BA History of Art and Literature

Key details

BA HISTORY OF ART AND LITERATURE

Start Year

2022

Attendance

Full Time

Award

Degree of Bachelor of Arts

UCAS course code

VQ32

Entry Requirements

ABB

Study word and image in unison and gain a deeper understanding of the intertwined histories of art and literature. You’ll encounter the most important periods and movements of European, British and American art and literature. At the same time, you’ll broaden your horizons by exploring the arts of other cultures, including those of the Pacific, Africa and the Americas.

On this course, you’ll benefit from the expertise of both the department of Art History and World Art Studies and the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. You will explore the intimate relationships forged between artistic movements both literary and visual, from the strong links between literature and church architecture of the medieval period to the literary impressionism of the modernist period, to experimentation with word and image in postmodernity.

About

You’ll be equipped with key skills in imaginative understanding, critical thinking, and confident communication. You’ll expand and deepen your understanding of texts and artworks from a uniquely wide array of contexts while developing your intellectual and professional skills via your interaction with outstanding academics in both literature and history of art.

You’ll establish firm foundations in both disciplines through your engagement with different documents and sources. At the same time, you’ll encounter works of art at first hand in the collections of the internationally recognised Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, which includes works of modern European art and also outstanding works from Africa, Asia and the Americas.

In your second and third years, you’ll select from a range of optional modules in order to pursue your own interests in more depth. This will enable you, for example, to explore the medieval period through texts such as Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and through monuments such as the great cathedrals, including, of course, those of Norwich and Canterbury. Or you might choose to examine the 20th century through the history of modernist texts and modernist art, by studying movements such as Surrealism.

As you progress through the course, you’ll be encouraged to engage with different methods and approaches and to develop informed views of your own. You will consolidate your independence as a scholar through the completion of a research dissertation in your final year.

You’ll have the opportunity to study the world-famous collection of art held in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, itself a celebrated icon of modern museum architecture. This means you will have access to important artworks from Asia, Africa, the Pacific, the Americas, and Europe. You will be able to study relevant objects at first-hand, while learning about the processes of collecting objects for museums.

This course is delivered by UEA’s world-leading department of Art History and World Art Studies in cooperation with The School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing.

Art History and World Art Studies is part of a close network of internationally renowned centres for the study and display of art: the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. Our main areas of research are the history of art and architecture in Europe and North America; the arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania and South America; the archaeology and anthropology of art; and museum studies and cultural heritage.

Norwich is England's first UNESCO City of Literature, and it boasts a vibrant literary community. Great literature has been produced here from the 14th century, when Julian of Norwich became the first woman to write a book in English, right up to 20th and 21st century work by UEA graduates like Nobel Laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan and Costa Award winning author Emma Healey.

UEA’s School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing is famed for the quality, rigour and adventurousness of its teaching.

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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 won’t sit any formal examinations. Instead, in each year you’ll be assessed on written coursework, usually in the form of essays, presentations, critiques, portfolios, posters, exhibition catalogues to name only a few. Our assessment methods have been developed to measure your skills, but also to aid your learning. Your final assessment is your dissertation, a piece of independent research that you will carry out in the third year.

Structure

You’ll begin with studies of artists and artisans, and the processes of creating. Here you’ll engage directly with artworks first hand in order to explore different techniques and visual effects, deepening your appreciation of their different functions and meanings. At the same time, you’ll be introduced to the study of literature as a historical discipline.

In the second semester, you’ll engage with some of the most significant topics in art history, beginning with an exploration of the role of portraiture in shaping our identities. You’ll also be introduced to key debates in the study of literature.

Teaching and Learning

You’ll be taught by leading scholars in the fields of art history and literature and will learn through a combination of lectures, seminars and field trips.

In your first and second years, and the first semester of your third year, your learning activities will involve a combination of lectures, seminars and tutorials combined with independent learning. A representative week will consist of 15-20% class time, 40% work on assessments and 40% of independent learning. In the Spring semester of your third year, independent learning increases in line with work towards your dissertation.

Teaching methods vary but most sessions are organised around investigation of particular topics supported by close analysis of artworks and texts. As you progress through your course, you’ll expand your knowledge, skills and understanding as you become familiar with different art practices and techniques and become accustomed to reading diverse sources, including art historical and critical texts.

