Module overview

From the early twentieth century to the present day, French and Francophone artists, writers, film-makers, and thinkers have proposed a series of compelling, and often conflicting accounts of the encounter between cultural production, in all its forms, and the material, textures, rhythms, and practices of lived experience. This module will build up a picture of this central strand of the culture of its period, through a series of sessions dedicated to engagement with topics and works in which its key concerns are decisively articulated. The question of the engagement between the cultural object and its world forms a core around which many of the period's most significant contributions to intellectual and cultural debate may be gathered: the module thus aims both to propose a coherent exploration of a specific question, and to open onto a panoramic view of the period's most interesting and important aspects, as well as some particularly striking recent work in the fields of intellectual and aesthetic inquiry.
The module is open to all those who have degree-level French, whether or not they have previously studied the period. It may also be borrowed by students taking the MPhil in Film and Screen Studies.

Increasingly, the humanities are engaging in conversations and collaborative work on the subject of mental and bodily health and wholeness. It is acknowledged that the World Health Organisation definition of health (‘a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’) needs to be tested in all the many, diverse fields in which we study corporeality, the senses, and the interconnections between body and mind. Precisely because concepts such as mental and bodily health and disease can be difficult to define, we need to consider their history: how they have been articulated over time. Early modern France offers us a particularly rich set of resources for considering sensory experience and how this frames concepts of wellness or disease (etymologically, ‘lack of ease’).
Montaigne uses his own body, in sickness and in health, as a source of knowledge. Descartes foregrounds the subject as sensitive even in tracing the paths taken by the intellect, and theorises mind-body union in his work on the passions of the soul. The wider philosophical and religious writing of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is marked by a conflict between this-worldly and divine conceptions of infirmity and health: the senses are a key battleground here. Writers for the stage explore the full agitation of our feelings and emotions, activating sensual experience through the eruptive energy of sound and music. They ask what it might mean for us to be ‘touched’ by what we see and hear, and whether this can do us good. Meanwhile, taste and smell conjure up shared pleasures and connections to previously alien worlds. Throughout, engagement with other cultures, along with the sensory shocks this brings with it, leads to self-interrogation about European ideas of fulfilment. This module places literature and cultural expressions in conversation with interdisciplinary fields such as gender studies, decolonial studies, and sound studies. We look forward to discussing how the early modern period conceptualizes the senses across body and soul.

What is the relationship between experience and narrative? This module offers a framework within which to study that relationship, with a focus on modern and contemporary German culture. Topics for the seminars include embodied subjectivity; gender, sexual identity and race; metaphors of the body/the body politic; human and para-human; the ethics of memory and meaning-making (hermeneutic justice; narrative justice; subjugated knowledge). A good reading knowledge of German is required.
In a German context, where events not only of the twentieth century pose particular ethical, political and aesthetic problems for writers and artists, we shall consider how authors and film-makers integrate ‘precarious’ narratives into accounts of their historical and political settings. We shall explore how narratives describe, reproduce, and critically engage with both liveable and unliveable conditions of subjectivity in relation to politics, ideology, and institutions, as well as how particular narrative operations become accordingly bound by, or transcend, the constraints of form.
After an introductory session, each meeting will be devoted to a paper presented by a seminar member or members on a novel or film that will have been read/viewed by all. There will be one or two set novels or films per week; the course essay may focus on one work or make a comparative study of two or more.
Undergraduate degree-level German is a requirement for this module.
There will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module.

