnational and global frameworks. You will look at the current rise in international popularity of Japanese filmmaking, assessing the importance of cycles of filmmaking, audiences and distribution to the notoriety of Japanese cinema on a global level. These discussions are intended to reframe discussions on current and past Japanese filmmaking, challenging existing theorisations of Japanese cinema by examining it through alternative methodological frameworks. There is no expectation that you should be able to speak Japanese, nor are you expected to be an expert in Japanese cultural studies. While the module does focus on the history and culture of Japan and Japanese filmmaking as specific to this national cinema, it is intended to provide you with the tools to study other national and global cinemas too. By taking in a range of frameworks from the national to the global, the module is intended to provide you with a set of theoretical concepts relevant to every cinema, everywhere and throughout film history.

ADAPTATION AND SCRIPTWRITING

Code AMAM6115A

Credits 30

Today more films are made from adaptations than wholly original screenplays. All scriptwriters preparing for work in the business today should therefore be aware of the process and nature of script adaptation. TV and radio are also heavily dependent on adaptations and remakes. This module will explore the practice of scriptwriting, dramaturgy and story structure; and explore key theories of adaptation, from the earliest ideas of ‘fidelity’ to the source, to later approaches emphasising intertextuality, and the movement of narratives across media. It will enable students to examine a series of different examples of narrative adaptation across literary and media contexts.

SCIENCE FICTION

Code AMAM6121A

Credits 30

Science Fiction films and television series have provided a significant focus for addressing social, cultural and political issues. You will look at the historical development of the genre, with an emphasis on situating examples of films and television programs within their historical and cultural context. The module also concentrates on issues surrounding human identity, as played out in this genre. A range of films and series episodes from both the US and UK will be screened and various clips will also be discussed in seminar.

MEDIA PRACTICE PROJECT (AUTUMN)

Code AMAP6097A

Credits 30

You’ll be able to make use of your practical skills to produce a significant practice-based project investigating some aspect of Media, Film and/or Television studies. You’ll produce a significant practical work that refers to, and makes use of, relevant theoretical debates and issues, and will also write a critical evaluation of your work. Projects are individually negotiated with supervisors, and will build upon an area of practice that you have previously covered (film-making, screenwriting, digital media, magazine or sound media). Before taking this module students MUST have completed one of the following modules: AMAP5119B – Television Studio Production; AMAP5123A – Film & Video Production; AMAP5124B – Digital Media Theory and Practice; AMAM5052B - Writing the American Script; AMAM5051A/AMAM5052B – Writing The American Script: Hollywood and Beyond; LDCC5002A or LDCC5008B – Creative Writing: Scriptwriting.

NATIVE AMERICAN WRITING AND FILM

Code AMAS6027A

Credits 30

Contemporary Native America is often visible only as a cultural stereotype, making the complexities of contemporary tribal experiences invisible within the American national narrative. In this module you will consider contemporary Native American self-representation, exploring recent Native writing and film as sites of cultural and political resistance, and analysing the ways in which a diverse range of Native authors, screenwriters and directors respond to contemporary tribal socio-economic and political conditions within the US. Taking popular ideas of 'the Indian', you’ll consider the ways in which stereotypes and audience expectations are subverted and challenged. You’ll make connections between these distinct groups of writers, to consider topics such as race and racism, indigeneity, identity, culture, gender, genre, land and 'home', community, and political issues such as human rights and environmental racism. You’ll assess how complex Federal-Indian histories are related to diverse contemporary political events such as the indigenous Idle No More movement, and the NDAPL oil pipeline controversies. You will also explore how Native writers engage with the political paradox of remaining colonised within the ‘Land of the Free’. Through seminar based discussion, you will develop a broad understanding of the contemporary issues faced by Native peoples, a familiarity with the ways in which stereotypes and audience expectations are subverted and challenged by Native authors, screenwriters, and directors, and insights into the ways in which Native peoples are shaping the debates around contemporary tribal socio-economic and political conditions. You will be assessed through coursework, reflective reports, and student-led workshops, and gain expertise in communicating your ideas via student-led groupwork and seminar discussion. On successful completion of the module, you will have the knowledge and skills to assess the complexities and diversities of Native American cultural and national identity, and the literary and cinematic strategies of Native writers and filmmakers.

