Modern Language Studies BA Hons

This module will provide an introduction to the range of topics and study skills you will need and further develop in the course of your study of French and Francophone studies.

It will cover the main fields of the discipline, including linguistics, politics, history, thought, French and Francophone literature, media, visual culture and cinema. These topics will be covered in four thematic units over the course of the year and the material studied ranges from different types of texts to images and film.

Dedicated research skills sessions will address core study skills, such as reading skills, awareness of register, close reading, essay writing, commentary writing, bibliographical and referencing skills and visual analysis. 

This module will provide an introduction to the study of German. It will cover the main fields of German studies (literature, culture, history, linguistics, media) as well as the study skills required for academic study (critical and analytic skills, reading skills, presentation skills, writing skills).

This module is designed as a foundation for all later modules covering Spanish and Portuguese literatures.

Its main aims are to:

• give students a general introduction to literature and to the study of literature
• provide students with a partial overview of literary writing in the Spanish language
• introduce students to some of the key theoretical issues of literary study
• inculcate good reading and critical habits.

The main skills tested on this module are:

• close reading
• textual analysis
• seminar participation
• the ability to write cogent and convincing commentaries and essays.

This module uses the study of cinema, writing, and popular culture – music, sport, and TV – to provide students with a knowledge of modern cultural currents in Brazil, Portugal and Portuguese-speaking Asia and Africa.

It also aims to build an awareness of the main social and political contexts in which these cultures emerged, and an understanding of the complexities and challenges they face.

Students will develop skills in critical and comparative analysis, research methods, presentation and essay writing.

This module  focuses on the interplay between language and politics in 21st-century French. It addresses issues of ideology, identity, and power in French-speaking countries from a linguistic perspective. Students examine the driving forces behind the invention and the preservation of standard French, the role of norms and variation in identity politics, and the role of language choices in current political debates in France. Students apply the principles and methods of sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics to a variety of recent textual and audiovisual documents, and digital data (TV programmes, news broadcasts, interviews, radio podcasts, corpora based on social media and online newspapers).

This module explores a cultural period in the Hispanic world characterised by profound social change and the emergence of major world-figures of modern art (e.g. Pablo Picasso). It is structured around key literary and artistic movements from Spain and Spanish America from the early nineteenth century to the late 20th century, such as Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism, the Avant-garde, and Modernism. The module focuses on reading literary and visual texts of the period in relation to the socio-economic and political context of Spain’s and Spanish America’s rapid, but hugely uneven, modernisation. Individual novels, plays, films, paintings or poems are used to exemplify and explore particular movements and historical moments. The module offers students skills in close analysis of complex texts, an understanding of some of the major directions of Spain and Spanish American literature in the twentieth century, and the ability to relate texts studied to historico-cultural contexts.

This module provides an introduction to three major figures in modern French poetry (Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Apollinaire), and to the major formal developments in poetry in the period 1850-1914, including the prose poem and free verse. Students will learn to analyse, interpret and write commentaries on poetry, and individual poems will be considered in relation to broad themes such as the representations of self, and notions of modernism. 

This module will introduce students to the history of the Germanic languages, from the earliest linguistic evidence up to the present day. We will investigate the major sound changes that distinguish Dutch, German and other Germanic languages like English from the rest of the Indo-European language family, which includes French, Greek, and many other European languages, as well as Sanskrit. You'll look at the process by which Dutch and German went their separate ways , ultimately emerging as two standardised languages in the 17th century. You'll spend two hours per week in lectures and seminars.

In this module you will acquire an in-depth understanding of developments in Russian society and culture as reflected in popular and influential films from the period 1900 to 2010. You’ll examine how films are constructed technically and develop skills in analysing cinema in its historical and social contexts. You’ll spend two hours per week in lectures and seminars.

The relationship between the state and the intellectual in Russia has traditionally been a problematic one, marked by repression, persecution, forced and voluntary exile and censorship. Political concern and resistance to an authoritarian state are central themes in the Russian cultural and literary tradition as well as a defining feature in the lives and works of numerous Russian writers and intellectuals.

We will explore the cultural tradition and identity of the literary intelligentsia in Russian and Soviet history. We'll also examine different responses to the experience of state persecution in the work of writers and artists.

Covering an extensive period of Russian history we will look at examples of writers and artists who have defied the state.

Wider questions which will be discussed include the role of the artist and the intellectual in Russian culture, the myth of the persecuted writer and the complex relationship between the intellectual and the masses.

You’ll examine major literary movements in Serbia and Croatia during the 20th century, from Modernism to the socially engaged literature of the 1930s, Socialist Realism, literary politics under the Communists in Yugoslavia and the emergence of critical literature in the 1980s and 1990s. You’ll also undertake a textual analysis of representative works from 20th century literature; for example, works by Milos Crnjanski, Ivo Andrić, Miroslav Krleža, Danilo Kiš and Slobodan Selenić. You’ll spend around two hours per week studying in lectures and seminars. 

This module will examine the development of cinema during the silent era, from its invention in the 1890s through to the early 1930s, in France, Germany and the Russian Empire/Soviet Union. Because silent cinema was easy to translate and export from one country to another, it was highly transnational, and the module will enable students to see how filmmakers in different countries entered into dialogue with one another. Students will be able to compare and contrast the themes and preoccupations of films produced in these countries, and consider how these reflected distinct political and cultural agendas.