You’ll be asked to prepare material for classes which will often be developed into assessments. You’ll also be given the opportunity to engage with a diverse range of relevant presentation styles such as catalogue entries and exhibition reviews.

Alongside the optional modules, in the lecture modules you’ll engage with a range of art-historical problems and methods. Lectures are delivered by members of staff in the department and embrace approaches from art history to anthropology and archaeology.

As you develop specialist knowledge in your final year, you’ll also begin work on a dissertation. This will enable you to refine your understanding of a particular topic and develop the independent perspective crucial to practising art history beyond university.

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Virtual Open Day

Assessment for Year 2

Structure

At this stage of your course, you’ll be able to choose from a very wide range of topics in art history and literature and you’ll begin to tailor your studies to your own developing interests. These modules will allow you to develop more specialist knowledge of particular problems and periods. In the autumn semester, you’ll be invited to consider how historical writing relates to contemporary debates about art and to explore the role and status of art, criticism and creativity. In the spring semester, you will be able to focus on case studies that enable you to develop your own interests to a deeper level.

Teaching and Learning

You’ll be taught by leading scholars in the fields of art history and literature and will learn through a combination of lectures, seminars and field trips.

Admissions Live Chat

Virtual Open Day

Assessment for Year 3

Structure

In your final year, you’ll choose three modules which involve close engagement with advanced topics in literature and art history. You might, for example, choose to study public art in relation to literature and the politics of memory, or combine an exploration of art patronage with writing about religion. You’ll also write an extended essay in which you’ll explore a topic of your own choice through a combined literary and art-historical perspective.

Teaching and Learning

You’ll be taught by leading scholars in the fields of art history and literature and will learn through a combination of lectures, seminars and field trips.

Admissions Live Chat

Virtual Open Day

Assessment for Year 1

Compulsory Modules

LEARNING ON SITE: THE SAINSBURY CENTRE FOR VISUAL ARTS

Code AMAA4007A

Credits 20

In this module, you will discover the art and architecture that makes up our department’s home in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA). Designed by Lord Norman Foster and opened in 1978, this building and the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection have shaped the study of Art History and World Art Studies at UEA. Through readings, group discussions, and the close study of objects in the SCVA, you will be encouraged to challenge assumptions and preconceptions about different kinds of art – from around the world, and from prehistory to the 20th century. This module will also develop your abilities in library research and academic referencing.

ENVIRONMENT, ART AND CULTURE

Code AMAA4004B

Credits 20

Most works of art – whether objects, buildings, or performances – are designed to serve a set of purposes. How their forms and functions relate may be straightforward and practical, or complex and elusive. Through a range of case studies, presented in lectures by our staff in Art History and World Art Studies, you will examine the connections between the uses, meanings, and appearances of art, culture, space, and landscape. You will also consider how these connections may change over time, especially in the context of cross-cultural contact. The opportunity to analyze texts on your own and in discussion groups will help you understand different points of view and construct an argument supported by evidence.

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.

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.

PORTRAITURE AND IDENTITY

Code AMAA4025B

Credits 20

How do you represent a person? On this module, you will explore the genre of portraiture as it has been practiced by visual artists from the ancient world to the present day. You will develop the skill of visual analysis as you consider issues such as 'likeness'; the face; the self-portrait; portraiture as the embodiment of political, social and aesthetic power; the ways in which portraiture has variously reinforced and challenged concepts of class, race and gender; the photographic portrait, and the role of portraiture in contemporary art and culture. You will also continue to develop your writing skills, as we analyze works of art alongside histories and concepts of the individual self – perhaps the supreme artefact of all.

INTRODUCTION TO ART HISTORY

Code AMAA4001A

Credits 20

This module introduces you to the study of art history. You will discover what makes art history distinct as an academic discipline. By learning about the themes art historians have explored over time, and some of the methods they use to study art, you will start to understand the subject better – and to appreciate how it fits into your degree. As a seminar, this module also gives you the chance to experience the small-group discussions that are central to our teaching.

Admissions Live Chat

Virtual Open Day

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.

