BA Creative Writing and English Literature

Key details

BA CREATIVE WRITING AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

Start Year

2021

Attendance

Full Time

Award

Degree of Bachelor of Arts

UCAS course code

W8Q3

Entry Requirements

AAA

The teaching of creative writing in the UK began at UEA fifty years ago, and we are still widely seen as the home of creative writing in this country.

You will be studying at a university rich in famous creative writing alumni, including Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan and Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro. You will develop your craft as a writer under the supervision of world-renowned novelists, poets and scriptwriters, while benefitting from first-class literature teaching.

In addition to the creative writing workshops offered by our pioneering and world-famous, 'English Literature with Creative Writing' degree, this course offers you a suite of modules designed to help you enter the working writer's world once you graduate. They'll enable you as writer to work across disciplines, to function in a professional context, and to get actively involved in the production, publication and performance of your work.

In your study of English literature, you’ll discover a wealth of writers from the middle ages right up to poets and novelists writing now. You might explore diverse literary traditions from across the globe, and you’ll tackle a heady mix of genres, which currently range from epic to children’s literature, crime writing to Latin American fiction, tragedy to biography.

Norwich is an extraordinary place in which to be a writer. It’s England’s first UNESCO City of Literature, awarded in recognition of the city’s vivid literary heritage and vibrant contemporary writing scene. You’ll immerse yourself in this community -- you might find yourself sharing your work with a packed audience of students and professional writers at UEA Live, or hearing readings from dozens of internationally leading literary figures.

We say that UEA is the place where literature lives – when you join the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, you’ll join a unique and supportive community of critics, writers, and drama practitioners, who bring literature to life every day.

About

The writer's world has never been more diverse, exciting, and collaborative than it is today. Whether you're eager to embark on creative and community exchanges, to make your words come alive in the imaginations of new audiences, or to work across literary, visual, and digital media, this is the world you'll want to join.   

You'll hone your skills as a writer while exploring literatures from a host of genres, countries, and time periods. You will be able to take all the same creative writing workshops (in poetry, prose, and scriptwriting) as our English with Creative Writing students, but you'll also have the chance to take unique modules designed to enable you, once you graduate, to enter the working writer's world. Through a lively mix of seminars, workshops and writing world experience, you'll develop skills in working across disciplines and media, in community engagement, and in publishing and presenting your own work.

Admissions Live Chat

UEA Live

The University of East Anglia's first literary festival took place in 1991 and over the last twenty five years we have welcomed a host of award-winning authors, journalists, illustrators, scientists, economists, broadcasters and more.

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After English

Useful careers information to help you make great decisions about your future after uni.

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Course Reference Number: 667257

Important Information

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the courses listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the regular review of course programmes. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes, there will normally be prior consultation of students and others. Changes may for example consist of variations to the content and method of delivery of programmes, courses and other services, to discontinue programmes, courses and other services and to merge or combine programmes or courses. The University will endeavour to keep such changes to a minimum, and will inform students.

After the Course

You could go on to work as a prose fiction or non-fiction writer, poet or scriptwriter, or go into many careers in arts, media, publishing, politics, charities and NGOs, teaching or the commercial sector. You will be a first-rate writer, equipped with skills of critical reading, independence, time management, teamwork, and more, which are highly valued by employers. You’ll also be well placed to study for a postgraduate degree, including one of our world-famous Creative Writing MAs.

Our Careers Service is here to support you in launching your career by advising with CV writing, internships, and much more. Every year we run an event, Working with Words, where you’ll have the chance to meet and hear from successful UEA alumni from across the creative industries.

UEA also has its own in-house publishing project, Egg Box, along with many other exciting initiatives that give you opportunities to turn your love of writing into a foundation for your future career.

Career destinations

Examples of careers you could enter include:

Freelance writer
Scriptwriter
Publishing
Community and Arts-related Projects
Media
Marketing
Communication and PR

Admissions Live Chat

UEA Live

LEARN MORE >

Social Media

After English

Useful careers information to help you make great decisions about your future after uni.

Ask A Student

This is your chance to ask UEA's students about UEA, university life, Norwich and anything else you would like an answer to.

JUST ASK >

Course Reference Number: 667257

Assessment for Year 1

All our BA modules in Creative Writing and English Literature have no exams – we believe that the best way to express your thoughts about literature and to show off your development as a writer is through carefully crafted pieces of writing which you have time to rethink and revise. All your modules will be assessed through submitted coursework. Your final degree classification is made up of the marks you receive in your second and third years.