The first part of the module will introduce students to the history of early film, primarily as it developed in France, looking at short actualité films produced by the Lumière brothers and others. It will consider the practices of display of ‘silent’ film (looking especially at how it was accompanied by music, speech and sound effects), and look at its appeal to popular audiences as well as its broader critical reception. We will then go on to consider a range of films made during the silent era, which represent two main tendencies: (a) a tendency towards realism and the examination of everyday life; and (b) a tendency towards fantasy and the creation of spectacular new realities. Students will be introduced to the fundamentals of film language and will be encouraged to engage in close analysis of short extracts from the films.

 

Films will include (but will not be limited to):

• Georges Méliès, Voyage to the Moon (1902)
• Louis Feuillade, Fantômas serial (1913)
• Paul Wegener, The Golem (1920)

The module aims to explore the ways in which French social theory and fiction have thought through the changing nature of the individual and the self in society. In order to explore these shifts in subjectivity and selfhood in relation to wider societal transformations the module focuses primarily on the world of work as a defining mode of social organisation. The first half of the module will be devoted to a brief survey of some of the main themes in recent sociological literature on work and subjectivity. The second half of the module will look at these ideas in the context of some notable recent fictional explorations of the subjective dimensions of work, including Laurent Cantet’s film L’emploi du temps and Thierry Beinstingel’s novel Retour aux mots sauvages.

This module will consider a series of avant-garde movements in France, from the late 19th century through to the middle of the 20th century. Students will look at each of these movements through a range of texts (including manifestos, theoretical tracts, art criticism, poetry, plays and novels), as well as through film and the visual arts. The module will thus encourage a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. The first part of the module will consider the Symbolist movement that emerged in the 1880s, touching on the Nabi painters, free verse poetry and Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu roi. We will then consider Cubism and Futurism in the years running up to the First World War, focusing on the poetry and art criticism of Guillaume Apollinaire. In the second semester, we will look at Dada and Surrealism, including André Breton’s Nadja and various short films. In the final part of the module we will consider the impact of the Second World War on avant-garde cultural production, focusing on a novel by Georges Perec and a film by Chris Marker. Throughout the module, students will be asked to reflect critically on theories of modernism and avant-gardism, and to grasp a range of critical concepts used in the analysis of avant-garde works. We will also be relating avant-garde movements to their broader historical and cultural contexts, and querying in particular whether the avant-garde is always political – and if so, whether it is always associated with a progressive politics.

This module focuses on the theory and practice of two modes of audio-visual translation: subtitling and dubbing.

The linguistic, technical, and cultural theoretical underpinnings of subtitling and dubbing from French into English will be examined in detail, and students will be able to put the theory into practice using professional dedicated software.

This optional module offers in-depth discussion of grammatical, lexical and idiomatic aspects of German and English as well as issues of translation, register and cultural difference. Regular practical work on translation from and into German in small groups of native speakers of both target languages will not only instigate an intellectual discussion of linguistic and translation issues but will also offer an opportunity to explore each language from at least two cultural perspectives. Nottingham students will work with exchange students from Germany and/or Austria in this module.

This module is concerned with the emergence, nature and evolution of the Cuban Revolution. You will consider the Revolution in question within a wider historical and ideological context: the Latin American tradition of an increasingly radical nationalism. Dating from the 19th and early 20th century this is a time when there was a need to engage in serious and collective nation-building. The module therefore examines how the Cuban Revolution went on to influence the subsequent radicalisation of that tradition, shaping a range of political manifestation. For this module you will have one two-hour seminar each week.

In this module students learn to devise and develop projects and teaching methods appropriate to engage the age and ability group they are working with. The module enables students to gain confidence in communicating their subject, develop strong organisational and interpersonal skills, and to understand how to address the needs of individuals.

The Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was one of the most fascinating and culturally productive periods of German history, but it was equally ridden by crises and violent conflicts. This module aims to introduce central issues in the literary and social developments of Weimar Germany. You will study a wide range of materials (literary texts, film, aesthetic and political programmes) to analyse key features of the period. Topics will include the impact of the Great War, developments in the press and the cinema, political confrontations, cabaret, and unemployment. 

The aims of this linguistics module are twofold: 1. we will investigate the nature of language use in various social media e.g. Facebook, Twitter, chat rooms, email, texts; 2. we will experiment with using social media as a means of gathering reliable quantifiable data on actual everyday language use. We will also focus on the challenges that the analysis of the language used in social media presents to linguistic theory. Several aspects of linguistics will be investigated, including pragmatics, morphology and syntax, sociolinguistics, borrowing, and language change. You will conduct original research, using social media as a source of linguistic data.

The traumatic experience of the Second World War left a deep impression on Russian and Soviet society and culture. Even before it ended, the War was already in the process of being commemorated in such dramatic artistic works as Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, which was performed during the Siege of Leningrad. Compelling stories, myths and legends of a people’s suffering and heroism emerged in artistic representations, official accounts and in personal testimonies.

This module explores the construction of national and collective memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Russian culture and society, focusing on artistic and social responses to the experience of war, as well as examining individual acts of remembering (diaries, reports, letters). The module addresses wider questions relating to the very nature of memory, rituals, and identity formation in twentieth-century Russian and Soviet culture.

This module introduces different films produced during and after the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the ways that these films interacted with their social, political and historical contexts.

Themes for study include memory politics, depictions of social inequalities, cults of personality, and theories of nation building/breaking on film, amongst others