Culture and Text

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 4
• Convenor: Dr Damian Catani
• Assessment: a 1500-word essay (50%) and 1500-word test (50%)

In this module we introduce you to the study of written cultures across a variety of periods and language-speaking areas that are clustered around a common theme: the idea of real or imagined communities. We will introduce and explore a range of genres such as the short story, novel, theatre, poetry and other discursive forms. You will gain the skills to analyse these different textual media, learn about their histories and how they have developed in different cultures. You will also engage with significant theoretical ideas in the study of written cultures.

A key aim of the module is to enable you to think critically about the notion of community in different cultural contexts. This will provide you with the conceptual tools to compare and contrast cultural production and history across more than one language-speaking area.

Indicative syllabus

• Studying culture and text: ‘imagined communities’ - introduction, histories, theories, genres
• French short story and epistolary novel: imagining the outsider’s view in eighteenth-century France (Voltaire and Graffigny)
• The fractured nation and the Paris Commune
• Spanish novella: imagined community in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Trafalgar
• Latin American novel: gender, race and slavery in Cuba
• Constitutions: defining the nation
• Korean short story
• German theatre: Schiller
• Italian theatre: Eduardo De Filippo’s Filumena (1946)
• Japanese classical poetry
• French poetry: Baudelaire

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• understand aspects of the history of textual artefacts across various cultural contexts such as the French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish-speaking worlds (not all will be covered in any given year)
• understand the constructed nature of national identity, of the idea of the nation, and the notion of ‘imagined communities’, for example as articulated by Benedict Anderson
• understand the differential development of texts across these language-speaking areas
• compare and contrast histories and cultural production across more than one language-speaking area
• use key skills to analyse written texts
• understand key theoretical ideas in the study of written texts
• analyse different textual forms in writing
• engage in academic discussion about written texts.