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- French and Russian literatureCourse start date: Tue 30 Apr 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Richard NilandExplore classic texts of 19th century French and Russian literature, discussing literary style, themes, and contexts as a way of developing and sharing responses to celebrated European writing. Among the French writers examined will be Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert and Rimbaud, with our Russians including Pushkin, Lemontov, and Tolstoy.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £143.00 Concession £116.00 - The death of GodCourse start date: Wed 1 May 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Over the past five hundred years in the West belief in God has declined. This course will examine why this has happened and consider the meaning and significance of what has taken place.
Please note: There will be no class on 20/05/24.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £143.00 Concession £116.00 - The world of Bob DylanCourse start date: Thu 2 May 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Richard NilandThis class explores the work of Bob Dylan, examining his song writing, musical style, and persona in the context of American cultural, political, and musical history, exploring how Dylan engages with American culture through his absorption and reworking of multifarious aspects of both historical and modern Americana.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £143.00 Concession £116.00 - Historical fiction: reimagining and rewritingCourse start date: Thu 2 May 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonWhat’s the unique appeal of historical fiction? Why do we read it, and what are we looking for? This course investigates historical fiction written in the twenty-first century and how it reimagines the past for us as contemporary readers. Reading novels and short stories set in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we’ll explore historical fiction’s strategies, challenges and pleasures: how it can bring unknown stories into view and rewrite what we think we know. Includes Francis Spufford's Golden Hill (2016), Emma Donoghue's The Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) and Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet (2020).Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £143.00 Concession £116.00 - Discovering Victorian London: empire, enterprise and educationCourse start date: Tue 7 May 2024
Location on this date: Blended (learn both online and in-person)
Tutors: Eleanor JacksonVictorian London shaped today's city. Discover the lasting legacy of the Victorian age, uncover its secrets, and meet some of the characters who created one of the world's greatest cities.
Initial lecture via zoom followed by 7 guided walks.
This course will be delivered online and in person. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information. - Rising powers: IndiaCourse start date: Tue 7 May 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Sebastien ArdouinWithin a few decades, India has become a key global actor. What explains this rise and what does it mean for the “world’s largest democracy” and the world?
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 £135.00 Concession £110.00 - 'A terrible beauty is born': poetry in revolutionary timesCourse start date: Mon 10 Jun 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Laurie SmithIs Auden right that “poetry makes nothing happen”? We look at how poets have helped people to understand, cope with and sometimes resist oppression in revolutionary periods from the late18th century to the present.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £143.00 Concession £116.00 - It Can't Happen Here: Sinclair Lewis, Philip Roth, Muriel SparkCourse start date: Tue 24 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Alexander Fairbairn-DixonExplore 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’?Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00 - Reading Shakespeare: a director's perspective - Romeo and Juliet and the Taming of the ShrewCourse start date: Wed 25 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Laura BaggaleyTake 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.Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £199.00 Concession £129.00 - Cultureplex ciné-clubCourse start date: Thu 26 Sep 2024 (and 1 other date)
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Paul SuttonCome and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club, 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.Full fee £249.00 Senior fee £199.00 Concession £162.00 - Exploring literature: an introduction to prose and poetryCourse start date: Thu 26 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonThis course introduces you to a range of prose and poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. Learn about how poems work, both ‘on the page’ and as spoken words. Reading novels and short stories, we’ll explore characterisation, the social and historical contexts of the works and writers’ techniques. Come and discover what’s distinctive about different forms of literature.Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £159.00 Concession £129.00 - Nineteenth Century American Literary ClassicsCourse start date: Fri 27 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Richard NilandThis 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.Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £159.00 Concession £129.00 - Chaucer's The Canterbury TalesCourse start date: Mon 30 Sep 2024
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Rachel BuglassThe 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.Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00 - Fifties MusicalsCourse start date: Wed 16 Oct 2024
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: John Wischmeyer“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).Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00
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