| ADAPTATION AND INTERPRETATION | LDCCM007 | 20 |
| Critical reading and creative writing meet in the activity of adapting a text in one medium for presentation in another. The module focuses on dramatic adaptation, establishing a foundation in basic theory and then focusing on readings or original works and screenings. Discussions probe the choices offered by original texts and explore the possibilities and limitations inherent in different dramatic forms. In the later sessions, students will have the opportunity to workshop an adaptation for a final project. |
| ADAPTATION AND INTERPRETATION | LDCCM012 | 20 |
| Critical reading and creative writing meet in the activity of adapting a text in one medium for presentation in another. The module focuses on dramatic adaptation, establishing a foundation in basic theory and then focusing on readings or original works and screenings. Discussions probe the choices offered by original texts and explore the possibilities and limitations inherent in different dramatic forms. In the later sessions, students will have the opportunity to workshop an adaptation for a final project. |
| CASE STUDIES | LDCEM002 | 20 |
| This seminar looks at ways in which specific authors/works/genres pass into other cultures through translation. We will look at three genres – children’s literature, drama, and crime fiction – and for each one, we will analyse the genre, identify challenges in translating it, discuss strategies, and examine examples of relevant works, using close textual analysis to see how translators can tackle problems of linguistic, stylistic, and cultural difference. We will then practice translating texts from that genre. |
| CASE STUDIES | LDCEM002 | 20 |
| This seminar looks at ways in which specific authors/works/genres pass into other cultures through translation. We will look at three genres – children’s literature, drama, and crime fiction – and for each one, we will analyse the genre, identify challenges in translating it, discuss strategies, and examine examples of relevant works, using close textual analysis to see how translators can tackle problems of linguistic, stylistic, and cultural difference. We will then practice translating texts from that genre. |
| CONTEMPORARY WORLD THEATRE | LDCDM002 | 20 |
| Contemporary World Theatre examines how twentieth century theatre around the world has been affected by postcolonialism, globalization, immigration and interculturalism. Through an examination of postcolonial performance from former British colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India, and the West Indies, important theatrical movements in the Americas, new performance styles found in Russia and Eastern Europe, immigrant performance in the United States and Britain, as well as the new 'intercultural' performance styles of directors such as Lepage and Mnouchkine, this course will examine how gender, race and class become key issues in understanding the ramifications of these colliding cultures. |
| CREATIVE WRITING AND RESEARCH SEMINARS | LDCCM008 | 10 |
| This 10-credit module, will consist of the writing of a synopsis or summary of the Dissertation script. It will be due for submission at the same time as the Dissertation itself. The word limit will be 500 to 1000 words. |
| CREATIVE WRITING DISSERTATION | LDCCM03X | 90 |
| Students are required to write a dissertation of a length as specified in their MA Course Guide on a topic approved by the Course Director or other authorised person. |
| CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP: POETRY 1 | LDCCM003 | 20 |
| AFTER TAKING THIS MODULE YOU MUST TAKE LDCCM004 Only students who are registered for the MA in Creative Writing: Poetry students may enrol for this module. |
| CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP: POETRY 2 | LDCCM004 | 20 |
| BEFORE TAKING THIS MODULE YOU MUST TAKE LDCCM003 Only students registered for Creative Writing: Poetry may enrol for this module. |
| CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP: PROSE 1 | LDCCM001 | 20 |
| Only students who are registered for the MA in Creative Writing: Prose may enrol for this module. |
| CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP: PROSE 2 | LDCCM002 | 20 |
| BEFORE TAKING THIS MODULE YOU MUST TAKE LDCCM001 Only students who are registered for creative writing: prose may enrol for this module. |
| CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP: SCRIPTWRITING | LDCCM005 | 20 |
| AFTER TAKING THIS MODULE YOU MUST TAKE LDCCM006 This module is compulsory for all Scriptwriting MA students and is reserved for students of the Scriptwriting programme. It is co-requisite with Scriptwriting: Dramaturgy (full-time students). Part-time students must complete Dramaturgy as a pre-requisite, in year 1. Workshop 1 builds upon the parallel study of dramaturgical theory and practice in the four major dramatic performance media. The module requires scriptwriters to incorporate the theory into their own creative practice in weekly creative development workshops. Writers will all complete a series of script planning and writing exercises: each week, two writers will bring their exercise to the workshop table for group discussion. |
