Connecting the Arts

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: Dr Luisa Calè
  
• Assessment: a 1500-word essay title, outline and bibliography (35%) and 3000-word essay (65%)

In this module we introduce you to key questions in the arts, focusing in particular on borders, divisions and convergences (literature, painting, film, etc).

Beginning with G. E. Lessing’s theorisation of the arts as spatial and temporal, the module is divided into four blocks:

• The verbal
• The visual
• Space
• Time

These test the divisions and convergences of the arts at particular moments in history (medieval, early modern, contemporary) and in particular media cultures (oral, print, digital). They will give you a thorough grounding in the ways the arts have been practised, perceived and theorised.

Taught by multiple specialists, this module is also an opportunity to try out different disciplines and cultural forms, helping you make informed and coherent module choices in your degree. The assessment is designed to help you develop your ability to concentrate on close analysis and critical practice in a specific art form, and to make comparisons and conceptualise the relationship between the arts.

Indicative syllabus

• Boundaries between the arts?
• The poetics of space
• The visual in contemporary art
• Space, representation and power
• The document as form
• From orality to literacy
• Print and digital revolutions
• Beyond the text: performative speech in theatre and performance studies
• Remembering, repeating and working through trauma in the time-based forms and processes of film and video
• Queer (in) history

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• understand the various forms and genres of texts in the arts and the different techniques and processes they employ as well as those employed to understand them, perceive them and archive them
• analyse and discuss the borders and divisions of the arts according to media and institutional cultures and practices
• identify and analyse how concepts and systems have articulated the divisions and convergences between the arts
• theorise and historicise time and space as categories for defining and perceiving the arts
• understand and reconstruct the circulation and modes of transmission of media in particular moments in history
• identify and make informed discriminations and connections between different disciplinary approaches and content
• analyse and articulate the relationship of artefacts to historical (re)construction
• integrate experience in the arts gained at Level 4
• gain enhanced self-directed learning strategies, including the ability to identify a critical field and formulate your own research question.