Assessment for Year 2

Compulsory Modules

ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Code AMAA5090B

Credits 20

Art is a resource which can be used both positively and critically to affect the contemporary world around us. It may be exploited, most obviously for its economic value, but also for broader social or political gain. You will explore these different uses of art by addressing the factors that condition our contemporary reception of art works and visual culture. You will begin by examining some of the key methodologies for interpreting art’s contemporary functions, including its capacity to create contemporary identities and world-views. You will then turn to focus on the museum and gallery as spaces for these contemporary issues to emerge, before considering the same ideas at work in more quotidian ways. And, finally, you will conclude with a reflection on your own position as art historians, anthropologists, and archeologists working with art in the contemporary world.

Optional A Modules

(60 credits)

MATERIAL WORLDS

Code AMAA5009A

Credits 20

We live our lives surrounded by material objects. In many ways, our lives are dictated by the consumption of goods. How then, should we understand our relation to materiality? In this module, you'll learn about contemporary archaeological and anthropological perspectives in the study of material culture. Questions that come up include: why the Summer Solstice is celebrated at Stonehenge; how houses differ across cultures; why we give each other gifts and wrap them; and how clothing gives us identity? Studying human-object relations from a range of perspectives, this module equips you to understand the role of materiality in your life and to think in nuanced ways on our consumer society.

MEDIEVAL BODIES

Code AMAA5086A

Credits 20

Born, bathed, dressed, worshipped, sexed, cut, bruised, ripped, split, buried: the human body offer historians a gateway onto understanding the cultures of the past. On this course you will examine several groups of objects from the visual culture of medieval Europe and the Middle East through this contemporary theoretical lens, building up a body of medieval artistic practice piece by bodily piece, and examining how the techniques and society of the medieval craftsman at once idolised and distorted the medieval body's forms. In previous years this course has also featured a study trip to museums and galleries in London to meet with curators and handle objects.

THE LIVES OF OBJECTS

Code AMAA5089A

Credits 20

Your main objective in this module will be to develop your critical skills as they pertain to thinking, reading, writing and looking. To enable this, the module will fall into two main sections. In the first section, you’ll focus on one particular methodology – object biographies – used in archaeology, anthropology, museum studies and art history. You’ll examine this methodology in detail, breaking it down into its component sections. You’ll then consider its strengths and its weaknesses, as we subject it to a thorough critical evaluation. In the second half of the module, you will study a range of theories and methodologies used in the study of material culture. In this part of the module, you will focus more broadly on what critical thinking is, both in general and within each of the four disciplines taught in the Department of Art History and World Art Studies. You’ll be taught through a combination of two weekly lectures and one discussion seminar. The lectures will offer you an introduction to the relevant topic, and will end with an opportunity to discuss/debate the issues raised. During the discussion seminars, you’ll consider key issues raised in preceding lectures and the weekly class readings which accompany them.

CONTEMPORARY GALLERY AND MUSEUM STUDIES

Code AMAA5102A

Credits 20

You will examine how contemporary artists have explored the way in which contemporary galleries and museums function. Since the 1960s artists have adopted the museum as both subject and medium in their artworks. These seminars will examine how such projects impact on our idea of what galleries and museums are, how they operate, and what role they have in public life today. Throughout, key ideas regarding aesthetics, politics, memory, and audience participation will be approached by way of specific artworks and exhibitions. These sessions will be supplemented by workshops exploring art criticism, as well as a study trip to London.

PHOTOGRAPHY AS CONTEMPORARY ART

Code AMAA5108A

Credits 20

“Art photography” is an unstable concept. Institutionally it often acts more as an interim placeholder born from practical necessity rather than denoting a negotiated theoretical relationship between a specific mode of practice and particular set of materials. For example: it may or may not involve a photographer; it may or may not involve a camera; it may or may not have any discernible aesthetic quality; it may or may not have any intelligible subject matter or material form. This module offers a thematic examination of artists who work to capitalize on the paradoxical nature of “art photography” and subvert our expectations of what a photograph is and how we use photography to understand and construct our ideas about place, history, and identity.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5041A

Credits 20

The eighteenth century was a time of great literary experimentation in which many new genres emerged, including the periodical essay, the mock-epic, the ballad opera, and the novel. These genres took shape within a commercial revolution that transformed both what it meant to be an author and what it meant to be a reader. In this module you will see how writers such as Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope and John Gay created works that both participated in and criticized the culture of commerce. You will explore the fictions created by writers such as Daniel Defoe, Horace Walpole, and Elizabeth Inchbald, who developed very different versions of the novel. You will also examine how writers such as Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and Olaudah Equiano navigated the new possibilities for authorship that were opening up in the period. Ultimately you are invited to become an “eighteenth-centuryist” and to make imaginative connections between the exciting range of genres that emerged in this century and the culture that produced them.

