Film and Creative Writing (Placement Year) BA Hons - 2020 Entry

Course Structure

Many of Lancaster's degree programmes are flexible, offering students the opportunity to cover a wide selection of subject areas to complement their main specialism. You will be able to study a range of modules, some examples of which are listed below.

Year 1

Core

• Introduction to Creative Writing

  This module develops the skills, knowledge and confidence of apprentice writers and their command and enjoyment of the craft. It approaches literature as something made by individuals out of their experience, imagination and knowledge, rather than as finished artefacts encountered as commodities. The module encourages you to experiment with different forms and approaches, to discover your individual strengths as a writer, whether of poetry, prose or drama.

  Lectures provide insight into a syllabus of key skills, techniques and approaches to writing poetry, prose fiction and drama. Workshops are tailored to reflect on the content of the weekly lectures and put these skills, techniques and approaches into practice. You will discuss in detail each others’ works-in-progress, developing critical and editorial skills and insight into the writing process. These skills and insight are then applied to your own, as well as peers' work. The 'Reading for Technique' element of the module allows you to develop skills to read as a writer, rather than as a critic or general reader.

• Introduction to Film Studies

  This module is intended to provide you with the essential knowledge and competencies to undertake the academic study of film at university level. The first term provides you with an understanding of the formal and technical composition of films to allow you to undertake detailed analysis of films, from the level of close scrutiny of individual images, and their interrelation with the soundtrack, to the narrative assembly of shots and scenes. Through the analysis of a range of examples, you will become familiar with the key formal and semantic conventions of cinema. The second term is designed to provide you with a framework knowledge of world film history. By focusing on a selection of key films and filmmakers, this section of the module will explore historically significant movements and themes within international cinema from the 1920s to the present day. This term is thematically organized around issues of ideology and realism, and explores the shifting social and political status of cinema during the last century. In the third term you will undertake a practical project, working with a small group to produce a short film.

• Placement Preparation

  Your placement year is a terrific opportunity to gain experience in the workplace and to develop your skills and knowledge. This short module has been designed to help you find a suitable placement position and make sure that you get the most benefit from your placement year.

  With the help of our expert tutors, you’ll find out about the graduate job market, including what employers expect from the graduates they employ, as well as the specifics of Lancaster’s placement year scheme and how this can support your career development.

  Using a range of tools, you will sharpen your job seeking skills such as researching job opportunities, and professional CVs, application forms and cover letters that are tailored for specific employers and sectors.

  An understanding and experience of the application and interview process is essential to successful job-seeking. The module includes an introduction to psychometric testing as well as practice for face-to-face and video interviews, and assessment centres. You will develop a greater awareness of your personal attributes, set up a LinkedIn profile, and consider how to present yourself effectively to employers.

  The skills and practice gained during this module, and the professional feedback and support you receive, will prepare you for your second year when you will start applying for placement positions.

  While this module is not credit-bearing, you will need to pass the two assignments in order to continue on the Placement Year scheme. The first assignment is designed to develop your skills in answering application form questions. For the second assignment you will develop a graduate standard CV and covering letter, and take part in a practice interview and mock assessment centre.

• The Arts and Culture in Modernity

  Introduction to the Contemporary Arts, part 1

  This module introduces students to university study of the arts and design, and their contexts and interrelations. Taking place in the first term only, students on the Art, Design, Film and Theatre programmes will work together to explore the different ways in which creative practitioners respond to the world around them. They will be introduced to the key critical concepts used by academics to write about the creative work produced by practitioners in these fields.

  Introduction to the Contemporary Arts, part 2 – Art/ Design/ Film/ Theatre

  In the second term, students take a specialised module in either Art, Design, Film or Theatre to supplement the essential knowledge and skills covered in Part 1.

