BA English Literature and History

• Find out more from student finance
• Eligible UK students can apply for bursaries and scholarships
• Funding for EU and international students is on our country-specific pages
• Many students work part-time or complete a student internship

The unit aims to:

• To locate the work of Tilda Swinton over the last 40 years within changing cultural, historical and political contexts

• To enable students to read Swinton’s work through the lens of feminist and queer theorists, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Mary Ann Doane and Richard Dyer.  

• To evaluate the shifting boundaries between experimental forms and popular culture via the ways in which Swinton’s worked has crossed between them.

• To encourage and enable students to engage with creative audio-visual practices, as a method of exploring the connections between cultural theories and forms.

• To provide opportunities for students to imagine, view, model connections between critical thinking, socially and political engagement and creative practices. 

The critical and creative outputs will enable students to enhance and demonstrate the following (employable) skills:

creative thinking;  

close reading of cultural texts;

writing for different audiences;  

critical evaluation and assessment;  

presentational skills, including audio-visual material;  

understanding of feminist and queer theories;  

familiarity with, and ability to use competing frameworks to read different cultural forms: film, live performance and arts activism;

time-management;

collaboration;

ability to appreciate and understand key concepts in critical practice, including: affect, whiteness, queering genre, the masquerade. 

WEEKLY:  

1-hour lecture

2-hour seminar/ workshop

Materials will all be on Blackboard/ e-library week-by-week, including essential and recommended reading, weblinks, viewings where available.  
 

 Demonstrate a critical understanding of Tilda Swinton’s works across a range of genres (film, video, live performance, arts activism)

Show familiarity with and confidence using a range of theory appropriate to the subject of intertextual transmission, appropriation and adaptation

Show critical understanding of contemporary feminist and queer re-visioning of conventional forms.

Show nuanced understanding of how political and ideological regimes construct conventional figurations of gender, sexuality and whiteness 

Demonstrate critical and creative understanding of the cultural placing of the work of Tilda Swinton from 1980-2025, including her collaborations with other key independent artists and filmmakers, such as Derek Jarman and Pedro Almadovar.  

Write and speak for appropriate and different audiences

Demonstrate an ability to understand how texts and their reception change through time

Synthesise theoretical material and apply to new readings of texts 

Plan and complete independent research work on chosen topic

Produce high-quality written outputs appropriate to genre and audience

Use ‘workshopping’ of ideas in a collaborative way in class

Develop ‘creative’ outputs relating to critical material 

Ability to use writing and thinking skills in ‘real world’ scenarios

Produce writing to specific audiences and to specific deadlines

Research historical and contextual material and synthesise for contemporary audience

• oral feedback on individual presentations
• written feedback on research presentation
• written feedback on extended essay
• additional one-to-one feedback (during the consultation hour or by making an appointment)

West, Dennis, and Joan M. West, 'Achieving a State of Limitlessness: An Interview with Tilda  

Swinton', Cineaste, 20, (1993), 18-21

Swinton, Tilda, 'Film: State of Cinema Address: 49th San Francisco International

Film Festival, 29 April 2006', Critical Quarterly, 48 (2006), 110-20

Brabazon, Tara, 'Reading Tilda: A Swinton Guide through Bodily Textualisation',

        Social Semiotics, 4:1-2 (1994), 9-30

Swinton, Tilda, ‘Interview with Actress Tilda Swinton: ‘I am probably a woman’,’ Interview by

Vera von Kreutzbruck, The Wip, March 20, 2009 http://thewip.net/2009/03/20/interview-with-actress-tilda-swinton-i-am-probably-a-woman/

Wood, Jason, ‘Tilda Swinton’, in Last Words: Considering Contemporary Cinema (London

            and New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 140-45

Druick, Zoë, 'On Female Perversions: A Conversation with Susan Streitfeld', Tessera 23 (1997), 107-110

Bainbridge, Caroline, ‘Fantasy and the Feminine: Female Perversions and Under the Skin’ in A  

           Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film (Basingstoke and New York:  

          Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 77-98

Doane, Mary Ann, 'Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator', in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Studies and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 17-32

Butler, Judith, 'Lacan, Riviere and Strategies of Masquerade', in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge Classics edn. (New York and London: Routledge, 2006 [1990]), pp. 59-77 [in 1990 edition, pp. 43-57]

Butler, Judith, 'Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions', in Gender Trouble, pp. 175-93  

           [in 1990 edition, pp. 128-141]

Angerer, Marie-Luise, 'Affective Troubles in Media and Art', in Desire after Affect (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 'Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,  

         or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You', in Touching  

          Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),      

          pp. 123-151

Dyer, Richard, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997)