Admission requirements
This course is only meant for BA students of English language and culture.
Description
This course gives students knowledge of and insight into the ways in which cultural productions are embedded in, engage with, and help shape English-language cultures in a broader sense. As the pioneering cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams explains, “the questions now concentrated in the meanings of the word culture are questions directly raised by the great historical changes which the changes in industry, democracy and class, in their own way, represent, and to which the changes in art are a closely related response.” To study English-language cultures, therefore, is to study the modes of production, circulation, reproduction and consumption of art, music, literature, film as well as the new media, in relation to “a whole way of life.” Taking Williams’ definition of culture as a starting point, British and Irish Culture and Society offers students a series of lectures in which various members of staff will present case studies in the production, reception and cultural politics of British and/or Irish (popular) culture from the 1940s to the present, from their respective areas of expertise. The eight case studies presented may differ from year to year, but recurring topics will be the persistent popularity, re-imaginings and cultural relevance of older forms of British and Irish culture in contemporary British and Irish society, the socio-political impact on British and Irish society of various youth subcultures since the 1960s, the effect of popular-culture genres on the formation of individual and national identities, and the important presence and (re)shaping influence of post-colonial cultures in British and Irish society.
Course Objectives
Knowledge: Students will become knowledgeable of the relationship between modern British and Irish culture and society: how culture shapes individual and national identities, how ideologies shape culture and vice versa, and how older forms of culture are continually re-invented to play an important role in society.
Insight: Students will gain insight into the history, research questions and methodologies of the academic discipline of cultural studies.
Skills: Students will learn skills that will allow them to identify and analyse both intertextual and intercultural relations, as well as the ability to identify and study ways in which cultural productions play a role in the representation and discussion of wider socio-political issues.
Timetable
Mode of instruction
A series of lectures
Self-motivated study of written and audiovisual materials.
Course Load
5 ECTS = 140 hours of study
13 hours lectures
6 hours examination
21 hours exam preparation
100 hours of studying the reading/viewing materials
Assessment method
A 3-hour written mid-term exam on the material of Block III; 50% of the final grade.
A 3-hour end-of-term exam on the material of Block IV; 50% of the final grade.
When the final grade is 5.49 or lower, one or more of the exams (depending on the grade of the individual exams) will have to be retaken during the resit period.
Blackboard
Reading list
A syllabus containing further instructions and the list of reading and audiovisual materials to be studied for each week will be posted on the Blackboard site two weeks before the start fo the course.
The reading for week 1 is posted in the “remarks” section below.
Registration Studeren à la carte and Contractonderwijs
Registration Studeren à la carte via: www.hum.leidenuniv.nl/onderwijs/alacarte
Registration Contractonderwijs via: http://www.hum.leidenuniv.nl/onderwijs/contractonderwijs/
Contact
Contact information
Remarks
For week 1 study:
Michael Higgins, Clarissa Smith and John Storey, “Introduction: modern British culture: tradition, diversity and criticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), available online via the university library catalogue.
Raymond Williams, “Part I of Chapter 2: The Analysis of Culture” ; this brief excerpt from The Long Revolution (1961) will be available as an e-text in the course documents folder on Blackboard.