English Culture

Code:

MEAAM003

Acronym:

CING

Instance: 2014/2015 - 2S

Active?	Yes
Responsible unit:	Department of Anglo-American Studies
Course/CS Responsible:	Masters in Anglo-American Studies

Cycles of Study/Courses

Acronym	No. of Students	Study Plan	Curricular Years	Credits UCN	Credits ECTS	Contact hours	Total Time
MEAA	8	Study Plan since 2007/2008	1	-	6	55	162

Teaching language

English

Objectives

O programa procurará examinar alguns aspectos centrais da cultura britânica na segunda metade do século vinte: o papel da religião e do sentimento religioso na vida quotidiana, a cultura dos jovens e a violência, o multiculturalismo e a identidade nacional, conflito e reconciliação no rescaldo da empresa do império.

Learning outcomes and competences

Students are supposed to be acquainted with the scheduled topics by the end of the course, knowing how to elicit and organize information from sources and give critical discursive form and meaning to the issues under consideration.

Working method

Presencial

Program

In Our Time: Faces of Modern Britain.

The programme aims at identifying and discussing some vital cultural trends of Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. With historical background as reference, fiction will be looked at as a discursive starting point and as a qualified site of cultural documentation concerning basic topics in modern life: predicaments of faith and profane love (The End of the Affair, 1951, by Graham Greene), youth culture, social rupture and violence (The Cement Garden, 1978, by Ian McEwan), places and people, and the mixture the British are (London Observed, Stories and Sketches, 1993, by Doris Lessing), after 'the Troubles' and in our time (Amongst Women, 1990, by John McGahern), and the risks of diversity and multicultural commitment (My Son the Fanatic, 1997, by Hanif Kureishi).

Mandatory literature

Christopher David; british culture - an introduction, routledge, 1999. ISBN: 0-415-14218-0
Ford Boris; Modern Britain, Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN: 0521428890
Greene Graham; The End of the Affair, Penguin Books, 2004. ISBN: 0142437980
Kureishi Hanif; My Son the Fanatic, Faber and Faber, 1997. ISBN: 0-571-19234-3
Lessing Doris; London Observed - Stories and Sketches, Flamingo, 1992. ISBN: 0586092269
Marwick Arthur; British Society since 1945, Penguin Books, 1982
McEwan Ian; The Cement Garden, Picador, 1978. ISBN: 033029575X
McGahern John; Amongst Women, Faber and Faber, 1990. ISBN: 0-571-14284-2

Complementary Bibliography

Clarke Peter; Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990, Penguin Books, 1997. ISBN: 357910864
Freeman John; Britain, Granta Books, 2012. ISBN: 978-1-905881-56-7

Teaching methods and learning activities

Lectures; discussion in class - introduction of relevant topics and debate. Students are urged to enlarge the open list of books and references and to do their own research according to their interests and inclinations.

keywords

Humanities > History
Humanities > Literature
Social sciences > Cultural studies > Anglo saxon studies

Evaluation Type

Distributed evaluation without final exam

Assessment Components

Designation	Weight (%)
Defesa pública de dissertação, de relatório de projeto ou estágio, ou de tese	60,00
Participação presencial	40,00
Total:	100,00

Amount of time allocated to each course unit

Designation	Time (hours)
Estudo autónomo	132,00
Total:	132,00

Eligibility for exams

Students are expected to attend 75% of the scheduled session, to cooperate on a regular basis in class and to submit a final work to discussion and evaluation.

Calculation formula of final grade

Final work - 60%; cooperation in classes - 40%.

Examinations or Special Assignments

n/a

Special assessment (TE, DA, ...)

n/a

Classification improvement

n/a