Contemporary Culture Courses in London

London’s recent building boom has foregrounded discussions about architectural style, but postmodernism has been practiced in the capital for more than forty years. This course will look at the style’s variety through key examples.

Are you a fan of Dracula? Buffy? Blade? Carmilla? Do you like your vampires to be monstrous or romantic? This day event will look at how 21st century film and television has fostered a global fascination with the undead, reinventing the genre for new audiences and in response to changing understandings of life, death, gender, sex, and disease. This day course will unpack these issues and explore the allure of the vampire while also reflecting on its more monstrous qualities.

Literature has long been an important source for filmmakers, but adaptations of well-known texts are not always well received by audiences. This one-day course will take Patricia Highsmith’s celebrated 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley as a particular example and explore its cinematic adaptations. We will consider what is at stake in adapting literary texts for the screen while examining the vexed question of fidelity. You will have an opportunity to respond critically to Highsmith’s text as well as analysing a series of clips from the film versions of her novel.







The course will be taught by Patricia Sweeney (Co-ordinator for Literature) and Paul Sutton (Co-ordinator for Film, TV and Media Studies).

Discover how some Jewish characters have been portrayed by Italian novelists of the 20th century. We will read and comment on extracts from Italo Svevo, Giorgio Bassani and Natalia Ginzburg.

In this course, we will look at examples of ‘shrinks on screen’—portrayals of mental health professionals (psychiatrists, social workers, psychoanalysts, etc.) in cinema and TV. We will critically examine ‘head doctors’ tropes, and identify iconic psychotherapy sessions in movies and television that convincingly represent the challenges and effectiveness of the so-called ‘talking cure’.







Mary Wild is a film lecturer and podcaster with an academic background in psychoanalytic theory. Her research interests include cinematic representation of the unconscious, surrealism, mental illness, feminine subjectivity, the horror genre, and auteur studies. In addition to teaching at City Lit, she is a regular speaker at Freud Museum London.

Nowadays there are so many ways to watch film - smart phones, tablets, TVs - just as there are so many different spaces in which we encounter the moving image - cinemas, galleries, our homes, to name but a few. This day-long course will broaden and deepen your critical awareness of the diverse formal and experiential possibilities of cinema, both as they have developed in the past and as they are transforming in the contemporary moment. It will do this by reflecting on two questions: ‘what is cinema?’ and ‘where is cinema?’.