Year 2

Core

• Critical Reflections

  This course provides an introduction to critical theory in the arts and its application to aesthetics and art. The first term concentrates on 'structures' in artworks and the second on 'identities'. The structure of the course is six three-week blocks: (1) Form and Structure, (2) Semiotics and Authorship, (3) Phenomenology and Spectatorship, (4) Sex/uality and Gender, (5) Race and Ethnicity, and (6) Class and Society. Weekly plenary lectures make connections across the arts, and weekly two hour seminar/workshops allow students to work in their subject groups (art, film, theatre, design) on ideas and examples specifically tailored towards these disciplines.

• Hollywood and beyond: Global cinema

  This core module has two main objectives. Firstly, it is designed to develop further your analytical skills in order to examine individual films in greater detail. Secondly, it is intended to encourage you to understand world cinema in relation to a variety of social, cultural, political and industrial contexts. The module will explore such issues as the relationship between film form and modes of production (from industrial film-making through to low-budget art film), theories of film style and aesthetics, and the political function of cinema. In the first term, we focus wholly on various modes of American film production, and in the second term we explore some broader theoretical questions through an analysis of films from a number of different national traditions. Across the whole module, you will gain a thorough grasp not only of the historical factors shaping various national and international cinemas, but also of some key critical and theoretical concepts within the field of film studies.

• Intermediate Creative Writing Workshop

  Course Outline: Students will develop the key skills introduced at Part I level with an emphasis on writing as process, exploring creative voice, identifying point of view, the implied author and authorial guises whilst considering the creative and interactive nature of reading. Course Lectures will deepen your engagement with, and understanding of, literary forms. Weekly workshops will enable the development of specific aesthetic and technical skills through participation in constructive criticism relating to fellow students’ work-in-progress. Through this process, you will gain a deeper understanding of many important concepts such as structure, linguistic texture and resonance, point-of-view, form, pace, characterisation, the mediation of tone, and reader awareness. While the learning environment will usually be in the form of workshops, certain weeks will be designated for focussed and practical set tasks. You will be expected to read widely from modern and contemporary creative works and to explore the work of ‘writers on writing’. The aim of the course is to develop a closely edited creative and peer-critiqued body of work that displays your own form of expression alongside skills and insights developed through the course.

• Work Based Learning Preparation

  A placement year provides a valuable and safe opportunity to find out more about yourself and the type of career that is right for you. The aim of this module is to prepare you to maximise the opportunities for learning and development that your placement will provide, including formal elements such as Professional Development Reviews (PDR) and options for informal learning.

  You’ll consider your individual strengths and preferences through completion of a personality type assessment. This will be useful when we move on to looking at your aspirations for the placement. Working with others in the group and your tutors, you will be asked to develop strategies for achieving your goals and to record these in an action plan.

  You’ll be encouraged to think about challenges that you may encounter during your placement, such as management structures, working relationships, time management, work/life balance, and ethical considerations. You’ll also consider your role and responsibilities during the placement, as well as that of your employer and the University, and this awareness should help you to navigate any issues that arise once the placement has started.

  During your placement year you will be expected to create a Professional Placement Portfolio and your tutors will provide guidance on how to do this.

  There are two assessed elements to this module, the first is preparing an action plan for your placement year and the second is to complete the personality assessment exercise. You will need to successfully complete both elements in order to continue on the Placement Year scheme.

  This module provides 10 credits towards the 30 credits which successful completion of your placement year provides. These 30 credits are on top of the 360 credits of a standard degree, meaning that you will graduate with 390 credits; 30 more than if you took the same degree without a placement year. The additional credits recognise and reward the additional skills and experience that you will develop during your placement year.