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.

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.

EMPIRE AND AFTER: GLOBALIZING ENGLISH

Code LDCL5079A

Credits 20

Today, literature in English is produced in many countries across the world and English increasingly enjoys a status as a ‘global’ language. In this module you will explore how this situation came about by placing the development of English literary traditions both in the British Isles and elsewhere into the long historical context of the rise and fall of the British Empire. Beginning with canonical works by British writers from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, you will then consider literary and political responses to the experience of empire and colonization by writers from areas such as South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Australasia, and the Americas. You will explore how ‘English Literature’ has been shaped on a global scale by global historical forces, and how different the history of the English literary tradition looks when placed alongside and in counterpoint to these ‘other’ writings in English. You will then discuss the writings of authors such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, Amitav Ghosh, Kate Grenville and J.M Coetzee amongst others. The module will introduce you to the theoretical and conceptual apparatus of postcolonial literary studies and to some of the key frameworks for understanding the formation of the modern world, such as race and racism, nations and nationalism, colonial discourse and postcolonial theory, and how gender and sexuality were pivotal in the formation of colonial and post-colonial identities.

Optional B Modules

(20 credits)

CREATIVE WRITING: INTRODUCTION (SPR)

Code LDCC5004B

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.

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.

FEMINIST THEATRES

Code LDCD5058B

Credits 20

What was the feminist theatre movement and what does it mean for you now as a writer, theatre maker and/or scholar? Feminist Theatre allows you to explore key feminist theatre makers from the Suffrage movement to the present, focusing on radical companies and writers of the 1970s and 1980s. Combining seminars and practical workshops, you will investigate what feminist historiography is and how you can engage creatively with archives. The module invites you to draw on a lineage of feminist ideas and methods to consider and challenge the continued under representation of women in theatre (and beyond). Assessment will be part analytical and part creative or creative-critical work, with an option to create a performance. All welcome! No need to identify as a woman or feminist to take part.

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.

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

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.

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.

THE SHORT STORY (SPR)

Code LDCL5075B

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. You'll 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.

Optional C Modules

(20 credits)

ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN VENICE

Code AMAA5093B

Credits 20

Positioned at the hub of trade routes which spanned out across the known world, the city of Venice was a major commercial and political power during the medieval, renaissance, and early modern periods. It also grew to be one of Europe's most important centres of artistic production, with Venetian painters, sculptors, glassmakers, and architects channelling their city's diverse multiculturalism into a vast range of influential artworks. You will examine the development of art and architecture in the city from its earliest foundations through to the present day, tracing the aesthetic and urban history of what its inhabitants came to call 'La Serenissima,' the most serene city on earth. In previous years this module has featured a study trip to Venice.

ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD

Code AMAA5098B

Credits 20

Using a range of case studies from the Mediterranean World, this module introduces students to some of the most significant themes and debates in the archaeology of the Mediterranean and archaeology more generally. Case studies will be drawn from a range of time periods and will address ‘the big themes’ in archaeology, such as cultural transmission, cultural development, societal collapse, trade and exchange, conflict, migration, empire and expansion, the emergence of urban societies, climate and society and ritual and religion. Often more than one theme will be included in a case study and the aim will be to understand how they relate to each other. For example, how does conflict or climate change contribute to migration or societal collapse?

ACTION / ABSTRACTION:ART AFTER 1945

Code AMAA5103B

Credits 20

You will explore the rich history of art made after 1945, with a particular emphasis upon the problem of the relationship between the idea of art's autonomy and claims for its capacity to engage directly with social and political conditions. You will be introduced to key tendencies in art and a wide variety of artistic media made since 1945, with a (non-exclusive) focus upon Europe and North America.