Creative Writing coursework takes the form of portfolios of shorter pieces of writing, or a longer, more substantial single project. You are also asked to write reflectively and critically about your own creative writing.

In Literature modules, you’ll often find yourself writing a critical essay, but you might find yourself pushing the boundaries of what you write by submitting creative criticism, where you express your new critical ideas by writing creatively.

Your coursework is supported by seminar discussion, peer feedback and tutorials with your seminar leader

Structure

During your first year, you’ll take three bespoke Creative Writing modules, in which you will develop your range of skills as a writer. The first semester is all about cultivating your craft, testing out the possibilities of different forms and techniques, pushing your boundaries as a writer, and introducing writing exercises to help you generate material. In the second semester, you will experiment with more avant-garde possibilities and work on techniques for adapting writing for stage or screen.

You will also collaborate with visual artists from Norwich University of the Arts or with UEA students from a range of other disciplines, including media, or medicine, or environmental science to broaden your scope as a writer working on new forms for new audiences. You’ll also improve your skills as a close reader of literary texts in our Reading Now and Slow Reading modules and get to grips with the span of English Literature in our Reading Literature in History module.

Teaching and Learning

All our teaching enables you to learn by doing – whether that’s by pulling apart the language of a short poem in a small seminar or writing a new poem yourself.

You will hone your creative writing skills through seminars, workshops and real-world collaborations. In first-year seminars you will undertake writing exercises to inspire you as a writer, exploring strategies for creating character, writing dialogue, determining mood and maintaining atmosphere. You’ll also work with students in other disciplines to broaden your understanding of the writer’s world. Your workshops will give you the chance to share your work with your peers and published writers, getting invaluable feedback and learning how to give constructive feedback to your peers.

English Literature is taught through lectures and seminars. Lectures offer larger frameworks to help you get to grips with the texts you’re reading. In a literary seminar, you might work intensively with passages of text to understand and interpret their language, or grapple with how some broad theoretical concepts can help us get to grips with a challenging text.

Your tutors’ guidance doesn’t stop when the seminar or workshop ends. Each member of staff at UEA dedicates specific hours each week to one-to-one meetings with students, when you can come and seek additional advice and feedback. You’ll also be assigned an adviser who supports you through your time as a Creative Writing and English Literature student by providing guidance on your developing interests and skills as a writer and a reader of literature, and on where those skills might take you in your career.

Admissions Live Chat

Virtual Open Day

Assessment for Year 2

Your coursework is supported by seminar discussion, peer feedback and tutorials with your seminar leader

Structure

You will begin to focus your creative writing on a particular form (or two), choosing from prose, poetry and scriptwriting modules. You will share your writing with your peers and with a published author in our creative writing workshops, receiving feedback and learning how to give constructive criticism to your peers, too. You will also take a module in creative non-fiction, which will develop your skills in life writing and hybrid forms that you will put into practice through first-hand experience of the writer’s world.

As a literary critic, you will be able to choose from all the available literature modules, gaining a grounding in a variety of literary periods and traditions. You might also choose to experiment with our innovative creative-critical modules, where the reading and writing of literature go hand-in-hand. Over the course of this year you’ll take a module on Shakespeare or an historical period of English literature from before 1789.

Teaching and Learning

All our teaching enables you to learn by doing – whether that’s by pulling apart the language of a short poem in a small seminar or writing a new poem yourself.

Admissions Live Chat

Virtual Open Day

Assessment for Year 3

Your coursework is supported by seminar discussion, peer feedback and tutorials with your seminar leader.

Structure

In your final-year creative writing modules you will focus intensively on your own practice. You’ll take a workshop, modelled on our world-famous Creative Writing MA. This will give you the chance to develop your work in a particular form: prose, poetry, or scriptwriting. You’ll also have the chance to write a creative writing dissertation in which you produce a substantial piece of poetry, prose or script, with one-to-one support from a tutor. Or you can choose a module in which you will be able to publish your own book or work towards a production of your own script. On the literature side, you’ll choose from a dazzling array of specialist modules,– currently we offer topics covering everything from epic poetry to children’s literature.

Teaching and Learning

All our teaching enables you to learn by doing – whether that’s by pulling apart the language of a short poem in a small seminar or writing a new poem yourself.