NERVOUS NARRATIVES

Code LDCL6046A

Credits 30

‘We all say it’s nerves, and none of us knows what it means’, says a character in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel, The Woman in White. Our aim is to think about how a discourse of the ‘nerves’ – the ‘nervous temperament’ and nervous illness – can be both so pervasive culturally and so slippery in its meaning. This interdisciplinary module takes you from the late 17th century, when the concept of ‘neurologie’ first emerged, to the 21st century, linking literary, medical and philosophical writing to explore the representation - the discursive formation - of the ‘nerves’. The historical range of the module is not meant to imply a transhistorical understanding of nervous illness or temperament, but rather will enable us to analyse the historically specific nature of the nervous body and what it is made to mean, culturally, within different contexts. In this way, we will be working with issues as diverse as religious ‘enthusiasm’, hysteria and hypochondria, sensibility, sensation, fear of modernity, neurasthenia, manliness and effeminacy, shell-shock, PTSD and the concepts of the healthy or fragile body of the nation. Spanning time and genre, the literary texts studied will take us from the earliest, Jonathan Swift’s satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704) up to Siri Hustvedt’s analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010). The module equips you to work within an interdisciplinary frame and across historical periods from the late 17th century to the present.

THE ART OF MURDER

Code LDCL6130A

Credits 30

Crime, like death, has always been with us, yet it was only in the 19th century that de Quincey proposed considering murder as one of the fine arts and Poe established many of the central tenets of crime fiction with his 'tales of ratiocination'. Currently, crime fiction is the most bought, and read, literary genre and one diverse enough to include 'whodunits'; Baker Street's most notable resident; the genteel amateur detectives of the 'Golden Age'; hard-boiled thrillers; noir; psychological fiction and even the post-modern iterations of anti-detective fiction. Narratives about crime and criminals, detection and sleuths (not forgetting the violence and victims) can be both conservatively formulaic and radically diverse. It can articulate dangerous and disturbing transgressions against society (the crime) while also revealing the ideological forces of law (what constitutes a crime) order (the various detective figures) and the systems of justice and ill-justice (courts and punishment, state and government) with which a society protects and proscribes itself. Crime fiction is also concerned with interpreting clues, discovering secrets and solving enigmas, much in the way that critical theory investigates and analyses literary texts. In this module you will explore key texts and writers in the development of crime fiction as well as examining critical and theoretical responses to such texts. It will allow you to respond both creatively and critically to the concerns of, and thinking about this diverse genre.

URBAN VISIONS: THE CITY IN LITERATURE AND VISUAL CULTURE

Code LDCL6138A

Credits 30

This interdisciplinary module explores how 'the city' has been thought about and represented through a selection of writings (fiction, poetry, theory), visual material (painting, photography, film, street art) and occasionally other sensory material (sound, smell), spanning around 1850 to the present day and focused on two particular cities and great capitals of modernity, Paris and London. In this period the growth of the great European cities has created a new and diverse set of environments and possibilities. Utopias, dystopias, sites of ruin and construction of all kinds; what different, contradictory or coherent versions of urban experience do these texts and images offer? We'll investigate what kinds of writing, art, discourses and attitudes cities seem to generate. Was modernism, for example, as Malcolm Bradbury asserts, an ‘art of cities'? How do textual and pictorial techniques intersect, for example, in the case of nineteenth-century Impressionist art and writing, twentieth-century Surrealism, Situationist provocations, or contemporary street art and photography? What is ‘psychogeography’? In the company of the flâneur/flâneuse, the detective and other urban wanderers, we'll consider aspects such as space, place, urban being and time, love and eroticism, hauntings, crime, memory and the presence of the past, the individual and the crowd, consumption, nature and the natural, urban Gothic, and the pressures, preoccupations and thrills peculiar to urban living and imagining. The main mode is seminar discussion, supported by short lectures, virtual gallery visits and film viewings. Assessment is by means of an individually designed project which is supported by individual tutorials and formative work of various kinds, including the opportunity to practise reading images and spaces, as well as literary texts. There is scope to produce creative-critical (including visual) work as part of your assessment.

