Module overview
How do novels, films, artworks and performances shape political struggles and transform the societies we live in? This module invites you to explore the powerful ways in which culture responds to injustice, imagines new futures, and drives movements for human rights and social change.
The course focuses on key points of intersection between the arts and activism through a range of historical and contemporary social movements in the ‘Long 20th Century’. These may include, but are not limited to: feminism, migration, climate crisis, BLM, 1968, oil, Human/Animal Rights. In these contexts, you will consider how writers and artists question the status quo, give voice to marginalized perspectives and inspire others to take action.
Through close study of literary texts, films, visual culture and new media, you will gain tools for analysing the cultural politics of human rights and the role of creativity in moments of crisis and transformation. Drawing on theoretical and creative interventions into social change contexts, this module offers a chance to think deeply about how culture not only reflects the world, but helps to remake it.
Aims and Objectives
Learning Outcomes
Knowledge and Understanding
Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:
- the ways in which literature and other art forms respond to, and can shape, social change
- a variety of modes and forms through which writers and artists intervene in social change contexts
- how literary texts and other art forms represent intersections between environment and human culture
- how literary and cultural texts reflect and shape social change both historically and in the present.
- the varied historical, social, political and economic contexts which shape writing and other art forms engaging with social change movements.
Transferable and Generic Skills
Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:
- carry out a sustained analysis of a subject across relevant forms of evidence
- research a topic or an issue independently
- construct a reasoned argument based on research and analysis
Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills
Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:
- demonstrate knowledge of important issues in the role of art on social change contexts
- situate literary and artistic interventions into social change movements within their broader historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts
- undertake close reading and analysis of literary texts and other art forms
- compose historically and culturally-informed analyses of texts and creative artefacts
- evaluate the efficacy of key theories and critical methods pertinent to analysis of literary and other forms of cultural analysis
Syllabus
This module will usually, though not always, be team-taught by staff with different specialist interests from across the department of English with shared interests in the intersections between literature, culture and social change. It will introduce you to key critical, theoretical, historiographical and conceptual debates surrounding the role of literature and culture in the context of social change. You will consider how writers and artists question the status quo, give voice to marginalized perspectives and inspire others to take action.
Indicative topics include: disability activism, 1968, feminism, environmentalism, migration, human/animal rights, Harlem Renaissance, decolonisation, artist manifestos, ‘writer-activists’, visual media from cinema to TikTok.
Preliminary Critical Reading:
The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics. ed. by Randy Martin (Routledge, 2015)
Jacques Ranciere, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2010)
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard, 2011)
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (Norton, 2008)
Julietta Sing, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke, 2018)
Aesthetics and Politics by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács (Verso, 2020)
Learning and Teaching
Teaching and learning methods
Teaching methods may include:
•seminars involving both tutor and student led discussion
•Interactive lectures
•use of internet and other electronic resources
Learning activities include:
•participation in general discussion of themes drawn from weekly reading
•oral seminar presentation
•independent reading and research
•development of techniques and conventions of visual and literary analysis.
The module will make use of primary materials that intervene in social change contexts using a variety of forms such as literary texts, essays, letters, visual media, memoir and manifestoes, in relation to a wide range of secondary critical and historical texts drawn from literary criticism and its history, social history, ecology, the history of art, the law, and political economy.
| Type | Hours |
|---|---|
| Teaching | 20 |
| Independent Study | 280 |
| Total study time | 300 |
Resources & Reading list
Textbooks
Randy Martin (2015). The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics. Routledge.
Jacques Rancierre (2010). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics. Bloomsbury.
(2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial entanglements. Duke University Press.
Lynn Hunt (2008). Inventing Human Rights: A History. Norton.
Rob Nixon (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor.
Assessment
Summative
This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.
| Method | Percentage contribution |
|---|---|
| Critical commentary | 15% |
| Essay | 85% |
Referral
This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.
| Method | Percentage contribution |
|---|---|
| Critical commentary | 15% |
| Essay | 85% |
Repeat
An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.
| Method | Percentage contribution |
|---|---|
| Essay | 85% |
| Critical commentary | 15% |
Repeat Information
Repeat type: Internal & External