Admissions Live Chat

Virtual Open Day

Assessment for Year 1

Your coursework is supported by seminar discussion, peer feedback and tutorials with your seminar leader

Compulsory Modules

CREATIVE WRITING: AUTUMN SEMESTER

Code LDCC4001A

Credits 20

You will use structured exercises based on objects, handouts, discussion and visualisation to stimulate the production of prose fiction and poetry. Initially, you’ll write about 'what you know', drawing on notebooks, memories and family stories. Focus will shift to the work of established authors, using sample texts as a stimulus to your own writing. The aim of this module is to get you writing prose fiction and poetry. Along the way you’ll develop the craft elements of writing and acquire some of the disciplines necessary to be a writer: observation, keeping notebooks, writing in drafts, reading as a writer an submitting to deadlines, among others.

CREATIVE WRITING: SPRING SEMESTER

Code LDCC4015B

Credits 20

This module will build on the skills you have learnt in the Autumn Creative Writing workshops, using exercises, discussion and critique, but it will also provide you with experience in a broader range of forms and styles, including adaptation and scriptwriting. The module will be organised into three blocks/strands within which you’ll focus on Experimentation in writing, Adaptation into dramatic forms, and Collaboration in theory and practice. You'll have the opportunity to explore collaborative practice, potentially engaging in cross-arts. This process may also involve reflective practice and blogging (via a Virtual Learning Environment).

NEW FORMS: WRITING IN COLLABORATION

Code LDCC4017B

Credits 20

Writing is changing; creative forms are expanding to include interdisciplinary work. Writers no longer work only in isolation. The creative process often happens in collaboration with others in different disciplines and different environments. This module explores how writers work in collaboration with other artists, practitioners, theorists and industry to create work. You will be given an opportunity to learn and critically reflect on the skills of collaboration that will enable you to create a project with students from complementary disciplines.

READING LITERATURE IN HISTORY

Code LDCL4008A

Credits 20

This is the main introductory module to the study of literature. It aims to help new students to read historically, by offering a range of models of the relationship between literature and history, explored through the study of selected historical and literary moments. The module is taught by a weekly lecture, with an accompanying seminar.

READING NOW

Code LDCL4009A

Credits 20

Reading is at the heart of our experience of literature. It is central to the ways in which we think and write about literary texts, and to some of the claims made on their behalf. This module is concerned with what it is we do when we read literature, at university and elsewhere, and why. We will concentrate in particular on four elements: on the practice of what is commonly known as close reading, one of the building blocks of literary study; on some of the ways in which reading has been represented in literary texts themselves; on the kinds of significance, both moral and political, claimed on behalf of reading; and on reading as we do and think about it today, in a world ever more virtual and networked.

SLOW READING

Code LDCL4011B

Credits 20

This module seeks to build on and develop the work of the Autumn semester, in particular that of modules concerned with close reading. In small tutorial classes of two hours per week you will engage with a long text in a deep and sustained way across the semester, opening up a multi-layered and multi-faceted reading. The first half of the course will focus on the literary text itself, its forms and its stylistic innovations, alongside some short supplementary readings. As the module goes on, you will encounter the diverse ways in which others have read the text from different critical perspectives. You will reflect on, especially, the ways critics have brought the literary text into dialogue with theoretical texts to mutually illuminating effect, looking closely at some of the theoretical texts they are drawing on too. In the end, you too will bring the literary text into dialogue with some of the theoretical writing you encounter in the second half of the course. The real focus of this course is, of course, less the text you are reading than the very practice of reading itself.

Admissions Live Chat

Virtual Open Day

Important Information

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the modules listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the annual monitoring, review and update of modules. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes and their constituent modules, the University will endeavour to consult with students and others. It is also possible that the University may not be able to offer a module for reasons outside of its control, such as the illness of a member of staff. In some cases optional modules can have limited places available and so you may be asked to make additional module choices in the event you do not gain a place on your first choice. Where this is the case, the University will inform students.

Assessment for Year 2

Your coursework is supported by seminar discussion, peer feedback and tutorials with your seminar leader

Compulsory Modules

WRITING LIFE: THE WRITER'S WORLD THROUGH CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Code LDCC5018B

Credits 20

This module introduces you to writing creative non-fiction. You will investigate the nature of creative nonfiction, exploring the distinctive issues it raises for writers in recent published works and in the original writing you produce during the module; these issues included ethical considerations involved in drawing from real-life subjects as source material, the nature of truth, the role of research, and the interplay between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction.’ You will explore forms of creative nonfiction, such as life writing, travel writing, observational writing, the personal essay, and the lyric essay. The module will also offer you the opportunity to experience your writing ‘in the world’ via a community group or organisation as a research source for your creative non-fiction.

