University of London, Queen Mary

This course examines celebrity and the performance of celebrity. It positions an array of celebrities (actors, politicians, musicians, sports-people, for example) within their individual political, social, historical and cultural contexts allowing them to be read as texts through which to think through and around issues of commodification, globalization, virtuosity, stardom, identity, and consumerism, for example. The course refracts these issues through a variety of theoretical and ideological lenses, encouraging an analysis of how celebrity constructions of race, gender, nation, sexuality, and power, for example, function in the public imagination. 

This course introduces students to poetry in English. Working across a wide range of examples, from the ancient through the contemporary, it introduces poetic genres, techniques, and key theoretical debates in the history of poetry. It helps students to make sense of how poetry works, why poets make the choices they do, and how poetic experiences emerge from the conjunction of sound, rhythm, form, the body, lyric subjects, performance, readers and listeners.