The Enlightenment was one of the main roads to modernity in eighteenth-century Europe and its latter-day proponents still regard its central tenets – rationalism, secularism, individualism – as the very definition of what it means to be modern. For many historians of European thought, it represents the single most significant event since the Renaissance: an intellectual revolution that fundamentally transformed man’s understanding of his place in the natural as well as the social world and produced not just the ‘ideas of 1789’, but the various ideologies (liberalism, socialism, pacifism) that would shape Western political theory and praxis over the next two centuries.
While the scholarly output on the Enlightenment and its various individual representatives is vast, relatively little is known about those thinkers who resisted the ‘Age of Reason’ and launched what Isaiah Berlin later identified as a ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. And yet there was, as early as the mid-eighteenth century, a vociferous and highly articulate contingent in the new republic of letters which fiercely opposed the materialism and atheism of the lumières, their abstract, a-historical conceptions of the self and their levelling of national traditions and cultural diversity in the name of universalism and progress. These anti-philosophes, though frequently marginalized in the history of ideas, played a no less important role in the formation of European thought. Appalled by the rapid ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Max Weber), they attacked what they viewed as the terribles simplifications and, especially in the wake of the French Revolution, the doctrinaire intolerance of their enlightening enemies. In doing so, they formulated crucial new concepts and ideals that laid the discursive foundations, first for what we now call, somewhat vaguely, ‘the Right’, and later, in the second half of the twentieth century, post-modernism. At the same time, they also forced the ‘party of progress’ to re-define its own positions.
In this seminar, we will trace the intellectual struggles over Enlightenment from Kant’s critique of revealed religion in the ancien régime to Heidegger’s challenge to the narratives of progress, rationality, and technocratic control. We will examine these struggles as on-going, politically charged controversies about the nature and meaning of modernity, without, however, establishing any facile links between ‘the unfinished project of modernity’ (Jürgen Habermas) and the ‘Enlightenment project’. We shall approach both projects, instead, as profoundly dialectical phenomena that were generated and defined, from the beginning, by their opposites. Particular attention will be given, accordingly, to liminal figures, theorists at the interface between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment like Herder, Nietzsche, Weber, and Adorno, who embraced central aspects of Aufklärung while questioning its triumphalist belief in humanity’s inexorable march towards ever-higher levels of rationality, emancipation, and civilization. We shall read the works of these theorists as historically as is possible in such a text-based seminar, concentrating on the following themes, listed here, rather simplistically, as binary oppositions: progressivism/historicism, optimism/Kulturkritik, society/community, reason/faith, rationalization/myth, peaceful meliorism/violent renewal.
Although all of the primary texts on our syllabus are by German authors, we will also consider the concept of Enlightenment as it was formulated and debated in other national contexts. While you are encouraged to read the primary literature in the original German, you can of course consult English translations (I am happy to point you to particular editions). The reading list attached below, though quite expansive, is by no means final and I welcome bibliographical suggestions (regarding the set texts as well as the scholarly literature) from all participants.

This module focuses on feminist reworkings of ancient Greek myths by women writers (and, in some cases, men sensitive to women’s concerns). It will explore feminist perspectives on classical reception. Each seminar will concentrate on one theme: either on a mythical figure (Penelope, Eurydice and Iphigenia) or on reworkings of epic motifs on a larger scale (Aguirre, Ithaca; Atwood, The Penelopiad; Giannisi, Homerica). These have all, since the 1970s, been at the centre of an emerging feminist theoretical discourse in the sphere of classical reception. The final seminar will discuss cinematic reworkings of these figures in three Greek films, two well-known and another less so, but all unlocking fascinating and original perspectives on the old stories.
Our starting point will be modern Greek poetry, which shows a surprisingly early engagement with issues of gender representation in literature and classical myth; some of the poems we will discuss predate the 1970s surge in theoretical feminist texts. As heirs to a weighty classical tradition, which has largely been appropriated by men in the context of a nationally-oriented literature, Greek women poets are well-placed to question, challenge and subvert established patterns of classical reception. Myth gives them the space to do so effectively and with great originality.
The module will not be restricted to modern Greek literature. Modern Greek texts will be placed in the broader context of world literature, alongside poems from the United States (Hilda Doolittle), Canada (Margaret Atwood), Germany (Rilke) and Poland (Zbignew Herbert), as we explore and discuss the ways in which these myths have gradually contributed to the shaping of a poetics of resistance to dominant, patriarchal and authoritative discourses. We shall explore how original reworkings of old stories not only provide new readings of the source texts but may also challenge the very genres in which these stories are told and female identities were first framed: epic, tragedy and lyric.
This module is open to non-Greek speakers as well as those with a reading knowledge of Greek. Translations of all the poems discussed will be provided, and all the films have English subtitles.
There will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module.