Optional

• Creative Non-Fiction: Genre and Practice

  Course Outline:

  This module will explore the writing of creative non-fiction (mainly, though by no means exclusively, in the areas of memoir and biography) through the development, in a workshop environment, of the student’s own work, combined with the directed reading of a selection of contemporary work and secondary texts. Over the course of ten weeks, you are expected to read and discuss each key text, and to submit your own work for workshopping on a regular basis. Students are also expected to familiarise themselves with books listed as ‘supplementary’ and ‘background’ reading: the books are selected to offer different perspectives on the key issues raised. The course should be considered to have a cumulative effect, in that the books discussed early on may be drawn upon in later weeks to illustrate different aspects of writing. During the course you are also expected to keep a journal, in which you reflect upon your writing and reading. This journal will form the basis of the reflective element of your final portfolio, and it will be discussed in an end-of-term personal tutorial with your tutor.

• Documentary Film Practice

  Documentary Film Practice is a practice-based module in which small groups of students (3-7 students) make a short documentary film (between 5-7 minutes in length). The module builds on knowledge acquired in LICA250: Documentary Cultures.

  By undertaking a practical project in Documentary Film Practice, students are expected to apply theoretical knowledge gained in LICA250 to a practical project. As well as applying theory to practice, the module aims to enhance students’ filmmaking skills, with specific training provided for camera operation, sound recording and editing skills. Students will also gain skills in terms of working in groups.

• European New Wave Cinema

  The module aims to develop an understanding of historically important European films from the 1950s-1980s and the stylistic and historical significance of these films. It will explore the thematic importance of these films and consider the critical debates relating to this period of filmmaking enabling students to develop a critical understanding of the conditions of production, reception and distribution of these films.

• Film and Comic Books

  LICA256 is a specialist module examining a historical genre that now occupies the economic centre of Hollywood film production. The module focuses centrally on film and comic book aesthetics; on questions of narration and visual depiction in these two related media; on the shifting norms of this film genre in relation to technological change across history; and on the significance and uses of the comic-book film in society. As such, the module develops ideas introduced, and skills acquired, in the core Film Studies modules in both Part 1 and Part 2 (LICA 150 [Introduction to Film Studies] and LICA251 [Global Cinema]).

• Media & Performance

  This module aims to introduce key issues and practical skills in the production of video for media, performance, new media art and documentary film. The module will introduce the historical and practical applications of media technologies in art, theatre and performance by presenting the key practitioners in the areas of installation, multi­media performance, video, and new media art.

  A group practical project will introduce the use of video cameras, filming and editing, project planning, team work and the practical use of installation technologies. The module offers students the opportunity to work in interdisciplinary teams to produce a short film, performance, installation or documentary, including video and other media where appropriate.

• Perception and the Arts

  This module explores the relationships between the arts and how we see and hear. Artists are aware, consciously or unconsciously, of the processes and limitations of perception. They often play with our perceptions in their works to make something which draws our attention, makes us see something in a different way, or gives us a kind of perceptual puzzle or challenge. The module also explores recent scientific research on perceiving art and how that relates to ordinary perception.

  Assessment is by an essay and an exam.

• Poetry: Genre and Practice

  Course Aims and Objectives:

  The emphasis in this module is on reading as well as writing poetry; it will also explore how our own experience translates into poetry and how poetry becomes an experience generated by language, memory, imagination and form. Students will be encouraged to seek out new reading as a result of seminar discussion. The writing of poetry is largely dependent on your abilities as a reader and interpreter of poems and on the textures of lived experience. Technique is vital to composition and it is strongly recommended that students buy or borrows a copy of ‘Rhyme’s Reason’ by John Hollander and ‘The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary’ by Frances Stillman. You are expected to keep a journal throughout the course, the contents of which will be used to create the reflective essay for your portfolio.

• Short Fiction: Genre and Practice

  Course Outline:

  The aims of this course are to provide an opportunity for second year students to develop a knowledge of the short story form, and to develop their experience of writing the form. They will gain experience in reading, writing, workshopping and reflecting on short fiction, and will develop a knowledge of the history and development of the form, current theoretical approaches to reading and practice in this form, and an awareness of their own literary context. The course will offer students the opportunity to develop their oral and written communication skills, enhance awareness of their approach to the creative process, and enhance their skills in the critical analysis of texts. This course is then developed by the third year specialization in short fiction.

