Explore History, Culture & Writing

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 Ciné-Club, which will run with the same films screened last year. If you took the Cultureplex Ciné-Club course last year (2022-23), please ensure that you take the Cultureplex Ciné-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.

Join this course and discover the work of John Locke, the founder of British Empiricism; George Berkeley and his famous view on perception; and David Hume’s fork of ‘relations of ideas' and 'matters of fact'.

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.

For those who want to further develop their literary skills, focusing on the three main literary genres of fiction,



poetry and drama. Read, analyse and debate works that reflect the cultural and historical changes as the world moves from the Victorian age to modernity, including 'The Awakening' (1899) by Kate Chopin, 'Three Sisters' (1901) by Anton Chekhov and poetry by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

“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).

We explore Michel Foucault's public lectures at the Collège de France, introducing key concepts such as genealogy, governmentality, and biopolitics. Through Foucault's lens, we critically navigate debates on truth, social engineering, and politics in turbulent times.

Is it possible to be true to oneself? And, is this a worthwhile pursuit or a delusion of modernity? This course will explore these questions with the help of five modern philosophers.

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.

Join this course to explore the intertwined evolution of mathematics and engineering, from the invention of the wheel to the foundational mathematical theories developed up to the 20th century.



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