This module will examine a varied body of work in Italian film, literature and intellectual debate from the late 1950s to the present day. It is interested in analysing the on-going evolution of forms of social or political commitment within the cultural sphere, in a period of intense change in culture and society, and of increasing scepticism about the ideological models of the preceding anti-Fascist, neo-realist generations. Building on, but also challenging their neorealist predecessors, Italian writers, filmmakers and intellectuals in this period reconfigured the workings of political art in response to shifting national and international histories, from social changes in the family and society to the upheavals of terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s to the end of the Cold War and the 'mediocracy' of the fin de siècle to the emergence of a new, multicultural Italy. They also responded to changes in conceptions of history and memory, and the nature of aesthetic form, including gestures towards postmodernism (although the latter term has proved a highly problematic one in Italy). As a result, complex new relations between narrative, history, ideology, identity and representation emerged, including new uses for materials such as the document, the archive, spoken memory and recovered histories. The module will build a student-led programme based on shared interests. It typically focusses on key figures who worked towards new forms of cultural commitment in this period (Pasolini, Sciascia, Levi, Antonioni, Moretti, Passerini, Scego, Rohrwacher etc) as well as on key motifs or issues at stake within them (eg. relations between law and history, avant-garde and postmodernism, memory, oral history and orality, gender, race and exclusion, and forms such as documentary and narrative, pop genres, the historical film and novel).
There will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module. The module is open to students of both Film and Screen Studies and Literature, Culture and Thought. Students with no prior knowledge of Italian or studies in Italian culture may take the module, but they should contact the module convenor first.

This course explores the intersection of intellectual culture and poetic traditions in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Europe, with a specific focus on Italy. This period marks a pivotal moment in the development of Western culture, within which the rapid flourishing of Italian literature unfolded, culminating in the works of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). Through six seminars, we will investigate the institutional and intellectual landscape of the time, exploring how both university learning and extra-academic lay intellectual culture shaped Italian literary production. The Aristotelian ideal of a philosophical life as the full actualization of human reason profoundly influenced poets such as Dante and Guido Cavalcanti, while Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy
permeated late-medieval intellectual culture at all levels. A key focus will also be the knotty entanglement between academic discourse and poetic expression, examining how the language and forms of scholarly debate—such as the questio and logical argumentation—influenced literary production. Attention will be paid to the interplay between Latin and the vernacular, as well as the
role of vernacularisation in the development of extra–academic intellectual traditions. By contextualizing these themes within their social and literary frameworks, the course provides an in-depth understanding of the intricate relationship between intellectual life, language, and poetry in Dante’s world. Through texts like the Convivio , we will analyse Dante’s project of mediating
philosophical knowledge in the vernacular for a wider audience, whilst in his Paradiso we will assess how he frames his journey through the otherworld as a learning process reconfiguring academic discourse. This module will be of interest to students working on late Medieval culture in any language. A reading knowledge of Italian or Latin is desirable, but all texts will be available in English translation. Students with no prior knowledge of Italian or studies in Italian culture are encouraged to contact the module convenor before registering for the module.

Against the general ideological background regarding women’s nature and role in society, this module examines women’s contribution to the Italian cultural and literary tradition, starting from the unprecedented increase in published women writers in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a phenomenon which distinguishes Italy in relation to its European neighbours, where the number of women writers in the period was far smaller), until the post-unification period, that is, the decades following the political unification of 1861, when the discussion of available models for representing women was enriched by emerging new ideas on female authorship. Through an analysis of a range of texts—of different genres—by, for and about women, we will examine the manner in which women constructed gendered identities for themselves and their role in the literary world at different moments in time, as well as the various ways in which women are represented in male-authored works of the period.
While examining women’s contribution to the literary and intellectual world in the period under consideration, this module also offers fascinating insights into women’s lives, the constraints they had to face, the obstacles they managed to overcome, as well as the opportunities they succeeded in creating for themselves. It will be of interest not only to students specializing in Italian, but also, more broadly, to those working on gender issues and women’s history and wishing to explore comparative perspectives.
A good reading knowledge of Italian is desirable, although a number of the works now exist in translation and the convenor will consider requests from non-Italian-speakers.
There will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module.

It was the Russian Formalist critics who first argued for drawing a line between a work of art and its biographical creator – a theory that has since become central to western criticism. But they also laid the groundwork for analysing how artists could fashion their lives in artistic ways. This module takes those theoretical strands as the starting point for an investigation of selfhood and storytelling across 20th-century Russian and Polish literature, film, and literary criticism. Profiling a range of authors and their autobiographical, deceptively autobiographical, or first-person works, it examines how some sought to insulate life from art, while others creatively conflated those categories. At the same time, it puts both theories into practice by exploring the works as self-contained texts and products of their political, social and cultural contexts.
The module is open to students with a good knowledge of Russian or Polish.