THE BLACK RENAISSANCE

Code AMAA5109B

Credits 20

This module examines how Black artists have expressed their experience of the modern world in art. The module situates the making of Black Consciousness in the Black Atlantic, that space of cultural exchanges between Africa, the Americas and Europe as it emerged in the context of the slave trade. In this module you’ll learn how Black artists articulated their membership of modernity in the Harlem Renaissance in 1920s New York, Black Paris in the interwar period, the decolonization movement, African nationalism and Pan-Africanism, and the Black Power movement in the 1960s. You will learn how diasporic artists articulate their remembrance of slavery and engage with the intersections of race and gender in representations of Black subjectivity today. You will look at the work of Feral Benga, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, the Dakar School, the Zaria Art Society, Faith Ringgold, David Hammons, Emory Douglas, Adrian Piper, Keith Piper, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Carrie Mae Weems, Sonia Boyce, Fred Wilson, Yinka Shonibare, Chris Ofili, El Anatsui, Sammy Baloji, Kara Walker, Lubaina Himid, and Zanele Muholi.

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.

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Important Information

Assessment for Year 3

Compulsory Modules

DISSERTATION

Code AMAA6112B

Credits 30

On this module you will undertake a research project on a topic related to your specialised interests, in consultation with an appropriate member of ART Faculty, leading to a 9,000 word dissertation.

Optional A Modules

(30 credits)

ALTERNATIVE MODERNISMS

Code AMAA6131A

Credits 30

You will learn about the role of modern art in the making of India’s national identity and address probing questions, notably ‘When was Modernism in Indian Art?’ Since the beginning of the 20th century, artists and other cultural producers in India, such as film-makers, educationalists and anthropologists, sought to dismantle the colonial concepts that once framed their histories and identities. You will explore how artists such as Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij and Rabindranath Tagore established cultural exchanges with diverse national and international communities in the early to mid 20th century. You will consider the many new artistic and cultural formations that emerged via the Bengal School and related movements, raising important questions concerning the meaning of the relationships between the local and the national, the future and the past, and the visual and the spatial. Including debates on issues as diverse as identity/difference, visual display, internationalism, cultural heritage, and the politics of representation This module is of potential interest if you have a specific interest in art history, anthropology and museum studies.

GODS, KINGS AND PRE-COLUMBIAN ART: DIVINE RULERSHIP IN ANCIENT AMERICA

Code AMAA6140A

Credits 30

Why are some rulers seen as gods and supernatural beings? How do rulers participate in and draw power from superhuman sources? How do artworks express and presence their divinity? To explore these questions, this module explores visual systems of the ancient Americas and focuses on the rich artistic and archaeological records that connect rulership (and associated men and women) to divinity. Drawing especially from general anthropological and archaeological theory, the first sessions lay out the comparative basis to consider how humans are seen and treated as gods (e.g., naming, ancestrality, myth, attire, performance, ritual). The remainder of the module details case studies from major civilizations of the Americas (e.g., Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Moche, Inca), to reveal unique variations of this global human pattern.

MODERN ART AND STATES OF MIND

Code AMAA6141A

Credits 30

This module explores art’s relationship with aspects of mental and emotional life in the 20th Century. Each seminar is dedicated to a particular ‘state of mind’: anxiety, boredom, anger, joy, love, grief, or shame, for example. The module examines both the way in which inner life is subject to social, historical and technological forces, and how artworks engage such crucial dimensions of lived experience. The seminars will draw upon rich conceptual resources derived not only from art history but also from psychology, literary theory, sociology, and philosophy.

Optional B Modules

(30 credits)

MAPPING WORLDS

Code AMAA6121A

Credits 30

Mapping helps us to conceive of abstract concepts in tangible visual form. Be it geographical notions of the globe and the heavens, or more complex outlines of the body, the mind, time, even history, a map helps to bound and give features to otherwise inexplicable space and knowledge. This course uses historical maps and modern theories of cartography as the jumping-off point for an in-depth investigation of the visual and imaginative cultures of Europe and the Middle East from the prehistoric and classical eras through to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In previous years this course has also featured a study trip to museums and galleries in London to meet with curators and handle objects.

GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS PRACTICE

Code AMAA6126A

Credits 30

This module explores a variety of practical and conceptual considerations in Gallery and Museum Studies by focusing on specific aspects of these institutional structures: from building, housing and caring for collections, to curating shows and exhibitions, and producing texts and writing criticism. You will develop your engagement with the practice of conceiving, designing and mounting exhibitions, exploring both the conceptual demands of putting on a successful show and the practical considerations involved in doing so. Finally we consider the role of interpretation and learning in galleries and museums practice, thinking also about how texts of various sorts operate in exhibitions and collections displays. The module has previously involved a study trip to London or Cambridge.

