Teaching Responsibility

LJMU Schools involved in Delivery:

Humanities and Social Science

Learning Methods

Lecture
Seminar

Module Offerings

6110MEDCUL-SEP-MTP

Aims

1. To offer students the opportunity to develop critical, analytical and evaluative skills appropriate to the textual study of screen and print media. 2. To locate the production and consumption of popular fiction within the context of economic and institutional imperatives. 3. To identify and critically evaluate narrative and storytelling patterns and their relationship with social and cultural conditions, with reference to given examples of screen and print media.

Learning Outcomes

1.
Critically evaluate the relationship between popular narrative media and the cultures within which they were produced and consumed.
2.
Critically review the contemporary publishing and retail environment for popular fiction.
3.
Offer a theoretically informed analysis of an example of popular fiction.

Module Content

Outline Syllabus:Approaches to analysing popular fiction; the reader experience; popular fiction, the city and social order; morality, power and conspiracy in popular fiction; gender and popular narrative; publishing, bestsellers and the experience commodity; young adult fiction; convergence and the entertainment industries; marketing popular fiction.
Module Overview:
This module poses the question: why is popular fiction popular, and how does it maintain that popularity across a range of narrative media, including books, films, TV, comics and even games?  This module offers you the opportunity to analyse storytelling across a variety of commercial narrative media forms.  We currently examine two case studies - the genres of detective fiction and the thriller and consider how they adapt to changing cultural climates from the 19th century to the present day. We also analyse the production and consumption of popular fiction within the context of creative, economic and institutional imperatives, to see how publishers, film companies, and other makers and distributors of media predict and fail to predict - what will be popular.  
Additional Information:This module draws on theoretical approaches developed for print fiction but students may choose examples for their assessed work from a variety of popular narrative media i.e.. film, television, digital media, young adult fiction.

Assessments

Essay
Report