2024/25 Undergraduate Module Catalogue
ARTF2210 Absence, Representation, Violence
20 creditsClass Size: 18
Module manager: Brenda Hollweg
Email: b.hollweg@leeds.ac.uk
Taught: Semester 1 (Sep to Jan) View Timetable
Year running 2024/25
This module is not approved as a discovery module
Module summary
This module explores the significance of absences within cultural texts. By analysing how various scholars have explored the hauntings, opacities, and other absences in cultural texts, you will critically reflect on the links between representation and violence. The module will also encourage you to engage in a close reading of several cultural texts, including some of your own choosing, allowing you to generate surprising, imaginative insights into what absences can reveal.Objectives
1. This module aims to introduce students to closely reading for absences as a methodology within cultural studies, drawing upon the scholarship of a diverse range of scholars across different disciplines. As opposed to only analysing what people, objects, and ideas often fail to be represented or are underrepresented within the cultural texts we consume (film, television, photography, performance art, and so on), the focus is on exploring how cultural texts themselves can invoke hauntings, opacities, gaps, omissions, silences, obscurities, ephemera, and unanswerable questions—a ‘presence of absence’ only visible if closely read for.2. Through analysing the presence of absence within a range of cultural texts, students will critically reflect on how violence, power, and hegemony shape what is representable and what is relegated to the margins of visibility. However, rather than assuming that absences must be filled with more transparent knowledge about specific people, objects, or ideas, the module encourages a reflexive engagement on the processes of knowledge production itself.
3. By engaging with how a range of scholars have grappled with absences, students will develop a more nuanced understanding of several key themes in cultural studies, potentially including the gaze, desire, the archive, and opacity. Students will also gain skills in close reading through their engagement with a number of cultural texts, some of which they can choose themselves, allowing them to explore what can be learnt if one reads for absences as opposed to relying on the blatantly visible.
Learning outcomes
On successful completion of the module students you will be able to:
1. Evaluate how a number of scholars have engaged with absences in cultural texts.
2. Analyse how cultural texts contain various absences.
3. Engage with theories on absences to support the study of representation and violence.
4. Evaluate how absences relate to the power dynamics involved in knowledge production.
Skills learning outcomes
On successful completion of the module you will be able to:
5. Write in a clear, concise, focused and structured manner that is supported by relevant evidence.
6. Generate ideas, demonstrate originality and imaginative thinking, including the concept of ‘thinking outside the box’.
Syllabus
Details of the syllabus will be provided on the Minerva organisation (or equivalent) for the module
Teaching methods
| Delivery type | Number | Length hours | Student hours |
| Lectures | 10 | 2.00 | 20.00 |
| Seminars | 2 | 4.00 | 8.00 |
| Independent online learning hours | 2.00 | ||
| Private study hours | 170.00 | ||
| Total Contact hours | 28.00 | ||
| Total hours (100hr per 10 credits) | 200.00 | ||
Opportunities for Formative Feedback
Students will receive formative feedback on their understanding of the during the ten lectures, allowing for their progress to be monitored too. Students will also receive feedback on the first assignment in time for them to apply this to the second assignment. There will also be a progress check in the middle of the module too, allowing for students to voice how they are finding the module thus far.Methods of assessment
Coursework
| Assessment type | Notes | % of formal assessment |
| Assignment | Coursework 2,000-word textual analysis | 30.00 |
| Assignment | 3,000-word essay | 70.00 |
| Total percentage (Assessment Coursework) | 100.00 | |
Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated
Reading list
The reading list is available from the Library websiteLast updated: 29/08/2024
Browse Other Catalogues
- Undergraduate module catalogue
- Taught Postgraduate module catalogue
- Undergraduate programme catalogue
- Taught Postgraduate programme catalogue
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