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: NONSENSE AND MODERN WRITING

Code LDCL6015A

Credits 30

It's widely recognised that modernist literature is characterised by a revolution of the word. Less widely recognised, and little explored, is the relationship between modernist linguistic experimentation and literary nonsense. Beginning with two 19th-century writers, Carroll and Dickinson, you will go on to explore various of the radical disruptions in ordinary sense and meaning practiced across 20th-century writing, asking about their purposes and possibilities, and inquiring into what they tell us about ordinary language. You will take in such subjects as William’s Empson’s analysis and practice of poetic ambiguity; surrealism’s Freudian inquiry into the illogical language of the unconscious; Joyce’s invention of new words to express this illogic; Plath’s surrealist play with metaphor; the early Auden’s distortion of syntax, pronoun, and tense; and Ashbery’s indeterminacy. We will read such work against various theories of nonsense, laughter, and play. Your principal focus will be on poetry and language itself and there will be detailed discussions of word-history, ambiguity, broken syntax, incomplete metaphor. Major topics will include the relation of nonsense to dreams, jokes, games, and madness, and this will be informed by psychoanalytic theory, especially in Freud’s writing. This is not a course on children's literature, but on some very challenging modern literature, mostly poetry. You will need to enjoy uncertainty and have good close-reading skills. There will be opportunities for creative writing of nonsense and creative writers are encouraged to take the module. By the end of the module you should have an understanding of the various ways in which modern writers have revolutionised and distorted language, and the reasons why they did so. You should be able to analyse the differences to meaning made by such distortions, and to trace the gaps in sense that they open. You should be able to draw on relevant theories of nonsense, laughter, play, childhood, and language, to enrich your analysis. You could offer your own creative writing in the same mode of nonsense, and if so, this will show an understanding of the techniques of the writers studied. In either case, you will have done some of your own original reading, thinking, and research, beyond the texts and topics covered in seminars.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Code LDCL6038A

Credits 30

This module offers you the chance to learn about children’s literature and its development. It starts with the history of children’s literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through Aesop’s fables, fairy tales, Victorian and Edwardian literature, and examining authors that might include A.A Milne, Dr. Seuss, Sherman Alexie, and Melvin Burgess, amongst others. The course looks at issues of genre and content as well as at historical context. Theoretical readings on children’s literature are also closely engaged with. By studying the development of children’s literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society. This module is creative and critical and students have a chance to write for children in it.

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.

MINOR LITERATURES: RESISTANCE, RADICALISATION AND READING

Code LDCL6146A

Credits 30

You'll explore writing as a site of resistance and protest and consider representation itself as inherently political. Does this make the work of a reader radical, or how can that work be radicalised? Taking a lead from the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, you’ll ask what it means to write or speak a dominant language in such a way that it stutters or stammers? What would such writing or speaking look or sound like? Deleuze and Guattari suggest that minor literature (minoritarian form in general) takes a dominant, hegemonic, major language and forces it to ‘say’ something different, and to do so differently, dislocating (deterritorialising) it so that a new voice (speaking from a new constituency) can be heard. They use the works of Kafka, a Czech Jew writing in ‘official’ German, as a representative example of how a dominant, major language can be pressed into the service of a minor literature, as a way of inscribing new constituencies, while other critics have considered sub-cultures’ re-appropriation of language, post-colonial writing back, musical subgenres and alternative/underground cinema as also being iterations of minoritarian impulses. You’ll explore various aspects of writing or speaking back, writing against the grain, saying the things major language finds itself unable or uncomfortable to speak about, and articulating the unheard. Writers and texts might include Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, Elias Khoury, Dana Spiotta, Jennifer Egan, along with punk ‘zines, samizdat writing and manifestoes.

Optional C Modules

(30 credits)

MODERNISM AND GENDER: FRANCE AND GERMANY 1900-1939

Code AMAA6128B

Credits 30

On this module you will study some of the most important modernist artists of the first part of the twentieth century. We will explore the work of male and female artists and also consider how gender structures representation and art practice. The module provides an opportunity to reconsider key works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Suzanne Valadon, Hannah Hoch and Claude Cahun, amongst others.

