Module ENGL3A21: Star Wars Stories: Inventing and Consuming Popular Culture

Department: English Studies

ENGL3A21: Star Wars Stories: Inventing and Consuming Popular Culture

Prerequisites

• None

Corequisites

• None

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None

Aims

• The module aims to:
• Use the Star Wars franchise as a way into the study of film production and its industrial/cultural contexts, from the New Hollywood era to contemporary corporate conglomeration.
• Explore the complex interplay between commerce, technology, and creativity that drives and shapes pop culture franchises such as Star Wars.
• Provide methodological tools for the analysis of pop culture franchises (with a primary emphasis on film but also encompassing Star Wars as an exemplary form of intermedial storytelling).
• Examine the cultural politics of popular genres (especially science fiction and fantasy) and the changing cultural status/reception of blockbuster franchises such as Star Wars.
• Engage with a range of critical concepts and cultural phenomena (nostalgia, myth, intertextuality, pastiche, allegory, postmodernity, auteurism, and more) in relation to Star Wars storytelling.
• Unpack the relationship between scholarly critique and fandom.
• Reflect on the links between the analysis of Star Wars storytelling and the wider fields of film, media, and literary studies.

Content

• This module provides an advanced introduction to the study of popular culture by focussing on Star Wars — the hugely successful (and indeed divisive) space fantasy film franchise created by George Lucas in the late seventies, which now straddles multiple decades and generations while proliferating across narrative media (novels, comics, games, animation, TV, and so on). The module is each year built around the nine films that make up the franchise’s canonical spine (the original trilogy, the prequels, and the sequels) and the corresponding contexts that Star Wars has both shaped and been shaped by. In doing so, it places a particular emphasis on questions of genre and the various ways in which Star Wars reinvents and repurposes cultural and political history (including its own). Related to this, it considers the complex interplay between the cutting-edge technological innovation that underpins the development of Star Wars, from the earliest days of Lucasfilm to the contemporary Disney era, and the franchise’s deep investment in nostalgia and myth. The module also investigates how Star Wars functions as an important touchstone in theoretical approaches to popular culture, ranging from Fredric Jameson’s influential writings on postmodernism through to Timothy Morton’s work on ecology and object-orientated ontology. In addition, it pays close attention to the role of Star Wars in economic and industrial change; to the significance of race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, and indigeneity in making and interpreting the franchise; and to the critical possibilities of fandom.

Learning Outcomes

• Detailed knowledge of the formal and thematic aspects of Star Wars and their wider implications for the understanding of 20th and 21st century cultural history (especially film history).
• Awareness of the specific contexts in which Star Wars was/is developed (from the 1970s to the present) and, more broadly, the ways in which pop culture franchises are both shaped by and responsive to social, political, industrial, and economic currents.
• Insight into the cultural status and value of franchise storytelling such as Star Wars and of popular media more generally.
• Appreciation of the technological factors (with a particular emphasis on the analogue-to-digital transition) associated with the development of pop culture film franchises.
• Advanced understanding of critical frameworks and approaches — from postmodernity to theories of the studio — relevant to the study of franchise storytelling such as Star Wars.
• Sensitivity to the codification, transformation, and reception of popular genres (especially science fiction and fantasy) in cinema and a broader range of narrative media.
• Capacity to engage in complex debates about fandom and the consumption of popular culture.

• Students studying this module will develop:
• Critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts.
• An ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches.
• Informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of film and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts.
• Sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language, imagery, sound, and music.
• An ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to film.
• An ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to film studies and popular media.
• Skills of effective communication and argument.
• Awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation.
• Command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology.
• Awareness of film as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated.

• Students studying this module will develop:
• A capacity to analyse critically.
• An ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject.
• Competence in the planning and execution of assessed work.
• A capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others.
• Skills in critical reasoning.
• An ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner.
• Information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information.
• 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 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.
• 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.  This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.
• Coursework: tests 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 film creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions. In individual Special Topics, the assessment may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessment allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second assessment.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Before Essay 1, students have an individual 15 minute consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a sheet of points relevant to the assessment and to receive oral comment on these points. Students may also if they wish, discuss their ideas for Essay 2 at this meeting.

■ Students who do not attend monitored activities shown under Teaching Methods and Learning Hours, or who fail to complete the summative or formative assessment(s) specified above, may be subject to the Academic Progress procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University.