  This module will explore the writing of short stories in a workshop environment through the development of the student’s own work, combined with the directed reading of selected texts. Over the course of ten weeks, you are expected to read and discuss each key text, and to submit your own work for workshopping on a regular basis. Students are also expected to explore some of the books and essays listed as ‘supplementary’ reading: the books are selected to offer different perspectives on the key issues raised. The course should be considered as having a cumulative effect, in that books discussed early on may be drawn upon in later weeks to illustrate different aspects of writing. During the course, you are also expected to keep a journal, in which you reflect upon your writing and reading. The journal will form the basis of the reflective element of your final portfolio.

• Women Film Makers

  This module will explore the work of some of the most historically important female film-makers from the 1890s through to the present, considering films from around the globe. The module will examine the significant but often marginalized and obscured roles that women have played in industrial, experimental and avant-garde film production across a spectrum of roles from costume and production designers through to screen-writers, editors and directors. You will be invited to reflect upon the fact that, despite playing key roles in the development of the medium, women continue to be excluded at all levels of film production; for example, of 1,591 films released in the US between 2010 and 2015, less than 9% were directed by women, while only 13% were written by women, less than 20% produced by women, and less than 30% had female leads. The decision by Hollywood star and activist Geena Davis to establish a campaigning ‘Institute on Gender in Media’ is a measure of the urgency of this subject.

  The module will engage with revisionist film histories concerned with interrogating the dominant bias of academic and popular histories of the medium; it will also draw on feminist film theory concerned both with a critical understanding of mainstream cinema and the development of politicized women’s cinemas. The module will examine a series of key female directors and their work, and each week will be oriented around the screening of a case study film that will be the focus for the seminar. The directors studied include Alice Guy-Blaché, Dorothy Arzner, Leni Riefenstahl, Ida Lupino, Laura Mulvey, Mira Nair, Kathryn Bigelow, Marziyeh Meshkini, Lynne Ramsay.'

  Assessment is by a combination of coursework essay and exam.

• Writing place and landscape

  Course Aims and Objectives:

  This module is designed for those students interested in writing imaginatively about places and/or landscapes, providing a grounding for writers of poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction in the broad field of nature, environmental and place writing (which has been undergoing something of a renaissance in recent years). Students will study key texts that engage with different kinds of place and landscape – from fields and forests to rivers and urban edgelands – and explore their own emergent interests in place writing. Students will be encouraged to consider their own work as part of a larger, ongoing literary conversation about place, and to explore those places and landscapes that interest and excite them. The course also contains an element of fieldwork, linking the act of physically walking through a landscape to the practice of reading and writing about it.

Year 3

Core

• Work Based Learning Placement

  A Lancaster University placement year is very different from any work experience you may have done at school or college. It is an exciting opportunity to be employed in a graduate level position for nine-twelve months, working in the type of environment and role you might be considering for after you graduate. You will develop a range of skills and experience both through doing the job and through accessing formal and informal development opportunities, as well as making industry contacts, and these should put you in a strong position when you enter the competitive graduate job market.

  During your placement year, although you will be working away from the University campus, you will be in regular contact with other students via our online learning platform and with your Lancaster University tutors. If your placement is in the UK, one of the placement team will visit you to discuss your progress towards your placement goals.

  As well as developing skills and experience that are specific to your placement position and industry, your placement year will also provide the opportunity to gain broader experience and professional skills in several areas:

  • analytical thinking, problem solving and decision making;
  • planning and negotiation;
  • prioritisation and time management;
  • critical engagement with theories and frameworks through applying them to real situations.

  There are two assessed elements to this module, the first is to develop a Learning Agreement during your first few weeks in the job, and the second is to evaluate and reflect on the development of your skills and knowledge through keeping a personal learning log during the placement.