Optional A Modules

(40 credits)

CRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE

Code LDCL5031A

Credits 20

This is a module you will find helpful throughout your degree, informing and perhaps changing the way you read and analyse literature, film and other cultural forms. Across the twelve weeks, you’ll not only engage with the rich, complex and provocative work of literary critics and theorists – including deconstructive, feminist, post-colonial and queer theorists – but also of some of the thinkers and writers who have influenced them: such as Marx, Freud and Saussure. You will therefore encounter some of the most important and exciting thinkers of the modern period, acquiring an understanding of developments in linguistics, economics, psychoanalysis and philosophy, and tracing the ways in which these overlap with, and inform, literary and cultural study.

EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Code LDCL5033B

Credits 20

In this module, you’ll examine examples of twentieth-century European writing (all read in translation). Rather than (merely) place writers in their national contexts, you’ll deal with topics, issues and formal experiments that complicate, sometimes transcend, national boundaries. In fact you’ll interrogate what 'European' might mean in relation to literature - where are the borders? Are continental Europeans fundamentally 'other'? And if so, how does this otherness manifest itself aesthetically, thematically, tonally and formally? You'll look at how writers from different countries frequently challenge the conventions of genre and the conventions of reading and interpreting. Among a range of important innovations (or continuities), you may explore varieties of 'European' modernism, postmodernism, the absurd, fantasy, noir, and other genres. You’ll also ask how European writers have responded to the challenges, upheavals and catastrophes of the twentieth century and how they deal with the ethnic, religious and cultural diversity within Europe. You’ll engage with these topics in weekly lectures, and you’ll be assessed by means of an individually chosen project (supported by a formative proposal followed by individual and group tutorials).

ROMANTICISM 1780-1840

Code LDCL5034B

Credits 20

1780-1840 was the Age of Revolution and Romanticism, often regarded as a revolutionary style of writing. It was the age of the American and French Revolution and the Wars they entailed, the age of slavery and rebellion, of empire and conquest. You may think of Romantic writing as mainly nature poetry, primarily work by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. But the signs of a ‘Romantic’ sensibility can also be found in a much broader constituency of writing: the novel, letter writing, the essay, political and aesthetic theory, and social commentary. In this module you’ll be introduced to some of the most exciting Romantic period writing, including poetry, fiction and non-fictional prose from the Age of Revolution. You’ll also explore key period artistic and literary concepts such as the sublime, beautiful, picturesque, the Hellenic, and pastoral, and you’ll analyse the many ways in which the writers of the period exploited concepts of landscape. You’ll look at issues such as the Supernatural and Dreaming. Your understanding of Romantic writing will be enhanced by an analysis of aesthetics, politics, and of the work of women writers. During the course you’ll explore poetry by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, as well as Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1816) and Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818; 1831). You may also consider writings by less familiar poets, such as John Clare, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, as well as prose works by Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft and others. You’ll look at how writing is gendered in the period and the implications of this for both male and female writers. You’ll be taught through a mixture of one-hour weekly lectures and two-hour weekly seminars, as well as self-directed study. You’ll gain experience in communicating your ideas in tutorials, as well as through written work and presentations. You’ll be assessed through two formative pieces (a close reading and a project bibliography) and one summative piece on a project chosen by yourself in discussion with your seminar tutors.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5041A

Credits 20

The eighteenth century was a time of great literary experimentation in which many new genres emerged, including the periodical essay, the mock-epic, the ballad opera, and the novel. These genres took shape within a commercial revolution that transformed both what it meant to be an author and what it meant to be a reader. In this module you will see how writers such as Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope and John Gay created works that both participated in and criticized the culture of commerce. You will explore the fictions created by writers such as Daniel Defoe, Horace Walpole, and Elizabeth Inchbald, who developed very different versions of the novel. You will also examine how writers such as Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and Olaudah Equiano navigated the new possibilities for authorship that were opening up in the period. Ultimately you are invited to become an “eighteenth-centuryist” and to make imaginative connections between the exciting range of genres that emerged in this century and the culture that produced them.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING: RENAISSANCE AND REVOLUTION (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5042A

