Module Tutor: Gillian Russell
Level: Postgraduate
Module Code: CES00007M
Credits: 20
Term Taught: Autumn
This module is intended to provide a common formative experience for students who may well be drawn from different disciplinary backgrounds, including literary studies, history, art history, philosophy and others. Seminars place emphasis both on the close analysis of texts, discourses and representations, and on the development of interdisciplinary frameworks of analysis by means of which text, discourse and representation can be related to broader conceptions of historical and cultural change. The module is also available as an option module to students following different MA programmes.
Some seminars in the core module will employ an anthology of short-to-medium length texts or extracts from contemporary printed materials, in order to explore the shifting and evolving meanings that were assigned to particular words, concepts or discursive formations in the period covered by the course. The emphasis here will be very much on contemporary usage and on the close analysis of discourse as expressed or embodied in primary textual materials, on topics such as Gender Difference, Public and Private, Decline and Fall, Colonization, Divisions of Labour. Other sessions will draw on secondary literature as well as primary materials and will aim to introduce students to the kinds of conceptual apparatus that present-day scholars employ in analysing and contextualising the discursive structures and representational patterns of the past. These seminars may include Theories of Representation, Text and Image, Readership, Spectatorship and Audience, Spatial Organisation and Material Culture.
Subject content
Academic and graduate skills
Assessment is by one 4,500 word essay.