Module ENGL2681: Literature (1900 to present), Cinema and Neuroscience

Department: English Studies

ENGL2681: Literature (1900 to present), Cinema and Neuroscience

Prerequisites

• Any Single or Joint Honours finalist student wishing to take this Special Topic module must have satisfactorily completed the required number of core modules. Combined Honours and Outside Honours students must have satisfactorily completed either two Level 1 core introductory modules, or at least one Level 1 core module and one further lecture based module in English at Level 2

Corequisites

• None.

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None.

Aims

• To introduce students to an emergent field study; which brings together literary studies, visual culture and neuroscience.
• To present theory in an applied context. Film theories studied may include W. Benjamin, G. Deleuze, S. Cavell and Patricia Pisters.
• To engage students with key issues and debates on the relationship between cinematic and literary strategies which are illuminatininge the ways in which our mind works.
• To encourage students to interrogate these issues through a range of literary and cinematic genres.
• To encourage students to consider how the issues raised by these texts, images, films relate to inquiries into how the mind works according to new neuroscientific discoveries.
• To practice research led teaching at the interdisciplinary interface between literary studies, visual culture, philosophy and neuroscience.

Content

• This module will first introduce the broad context of modern/contemporary literary and film studies through both the study of neuroscientific findings and how these new findings help us to better understand the affective and fictive relationship between literature and community issues in everyday life.
• The module will then examine how, on a neuroscientific as well as literary and cinematic level, the distinction between fiction and reality has recently become a question of rigorous research. How do characters in fiction shed light on the creation of realities in real life? One key example is Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: in what ways does Isabel Archer’s inability to read make her an easy prey for the spell which is, as James makes clear in his preface, the subject matter of the novel? The question of how we are at risk of falling for deceptions of various spells in fiction as well as in reality is a problematic wherein cinema, literature and neuroscientific research intersect. In other words, we risk succumbing to the deceptions of fiction, because fictional representations always feign to be of the real and claim a reality of their own. This function of the fictional points up the interstices between cinema, literature, and neuroscience.
• The module will draw on works by modernist and contemporary writers as well as leading neuroscientists, theorists and philosophers, including A. Damasio, P. Pasolini, S. Freud, W. Benjamin, and E. R. Kandel.
• It will encourage students to pay particular attention to the role of verbal and visual images not only in film but also in literary studies.
• The module will explore how certain neuroscientific models of perception (for example,that perception has recently been discovered to be a form of action) has been anticipated by various literary and cinematic techniques which turn us into active participants of what we read or watch. Texts studied may include James’sThe Portrait of a Lady, Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Franzen’sThe Corrections and selected short stories by David Foster Wallace. Films studied may include Chaplin’s Modern Times, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Pasolini’sTheorema, Fincher’s Fight Club, Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker.
• The module will raise the question of how seeing is a form of doing and how literature and cinema participate in this act of perceiving which is active rather than passive.

Learning Outcomes

• Upon successful completion of the module, students will have demonstrated:
• Knowledge of a diverse range of texts and images which help illuminate the relationship between fiction and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, past and present.
• Knowledge of the philosophical and neuroscientific context of contemporary literature and cinema.
• Knowledge of how modernist literature and cinema contributes to better understanding of how our mind works within a socio-political context.
• Engagement with the various critical and theoretical approaches to modernist and contemporary literature and film.
• An awareness of the special roles of seeing and perception in actions that constitute our private as well as public lives.
• Knowledge of literary and cinematic techniques of presenting sight and perception.

• Upon successful completion of the module, students will have demonstrated:
• Critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts and images and films
• An ability to analyse texts, films and images closely, using appropriate critical perspectives
• An ability to illustrate arguments through fine details of language and imagery
• A close engagement with an interdisciplinary understanding of both literary and film studies
• An ability to work effectively and flexibly with text and visual culture
• A basic command of neuroscientific discoveries and theories about how the mind creates literary and cinematic perceptions and insights

• Upon successful completion of the module, students will have demonstrated:
• A capacity to analyse critically
• Complex and nuanced skills of expression and argument
• An ability to compare and contrast the technologies of film and literature
• Competence in the planning and execution of essays
• A capacity to balance independent argument with appropriate critical perspectives
• Skills in critical reasoning
• An ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner
• An ability to use cinematic techniques for a fruitful encounter with literary strategies
• Organisation and time-management skills

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts and visual culture as well as skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology.
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work; in this session students are entitled to show their seminar leader a list of points relevant to the essay and receive oral comment on these points. Student may also, if they wish, discuss their ideas for the second essay at this meeting.
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor.
• Coursework: essays test the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary as well as cinematic creation and the close reading and analysis of texts and visual culture.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessed essay allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second essay.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Before the first essay, students will have an individual consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a list of points relevant to the essay and receive oral comment on these points. Students may also, if they wish, discuss their ideas for the second essay at this meeting.

■ Attendance at all activities marked with this symbol will be monitored. Students who fail to attend these activities, or to complete the summative or formative assessment specified above, will be subject to the procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University