Optional B Modules

(30-60 credits)

AMERICAN APOCALYPSE: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CLIMATE CHANGE FICTION

Code AMAL6012B

Credits 30

In the 21st century, the threat of global warming and climate change is quite literally ‘game-changing.’ Engaging with Naomi Klein’s contention that “this changes everything,” you will consider how the apocalyptic dangers of climate change are being addressed by 21st century American fiction. Climate change fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, has recently emerged as a distinct genre, directly responding to the dangers that global warming poses to human and non-human societies. You will consider how fiction offers us ways to assess, understand, and address the phenomenon of global warming, and the impact of humans on their environments. You will evaluate ongoing debates about the ‘facts’ of climate change and global warming, including the evidence being produced by scientists, and the emergence of ‘climate change denial’ as a feature both of popular culture and at the highest levels of government in the United States. Exploring American novels published since 2010, you will develop a broad understanding of how American climate change fiction represents the profound dangers of climate change, through its depiction of drought, flood, deforestation, species extinction, intelligent biotech, and the impact of global capitalism. Through seminar based discussion, you will gain insights into the ways that writers are engaging with the fact of climate change to shape both popular awareness and popular debates, and consider how cli-fi is imagining possible futures for human and all other life on Earth. You will be assessed through coursework, reflective reports, and student-led workshops, and gain expertise in communicating your ideas via student-led group work and seminar discussion. On successful completion of the module, you will have the knowledge and skills to assess the complexities of climate change fiction as a new literary genre, discuss the emotive reach and influence of fiction in this context, and evaluate the strategies of contemporary cli-fi writers.

LITTLE WOMEN AND BAREFOOT BOYS: INVENTING AMERICAN CHILDHOODS

Code AMAL6052B

Credits 30

American children’s literature in the nineteenth century invented the idea of modern childhood. It was also responsible for some of the most iconic characters in American literary history – from the March sisters to Tom Sawyer. Yet while contemporary audiences are as familiar with these texts as their historic counterparts, the story of the development of writing for children in America in this period is itself much less understood. This module, then, will explore the ways in which American writers addressed young audiences across a century of social and cultural change. Taking in iconic texts like Little Women and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it will also explore a diverse range of books written for children across this period. It will analyse their engagement with events like the Civil War, issues of national and social identity, and broader social and cultural issues relating to the shifting idea of childhood in America. More broadly, it will think about the development of children’s writing in America in relation to the wider issues of American literary history, and open up debates about what it meant to write for a young audience, then and now.

BRITISH FILM SINCE THE 1960s

Code AMAM6012B

Credits 30

How has British cinema developed through the 21st century? What has it learned from the successes and failures of its own past? By focusing on British film and British film culture from the 1960s to the present day, this module will give you new and different perspectives on the modern British film industry, and the films it produces. You'll get a grounding in the important movements, directors, genre, cycles and stars within the last 6 decades of British film. You'll learn how to examine and analyse those people, films, and movements within a cultural and industrial context, considering the social, technological, artistic and ideological motivations underpinning the creation of 'British' film. Central to this will be your exploration of how 21st century British cinema understands and exploits its own history, from Ealing Studios and Hammer Horror to claims of the 'boom and bust' economic cycle of British production.

GENDER AND GENRE IN AMERICAN CINEMA SINCE 2000

Code AMAM6062B

Credits 30

This module offers an overview of critical and theoretical approaches to gender and genre in film and television, focusing particularly on North American media, over the last decade. The module is taught by seminar, tutorial and screening and the topics explored may include: the articulation and development of postfeminism in film and television; popular and independent film; feminism and authorship; media responses to the political and cultural contexts of postfeminism; responses to the recession; race and the limits of feminist representation; motherhood and fatherhood; representations of queerness.

CREATIVE WORK IN THE MEDIA INDUSTRIES

Code AMAM6086B

Credits 30

What is it like working in the media industries? What are the key opportunities and challenges which face aspiring and established media professionals? In engaging with such questions, this module offers you the opportunity to gain an understanding of the industries in which you may well wish to work. Throughout the module you will engage with academic research and other writing, both historical and contemporary in nature, to provide you with an understanding of the potential to find pleasure, fulfilment (and a steady income), as well as pressure, frustration and precariousness in media work. As well as developing skills in communicating ideas, principles and theories, you will conduct your own research into the nature and conditions of media work. To help you understand media work, we reflect on changes in the nature of work itself in modern societies, considering historical and recent developments in working cultures and questions of work-life balance. Following this, you will gain insights into work in the media and creative industries through an engagement with academic research, policy developments and the accounts of media workers themselves (across sectors such as film, television, music, magazines, advertising and digital media). We also look at questions about the extent to which it is feasible to do ‘good work’ and produce challenging, innovative, ground breaking, thoughtful or just genuinely entertaining media products in a seemingly ever competitive and commercial media landscape. Having developed a grasp of some of the key dynamics at play in creative labouring, you’ll put this knowledge into practice by carrying out and reflecting upon your own research into the challenges and opportunities bound up with media work. The module will not only provide you with a range of valuable insights into the realities of media work but will also help you develop skills in conducting research, organising and communicating your ideas and weighing your own arguments against those of others.