  You will also collate materials for your Professional Placement Portfolio on an ongoing basis as a record of your learning and development, and this will form your final assessment that is handed in during your final year at Lancaster.

  Your tutors will provide guidance, support and templates for all of these elements.

  This module provides 10 credits towards the 30 credits which successful completion of your placement year provides. These 30 credits are on top of the 360 credits of a standard degree, meaning that you will graduate with 390 credits; 30 more than if you took the same degree without a placement year. The additional credits recognise and reward the additional skills and experience that you will develop during your placement year.

Year 4

Core

• Dissertation

  This core module is directed towards completion of an independent research project on a topic of the student’s choice, presented in the form of a dissertation. The course is taught through lecture/seminars focused on research skills and one-to-one supervision.

• Work Based Learning Reflection

  In your final year you’ll return to Lancaster to complete your degree. Feedback from previous students is that their final year studies are enhanced by the real-world experience they can now draw on.

  Whatever your career path, having the skills to critically evaluate your own learning and development will considerably enhance your effectiveness in the workplace. During your final year, you will be asked to reflect on your experience of work based learning. Did you take part in any formal training relating during your placement? How did this benefit your work? What kinds of informal learning opportunities arose? What did you learn about your own preferences for professional development? How do your experiences compare to those of other placement students?

  You will be asked to consider your future career aims and identify areas for further development using models of learning to analyse strategies. Finally, you will develop a personal action plan for continuing your personal and professional development in your final year and beyond.

  There is one assessed element to this module, which is completion of the Professional Placement Portfolio that you started during your placement year. The portfolio should reflect on your placement and highlight your key successes, challenges and development points.

  This module provides 10 credits towards the 30 credits which successful completion of your placement year provides. These 30 credits are on top of the 360 credits of a standard degree, meaning that you will graduate with 390 credits; 30 more than if you took the same degree without a placement year. The additional credits recognise and reward the additional skills and experience that you have developed during your placement year.

Optional

• Advanced Creative Writing Workshop

  Course Outline: Students will further develop key skills introduced in the first year of Part II, with an emphasis on writing as professional practice and process, exploring creative voice, identifying point of view, the implied author and authorial guises whilst considering the creative and interactive nature of reading. Course lectures will focus on professional practice, publishing, and the career opportunities available to graduates. A proactive workshop environment will enable the development of specific aesthetic and technical skills through participation in constructive criticism relating to fellow students’ work-in-progress. Through this process, you will gain a deeper understanding of many important concepts such as structure, linguistic texture and resonance, point-of-view, form, pace, characterisation, the mediation of tone, and reader awareness. While the learning environment will usually be in the form of workshops, certain weeks will be designated for focussed and practical set tasks. You will be expected to read widely from modern and contemporary creative works, to explore the work of ‘writers on writing’ and to draw on relevant literary theory where appropriate. The aim of the course is to develop a closely edited creative and peer-critiqued body of work that displays your own form of expression alongside skills and insights developed through the course.

• Advanced Film Theory

  This third-year core course will add to the theoretical, historical and cultural aspects of film investigated in Years 1 and 2, while focusing more closely on the challenging aesthetic and critical debates surrounding the concept of modernity. It will look at films made in the silent era, in post-war Europe and in Britain and the US. Key writings on film will be considered in conjunction with viewings of particular films, close analysis of specific filmic techniques and methods, and historical and theoretical approaches to film. The course will also pay attention to the debates of classical and contemporary film theory, feminist approaches and other critical traditions (semiotics, structuralism, formalism, cognitivism). Building on the approach to film taken in LICA251 (Film Cultures), this course focuses on film theory as students are introduced to key debates in classical and contemporary film theory, with topics exploring the relations between film and art, cinema and politics, cinema and psychoanalysis, and, above all, the question of how films produce meaning(s).

