Explore History, Culture & Writing

What 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.

Explore three ground-breaking works of ‘speculative’ prose fiction, each offering a highly innovative examination of C20 American political populism. From bitter satire, unnerving dystopia, to the lightly comic, we’ll see how the texts embody genuine anxieties of authoritarianism in America. Surely,- ‘it can’t happen here’?

Take a fresh look at Shakespeare, exploring selected plays in the company of an experienced theatre director. With performance in mind, we will examine the language and themes of two plays and discuss the extraordinary variety to be found within Shakespeare’s work.

Come 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.

This class explores the wonderful world of 19th century American literature, reading classic texts to broaden knowledge of literary history through a range of influential novels, stories, and poems. Among the writers considered in their literary, political, and cultural contexts will be Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain.

The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer’s most popular work and one of the most famous examples of Medieval literature. This course selects some of Chaucer’s most carefully crafted representations of individuals and explores the society they come from. We will enjoy intricate plots, comedy and poignant moments with these loveable and unforgettable characters! Students will be carefully guided through the texts to a fuller appreciation of Middle English verse narrative and Chaucer’s witty and energetic composition.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Ever 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.

“The more beautiful everything is, the more it will hurt without you”—Gene Kelly as An American in Paris (1951) singing to Leslie Caron. Happy endings are hard won in fifties’ musicals and The End is where they were heading. MGM was the studio of musicals in the 1950s. During this decade other studios presented only occasional musicals. The musical was big business for Hollywood in the 1950s and so was the western, so bringing them together made sense. Annie Get Your Gun had been a big success for MGM so Warner Bros. decided to get a piece of the action with Calamity Jane (1953 David Butler with Doris Day). Judy Garland was sacked by MGM in 1951, then followed Joan Crawford to Warner Brothers where she staged a big comeback in, fittingly, A Star is Born (1954 George Cukor). Oklahoma (1955 Fred Zinnemann) and Carousel (1956 Henry King) from 20th Century Fox introduced Shirley Jones. And don’t forget Leonard Bernstein’s score for On the Waterfront (1954) that anticipated West Side Story (1961). (See related courses on Fifties Melodrama and Film Noir and 50 Films From the ‘50s: Hollywood’s Last Stand).

This 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.

This 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.