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- Post-war German history: 1961 to reunification and beyondCourse start date: Wed 1 May 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Rudolf MuhsThis course offers a broad survey of German history from the sealing of the country’s division by the Berlin Wall to its unforeseen reunification in 1989-90 and its aftermath.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00 - The Soviet Union: a history in film, 1922-1991Course start date: Mon 13 May 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Nick MorganThis is an advanced course intended to use film as a primary source in exploring the history and culture of the Soviet Union in greater detail.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00 - Contemporary women's fictionCourse start date: Wed 22 May 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Fiona McCullochDiscuss a selection of novels written by women in contemporary British society. Focusing on the 21st century, we consider the concerns of fiction in grappling with representing the now. We will make links between literary texts and social context to consider how fiction might be influenced by and influencing the real world beyond its covers. Texts include Bernardine Evaristo's Mr. Loverman (2013), Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon (2013) and Ali Smith's Hotel World (2002).
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00 - Japan at the picturesCourse start date: Tue 17 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Jean-Baptiste de VaulxThis course will introduce you to the cinema of Japan, one of the world’s most important national cinemas. It will introduce you to films by major Japanese directors, such as Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kitano. It will also explore the aesthetics of these films, situating them within their broader historical, cultural, critical and industrial contexts. It will also look at the functioning of genre and the peculiarities of the star system within Japanese filmmaking.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00 - Memoir Fiction: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Martin Amis, Philip RothCourse start date: Tue 24 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Lewis WardWe will discuss questions of memory, history and genre through readings of three fascinating examples of ‘memoir fiction’: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Martin Amis’ Inside Story.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00 - Writing from Life: memoir, autofiction, novelsCourse start date: Tue 24 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonWhat do we want and expect from life stories? On this online literature course we’ll read a selection of fascinating books and extracts, which experiment in different ways to combine stories of personal experience and literary invention. As well as memoirs the course includes ‘autofiction’ – a description for the work of novelists whose material is, explicitly, their own life – and we’ll explore this tricky and sometimes controversial category of writing. We’ll think too about some of the ethical and cultural questions that writing from life can raise, including privacy and a right of reply, and think about factors that may affect a book’s critical reception.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00 - Cultureplex ciné-club 2Course start date: Thu 25 Apr 2024 (and 1 other date)
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Paul SuttonCome and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club 2, where once a week, for 12 weeks (and throughout the academic
year), we will watch and discuss film. Taking its cue from the famous Parisian ciné-club set up by the celebrated critic and writer, André Bazin, ‘the single thinker most responsible for bestowing on cinema the prestige both of an artform and of an object of knowledge’, and the man who foresaw the emergence of film studies as a legitimate discipline of academic study, our contemporary incarnation of the film club will offer a curated series of films for detailed study, discussion and debate. Each film will be introduced, placed in both its cinematic, cultural and historic context. In sharing our viewing in City Lit’s premier screening room, the Cultureplex, we will approximate the experience of watching film in the cinema, one that is intense and fully focussed in a way that other modes of viewing often are not. After the screening we will devote the rest of the class to a collective exploration of the film, led by the tutor, but involving everyone in a participatory discussion that will allow all to express their responses, their views, their thoughts on the film screened.
Please note that this course will screen a new and different set of films to HF211 Cultureplex Cine-Club, which will run with the same films screened last year. If you took the Cultureplex Cine-Club course last year (2023-4), please ensure that you take the Cultureplex Cine-Club 2 courses this year.Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £199.00 Concession £129.00 - Victorian networks: How trains and telegraphs shaped 19th century cultureCourse start date: Wed 2 Oct 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Harriet ThompsonEver wondered about the origins of our current networked culture and media-saturated society? Taking a deep delve into the weird and wonderful world of Victorian technologies, we will consider how advancements in media, transport, and communication produced new kinds of meaning and iterations of the human in the nineteenth century. Reading literary texts by Charles Dickens and Henry James, alongside theoretical work by Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Sadie Plant, and Donna Haraway, we will consider the influence of new technologies on literary form and style.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00 - Being ecological: environmental consciousness in cultures of climate crisisCourse start date: Mon 4 Nov 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Katie GossThis course will introduce students to exciting initiatives in twenty-first century cultural discourse that attempt to reconceptualise what an ecological consciousness might be or feel like. Drawing on theoretical and literary texts, films, performance art, and political activism, we will explore radical ways of rethinking and reinhabiting our relations with more-than-human worlds, and how they open new possibilities for living on a damaged planet.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00 - Fifties film and television: Hollywood's last stand as TV beginsCourse start date: Thu 7 Nov 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: John WischmeyerThis is the decade when television really took off, when I Love Lucy premiered on a Monday night in October 1951, followed by Milton Berle as “Mr. Television” on Tuesdays. Everyone went out to buy a TV set. How could Hollywood compete with this free home entertainment? Biblical epics and Ben-Hur was one answer. On the Waterfront (1954) to Some Like It Hot (1959) was another. The fifties was the beginning of the end for the business model of the studio-era, a golden age in place since the 1920s. However,
Hollywood reacted by producing some of the finest and most enduring films in its history as it slowly began to find newer, younger audiences for James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Coming-of-age indeed! So was television, as it produced some of its finest programmes. It seemed like every week a new show or a new genre: Sgt. Bilco, Playhouse 90, Edward R. Murrow, Walt Disney Presents, Route 66—and all in prime time.
(Also see related courses on 50s Westerns, Musicals and Film Noir).
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00 - Colonial America: European settlement 1560 – 1815Course start date: Wed 24 Apr 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Dafydd TownleyThe online course explores European settlement (British, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish) of North America. It examines the differences between English colonies; the American Revolution; the formation of the United States; and the War of 1812.
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information. - 20th Century Britain: The Thatcher Age 1975-1997Course start date: Wed 24 Apr 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: David FowlerThe fourth in a new cycle of modern British history courses, this course examines the transformative social and cultural change in Britain during the Thatcher Decade; probing how far the Thatcher Governments were responsible for social and cultural change. Or was this largely the work of provincial cultural entrepreneurs like Tony Wilson (“Mr Manchester”)?
This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00
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