• Advanced Short Story: Form and Practice

  Course Outline:

  This unit will provide an opportunity for students to develop their knowledge and skills of the short story form, history and practice with a more advanced course. Each week you will have the opportunity to discuss, in detail, one or two specimen short stories and workshop their own creative work. Topics covered will include:

  • plot, narrative and 'the twist in the tale';
  • the epiphany and other ways of ending;
  • writing extreme experiences
  • rewriting fairy tales, folk tales and myth
  • flash and sudden fiction;
  • voice and place
  • genre (the ghost story)
  • short stories in the literary world - the web, festivals, journals and competitions.
• Apocalypse Then: New Hollywood Cinema

  Topics studied will normally include:

  Introduction – Hollywood breakdown (Easy Rider, Medium Cool)

  The future of allusion: New Hollywood’s nostalgic mode (The Godfather)

  Popular feminism (Klute, Woman Under the Influence)

  Politics and conspiracy (The Parallax View, All The President’s Men)

  Disaster movies (The Poseidon Adventure)

  Comedy (Annie Hall)

  Exploitation cinema I: blaxploitation (Coffy, Foxy Brown)

  Exploitation cinema II: horror/body genres (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre)

  Blockbuster cinema and the franchise film (Star Wars)

  The end of the New (Apocalypse Now)

• Classic Hollywood: The Studio Era

  This module is designed to provide you with a chance to explore one of America's most significant cultural contributions to the twentieth century - the motion picture. You are introduced to the American cinema through a genre approach to a series of selected films. This entails that you frame the formal and aesthetic aspects of Hollywood filmmaking in an appropriate social, historical, cultural, and industrial context. In considering why certain popular narrative formulas (such as the Western and the Gangster) are so deeply associated with American commercial screen art, lectures and seminars will attend to movie production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its mass audience.

• Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema

  This module explores Hong Kong cinema from the mid-1980s up to the present – an era whose beginning witnesses the international breakthrough of a new wave of local filmmakers, and which goes on to encompass the early 1990s’ production surge, the 1997 handover to mainland China, the crippling economic crisis, and the outbreak of the SARS virus. The module will provide students with an understanding of a number of basic industrial, aesthetic, social and cultural trends marking Hong Kong films in the contemporary era. These include the emergence and impact of independent production; the rise of ‘high-concept’ filmmaking; the movement toward pan-Asian co-productions; the importance and cross-marketing of star performers and local musical traditions such as Cantopop; the popularity of genres like the swordplay film; and aesthetic tendencies such as episodic plotting and the narrative ‘thematisation’ of politics and identity. Emphasis will be placed not only on representative mainstream product, but also on the emergence of a distinct Hong Kong art cinema, whose presence and success on the international festival circuit has brought artistic credibility to a predominantly popular cinema, and which has heralded the arrival of a fresh wave of local ‘auteur’ filmmakers.

  Method of Assessment

  One essay of 5,000 words (100% of final course mark)

• Creative Non-Fiction II

  This module will explore the writing of creative non-fiction through the development, in a workshop environment, of the student’s own work, combined with the directed reading of a selection of contemporary work and secondary texts. This module builds both thematically and technically on CREW 206, which was introductory and primarily concerned with biography and memoir; CREW 305 will concentrate on reviews, essays, and cultural reflection. Over the course of ten weeks, you are expected to read and discuss each key text, and to submit your own work for workshopping on a regular basis. Students are also expected to familiarise themselves with the books listed as ‘supplementary’ reading below and ‘background’ reading (available on Moodle): the books are selected to offer different perspectives on the key issues raised. The course should be considered to have a cumulative effect, in that the books discussed earlier in the term (as well as those discussed in CREW 206) may be drawn upon in later weeks to illustrate different aspects of writing. During the course you are also expected to keep a journal, in which you reflect upon your writing and reading, and which will form the basis of the reflective element of your final portfolio. This journal will be discussed in an end-of-term personal tutorial with your tutor.

