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MAFilm and Literature

University of Essex
United Kingdom, Colchester
Tuition fee To be confirmed
More information

essex.ac.uk/..tercourse=PG00576&subgroup=1 

Overview

Explore the relationship between literature and film in an exceptionally broad array of contemporary and historical contexts, and from a variety of different perspectives. You discover cutting-edge approaches to cinematic and literary aesthetics, adaptation, and relationships between different media, reception contexts, ethics, and interfaces between theory and practice.

On our course you gain a deep understanding of the theoretical and practical interactions between literature and film, choosing specific areas of literary and cinema studies to complement your preparation for a creative practice or theoretical dissertation project of your choice. You will forge and develop connections between audio-visual and textual media. Focusing a variety of cultural productions and diverse forms of enlightenment, and entertainment, you will encounter parallel and sometimes more densely intertwined media histories, discovering the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with, and draw on one other.

Through weekly seminars, screenings and discussions of key cinematic and literary texts, you consider different ways that texts create their meanings. You study topics including:

- Areas such as modernism, poetic practice, American prose, Caribbean literature, and African American literature
- Documentary and fiction film production including screenwriting, pre-production, camera, lighting, sound, storyboarding and editing
- Landmark directors and movements such as Expressionism and the avant-garde
- Film theory including feminism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, haptic cinema
- Adaptation and comparative media

You also benefit from a series of masterclasses conducted by invited industry professionals which focus on the craft of filmmaking: developing your technical understanding of cinematography, directing and editing/postproduction.

These also introduce you to potential employment routes and industry career pathways, from setting up your own production company, to identifying and tapping into distribution networks and preparing and marketing your completed films.

We are ranked Top 20 in the UK (Times Good University Guide 2015), and three-quarters of our research is rated ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’ (REF 2014).

Programme structure

Year 1

Dissertation
Research Methods in Literary and Cultural Analysis
Critical Moments in the Theory and History of Film
The New Nature Writing (optional)
Writing the Novel (optional)
Memory Maps: Practices in Psychogeography (optional)
Dramatic Structure (optional)
Adaptation (optional)
Documentary and the Avant-garde: Film, Video, Digital (optional)
Film and Video Production Workshop (optional)
US Nationalism and Regionalism (optional)
African American Literature (optional)
Writing Magic (optional)
“There is a Continent Outside My Window” : United States and Caribbean Literatures in Dialogue (optional)
Literature and the Environmental Imagination: 19th to 21st Century Poetry and Prose (optional)

Career opportunities

A number of our Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies graduates have gone on to undertake successful careers as scholars, university lecturers, teachers, publishers, journalists, arts administrators, theatre artistic directors, drama advisers, filmmakers, film editors, and translators.

Apply now! Fall semester 2021/22
Application period has ended
Notes
Suspended for 2020 entry

Application deadlines apply to citizens of: United States

Apply now! Fall semester 2021/22
Application period has ended
Notes
Suspended for 2020 entry

Application deadlines apply to citizens of: United States