Comparative Literature and Culture with an Integrated Foundation Year

Our Integrated Foundation Year for Arts and Humanities will take you through a carefully-designed programme to help you to progress confidently onto your undergraduate degree.

Arts and Humanities subjects, like Comparative Literature and Culture,  provide key ways of understanding our complex world, its histories, and current debates facing contemporary society. Identity, political and social conflict, our interaction with new digital and genetic technologies, our stewardship of the environment are all issues where the voice of creative and critical thinking are key. Literary texts, films, plays and digital games offer important ways in which societies have debated - and continue to represent - their values and their futures.

The Foundation Year provides progressive structures in which you are able to gain knowledge and understanding of approaches to humanities study and your chosen degree subject.  All Foundation Year students take ‘Global Perspectives’, then four subject-based courses provide approaches to the study of arts and humanities subjects, giving you critical skills to explore a range of literary, visual, and cultural forms, including plays, films, and digital media.

Once you have completed your Foundation year, you progress onto the full degree programme, BA Comparative Literature and Culture.

Comparative Literature and Culture offers you the opportunity to study literature from across the world, as well as exploring film, philosophy and visual arts. This course combines a fascinating breadth of material with a focus on contexts – places, periods, and genres – to explore how key cultural shifts transform how we see, represent, and make sense of our changing world. Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway is a unique and intellectually stimulating course that will develop you as a culturally-aware, creative and adaptable thinker.

We’ve developed this course so that you can tailor it to suit your own evolving interests, enabling you to choose from our exceptionally wide range of fascinating options. These span continents and centuries, from antiquity to the present day, covering novels, poetry, philosophy, cinema and art. You will read, watch, and compare texts from Ancient Greece to contemporary New York, from Cuba to Korea, from epics to crime fiction, and from tragedy to the avant-garde. Comparative Literature and Culture also enables you to study a variety of foreign texts originally written in many languages, all translated into English.

You will be taught by world-class experts who genuinely want to get to know you. We create a supportive environment, often using group work so you can try out new ideas and participate in lively discussions. Throughout your studies, you will receive personal guidance to ensure your course is aligned with your strengths, interests and career plans. As part of our close-knit international community, you will be able to get involved with an array of cultural initiatives that take place on campus and make the most of being within easy reach of London and its many events and attractions.

Studying Comparative Literature and Culture will broaden your horizons, interests and passions, and give you a critical edge in a competitive global marketplace.

Course Modules

Term 1:

• Global perspectives and academic practice 1

• Cultures of reading

• Cultures of looking

• Global perspectives and academic practice 2

• Objects and rituals

• Digital Cultures

• Research Project and Reflection

Year 1

• Reading Texts: Criticism for Comparative Literature

• Tales of the City: Introduction to Thematic Analysis

Year 2

• Histories of Representation

• Critical Worlds: Theory for Comparative Literature and Culture

• International Film 2: Readings and Representations

• A Special Theme in the Novel: Transgressions

• Visual Arts II: Genre and Movements

• Gender and Clothing in 20th-Century Literature and Culture

• Deviance, Defiance and Disorder in Early Modern Spanish and French Literature

Year 3

• From Aestheticism to the Avant-Garde

• The Gothic Mode in Spanish and English Fiction

• Transnationalism, Diaspora and Globalisation in Contemporary Film

• Humans and Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction and Thought

Optional Modules

Below is a taster of some of the exciting optional modules that students on the course could choose from during this academic year. Please be aware these do change over time, and optional modules may be withdrawn or new ones added.

Year 1

• Key French Texts: The Individual and Society

• French History Through Film

• The Visual Image in French Culture and Society

• Introduction to German Studies

• German History and Culture

• Fascist Italy

• Passion and Betrayal on the Spanish Stage

• Journeys of Identity Discovery, Subversion and Destruction in the Hispanic Worlds

• Comparative Hispanic Culture

• International Film 1: Contexts and Practices

• The Birth of Film

• Visual Arts 1: Artists and their Materials

• Intensive French for Beginners

• Pratique du Français I

• French Language: Culture and Translation

• Intensive Beginners’ German I

• German Language I

• German Language: Culture and Translation

• Intensive Italian for Beginners

• Advanced Italian I

• Italian Language: Culture and Translation

• Intensive Spanish I

• Spanish 1

• Spanish Language: Culture and Translation

Year 2

• Writing Romance and Desire

• Cinema in France

• Death, Desire, Decline: Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka

• Love and Marriage in Major Novels by Theodor Fontane

• Representations of Childhood and Youth in Modern German Culture

• Postwar Italian Cinema: the Auteur Tradition

• Art and Literature in Renaissance Florence

• Italian Crime Fiction

• Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spanish Film

• 20th-Century Mexican Visual Arts and Film

• Rebels, Revolution & Representation in Latin America

• Intensive French for Beginners II

• French Language II

• Advanced French Translation: Skills and Practice

• Intensive Beginners’ German II

• German Language II

• Advanced German Translation: Skills and Practice

• Advanced Italian II for Post Beginners

• Italian Language II

• Advanced Italian Translation: Skills and Practice

• Intensive Spanish II

• Spanish Language II

• Advanced Spanish Translation: Skills and Practice

Year 3

• Research-based Dissertation

• Visual Arts Dissertation

• Image, Identity and Consumer Culture in Post-war Fiction and Film

• Text and Image in France: from Cubism to the Present

• Ethics and Violence: Murder, Suicide and Genocide in Literature and Film

• Villains and Villainy in Early Modern French Theatre

• Narrative and Identity: The German Novel from the 18th to the 21st Century

• Dark Tales: E.T.A. Hoffmann and German Romanticism

• National Socialism and the Third Reich in German Film and Visual Culture from 1933 to the Present

• Dante: Divine Comedy 2

• Shooting History: Dictatorship, Terror and Crime in Italian Film

• The Postmodern in Italian Literature: Pioneers, Practitioners and Critics

• Contemporary Mexican Cinema

• Deceit, Desire and the Self: Literature of the Spanish Golden Age

• Horror Cinema in the Hispanic World

https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/studying-here/undergraduate/languages-literatures-and-cultures/comparative-literature-and-culture-with-integrated-foundation-year/

In your Foundation Year, teaching methods include a mixture of lectures, seminars, workshops, individual tutorials, and supervisory sessions. Outside of the classroom you’ll undertake guided independent reading and study. You will also be assigned a Personal Tutor, who’ll be with you for the duration of your degree, and will have regular scheduled sessions to support learning and the development of study skills. Assessments are varied; quizzes, short written exercises, essays, examinations, poster preparation and presentation, blog/vlogs, short digital films, dissertations and personal development plans. In addition the Foundation Year offers a full range of skills-based training and also the opportunity to take a micro-placement to enhance your employability.

Once you progress onto your full degree course, you’ll continue to be taught through a combination of lectures and small seminar groups, where you will be able to try out new ideas by giving presentations and participating in lively discussions in a supportive environment. Private study and preparation remain essential parts of every course, and you will have access to many online resources and the university’s comprehensive e-learning facility, Moodle, which provides a variety of supporting materials.

We use a range of assessment models to suit different learning styles, from online comprehension tests and individual and group presentations, to coursework and examinations. You will take a study skills course during your first year, designed to equip you with and enhance the writing skills you will need to be successful in your degree. This course does not count towards your final degree award but you are required to pass it to progress to your second year. In your final year you will have the opportunity to write a research-led dissertation.