| CREATIVE WRITING: SCRIPTWRITING: DRAMATURGY | LDCCM009 | 20 |
| This module is compulsory for all scriptwriting MA students, and is a co requisite with Scriptwriting: Workshop 1 for full time students (part time students must take Dramaturgy in the autumn of year 1, Workshop 1 in autumn of year 2, Scriptwriting: Process in spring of year 2). It may be taken as an option by non Scriptwriting students, subject to a maximum enrolment of 16 students. Students should note that this is an advanced level study of dramatic theory in the four major performance media (theatre, film, television, radio); non Scriptwriting students must have some prior experience of dramatic writing. |
| CREATIVE WRITING: SCRIPTWRITING: PROCESS | LDCCM006 | 20 |
| This module is compulsory for all Scriptwriting MA students and is reserved for students of the Scriptwriting programme. Dramaturgy and Workshop 1 are pre-requisites for this module. Students develop a short script for theatre/film/television/radio from initial idea through pitch/treatment/step outline/script drafts. In weekly workshop sessions, the stages of project development are tabled for tutorial and peer group critique. Assessment is by presentation of a portfolio of working documentation, script drafts and a short reflective essay. |
| CREATIVE-CRITICAL WRITING | LDCEM008 | 20 |
| A CORE MODULE FOR STUDENTS ON THE MA WRITING THE MODERN WORLD. Too often, academic critical writing seems to bring pre-packaged language to bear on works whose whole essence and aim is to change the ways in which we see and describe our world. And too often such writing fails to acknowledge the ways in which it itself necessarily participates in the literary ‘creativity’ it is also about. How, then, to write criticism? Criticism which responds inventively to the literature which it analyzes? Criticism which registers, in its own form, language, method and thinking the ways in which it has been transformed by the work(s) of art it encounters? Criticism which recognizes that it cannot rest on received concepts and categories? This module aims to explore those questions. Over the course of the semester will consider – and experiment with – a broad range of possible ways of practising creative-criticism, including the ‘essay’ form, auto-commentary, aphorisms, écriture féminine, conceptual writing, criticism as performance, inventive ‘theoretical’ writing, camp, and diaristic writing. The module covers creative-critics as different from one another as Anne Carson and Jacques Derrida, Geoff Dyer and Hélène Cixous, Maurice Blanchot and T. J. Clark, Theodor Adorno and Eve Sedgwick. |
| CRITICAL THEORIES OF THE WESTERN SELF | LDCEM011 | 20 |
| The course introduces students to the major shifts in philosophical thinking about the Western self from Descartes to the twentieth century. The course will provide students with a training in theoretical debate through the analysis and discussion of a selection of the important thinkers on this list: Descartes, Rousseau, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, Deleuze and Butler. Through acquaintance with different theoretical traditions, students will have the opportunity to reflect critically on the processes and implications of cultural change; and to relate their understanding of the self and philosophy to other fields such as literature. |
| CULTURE AND ITS DISCONTENTS | LDCEM049 | 20 |
| From trauma theory and Holocaust Studies to critical human rights and refugee studies, thinking about culture’s profound discontents motivates much of the most innovative work in the theoretical humanities today. This module focuses on two key theorists of modern experience: Sigmund Freud, for whom the unconscious registered the trauma of modern living, and the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, for whom the horrors of totalitarianism opened up holes of oblivion in the way we think and judge. Reading them together, we will examine the way Freud and Arendt open up a new space to think about the relation between the psyche and the political. Core reading will include: The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (Penguin) The Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (Penguin) The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh UP) |
| DESCRIBING POETRY | LDCCM011 | 20 |
| CORE MODULE FOR STUDENTS ON THE MA CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY. Poetry often describes its own verbal processes ��� of rhythm, image and word choice ��� while thinking about the way that writing is intertwined with the world that it describes. Such thinking has also been importantly continued in prose. This module offers a historical survey of some of the major critical texts in Western poetics, from Plato to Ezra Pound and after, to be read closely alongside a wide range of poetic self-reflections in verse. Students will be encouraged to contribute texts from their own reading for discussion. Short writing exercises in a range of critical styles will also be set in class, in preparation for the final coursework essay. We will examine in particular the metaphors that have been used to describe the formal techniques of poetry, as well as to admire its powers, criticise its failings, and advocate its pleasures. |
