Gwybodaeth Modiwlau

Taking the work and legacy of Raymond Williams as a starting and ending point, the course is designed to introduce Liberal Arts students to the importance of thinking critically about the relationship between culture, politics, and affect by interrogating questions of genre, theme, meaning and value.
The module is ‘framed’ by Williams because he is a critic of major stature who wrote and theorised about both traditional literary forms and about modern media such as television, as well as being of Welsh nationality and therefore having special relevance to the Wales-based, and media-based aspects of the content of this module.
Exposition will be grounded in the exploration of different art forms and the analysis of specific cultural practices, focusing in particular on place, landscape, literature, and language, with a significant emphasis on the representation of contemporary Wales.

The module aims are:
1. To continue to develop students’ practical and conceptual grasp of interdisciplinary thinking, methods, and materials.
2. To do so by foregrounding the approach of a ‘cultural synthesiser’ whose best-known formulations (such as ‘structure of feeling’ and redefinitions of Marxist notions of ‘determination’) work across the boundaries of traditional cultural forms.
3. To make use, across these boundaries, of running themes that link and explore notions of politics, regional/national identities (primarily Welsh and Scottish, as set out in B4), personal sensibilities and ‘cultures’ in the broad sense posited by Williams.

This module builds on first year work by introducing a number of new elements, including the performance-based perspective, the Wales-based focus of a substantial part of the content, the detailed study of television drama, and the overarching intellectual frame which is provided by the outlook of a single major cultural critic.
However, in common with the other core modules of the first two years, it is divided into three stages, but unlike the others these are framed by two sessions which focus on the thought of Raymond Williams. Unlike the first year cores, the sessions will be taught as a two-hour lecture-then-seminar/workshop composite, and a further difference is that the assessment is part coursework and part examination.

NB: The texts listed below may vary from year to year in order to accommodate staff sabbaticals and changes or to make use of productions which are current when the module is being taught. But Stage 1 will always feature a novel and a collection of poetry, with one or the other of these, or both, being Wales-focused, and Stage 3 will always centre on a current or recent TV drama series.

Week 1 Introductory Lecture & Seminar: ‘Raymond Williams & Structures of Feeling’

Stage 1: Weeks 2--4 English & CW (Fiction and Poetry)
Week 2 Raymond Williams, Border Country
Week 3 Kathleen Jamie, The Tree House
Week 4 Kathleen Jamie, ‘Surgeons’ Hall’

Stage 2: Weeks 5-7 TFTS (Performance)
Week 5 Performance Studies – concepts and practices
Week 6 Session based on a current Arts Centre production
Week 7 Session based on work by current teaching staff (e.g. Mike Pearson, Eddie Ladd or Simon Whitehead)

Stage 3: Weeks 8-10 TFTS (Film/TV)
Week 8 Session 1 on Hinterland/Y Gwyll S4C TV series
Week 9 Session 2 on Hinterland/Y Gwyll S4C TV series
Week 10 Concluding Lecture & Seminar: Keywords - Politics, Sensibility, Culture & affect