Undergraduate

The arts past and present

On this page

• What you will study
• Entry
• If you have a disability or additional requirement
• Study materials
• Teaching and assessment
• Students also studied
• Future availability

This broadly-focused course introduces you to university-level study in the arts across a range of subject areas, including history, art history, philosophy, classical studies, history of science, religious studies, music and English. It is structured around four themes, guiding you through some of the basic concerns of arts subjects: Reputations; Tradition and Dissent; Cultural Encounters; and Place and Leisure. Your studies will range from poetry to string quartets, and from sculpture to short stories – across a wide variety of cultures and historical periods. This key introductory Level 1 course is also a useful means of acquiring the key skills required for further study of arts subjects.

Course facts

Register for the course

This course is available for study in the countries shown. Fees and financial support may vary by country.

What you will study

The arts past and present is presented through four themed books:

Book 1: Reputations Why are some individuals famous? What is it about Cézanne’s paintings or Cleopatra’s life that makes them so well known? This book takes you from the distant past to the contemporary world to consider these questions in the light of the famous, the infamous and the unjustly neglected. Case studies of significant figures (Cleopatra, Josef Stalin, Michael Faraday and the Dalai Lama) introduce subject-specific skills such as differentiating between primary and secondary sources, and understanding and interpreting varied points of view. This will enable you to develop an understanding of how we construct ideas of the past. Chapters on Christopher Marlowe and Paul Cézanne consider artistic reputation through the works that made them famous: Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, the absorbing, tragic story of the man who sells his soul to the devil; and Cézanne’s mysterious, beguiling paintings of bathers and the Mont St Victoire. You’ll acquire competencies in visual analysis and the critical reading of literary texts. A chapter on the musical Diva explores artistic reputation from a different perspective and investigates why some performers become famous. The same chapter also introduces varied musical repertoires and develops your close listening skills.

Book 2: Tradition and Dissent Tradition is a widely used word, particularly in academic contexts, but what do we mean by it? Why is it important to an understanding of the arts? What does it mean to dissent from tradition? This book provides some answers while extending the range of your skills. We begin with Laches, the work of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, which raises questions about how reliable tradition is as a source of knowledge. This is followed by discussion of tradition in relation to poetry, centred on an attractive anthology of poems about animals. Linked chapters explore religious dissent in England (including the cataclysmic story of the Reformation in England), and the gothic revival of the nineteenth century, concentrating on the work of the revolutionary architect Augustus Pugin. Ideas of tradition underpin the formation of nation states: by looking at the invention of tradition in Ireland, you’ll examine this historical process in action. Finally, you’ll listen to the string quartets of the controversial Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, which raise fascinating questions about the importance of tradition to music and the extent that musical works might act as a form of political dissent.

Book 3: Cultural Encounters Cultural Encounters addresses questions that are pertinent both to the changing world we live in and to all arts subjects: what is the relationship between works of art and colonial history? To what extent can objects and texts be translated from one culture to another? There’s more interdisciplinary work in this part of the course. The book begins with linked chapters on the art of Benin – these are extraordinary sculptures from West Africa, which were taken by Britain and other European countries in the late nineteenth century. The chapters consider this encounter between Europe and Africa from both historical and art historical perspectives. The book continues by examining the philosophical tension between liberal ideas of inclusivity and the pressure for exemptions for minorities in contemporary society. You’ll then read a collection of modern short stories from around the world that explore the ways encounters between different cultures shape ideas of identity and belonging. These short stories are followed by an epic of the exchange of knowledge between cultures: the transmission of medical knowledge from Ancient Greece to the Arabian world and then back to medieval Europe. The book ends with another ancient text – Sophocles’s seminal tragedy, Antigone. You’ll study this play in the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s 2004 translation, The Burial at Thebes. Cumulatively, these individual case studies enrich and complicate our sense of the interplay and exchange of ideas from one culture to another.

Book 4: Place and Leisure The final book explores ideas of place and leisure: how should we interpret sacred spaces or Roman villas? What is the meaning and history of leisure? As well as these thematic questions, the end of the course prompts you to consider what you’ve learnt and what you’ll want to study in the future. With AA100 as the basis for your studies, you will have a good grounding in a range of subjects and their methodologies. The book has two related concerns, outlined in the opening chapters. First we consider leisure as a philosophical issue: what is the purpose of life, and how does leisure fit into broader accounts of what its purpose should be? Secondly, we look at how we interpret the human environment, from ancient monuments through to twentieth-century cities, by interrogating what we mean by the idea of sacred space. These concerns are joined together by focusing on Roman ideas of leisure, both in the evidence of Latin literature and the archaeological remains of villas from across the Roman Empire. The course concludes with a multidisciplinary study of the seaside. This material combines social history of the development of the British seaside resort in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including work on the changing technologies that fostered seaside holidays, with analysis of different representations of the seaside phenomenon in film, music and visual art.