| DISSERTATION - LITERARY TRANSLATION | LDCEM04X | 90 |
| The dissertation is a compulsory requirement for all taught MA programmes. Work on the dissertation is begun at the end of the 2nd teaching semester for full-time students, or earlier for part-time students. Dissertations may take the form of either (i) a critical essay about an aspect of translation or (ii) a translation with commentary. The choice of research topic for the dissertation is made by the students in consultation with their course convenor. Supervision normally functions on the basis of one contact hour with the supervisor every three weeks throughout the summer. |
| DRAMA DISSERTATION | LDCDM03X | 90 |
| Students are required to write a dissertation of a length as specified in their MA Course Guide on a topic approved by the Course Director or other authorised person. |
| EAST ANGLIAN LITERATURE | LDCEM006 | 20 |
| CORE MODULE FOR STUDENTS ON THE MA MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TEXTUAL CULTURES. This module has as its focus ideas of place and regional cultures. It introduces key subjects relating to regional literature, religious geographies, visual and verbal relationships, attitudes to gender and family, landscape and alternative cultures. Approaches will involve genre study, interdisciplinary enquiry, and theoretical study. We are spoilt for choice in relation to texts and authors to select from the region, including: John Bale, Osbern Bokenham, Thomas Browne, Meir ben Eiljah, John Capgrave, Robert Greene, Gabriel Harvey, Margery Kempe, John Lydgate, John Metham, Julian of Norwich, the N-Town plays, the Pastons and John Skelton. There will be the opportunity to visit a number of archives, specialist libraries and material culture from the period, including a visit to Norwich Cathedral, which has an extensive 17th-century library with material from the 15th century onwards, Norfolk's heritage collection housed in The Forum's Millennium Library which holds documents from the 13th century onwards, and the Julian of Norwich Centre and Shrine. |
| ENGLISH LITERATURE DISSERTATION | LDCEM03X | 90 |
| Students are required to write a dissertation of a length as specified in their MA Course Guide on a topic approved by the Course Director or other authorised person. |
| EVALUATING NATURE | LDCEM058 | 20 |
| This module aims to equip students with a historically informed understanding of the emergence of different theories and modes of evaluation, focusing in particular on the economic, aesthetic, and moral questions arising from the evaluation of nature in particular. Is it, for example, ethically defensible to value nature as a resource? Is a genuinely ‘ecological’ or, indeed, ‘green’ economics conceivable – and, if so, what would that involve in practice? How sure are we that art in general and writing in particular are good ways to articulate the value of the natural? And is a genuinely ‘ecological’ or ‘green’ poetics conceivable? Addressing these questions will involve exploration both of the history of ideas and of contemporary understandings of natural capital, resource allocation, and moral evaluation. |
| FICTION AFTER MODERNISM: RE-READING THE 20TH CENTURY | LDCEM023 | 20 |
| ���Fiction After Modernism��� responds to the current reassessment of critical narratives about twentieth century fiction by restoring significance to a critically awkward phase of twentieth-century writing. Focusing roughly on the years between 1930 and 1980, we examine what it meant for mid-century writers to work in the wake of modernism. By thinking about mid-century fiction in terms of its own historical and aesthetic awkwardness, we will challenge the formalist distinction between experimental and realist fiction that has dominated the most influential work on the mid-century novel, and which has also stamped many post-war writers as irretrievably minor. In a similar spirit, we will explore how writers worked in the 'between' of modernism and postmodernism. Rather than produce a cohesive narrative about the period, we will examine how our writers engage with, and disturb, their own literary, historical and critical inheritances. This module is an opportunity to participate in an emerging critical conversation that is carving out new directions in literary study. Working through the period with special attention to previously marginalized (and in some cases forgotten) writers, alongside a selection of critical and theoretical texts, we will examine the ways our writers accede to, challenge, and disrupt our critical understanding of fiction after modernism. |
| LITERARY TRANSLATION RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY TRAINING SEMINAR | LDCEM06Y | 10 |