CELEBRITY

Code AMAM6090B

Credits 30

You'll explore the phenomenon of celebrity and fame from its origins to the present day, moving across a range of different media, including film, television, print media and the internet. In the process, You'll examine key approaches to the study of celebrity, paying particular attention to the cultural formation of celebrity and how it is bound up with structures of power (e.g. gender, class, ethnicity). It will feature a range of case studies that will include Classical Hollywood cinema, the coming of television, the supposed 'tabloidization' of print media, the birth of Reality TV, the growth of the celebrity scandal and the relationship between celebrity and the internet.

INVESTIGATING AUDIENCES

Code AMAM6108B

Credits 30

In this module you will investigate a range of changing audience practices and cultures in the twenty-first century. You will be introduced to some of the key research on, and theoretical debates around, audience practices in relation to changes in distribution, technology and evolving forms of engagement. You will also study social practices and fan cultures surrounding new technologies, transmedia storytelling, branding, steamed media, event cinema, theme park attractions and other participatory cultures. Investigating Audiences will enable you to expand your critical and analytical skills, and also to develop your abilities as an audience researcher. You will evaluate and assess published academic writing on audience research methodologies, which will then enable you to exercise critical judgement in the design of your own empirical research project.

ADAPTATION AND SCRIPTWRITING

Code AMAM6116B

Credits 30

Today more films are made from adaptations than wholly original screenplays. All scriptwriters preparing for work in the business today should therefore be aware of the process and nature of script adaptation. You will explore the practice of scriptwriting, dramaturgy and story structure; and explore key theories of adaptation, from the earliest ideas of ‘fidelity’ to the source, to later approaches emphasising intertextuality, and the movement of narratives across media. You can examine a series of different examples of narrative adaptation across literary and media contexts.

ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

Code AMAM6133B

Credits 30

This module looks at a range of print, broadcast and online alternative media in the USA and Britain from largely the 1960s counterculture onwards. This includes pirate radio, underground press, guerrilla television, fanzines, subvertising, video activism, Indymedia, community media. It maps the history and development of alternative media, explores connections and tensions with technological innovations, the cultural politics of alternative media, the relationship with and impact on mainstream media forms, and assesses the significance of alternative media for social change. There is an emphasis on historical and cultural material theorised through aspects of media, subculture and social movements.

COMICS GET REAL: GRAPHIC NARRATIVES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TRAUMA, AND WAR

Code AMAS6059B

Credits 30

Why do people draw their life stories in comics form? How can trauma be represented in words and pictures? What does it mean to bear witness to horrific events graphically? Throughout this module, you’ll study the recent phenomenon of reality-based American comics, which stand in sharp contrast to the form’s common association with superheroes and the fantastic. In addition to discovering comics’ powerful potential for representing real-life events in engaging and disturbing ways, you’ll learn to analyse both form and content, and will develop a critical vocabulary for reading, thinking, and writing about comics. You’ll read comics that tell a wide variety of stories anchored in real life, and from many different genres, such as autobiography, memoir, investigative journalism, and war reportage. Throughout, you’ll learn to pay special attention to issues of representation, spectatorship, and the position of the artist in relation to the events depicted. You’ll also study a variety of critical and theoretical material that puts these comics-specific issues in conversation with more general concerns about the ethics of representing the real world in diverse written or visual forms. You’ll learn through seminars and independent study, and will be assessed through coursework including a final essay. At the end of the module, you’ll be able to read reality-based as well as other comics in a transformative way, and will have gained a deep understanding of how this vibrant and upcoming cultural form creates new opportunities for representing the increasingly complex personal and geopolitical realities of the world in the twenty-first century.

QUEERS READ THIS : NARRATIVES OF GENDER, SEXUALITY

Code AMAS6061B

Credits 30

Ideas and ideals of gender and sexuality in US culture and society are all around - in advertising, film and TV, education, the law and more. Most Americans engage in the performative matrix of expected patterns of gender and sexuality without really ever thinking about it; for others they can be, often painfully, aware of the limitations and impositions of such expectations. This module will see students engage with narrative theory as a means to interrogate the sustained construction and dissemination of these patterns of gender and sexuality, as well as explore those points of challenge that create fissures and changes in such patterns.

