Humanities and Social Sciences

School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry

Literature, Film and Art

Latest news:
Now taking mid-year entry applications for the Bachelor of Arts at Bendigo.
For more information please contact Debra Amarant 5444 7225

What is Literature, Film and Art?

People think you are only enjoying yourself when you go to university and spend three years studying stories and poems and pictures, and study is not supposed to be enjoyable. Yes we do enjoy ourselves. Studying literature, film and pictures is precisely the sort of study in which enjoyment leads to understanding.

Sometimes our enjoyment will be of that strange kind in which we say we 'enjoy' a tragic story because we do not know what else to call the state that it leaves us in. And it is also true that precisely because stories and poems can move us so deeply we will sometimes get upset in studying these subjects. But if the hurts we get can be acute, so are the exhilarations higher.

What understandings are we led to? Well, something of other people - and the sort of purposes, hopes and fears that other people have. Something of ourselves - and what to call the thoughts and feelings that we ourselves have, as we read these stories and watch these pictures. Something of life too, which is more a matter of how things happen than of what we do. Stories show us these things - whereas other modes of understanding can only tell us. That is why teachers of wisdom have always taught by story.

But works of art are not transparent windows on people or on life (though some of them give us the illusion that they are). Insight comes only from seeing in a certain way. So we also study the conventions of story-telling that works of art use, whether they are aware of those conventions or not. That is to say, we study the construction of story-telling itself, because there are meanings that are built into those constructions, whether it is story-telling in words or in pictures.