| All MALT students are enrolled on a Research Methods module. The assessment for this is a pass/fail viva in May or early June (date will be given in the course of the Autumn semester). This module is not taught separately, but consists of a number of generic sessions and also a number of specific MALT sessions within the seminars, such as “Essay Writing”, “Reading as an Academic”, “Doing Glosses” and so on. |
| LIVING MODERNISM | LDCEM017 | 20 |
| A CORE MODULE FOR STUDENTS ON THE MA WRITING THE MODERN WORLD. The word modernism was applied only retrospectively to the texts written at the beginning of the twentieth century; and that retrospective naming has worked to define an ever-shifting field of cultural activity. This course aims to introduce students to ‘living modernism’, a phrase that highlights the mutually informing relationship of contemporary writing and modernism. In the first 5 weeks, students will be asked to read James Joyce’s Ulysses and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The course then considers the ways in which Joyce’s and Kafka’s writing continues to animate critical and creative knowledge. In weeks 6-12, critical and literary questions of law, justice, exile, and narrative voice will be posed out of modernism. The living legacy of modernism will be considered in different ways; as literary influence, (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a Kafkaesque meditation on exile, for instance), as critical quotation and interpretation, (Jacques Derrida’s claim, for example, that Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ is a staging of justice and literary interpretation), and linguistic or thematic interaction (Lolita as Nabokov’s Joycean writing of exile in America). There will be a particular focus on how Joyce and Kafka write law, justice and exile as global, rather than state-based, categories, and the importance of these transnational visions for their continuing influence. Authors explored will include James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Mladen Dolar, Denise Riley and W. G. Sebald. |
| LUDIC LITERATURE | LDCEM016 | 20 |
| Play, or the ludic, is often listed as one of the main characteristics of postmodernist art, but what is meant by play is usually left no more clearly defined than what is meant by postmodernism. This course seeks to trace the evolution of leading postmodernist styles and themes, especially ludic ones, back to their origins in Borges and Nabokov. Using these enormously influential authors as a starting point, we will read a range of ludic authors, passing back and forth between languages, nations, and genres. Authors studied will include some though not all of: Calvino, Queneau, Perec, Barthes, Barthelme, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, Grass, Carter, Rushdie, Bolano, Muldoon, Simic, and Ashbery. We will examine these authors in relation to one another, to Borges and Nabokov, and to their major pre-postmodernist sources: Sterne, Mallarm��, Dostoevsky, Chesterton, Stevenson, Joyce, and Kafka. We will also be looking at visual art related to ludic literature, including Duchamp���s readymades, Steinberg���s cartoons, and Cornell���s boxes. Themes we will explore will include aestheticism, doubt, vagueness, jokes, freedom and constraint, mixed styles, parody and pastiche. There will be an opportunity for students to play with the texts by re-writing them under the sorts of rules advanced by Queneau and Oulipo, Koch and Ashbery. |
| NOVEL HISTORY | LDCCM010 | 20 |
| We are currently witnessing a renaissance in history writing. Sales of historical novels continue to rise steeply. Societies have formed, new prizes established. A number of eminent historians are turning from fact to fiction. What can the historical novel do in terms of reaching the past that more conventional historical accounts cannot do? Can it challenge long-told historical narratives, propose new ones or give us new vantage points? Novel History is a critical-creative MA module that crosses the boundaries between literature, art history, history and creative writing to explore the possibilities (and paradoxes) of historical fiction. Students will study the history of the historical novel and read critical and theoretical essays about the writing of history alongside examples of innovative or revisionist contemporary historical fiction. They will also explore ideas around 'object history' through a series of workshop sessions amongst the historical objects of UEA's extraordinary rich collection in the Sainsbury Centre. Students will present work in progress in the workshop format as they move towards a final piece of creative writing, a short story or radio script, screen or theatre script. Students will be given the option of structuring their final work around a single chosen object from the Sainsbury Centre collection. |
| POLITICS AND PUBLIC CULTURE | LDCEM069 | 20 |