Entry

This is a key introductory Level 1 course. Level 1 courses provide core subject knowledge and study skills needed for both higher education and distance learning, to help you progress to courses at Level 2.

As this course is a broad introduction to the study of the arts and humanities and to the University as a whole, no assumptions are made about the knowledge or education you bring to it. 

Successful completion of this course will equip you to go on to Voices and texts (A150), Making sense of things: an introduction to material culture (A151) or any of the more specialised Level 2 arts courses. By the end of AA100 you will be expected to be working successfully at the level required of first-year undergraduate students.  

If you are new or a less confident learner, start with Making sense of the arts (Y180). This is an Openings course, also at Level 1 but worth 15 credits. Designed with lots of support and no examination, it will give you a gentle introduction to this subject and to OU study. If you successfully complete this Openings course, you’ll be ready to study AA100.

If you have any doubt about the suitability of the course, please contact our Student Registration & Enquiry Service.

Preparatory work

If you have registered for the course and would like to prepare before the course start, see our Getting ready for AA100 website.

If you have a disability or additional requirement

The course makes use of DVDs containing detailed illustrations and floor plans. If you have severely impaired sight you might benefit from the help of a sighted assistant to access this material.  Written transcripts of any audio-visual components, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) versions of printed material, and brief descriptions of key visual material are available. Some Adobe PDF components may not be available or fully accessible using a screen reader and musical notation and mathematical, scientific, and foreign language materials may be particularly difficult to read in this way. The printed study materials are available in the DAISY Digital Talking Book format. Other alternative formats of the study materials may be available in the future. Our Services for disabled students website has the latest information about availability.

If you are a new student, or new to courses using a computer or the internet, you will need to inform us of your particular needs as soon as possible, as some of our support services may take several weeks to arrange. Details of how to do this and our range of support services are described in our publication Meeting Your Needs.

You can also find information about accessible study materials, financial support and the Disabled Students' Allowance, equipment and other services, on our Services for disabled students website. It also includes our contact details for advice and support both before you register and while you are studying.

Study materials

You will need

CD player and DVD player (or a computer with DVD-ROM).

Computing requirements

This course includes online computer activities – you can access these using a web browser that can play Flash and Shockwave.

You will need internet access and a computer. If you have purchased a new computer since 2005 it should meet your course computing requirements. Check our Technical Requirements section if your computer is older than this or is otherwise unusual.

Teaching and assessment

Support from your tutor

You will have a tutor who will help you with the study material and mark and comment on your written work, and whom you can ask for advice and guidance. If you are new to The Open University, you will find that your tutor is particularly concerned to help you with your study methods. Tuition will take place across a range of media: there will be group tutorials and day-schools which you are strongly encouraged to attend. Where tutorials are held depends on the distribution of students taking each course. There will also be online tutorials and telephone tutorials.  

Contact our Student Registration & Enquiry Service if you want to know more about study with The Open University before you register.

Assessment

The assessment details for this course can be found in the facts box above.

You will be expected to submit your tutor-marked assignments (TMAs) online through the eTMA system unless there are some difficulties which prevent you from doing so. In these circumstances, you must negotiate with your tutor to get their agreement to submit your assignment on paper.

Assessment is an essential part of the teaching, so you are expected to complete it all.

Students also studied

Students who studied this course also studied at some time:

• Exploring history: medieval to modern 1400-1900 (A200)
• Creative writing (A215)
• Reading and studying literature (A230)
• Voices and texts (A150)
• Exploring the classical world (A219)

Future availability

The details given here are for the course that starts in October 2012 and February 2013.  We expect it to be available twice a year.

Fees 2012

See fees and funding options for study from September 2012.

Study explained

Financial support

- find out if you qualify for support with your fees with our eligibility checker.

Study explained

- all you need to know about distance learning with the OU.

A taste of OU study

Student Reviews

A fantastic course and the first I have done with the OU. I studied it in October 2010 and would ...
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Brilliant starter course, recommend it highly! Covers a wide range of topics which help you choose your next step. I ...
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