These lectures are designed for post 16 students and will last 1 hour. Where applicable, each session has been aligned with content delivered on the A Level syllabus but is designed to give students an idea of how the subject would be taught at the university level.
Typical lecture content could include:
1. AO3 Lecture: A Streetcar Named Desire.
This is a single session designed to help students recognise, illustrate, and evaluate the influence of key contextual factors upon Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Specifically, it will offer readings of the play in relation to Williams’ family life and personal relationships, post-war American culture and the decline of the South, the Cold War and cultural conformity, and the new theatrical radicalism of the 1940s.
2. Guidance for Non-Examination Assessment: Selection, Connection and Research.
This session is designed to help students with the key requirements of the AQA or Edexcel non-examination essays. It will include guidance upon the selection of suitable literary texts and thematic connections, advice on how to frame and refine a question or thesis, and most importantly, how to locate secondary research materials, and successfully employ critical resources within a comparative essay.
3. ‘Is there ever such a thing as a new story?’
The session will explore the origins and development of some of humanity’s most loved myths and legends; where have they come from and where are they going? Using well known examples from popular culture, students are encouraged to discuss how stories continue to be retold and reinterpreted.
4. ‘To Tweet, or not to Tweet? Shakespeare’s plays as Elizabethan social media.
When speaking about social networks today we immediately think of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Yet the concept of social networks came long before the invention of the Internet; the ‘Great Bard’ himself was a pioneer of literature as a form of social networking. Not only did the ‘new media’ of print in sixteenth-century England enable theatres to draw together more diverse communities than ever before, we also find different metaphors for social media in Shakespeare’s plays. In this live, participative workshop, students are invited to consider Shakespeare as a forerunner of Elizabethan social networking before engaging in tutor led interactive exercises. There will also be an opportunity for Q&A.
5. Death and the Victorians: The Age of a Beautiful Death.
This single session investigates Victorian literature through the lens of Victorian culture to discover how this age developed a fascination with death that for those who could afford turn it into a cult. It studies how the Victorians mourned and remembered the death through complex and rigid mourning practices and etiquette, and objects such as funerary and commemorative jewels, photographs of the dead, elaborate headstones, and tombs in municipal cemeteries. This session will illustrate each aspect of this contextual session with textual reference and encourage the students to see literature from a multitude of lenses.
6. Love and the Victorians.
How was love conceptualised in Victorian literature? How did Victorian writers capture love? And what is their legacy to our understanding of the language of love today? This single session questions assumptions that are still often made when love is conveyed in literary form by exploring how the culture contexts of the nineteenth century reveal the socio-cultural inequalities of Victorian society. We will examine how their writing charmed Victorian audiences or shocked them and demonstrate how contexts connects us to the Victorian literature.
7. Transnational Victorians.
This single session aims to reassess the Victorians through a transnational perspective. Through literature of the nineteenth century, we will look at Victorian society in movement across the globe and how, crossing borders, they create new identities in need of representations. What did it mean to be transnational in the Victorian age? This session will illustrate each aspect of this contextual session with textual reference and encourage students to appreciate the value literature from a multitude of lenses.
8. Haunting Gothic: Danger and Desire in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938).
.This single session focuses on Daphne Du Maurier’s seminal gothic novel and its film adaptations to study the contribution of women’s writing to the Gothic, a genre that remains a popular with persistent influence in our culture. We will study how, making use of fairy tale devices, this novel disrupts assumptions about gender, heteronormativity, and the domestic. Manderley, like Rebecca, haunts this story and its women turning their marital home into the most dangerous place. We will discuss how haunting, belonging, and doubles are central to this gothic tale, whose narrator is unnamed. Contextualising Rebecca through the female Gothic and gender studies, this session demonstrate how literature reflects those concerns, debates, and campaigning that remains relevant today.
9. How to Write a Successful Essay.
This interactive session includes top tips from a university lecturer on improving your essay writing. We will cover a range of essay skills, including structure, embedding quotations, and writing style, to discover what works when writing assignments. The session will be relevant to students studying GCSE and A-Level English, as well as those interested in writing essays at university in the future.
10. The Great Stink: Smelly Sewage and Deadly Disease in Victorian Literature.
In this contextual session we will learn about the Great Stink of 1858, when there was an outcry about the rancid smell of the Thames over a particularly hot summer. We will look at writers from Charles Dickens to Florence Nightingale to understand the range of genres that raised awareness of this foul smell and its health effects. This session is designed to support students and teachers with the AS/A-Level Assessment Objective 3 (AOS3), on showing understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were written.
How to book: Please contact outreach@bishopg.ac.uk if you would like to book a session.