| CORE MODULE FOR STUDENTS ON THE MA MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TEXTUAL CULTURES. The aim of this module will be to look at ways of reading literary works in their social, political and intellectual contexts, and to explore the role of the writer in early-modern culture. To do this we will focus on the works of John Milton ��� the full range of his works, including poetry, prose and (in translation) Latin polemic. The contexts we will consider might include: aesthetics; the history and theory of republicanism; religious radicalism; the problem of ���Britain���; news; the development of the printing trade and its relation to writing poetry and propaganda; Britain���s place in Europe; the history of reading; the social spaces where literature operated; the rise of the ���public sphere���. In addition to Milton���s writings, we will look at the print and news culture of early-modern Britain, with some attention to the materiality of printed texts. We may also look at other writings and other modes of writing by Milton���s contemporaries, including pamphleteering and journalism and works by Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham, Lucy Hutchinson and John Dryden. |
| POSTMODERNISM IN PERFORMANCE | LDCDM012 | 20 |
| This module interrogates the study of postmodernism in relation to theatre, performance and live art. Key theories relating to the emergence of the postmodern movement are studied alongside the work of practitioners. The module will examine some of the innovative work occurring in contemporary theatre and cultural practice, as well as study the influences upon contemporary artists from earlier modernist avant-garde work of Europe and the United States. These movements include Futurism, Dada, Constructivism and the 'neo-dada' Happenings and Fluxus movements in 1960s Europe and America and the study of contemporary postmodern performance groups and practitioners such as Forced Entertainment, The Wooster Group, Robert Wilson, SITI Company, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Need Company, and Le Page. |
| PROCESS AND PRODUCT IN TRANSLATION | LDCEM034 | 20 |
| This module is designed to allow students to produce translations in conditions that encourage and facilitate reflection on the process and product of translation. It encourages students to think experimentally, not only about the forms a finished translation might take, but also about the ways in which process might be incorporated into that translation. The module has a workshop format and culminates in a series of presentations by students of the projects on which they have chosen to work. A series of sessions, devoted to the discussion of problems, both theoretical and practical, connected with translation and the projects ahead, precede the presentations. |
| PUBLISHING - A PRACTICAL APPROACH | LDCCM016 | 20 |
| This module aims to give students an introduction to the modern publishing industry and a practical survival guide to the different functions involved in the publication of a book. As well as learning about the structure and economics of the British book industry, students will engage with the process whereby books are chosen for publication, review principles of text and jacket design, practice basic copyediting and proofreading skills and learn tips for running a marketing and publicity campaign, writing 'blurbs' and press releases. The course will also touch on copyright law, finance and distribution. |
| RADICAL DRAMATURGIES | LDCDM004 | 20 |
| This module will examine the rich field of writing within theatre which seeks to define new relationships with audiences and new notions of how texts might be written. Central to the module will be a consideration of how writing might respond to place, site, self, found text, the actor, music, film and multi-media approaches. Drawing on work and practises from a range of international contexts largely extant now in the field, students will explore a panoply of writing modes and encounter a range of study-texts. |
| RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY TRAINING SEMINAR | LDCDM020 | 10 |
| The 10 credit module is compulsory. |
| RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY TRAINING SEMINAR | LDCEM020 | 10 |
| |
| REUSING THE PAST: THE CLASSICAL IN THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN | LDCEM018 | 20 |
| CORE MODULE FOR STUDENTS ON THE MA MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TEXTUAL CULTURES. The complex and unstable movement from medieval to Early Modern culture is reflected in and effected through a fundamental revaluation of the classical legacy: in the development of new approaches to classical texts and of new uses to which their cultural authority might be put. This module explores this movement through the works of three late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century writers, Robert Henryson, Gavin Douglas, and John Bellenden, and their responses to the texts of Aesop, Virgil, Ovid and Livy. It tracks a movement from medieval adaptation to Early Modern translation, from moralising allegory to politically inflected intertextuality, exploring the rich variety of ways in which classical texts were made newly available and newly culturally meaningful. |
| STYLISTICS FOR TRANSLATORS | LDCEM033 | 20 |