This module centres on the cultural, historical, and political underpinnings of Spanish cinema from the 1939 to the present. Seminars will focus on a variety of themes, ranging from repression and censorship under the Francoist regime, political dissidence in cinematic discourse, the Spanish star system, the Transition from dictatorship to democracy, the death of Franco and la Movida madrileña, regional identities and Spanish nationalism(s), the recuperation of historical memory, Spanish national identity within the European Union, and issues related to immigration, the Movimiento 15-M, and (post-) crisis cinema. Teaching will take the form of open-discussion seminars for which students will be asked to present short response papers (2 pages). Please note that many of the films set for study in this module may not available with English subtitles and that some of the secondary readings will be conducted in Spanish. Alternative films may be suggested for students who do not speak Spanish.
There will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module.

In this course, we look at foundational issues surrounding identity, power, history and representation as they are addressed and reworked over time within key literary genres in Latin American writing. Each session takes two texts broadly pertaining to a single ‘genre’ (in 2026 these will be: the colonial chronicle, the slave (auto-)biography, the national romance, indigenismo in its written and visual articulation, the diary, and the urban chronicle), and focuses on the transhistorical dialogue established between them as they engage with significant moments in Latin American history (conquest, nation- and state-formation, abolition, revolution and urbanization). This pairing of contemporary and historical narratives – from the late twentieth century and from the colonial and Independence periods – invites multi-faceted reflection on the changing relationship between literature and history over time and aims to build up a systematic interrogation of the fetish of ‘the contemporary’ that determines much current literary inquiry.

This module offers students the opportunity to explore an exciting range of films and visual culture from Latin America that have addressed key political themes and reshaped our understanding of ‘political’ cinema. Taking us from the early films of the 1920s to contemporary productions, the module will examine questions of biopolitics, violence, neocolonialism, globalization, and gender and sexuality, and their (often very innovative) representation in fiction and documentary films.
Students are strongly encouraged to read a number of the following texts as advance preparation for the module in The Politics of Representation. The aim is to familiarize yourself with some of the key historical contexts, major movements and conceptual frameworks relating to film, photography, painting and other forms of art and visual culture in Latin America. The list is not prescriptive: students should choose 3-4 texts that they are able to access without too much difficulty.
This is a particularly popular module and there is a maximum capacity for this module of 10 students. It is shared with students taking the MPhil in Latin American Studies. Priority will be given to students who have degree-level Spanish or Portuguese and who are writing a dissertation in a directly related field, but even if these requirements are fulfilled, it does not guarantee a place in cases where the module is highly over-subscribed. Non-enrolled students will not be permitted to ‘audit’ (observe) sessions due to constraints on the module.

This module focuses on the medieval and early modern culture of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. The various seminars consider concepts such as myth, history and invention as capital ideas in the formation of literary and ideological identities. Myths such as the imagined community of Christian inhabitants of the Peninsula before the Arab Conquest and the downfall of Spain due to King Roderick’s sins are read against the backdrop of medieval historical sources and modern theoretical discussions. Myths elicited by Portugal’s fraught imperial history are discussed in connection to 16th-century shipwreck narratives, which both construct and undermine religious imperialistic discourses. Baroque culture gave these principles a final twist, producing condensed religious plays that, thanks to the use of contradictory allegories, merged Christianity and paganism in order to craft a vision of the world where political power is both essential and pointless: myths revert on themselves leaving traces of an empire that is dissolving, inevitably, with the passage of time. Faced with the signs of a crumbling empire at the end of the eighteenth century, the Spanish monarchy looked back at the conquest of the New World as a moment of great imperial power. The resurgence of the debates about the legitimacy of the possession of the Indies is analyzed in connection to the myth of an uncivilized pre-Columbian America and the opposing creole narratives that extolled the cultural complexity of native societies.
There will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module.
 

This module aims to analyse some of the most relevant aspects of this rich and controversial historical period. The Renaissance will be studied through an interdisciplinary approach, touching upon its main ideological and cultural points. This will offer students an ample opportunity to engage with one of the defining periods in modern history, while developing their academic interests, which may lead to doctoral research. The Renaissance is one of the most crucial periods in European cultural history. Europe saw at this time a revolution in communication: printing was invented, and the development of the printed book had a profound impact on knowledge, literature, religion, systems of belief, and social relations, including gender relations. The humanistic movement, which began in Italy during the 15th century, was based on a deep rediscovery of the classical heritage; and through this rediscovery a modern vision of the world was born. This led to a new understanding of language, literature, music, art, politics, religion, philosophy, medicine, law, or social manners. These ideas were soon to spread across Europe, defining the Renaissance as a moment of intense cultural exchange. There was a common project of reform among scholars of different nations. The Renaissance is also a paradoxical period: one of economic crisis, war and violence. National and religious identities were confronted and challenged, leading for example to the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. This interdisciplinary module enables you to investigate many dimensions of intellectual and literary culture and practice across Renaissance Europe, whether or not you have previously studied the period. 