• Longer Fiction: Skills and Techniques for Approaching a Novel

  Course Outline:

  During this module students will examine, through the set reading and in-class writing prompts and tasks, the unique features of long fiction (novellas and novels). Through seminar discussion of set texts, the workshopping of creative writing in progress and the writing of synopses and other planning documents, students will develop competence in approaching a long fiction project. This includes: strategies for planning and structuring, choosing point of view and tense, developing plot, addressing theme and characterisation, experimenting with form and considering an ending.

• Narrative and New Media

  Course Outline:

  This course will provide the space for you to work on a creative project that utilises opportunities afforded by new media. New media narratives (please see the list of set ‘texts’ for examples) are often interactive, participatory, immersive and cross-platform and you will be encouraged to design and provide writing samples from a project that engages with these features. During the course we will examine a variety of new media narratives, compare them to non-linear ‘old media’ narratives (books!) and you will work towards placing your own creative work in a literary and critical context.

  The topics we will cover will respond to your own project ideas and interests, but may include:

  • Interactivity and immersion,

  • Space, place, mapping and journeying,

  • The problem of character,

  • Who is the author? Collaboration and crowd-sourced fictions.

    Note: while we will talk about the ways these narratives can resemble games, this is not a course where you will be designing a computer game. You do not need to have any special computer skills – only an interest in the opportunities afforded to writers by new media forms.

• Poetry and Experiment

  Course Outline:

  This course aims to challenge the received structures of language in the students' own poetry through a close reading of poets who opened up new frontiers of 20th/21st century literature through their experimental approaches to language. Every seminar will be split in two halves; the first hour will be devoted to a close reading of experimental work by a published poet, from Alice Oswald to Ezra Pound, looking at how they stretch or break the lyric formula; the second hour will a workshop based on critiquing the students' own poetic experiments. In week two, students will receive a basic introduction to Wittgenstein's theory of language games, with each subsequent poet examined in the light of how they try to break the rules of the game. The students' own experiments are encouraged as either continuations of the radical departures first implemented by the poets in question, or the students' own attempts to break from comfortable notions of confessional or lyric poetry.

• Silent Cinema

  This course offers an introduction to the broad area of silent cinema and to a range of critical approaches to this rich area of study. You will have the opportunity to view and analyse a number of important films. We will also explore a number of critical questions raised by this material with regard to the writing and study of histories of cinema (and popular culture in general), the relationships between technology and form, the economics of film production, distribution and reception, the relationship between cinema and national identity, the social and cultural impact of new (entertainment) media, the study of cinema audiences.

• Writing/Reading Poetry

  Course Outline:

  ‘No art without the resistance of the medium’, Raymond Chandler once said. This module will build on CREW 205 (Writing Poetry), deepening student engagement with both the writing and the reading process. Poetic form will be explored through a wide-ranging selection of poems (all of which can be found in the set text for the course: The Making of a Poem (ed. Boland and Strand) and Poetry By Heart’s online anthology http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/anthology/ We will consider form as historical poetic model and a tradition that has been questioned, adapted, subverted, upcycled, reaffirmed—rather than the binaries of free/formal verse, open/closed form, etc—and there will be particular emphasis on those forms regularly employed or reimagined in a twentieth century and a more recent contemporary context.

  A portion of each seminar will be spent discussing the set poems. Students will submit their own poems on a fortnightly basis. The dual assessment (a portfolio of students’ own poems plus a close reading of two of the syllabus poems) reflects the course emphasis on the inter-relationship between reading and writing.

Lancaster University offers a range of programmes, some of which follow a structured study programme, and others which offer the chance for you to devise a more flexible programme. We divide academic study into two sections - Part 1 (Year 1) and Part 2 (Year 2, 3 and sometimes 4). For most programmes Part 1 requires you to study 120 credits spread over at least three modules which, depending upon your programme, will be drawn from one, two or three different academic subjects. A higher degree of specialisation then develops in subsequent years. For more information about our teaching methods at Lancaster visit our Teaching and Learning section.

Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research.