| This module will examine style in texts, and how the analysis of style affects translation. We will look at various different approaches to the definition and understanding of style, concentrating on the stylistic analysis of literary (and some non-literary) texts of all types. In the final weeks of the semester students will present and discuss the translation of style in texts and languages of their choice |
| TEXT AND PRODUCTION: SCENE CLASS | LDCDM001 | 20 |
| The module is broken into two parts. One consists of a weekly three hour meeting in which we study various methods of directing via textual analysis. These include 'actioning', working with verse and language, Laban's effort analyses, status games and an introduction to Lecoq's physical methods. In these sessions we also discuss some of the major theories of what the theatre is or should be - those of Gordon Craig, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht and Peter Brooks, in relation to many texts, including Shakespeare. The other part of the module is a series of weekly 'scene-classes' in which the MA students present the results of their directing undergraduate students in rehearsing scenes. |
| THE ACTOR IN SPACE | LDCEM047 | 20 |
| The extremely various theatres of late medieval and early modern England situate the figure of the actor in a great many different settings and configurations. The place of performance may be public, or owned by a patron or by the actors themselves; it may be candle-lit or open to the sky; it may be a communal space for action or the illusionistic location of the fiction; and that fictional world, in turn, may be unitary or else divisively assigned to angels and devils, kings and clowns, speakers and singers. It is possible to grasp this diversity as an historical narrative (from the medieval pageant to the professional stage, from the Elizabethan amphitheatre to the Restoration playhouse with movable scenery), but it was also, often, a synchronic range of possible spaces, each with its distinctive cultural affiliation, each corresponding to, and making visible, its distinctive conceptions of the human, the social and the sacred. The course will explore these spaces by looking not only or even mainly at the theatre history, but at the scripts that record and suggest their meanings. |
| THE ART OF SHORT FICTION | LDCCM017 | 20 |
| Short fiction is too often defined in terms of what it is not – namely, a novel. Whether stories, novellas or experimental short fiction, short fiction is an art form in its own right. While acknowledging that there are no ‘rules’ as to what makes a good short story, we will look at the expectations and technical challenges created by the form, and in so doing to sharpen our analytical and critical faculties. This is predominantly a practical, workshop-based course oriented at writing short fiction, although students will also be asked to form critical opinions and perspectives on published short stories, the technical aspects of writing in the form, and on themes and trends in short fiction |
| THE LIFE OF THE BOOK | LDCEM007 | 20 |
| CORE MODULE FOR STUDENTS ON THE MA BIOGRAPHY AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION (RESERVED FOR STUDENTS ON ROUTE T1Q325101 - LIFE WRITING). This module will follow the arc of the life of a book from inception to reception. How do you choose a subject, determine a book’s structure, find a voice and build character? What about the often daunting question of research? Once the book is written, how do you set about writing a proposal and finding a publisher? We will also consider questions surrounding copyright, editing and reviewing. The emphasis will be practical, with a significant workshop element. |
| THE PERSISTENCE OF THE AESTHETIC | LDCEM062 | 20 |
| This module addresses the relation between art and politics by examining the attempt to unmask the aesthetic as ideological. In order to do this, we will acquire a firm grasp of the meaning of 'the aesthetic' and of what it is often taken to conceal, 'ideology'. We will, therefore, begin by exploring what has been called the 'invention' of the aesthetic in modernity, paying particular attention to the emergence of the aesthetic as a category in the eighteenth century as part of debates concerning the public sphere, disinterestedness, and universality. Key figures here will include the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller. We will then move on to consider the precise meaning of 'ideology' in its various forms in the work of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Theodor Adorno. Our focus in particular will be on the way in which the aesthetic has been thought to relate to 'ideology' by these, and numerous other, thinkers from fields such as sociology, anthropology, literary criticism, and art history. But far from simply deploying the tools of ideological analysis as a means to expose the covert politics of the aesthetic as such, we will ask whether the aesthetic is as vulnerable to so-called ideology - critique as has sometime been claimed. We will thus evaluate recent attempts to renovate the aesthetic by figures such as Jacques Ranciere, Isobel Armstrong, J.M. Berstein and others. This module, therefore, will address concerns central to those interested in the history and theory of literary and art criticism, and also in cultural and educational policy. |
