International students have to attend only Part 1 within the ELC Module: English Literatures and Cultures.
Di, 14-16, Seminar I: Social Realism: Histories, Forms and Genres
Di, 16-18, Seminar II: Social Realism in British Cinema
Social realism is an aesthetic mode of representation that seeks to critically engage with the socio-political conditions of working-class life. While it broadly has its origins in 19th-century visual art and narrative literature, social-realist forms and poetics are hard to define and have diversified over time and within differing cultural and national contexts. In cinema, for instance, social realism has its origins in 1950s Italian neorealism and in the British New Wave Cinema of the late 1950s-1960s. By way of a loose working definition, social realism could be used to describe any film that employs a particular set of representational techniques that try to create an accurate and “unfiltered” image of regular people’s everyday lives and surroundings and that are used to deal with a particular set of themes, such as sociopolitical issues, the hardships of regular working-class people etc. Thus, social realism of more of a mode than a distinct genre.
In this course, we will explore the early traditions of literary, cinematic and photographic social realism in British culture.
In seminar I, students will learn about the histories and traditions of social-realist art across forms and genres. We will focus on the cultural theories associated with social realism and train methods of analysing social-realist modes of representation in literary texts, film and photography.
Seminar II, which can only be taken in tandem with seminar I, will focus on the work of key directors of British social-realist film. The seminar will allow for more focussed attention to film analysis and to understanding the political and historical contexts of these works.
Recommended introductory reading:
David Forrest. Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics. Cambridge Scholars, 2013.
Julia Hallam, Margaret Marshment. Realism and Popular Cinema. Manchester UP, 2000.
Samantha Lay. British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit. Wallflower Press, 2003.
Most material will be available on Moodle. Novels and films will have to be purchased individually. The list of texts and films will be provided during the first session. |
