Undergraduate Module Descriptor

POL2112: Politics and Its Discontents

This module descriptor refers to the 2019/0 academic year.

Whilst the module’s precise content may vary from year to year, it is envisaged that the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics:

Key elements of Nietzsche’s thinking: the death of god, perspectivism and genealogy, the transvaluation of all values.
A close reading of The Genealogy of Morality.
Key elements of Freuds thinking: the unconscious (via dreams and parapraxes), the metapsychology of repression, and the struggle between the pleasure principle of the unconscious and the reality principle of the conscious.
A close reading of Civilisation and its Discontents.
A reading of The Mass Psychology of Facism, and a concluding comparison of the theories of Nietzsche and Freud.

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	Guided independent study	Placement / study abroad
22	128	0

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

Category	Hours of study time	Description
Scheduled Learning & Teaching Activity	22	11 x 2-hour seminars
Guided Independent Study	50	Private study reading and preparing for seminars
Guided Independent Study	78	Preparation for textual analysis assignments and essay including researching and collating relevant sources; planning the structure and argument; writing up the essay

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).