| THE WRITING OF CRIME/THRILLER FICTION | LDCCM013 | 20 |
| This module will provide students with critical and creative knowledge of modern crime/thriller fiction, and is designed to complement the Creative Writing MA programme, but is open to students across the MA. Crime/thriller fiction, the world’s most popular literary genre, is particularly subject to ever evolving conventions, expectations, precedents and sub-genres. Understanding the presiding logistical and thematic issues is fundamental to both the creation of and critical response to crime/thriller fiction. The module will analyse the developments and characteristics of the modernisation of the genre, through a symptomatic approach to authors, from Dashiell Hammett to Jo Nesbo, from police procedurals to psychological thrillers. Issues of literary worth, escapism and social context particularly will be examined. Creative work will also concentrate on how to craft a convincing plot, creating believable characters, building suspense, generating voice and exploring new ways to tackle new crimes. Students will be required to make presentations on a particular author/style, and to produce original crime/thriller fiction. Assessment by creative writing - a short piece of fiction - with accompanying critical essay. |
| THEORY AND PRACTICE OF FICTION | LDCCM024 | 20 |
| This module is designed to complement the prose fiction workshop but is open to students on related programmes. It is intended to provide students with creative and critical knowledge in a single experiential burst, by exploring as they are relevant to writing fiction such topics as time, place, dramatic structure, character and concinnity. The unit also gives consideration to professional issues confronting novelists, from writer���s block to editing, contracts and dealing with the media. The module presents the writer as both artist and supplier of intellectual property to a market, while examining that and other tensions critically. Reading, writing and analysis happen alongside each other. Fictional, critical and professional texts are examined, writing exercises illuminating the issue at hand are undertaken. Students are also expected to make presentations on topics of their choice. Assessment by creative writing coursework with a critical commentary. |
| TRANSLATION THEORY | LDCEM043 | 20 |
| This module discusses key theoretical and descriptive pronouncements on translation by theorists and practising translators working within the Western tradition. The focus is predominantly on contemporary work, with some older commentary providing historical context. Students are encouraged to explore their own theoretical interests and present their findings in class. |
| TRANSLATION WORKSHOP | LDCEM04Y | 0 |
| A series of workshops by practising translators, shared by the MA in Literary Translation and the MA in Applied Translation Studies. These will be on different aspects of translation, and will involve various genres. There is generally no preparation required for workshops, but students are asked to find out as much as possible in advance about the workshop-holder's background and work. There will usually be translation exercises and discussion in class. Some workshops are on literary topics, but some also deal with non-literary translation or other issues such as approaching a publisher. The workshop programme will be distributed at the start of the academic year. |
| WRITING IN THE FIRST PERSON | LDCEM012 | 20 |
| CORE MODULE FOR STUDENTS ON THE MA BIOGRAPHY AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION. This module looks at autobiography in the broadest sense, taking in memoir, nature writing, travel writing, reportage and essay. We'll be talking about the history and variety of first-person narratives, the ways writers reveal themselves in their words, how autobiography keeps to and departs from the facts, the importance of form and structure, and about non-fiction's relationship to novels and poems. Seminars will feature practical writing exercises as well as readings and discussions. |
| WRITING LIVES | LDCEM003 | 20 |
| CORE MODULE FOR STUDENTS ON THE MA BIOGRAPHY AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION. This module explores the many ways in which writers have grappled with getting ‘life’ and ‘lives’ down on paper. We will look at samples of writing from many different genres, including travel, nature, music and sports writing. We will also be looking at those returning figures – the Hero, the Villain, the Madwoman. In the process we will discuss cultural myth, human empathy and identity and notions of celebrity. Students will be encouraged to find their own special subjects, to study comparative biography, and to look at the many new experimental approaches that make Biography such a flourishing phenomenon today. |
Literature
Creative Writing
Drama