You can specialize in the language(s) of your own choosing and also have the opportunity to handle early printed books and to be shown how they were made and what information they yield as artefacts. The libraries of Cambridge have exceptional holdings of early printed books. Sessions will be held by colleagues from different Departments. The language used will be English. However, it is strongly recommended that students have knowledge of at least one European language. There will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module.

This module will offer an exploration of the notion and category of ‘gender’ across the centuries (from the Medieval times to the present) and across different contexts, traditions, subjects, and disciplines. It allows students to explore the various meanings, understandings and implications of ‘gender,’ its uses in the construction of ‘identities’, its representation, across literature, history, art, cinema, and language, its indispensable function as a category of analysis.  The nature and scope of the module aims to offer students both the option of in-depth investigation into gender-related issues and topics, and to transcend linguistic, national, and chronological divisions to pose broader comparative questions. More specifically, the different sessions in this module chart how ideas about femininity and masculinity change over time, while identifying normative gender constructions and conflict around them and asking conceptual and methodological questions.  The sessions will present different research approaches which explore the history, role, and meaning of gender. They will be exemplary of ways of reading gender which students might want to apply to other historical periods or indeed other languages, while also being encouraged to develop their own, new approaches.  Students may also investigate the category of ‘gender’ from a linguistic point of view (e.g. language and gender), as well as the implications and workings of gender in terms of the history of the language, and the history of linguistics.  There will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module.

Whilst the Middle Ages were influenced by Greek philosophical traditions which regarded truth and science as an abstraction from matter, time, body and contingency, at the same time the central doctrine of Christianity, that of the Incarnation, suggested that truth has been fully manifested in one particular time, as one particular embodied person. Here, truth is as much a performative manifestation as a theoretical indication of the universal. It also consists in Christ’s deeds and gestures (for example, the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday) as much as in his words. Later Christian thought tended to resolve this tension in terms of a sharp distinction between natural and supernatural levels of understanding. But this was less true of earlier Christian thought which made no abrupt distinction between philosophy and theology, or between metaphysics and liturgical illumination. This MPhil module investigates the mutual interference between traditions of abstraction and embodiment in the High to Late Middle Ages. Seminars will focus on a selection of Latin, Italian and English primary sources that range between literary, devotional and philosophico-theological modes as a main focus, with associated readings. The first two seminars introduce the main research questions under consideration in the course as a whole. All texts are available in translation and while reading knowledge of Latin or Italian is recommended, it is not required. This module is shared with the Faculty Of Divinity and there will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module.

Seminars will focus on: Seminar One: Introduction to Gestures and Postures of Prayer in Medieval Europe (HW) Seminar Two: Truth and Event (Augustine) (CP) Seminar Three: Perception and Speculation (Anselm) (CP) Seminar Four: Truth and Being (Aquinas) (CP) Seminar Five: Gesture, Perception, and Revelation in Dante (HW) Seminar Six: Catherine of Siena: Performing the Passion; Performing Compassion (HW).

This module is the Faculty’s main route for route for students interested in any aspect of the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). Beyond its remit as a Lent Term module, it also helps students shape plans for Easter Term dissertations on nineteenth-century material and for subsequent PhD projects. The seminars will take a range of approaches to the question of writing at and about the margins of society and culture in the nineteenth century. Our key term, ‘marginalities’, will be examined through the prism of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and indeed of the intersections between categories. Topics for discussion will include processes of empowerment and disempowerment; the nineteenth-century fascination with ‘transgression’; questions of national community and belonging; and the insights which might be born of a position of marginality. Individual sessions will be introduced by members of different Sections, but will be organized thematically, with a view to opening up comparisons with corresponding material in other areas.  The reading list below is intended to give a taste of some of the directions in which this topic could be taken. But the leaders of each individual seminar will recommend material tailored to their particular area. English translations of foreign-language material will be used, but students will be encouraged to use original material in those languages they know. There is a rich research base in Cambridge on 19th century European culture, and we would normally expect to offer seminars based on material from France, Germany, Italy, Russia & Spain. A variety of theoretical approaches will be set out, often working at the junction of literary studies and cultural history. Students wishing to work on other areas should contact the convenor at an early stage to explore how their interests can be catered for in the module. There will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module.