CONTEMPORARY DRAMA AND FILM

Code LDCD6103B

Credits 30

In this module you will examine emergent voices and trends in recent theatre, film and television (mainly British but with some American or European contributions). Topics covered include the (questioned) demise of explicitly political drama and the appearance of previously silenced voices (e.g. gay and lesbian themes, feminist playwrights and writing ethnicity, physical theatre practitioners). In this course you will also examine recent works related to representations of (for example) religious controversy, sexual identity, politics and the social impact of scientific discovery.

WRITING LIFE: BIOGRAPHY AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Code LDCL6026B

Credits 30

‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ and it’s often more moving, powerful, inspiring and funnier too. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to discover some extraordinary ‘true’ stories on this module as well as the possibility to write one of your own. You’ll think about the ever-shifting boundaries between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ as well as the ethical questions that arise when you’re writing about real people and situations. This is a module that enables you to do something very different in your final semester at UEA. During this module you’ll consider if and how non-fiction writing differs from fictional literature. You’ll learn about research, how to read and interrogate personal documents and the challenges presented by memory and anecdote. How do you assemble facts so that the resulting story is as compelling as fiction? What clothes can the non-fiction writer steal from the novelist’s wardrobe? Throughout the module you’ll read different types of non-fiction and think about how individual authors weave their research material into narrative form. You will have the opportunity to write your own piece of non-fiction for your summative assessment if you wish. This is a 5,000 word creative or critical piece which everyone will workshop during the semester. There will also be tutorials in which you can discuss your summative work. By the end of the module you’ll have gained an understanding of the craft of non-fiction and you’ll have developed your ability to ask pertinent questions of any non-fiction you read, be it a newspaper story or a highly researched account of a life or situation. You’ll have honed your research abilities and perhaps your interview skills too if you decide to write something that involves interviews. You’ll also have thought about the ethical implications that may arise when writing about ‘real life’ - all qualities that are highly valued by employers.

SHAKESPEARE: SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6056B

Credits 30

Platonist epistemology permeated Elizabethan culture: the aim of this module is to explore the relationship of Shakespeare's topic of the world as a stage to Neoplatonic conceptions of perception, politics, poetry and love. We will consider Plato as a poetic philosopher and Shakespeare as a philosophical poet by asking what difference the ‘dramatic’ form of Plato's Socratic dialogues makes to their 'ideas', and, conversely, how in Shakespeare's plays, particularising plots unfold into generalising arguments. In both cases, the concern is with how dramatic form with its special mixture of what is seen, what is said, what is known and what is enacted, can clarify perennial philosophical questions. We'll also touch on several possible mediators between Plato and Shakespeare, including Castiglione, Erasmus and Sir Philip Sidney.

THE ART OF EMOTION: LITERATURE, WRITING AND FEELING

Code LDCL6118B

Credits 30

According to Roland Barthes, emotion is 'a disturbance, a bordering on collapse: something perverse, under respectable appearances; emotion is even, perhaps, the slyest of losses'. This module takes this 'perversity, under respectable appearance' as the starting point for asking how an attention to our emotions - our feeling, affects, and intimacies, as well as our aversions - can make us rethink what it means to be critical and creative readers and writers. Drawing on a range of theoretical and critical work from literary studies, cultural theory, art, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience, psychology, creativity and creative writing studies, cognitive science, history and anthropology, we will ask what it means to read, and write, 'with feeling'. What is the relationship between language and feeling? Between the body and emotion? How does literature touch and move us? Are our 'aesthetic' emotions real? How does technology - the digital, virtual, prosthetic and online - affect our ideas about emotion? Are emotions universal and timeless, or historically and culturally specific? Private and personal, or collective and public? How do emotions construct gender, class, race, nationality, and other kinds of identity? Why do some feelings attract more critical interest than others? How does an attention to emotion affect our work as readers and writers? We will begin by building a theoretical and critical literacy for thinking feeling, before focusing our inquiry around specific themes that might include: Animal Passions; Psyche, Pathology and Resistances to Psychoanalysis; Feeling Texts: Touch, Texture and Fictional Fabrications; Moving Fictions: Cinema, Virtuality, and E-motion; Zombies: Can Dead Subjects Feel?; Affective Economies; Queering Feeling; and Feeling Human: Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Clones. We will engage with a range of literary texts and other aesthetic forms (such as art, film, etc.) chosen to correspond with our critical concerns. Please note that this is an indicative description only, and the weekly themes and reading are revised each year to stay up to date with current work in the field. You will have the opportunity to engage both as critical and creative readers and writers, and there will be critical and creative assessment options. This module is open to all students. It will complement level 3 options such as 'Literature and Deconstruction', 'Nervous Narratives', 'Traumaturgies', ' Literature and Human Rights' and 'Queer Literature and Theory'.

