The School of Languages, Linguistics and Film covers a diverse range of subject areas, from which we have created a number of thematic programmes that can be chosen by you as a package.
You can immerse yourself in a particular area of study, from postcolonial studies to a regional focus on Britain, Europe, or East Asia. Each thematic programme contains courses from the areas of film, literature, the languages and cultures of a society or region, taught by experts in the field.
To select one of the module suites, you don't need to register for a distinct pathway, just select the individual modules at the point of module registration, and select one or two free-choice electives. The suggested modules within each thematic programme will fit clash-free within your timetable, but please check that the free-choice elective you have selected fits as well, once the timetable has been published. If you replace some of the suggested modules with other modules, we cannot guarantee that they will be clash-free, so please do check.
You can choose from the following thematic programmes for Semester 2 (January - May 2024)
Through this module suite, which combines literature and film, you will study texts by non-European authors written in the context of European colonisation, covering topics such as anti-colonial resistance, neocolonialism, postcolonial ecocriticism and the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples. The film module analyzes the representation of history in African Cinema in three key moments of the continent's history, and the role of film in nation-building.
By taking this module suite you will study the ideas of three major German thinkers – including their theories of political economy, the philosophy of language and ideas about the unconscious. You will also study the interaction of Russian and East European social and political thought and literature with Western culture, and the relationship between literature and philosophy in European thought in broader terms, from thinkers in ancient Greece to writers in the 20th century.
This suite includes two modules that explore how writers and artists have tested the boundaries of social acceptability and violated accepted norms – one examining libertine and pornographic texts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality are represented within these and other texts from the period, and the other looking at the movements of Futurism, Dada, Expressionism and the Theatre of the Absurd, and the artistic and socio-political context that produced them.
This module suite looks at Britain through the perspectives of culture, language and film. It introduces British cultural history from the late Victorian period to the present, from the discourses of Empire to contemporary discourses of Britishness in relation to multiculturalism. One module introduces students to diverse language situations in the UK, including English dialects, Celtic and French varieties, and immigrant languages. The film module focuses on the social, political, and cultural contexts of British cinema, and the ways in which British cinema, and British culture, has been marked (and transformed) by the British Empire and its legacies – covering, amongst others, race, identity and diaspora; popular cinema under Thatcher; avant-garde cinema; cinema and `multiculturalism’ in the 1990s; Britpop cinema; and sovereignty and nationhood in 21st century British cinema.
This module suite includes two modules that focus on how film production reflects modern French and German societies: in the case of France how the social, political and cultural shifts in late 20th and 21st century France are represented cinematically, and in the case of Germany how post migrants address questions of otherness, exclusion and belonging, national identity and heritage, leading to the question of how Europe is being represented, and where it ends. The third module extends the geographical scope to the Iberian peninsula by specifically focusing on modern and contemporary Catalan culture, spanning the topics of nationalism, the politics of language, and football.
These language modules are for beginners. You can also select a non-beginner language module in these or other languages if you already have some knowledge of the language and want to improve it, but you need to check whether it fits into your timetable.
OR: Free choice of one 15-credit elective module, instead of a language.
Through this suite of modules you will study how, on the one hand, 'China' has been imagined, invented, and instrumentalised by non-Chinese cultures over the last millennium, i.e. how China has been imagined through a Western lens. The film module, on the other hand, investigates how Eastern philosophies such as Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism are invoked by East Asian cinema and how those Eastern philosophies can also be used as a lens to interpret non-Asian cinemas. This is complemented by the study of Mandarin Chinese.
1. Deconstructing 'China' in the Western Imagination (CHI4201, 15 credits)
2. Cinema and Eastern Philosophies (FLM6037)
3. Chinese Language and Culture I (a) (LAN4083, 15 credits)
This language module is for beginners. You can also select a non-beginner language module if you already have some knowledge of the language and want to improve it, or a different language, but you need to check whether it fits into your timetable.
4. Free choice of one more 15-credit elective module
This module suite introduces students to the methodology of visual studies. It explores the cultural history of France and Spain through applying visual methodologies to images and visual narratives, from historical imagery encapsulating ‘national’ values such as ‘Marianne’, to contemporary French satire and Spanish graphic novels, as well as the use of museums as spaces for cultural discourse and the formation of national and cultural identity.
This module suite enables students to learn about the systematic study of language-in-use through the example of how English is used in different contexts. You will also learn about language development in individuals who are proficient in more than one language, by examining bilingualism and multilingualism from a linguistic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspective. Finally, one of the modules looks at the many uses of Linguistics in real-world situations and fields of work, with talks given by representatives from a range of professions, such as forensic linguistics in criminal investigations and courtrooms, dialect coaching for film and theatre, speech and language therapy for children and adults with communication disorders, or the use of computational linguistics in IT and search engines such as Google.
If you are a non-native speaker of English and you want to use your semester or year abroad to deepen your English language competence, by analysing the implicit conventions of real-life contemporary English, then this suite is for you. The two modules in this suite will equip you with practical tools to use spoken and written English in a variety of socio-cultural situations. Both modules will boost your academic outcomes while studying through the medium of English, and they will also enhance your employability prospects when considering a future career in multicultural and multilingual contexts. In addition to the two modules, you can choose two more 15-credit modules of your own choice.