Community is a key term in thinking about the Middle Ages in Europe and beyond. Characterised by multilingualism, intellectual endeavour, affective bonds, and artistic innovation, medieval communities were constantly forming and reforming; and this dynamism is both reflected in texts and artefacts and prompted by them. Medieval texts were often produced by and for specific communities (religious orders, courts, universities, or cities), and thereby reinforced the bonds of belonging and exchange that constituted those communities. Developments in knowledge, belief, or technology could bind a community together or lead to fractious disagreement, and art and literature could be ways to reinforce orthodoxy or to reimagine its strictures. Artefacts and texts also circulated between communities – those characterised by distinct linguistic or regional identities, for example – so that translation in all its forms (interlinguistic and intermedial as well as transnational) is central to the understanding of contact between communities throughout the Middle Ages. As medieval authors and scholars scrutinised the created world, they conceived of communities that reached beyond the human, creating contact with the divine and with the nonhuman animal world through imagination, investigation, and innovation. We will also attend to the ways in which literary texts and artefacts become nodes in transtemporal networks, as readers across the centuries find contact, challenge, and community in the medieval.

In these seminars, we aim to reflect the best aspects of medieval senses of community in our teaching practice. Several sessions will be co-taught, and the reading list will offer students a range of options with which they can engage to discuss the themes we propose. These themes will include:

· Hybrid communities

· The saint and the community

· Translation within and between communities

· Gender, reading, and community

· Communities of the more than human

· Affective, imagined, and transtemporal communities.

This modern comparative module relates directly to the research interests of a number of colleagues in the faculty. Drawing primarily on material in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and English, the module will explore changing representations and meanings of the city. Sessions will be organized in conjunction with students’ interests, and in the past these have drawn on examples of texts, visual arts or film, from the late eighteenth through to the twenty-first century across a wide range of cultures. While the module explores questions of reading and interpreting the city in literary texts, photography, and painting, particular attention will be paid to the city as represented in film, a medium with which it shares a particularly close relationship. The module aims to provide an introduction to key conceptualisations of the modern city by theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre and Saskia Sassen. It will be particularly concerned with the relationship between the modernist city and its postmodern counterpart, with attention to such questions as psycho-topographical explorations, technological mediations and informational networking. In the past, sessions have focused on a wide variety of specific cities, with such topics as: Berlin (walled city, open city); Rome (viewed through 'postcard films' such as La Dolce Vita); Madrid (city of desire, as mapped in the films of Almodóvar); and the 'haunted city' of Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras. Sessions might equally well be devoted to other European or non-European cities (with cities such as Los Angeles and Mexico City central in current debates about urban cultures). There will be potential too for a variety of thematic aspects of the city (such as ruins, slums, suburbs, exile and invisibility) and of generic treatments (such as film noir or city symphonies). Each session, apart from the first, will have student-led presentations of material that has been made available in advance to the whole group. The convenor will set theoretical texts for reading to complement the overall themes of each session, and there will be ample time for discussion of both the primary and theoretical material selected. The module is comparative in spirit and in practice, and essays written for it will need to compare material either from different language cultures or different media.

There is a maximum capacity of 12 students on this module, so if it proves to be particularly popular then some students may need to be allocated their second module preference.

This comparative seminar explores theoretical developments, debates, and discourses in post/decolonial studies through a focus on key concepts, critical terms, and ‘untranslatables’—including the words ‘postcolonial’ and ‘decolonial’ themselves. It combines ‘classic’ interventions, foundational in postcolonial studies, by authors such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, with influential recent writings by writers such as Saidiya Hartman and Françoise Vergès. Emphasis will be placed on African and Caribbean thought in French, but with attention paid to other linguistic and cultural traditions; the politics and poetics of translation and untranslatability; the relationship of decolonial theory to literary studies and aesthetics; decolonial ecologies; the Black Atlantic as a theoretical and cultural-historical paradigm; and debates around cultural heritage and restitution. All readings will be made available in English, but students are encouraged to read in the original wherever possible.

Session topics will include:

● Decolonization, decolonizing & decoloniality

● Blackness, négritude & créolité

● The ‘Black Atlantic’ and the ‘afterlife of slavery’

● Ecological thinking

● Return, repatriation, restitution, reparation

There will be significant opportunities for student presentations, in which a broader range of cognate topics will be explored.