FEMINIST WRITING

Code LDCL6132B

Credits 30

We are witnessing an upsurge in feminist activism which some claim is forming the fourth wave of feminism. It is timely then to reconsider how feminist writing (literary texts, literary theory, and literary criticism) has helped to shape, influence, and articulate debates about gender, sexuality, and society in the past and how contemporary feminist writing is continuing to be part of that conversation now. You'll have the opportunity to read and analyse some of the most influential feminist literary texts and literary theory. Writers studied on the course may include Margaret Atwood, Henrik Ibsen, Angela Carter, Jean Rhys, Jeanette Winterson, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ali Smith, Beyoncé, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. You'll study the ways in which feminist criticism and theory (including Kristeva, Cixous, bell hooks, Haraway, and Butler) has reshaped the canon, challenged the ways literature is taught as well as making us consider what literature can, might and ought to be. Feminism has also exacted different forms of writing and challenged dominant modes of representation. We will take a particularly close look at the relationship between feminism and the gothic, the short story, and experimental writing. Assessment will be by course work and project and you'll be assessed in both critical and creative modes. Students of all genders are equally welcome.

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Entry Requirements

A Levels

BBB or ABC including English Literature or BBC including English Literature with an A in the Extended Project

BTEC

DDM alongside grade B in English Literature A-level (or equivalent qualification). Excludes BTEC Public Services, BTEC Uniformed Services and BTEC Business Administration

Scottish highers

AABBB including English Literature

Scottish highers advanced

CCC including English Literature

Irish leaving certificate

2 subjects at H2, 4 subjects at H3 including English Literature

Access course

Humanities & Social Sciences pathway. Pass the Access to HE Diploma with Merit in 45 credits at Level 3, including 12 credits in English Literature

European Baccalaureate

70% including 7 in English Literature

International Baccalaureate

31 points including HL5 English

GCSE offer

You are required to have Mathematics and English Language at a minimum of Grade C or Grade 4 or above at GCSE.

Additional entry requirements

If you do not have an A-Level or equivalent qualification in English Literature (or English Language and Literature), once you have submitted your UCAS form we may then contact you to ask you to submit a short analysis of a passage of a literary text in support of your application.

If you do not meet the academic requirements for direct entry, you may be interested in one of our Foundation Year programmes.

Alternative Qualifications

UEA recognises that some students take a mixture of International Baccalaureate IB or International Baccalaureate Career-related Programme IBCP study rather than the full diploma, taking Higher levels in addition to A levels and/or BTEC qualifications. At UEA we do consider a combination of qualifications for entry, provided a minimum of three qualifications are taken at a higher Level. In addition some degree programmes require specific subjects at a higher level.

Students for whom english is a foreign language

We welcome applications from students from all academic backgrounds. We require evidence of proficiency in English (including writing, speaking, listening and reading):

IELTS: 6.0 overall (with no less than 5.5 in any component)

We also accept a number of other English language tests. Please click here to see our full list.

If you do not yet meet the English language requirements for this course, INTO UEA offer a variety of English language programmes which are designed to help you develop the English skills necessary for successful undergraduate study:

Pre-sessional English at INTO UEA

Academic English at INTO UEA

Interviews

Most applicants will not be called for an interview and a decision will be made via UCAS Track. However, for some applicants an interview will be requested. Where an interview is required the Admissions Service will contact you directly to arrange a time.

Gap year

We welcome applications from students who have already taken or intend to take a gap year. We believe that a year between school and university can be of substantial benefit. You are advised to indicate your reason for wishing to defer entry on your UCAS application.

Intakes

This course is open to UK, EU and International applicants. The annual intake for this course is in September each year.

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Course Reference Number: 1463441

BA FILM STUDIES AND ENGLISH LITERATURE