RACE AND VISUAL CULTURE ACROSS ATLANTIC WORLDS

Code AMAA6142B

Credits 30

Recent movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter have connected activists across Africa, Europe and the Americas around issues of race and representation. This paper will explore the development of racial formations across Atlantic Worlds through the medium of Visual Culture - images and artworks depicting racialised bodies circulating since Portuguese voyages in the wider Atlantic during the fifteenth century. Broadly chronological, the paper will develop multiple perspectives on Atlantic histories, considering African, European and American made images in a range of media, from performance, painting and sculpture to print media, photography and film, ending with the contemporary circulations of digital images through social media.

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'.

T.S. ELIOT AND TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY

Code LDCL6122B

Credits 30

The poetry of T.S. Eliot has a unique place in modern verse as a body of writing that combines mass popular appeal with intense intellectual challenge. The first part of the module will take you chronologically through the various stages of Eliot's Collected Poems, from the nineteenth-century influences that combined to produce 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1915) to The Waste Land (1922) as a poem of empire and the wartime context of his final major work, Four Quartets (1935-1942). It will also offer an introduction to Eliot's literary and social criticism, as well as to criticism written about him. The first coursework essay will take the form of an editorial commentary on a chosen poem or passage, giving you an opportunity to follow up allusions and interpretations through wider reading. The second part of the module will look more broadly at Eliot's influence and reputation as a poet, critic, and editor. Beginning with his own views on the need to reinvent poetry's cultural significance for the 20th century, you will consider the importance of Eliot's example to the next generation of British modernist poets (such as W.H. Auden, W.S. Graham, Lynette Roberts) as well as later poets in England (such as Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes) and around the world (such as John Ashbery, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Jorie Graham and Fawzi Karim). The final project will be a 3,000-word essay on any Eliot-related topic of the your choosing, and may take the form of a creative-critical poetry portfolio and self-commentary in response to the reading for the course.

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.

RACE, WRITING AND IDENTITY IN POST-WAR BRITAIN

Code LDCL6168B

Credits 30

How did the legacy of its empire affect and shape British society during the period of increasing immigration from its former colonies following the Second World War and even now? How did the writing of those immigrants represent the social conflicts and tensions of that period, especially experience of racism and the resistance to it? How have contemporary minority ethnic writers responded to the challenges of the contemporary period, in which racism has taken new forms, such as Islamophobia and anti-refugee movements? You’ll focus on the ways in which postcolonial ideas can help us to understand and reflect upon the aftermath of empire in Britain. You’ll use selected writings by Black and Asian British writers to explore questions of race and racism, culture and ethnicity, religion, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, identity, and belonging that have been stimulated by post-war migration to Britain by residents of its former colonies. These issues will be set in the context of past and contemporary debates about British identity, and how these debates have been shaped and reshaped in response to the successive arrivals of migrants from other parts of the world, and by the creative, intellectual and everyday interventions of those migrants themselves. The main topics of study will be The literature of arrival – post-war Britain and ‘first generation’ migrants; The cultural politics of race, racism and anti-racism; Multiculturalism, belonging, hybridity and negotiation – the re-shaping of British identities; The new politics of exclusion – asylum seekers and Islamophobia.

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Important Information

Entry Requirements

A Levels

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

BTEC

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

Scottish highers

AAABB including an English Literature related subject.

Scottish highers advanced

BCC including an English Literature related subject.

Irish leaving certificate

3 subjects at H2, 3 subjects at H3 including an English Literature related subject.

Access course

Access to Humanities & Social Sciences pathway. Pass the Access to HE Diploma with Distinction in 30 credits at Level 3, including 12 credits in English Literature, and Merit in 15 credits at Level 3

European Baccalaureate

75% including 70% in an English Literature related subject.

International Baccalaureate

32 Points including HL 5 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 meet the academic requirements for direct entry, you may be interested in one of our Foundation Year programmes.

INTO UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

If you do not meet the academic and/or English requirements for direct entry our partner, INTO University of East Anglia offers guaranteed progression on to this undergraduate degree upon successful completion of a preparation programme. Depending on your interests, and your qualifications you can take a variety of routes to this degree:

International Foundation in Business, Economics, Society and Culture
International Foundation in Humanities and Law

Alternative Entry Requirements

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

Applications from students whose first language is not English are welcome. We require evidence of proficiency in English (including writing, speaking, listening and reading):

IELTS: 6.0 overall (minimum 5.5 in all components)

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

INTO University of East Anglia

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:

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 and International applicants. The annual intake is in September each year. 

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Course Reference Number: 4479762

BA HISTORY OF ART AND LITERATURE