Literature, Culture and Social Change

Learning Outcomes

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• research a topic or an issue independently
• carry out a sustained analysis of a subject across relevant forms of evidence
• 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:

• evaluate the efficacy of key theories and critical methods pertinent to analysis of literary and other forms of cultural analysis
• compose historically and culturally-informed analyses of texts and creative artefacts
• 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
• demonstrate knowledge of important issues in the role of art on social change contexts

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• how literary texts and other art forms represent intersections between environment and human culture
• a variety of modes and forms through which writers and artists intervene in social change contexts
• how literary and cultural texts reflect and shape social change both historically and in the present.
• the ways in which literature and other art forms respond to, and can shape, social change
• the varied historical, social, political and economic contexts which shape writing and other art forms engaging with social change movements.

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)

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.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

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.