Credits 20

This module introduces you to a huge variety of kinds of writing from one of Britain's most exciting and turbulent periods of cultural, political and intellectual transformation: the seventeenth century. The module works through lectures, which establish larger questions we might ask of the week's material, and seminars, in which we read passages of texts together closely. We begin in the early seventeenth century by exploring the ways English writing was transformed by its encounters with classical texts (giving you the opportunity to read classical authors such as Horace and Martial in translation), before turning to explore women writers’ complicated relationship to early-modern literary culture. We examine the emergence of new forms of life-writing, especially those written by women, and explore the ways in which seventeenth-century travellers wrote about their encounters with the Middle East. In the module's latter section, we ask how literary forms were transformed by the extraordinary upheavals of the English civil war and the execution of the monarch. Authors we study include famous figures such as Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton (including a look at his masterpiece, Paradise Lost), as well as many lesser-known writers, including women such as Lucy Hutchinson and Hester Pulter. To better understand the ways early-modern texts’ circumstances of publication shape their meaning, we offer the opportunity to sign up for an (entirely optional) visit to the Norfolk Heritage Centre (in the centre of Norwich) to handle their remarkable collection of seventeenth-century books.

MODERNISM

Code LDCL5045A

Credits 20

The modernist movement transformed literature and the arts worldwide in the early part of the 20th century, peaking in the period between 1918 and 1939. Although the term modernism was rarely used by authors in this period, in the period after World War II it became the usual term to describe a group of writers, responding to one another, whose work is characterised by radical experiments with language and form, which aimed to do justice to a range of many subjects such as the mysteries of consciousness and the unconscious, gender, sexuality, and desire, violence and democracy, the primitive and the mechanical. We will be reading a range of authors, including such long-canonised figures as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, HD, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, but expanding the modernist canon in the light of recent scholarship to other more recently revived authors such as Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, and Jean Rhys. We will trace some of the origins of modernism in earlier literary movements such as Symbolism, Imagism, Aestheticism, and Impressionism, and explore its kinship with foreign literary movements such as Dada and Surrealism. Modernism invented modern methods of criticism and we will be placing a particular emphasis on the close reading of poetry and poetic prose. A study of modernism is essential for understanding all 20th century literature and this module is highly recommended for any students wishing to take any modules in 20th-century literature.

MEDIEVAL WRITING (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5063A

Credits 20

This module provides an introduction to the study of medieval literature. You will explore Chaucer’s poetry (through works such as 'The Clerk’s Tale', 'The Merchant's Tale', 'The Nun’s Priest’s Tale'), the wonderful Morall Fabillis of Robert Henryson, the work of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, and a number of important Middle English Romances, including the superb 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. You will work in three inter-related ways: by exploring a range of important medieval literary genres (the lyric, allegorical narrative, romance, ‘mystical writing’, ‘life writing’, moral fable, dream vision); by considering important aspects of the medieval world (social, political, religious) and their textual representation; and by addressing the material circumstances in and by which medieval texts were written and read, published and circulated (in manuscripts and in the very earliest printed books). The aim, then, is really two-fold: to introduce you to the remarkable riches of medieval literature (one of the pay-offs of the relative linguistic difficulty of Middle English is that it forces us to attend slowly and carefully to the textual details of our material in a way I suspect we don’t always find ourselves able to and in a way that the texts we will be reading wonderfully reward), and, at the same time, to allow you to try your hand as medievalists, exploring the distinctive possibilities and practices that come with working with this material.

VICTORIAN WRITING

Code LDCL5067B

Credits 20

This module aims to equip you with a knowledge of writing from across the Victorian period, in a variety of modes (fiction, poetry, science, journalism, criticism, nonsense). We will examine authors such as George Eliot, Tennyson, Dickens, Darwin, Charlotte Bronte, and the Brownings. You will thus develop an awareness of how different kinds of writing in the period draw on, influence, and contest with each other. Likewise, you will acquire a sense for the cultural, political and socio-economic contexts of 19th-century writing, and some of the material contexts in which that writing took place (serial publication, popular readership, periodical writing, public controversy).

CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Code LDCL5069B

Credits 20

What is the state of the art of the novel at present? And what are some of the distinguishing preoccupations and characteristics of the contemporary novel? This module seeks to consider these questions with a view to developing an understanding of the condition of the novel today. The module focuses on fiction published in the UK and Ireland in the last ten years, with a particular focus on more inventive writing. We’ll read a small set of contemporary novels, the content and form of each of which will exemplify some of the possibilities for fiction in the present day. We’ll consider the relation between the contemporary novel and the contemporary moment – for example, our concerns regarding the environment, identity, nationhood, and history – and think also about what it might mean to be or to call oneself contemporary: to be together with one’s own time. The list of authors chosen for the module changes regularly, as you would expect. Recently, it has included the likes of Ali Smith, Anne Enright, Zadie Smith and Mohsin Hamid. You’ll consider a range of ways of conceiving and interpreting the contemporary novel, and discuss these ways with your peers. There is no consensus about what does or should constitute a canon of contemporary fiction, although there is a growing critical literature on the subject, some of which we’ll read. It will be our job, in lectures and in seminars, to think carefully about what novels published in the last ten years offer the best argument for the continued viability of the novel itself as a contemporary art form.

SHAKESPEARE (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5070B

Credits 20

The aim of this lecture-seminar module is to help you become a better reader of Shakespearean drama. Shakespeare is now so universally known and read that it is easy to forget that he wrote at a specific historical moment for specific audiences, actors and theatrical spaces. What happens to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays when we read them within the context of theatrical performance? This is what our module enables you to do -- and in doing so, it aims to give you fresh, new ways to interpret Shakespearean language and theatricality. Lectures equip you with methods and contexts for reading Shakespeare's plays; seminars give you the chance to put these into practice through close, attentive readings of his plays. Each week we study a different play in detail. The summative assessment asks you to put what you've been learning into practice by writing a critical analysis of more than one play using some of the module's methods.

EMPIRE AND AFTER: GLOBALIZING ENGLISH

Code LDCL5079A

Credits 20

Today, literature in English is produced in many countries across the world and English increasingly enjoys a status as a ‘global’ language. In this module you will explore how this situation came about by placing the development of English literary traditions both in the British Isles and elsewhere into the long historical context of the rise and fall of the British Empire. Beginning with canonical works by British writers from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, you will then consider literary and political responses to the experience of empire and colonization by writers from areas such as South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Australasia, and the Americas. You will explore how ‘English Literature’ has been shaped on a global scale by global historical forces, and how different the history of the English literary tradition looks when placed alongside and in counterpoint to these ‘other’ writings in English. You will then discuss the writings of authors such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, Amitav Ghosh, Kate Grenville and J.M Coetzee amongst others. The module will introduce you to the theoretical and conceptual apparatus of postcolonial literary studies and to some of the key frameworks for understanding the formation of the modern world, such as race and racism, nations and nationalism, colonial discourse and postcolonial theory, and how gender and sexuality were pivotal in the formation of colonial and post-colonial identities.

Optional B Modules

(20 credits)

LGBT AND BEYOND: SEXUAL CULTURES, QUEER IDENTITIES, AND THE POLITICS OF DESIRE

Code HUM-5007A

Credits 20

How do notions of gender and sexuality shape culture, and how are in turn our understanding and experiences of gender and sexuality shaped by cultural production? How important are other times, places and identifications – associated with class, race, ethnicity – to these understandings and experiences? And to what extent can a film, an image, a testimony, or a place capture such complexity? Addressing these questions from an interdisciplinary approach, the aim of the module is to explore the ways in which gender and sexuality are constituted through a broad array of experiences, practices, and cultural products. The module focuses on issues raised in classical and contemporary research in history, politics, media, cultural studies and visual cultures such as: representation and cultural production; subjectivity; identity; identification; bodies and embodiment; performance and performativity; among others. Overall, by exploring theory in conjunction with queer cultural production that explores questions of power, identity, and desire across different racial, national, and cultural landscapes, the module aims to problematise how gender and sexuality are not stable identities or classifications but are instead processes involving normalisations, hierarchies and relations of domination that can be challenged, troubled and/or queered.

THE WRITING OF JOURNALISM (AUT)

Code LDCC5013A

Credits 20

What kinds of writing skills produce great journalism? This question is essential to creating powerful journalism and it’s a central concern of this module. The Writing of Journalism enables you to develop a critical awareness of the skills and structures involved in creating effective journalism. You’ll consider a range of journalistic forms and find out how best to nurture and develop your own writing. You'll have the opportunity to explore the ways in which journalistic writing works – its contexts, its demands, and its inventiveness. This will enable us to approach journalism as a discourse with its own conventions, practices, and ideologies. This module is concerned with journalism as a practice, and a genre. As such, it involves discussion, peer-workshops, and practical experience of reading and writing news and feature articles. In addition to writing your own journalism, you will examine journalistic writing and critical work concerning the craft, in order to probe and challenge your own ideas and assumptions about the practice and production of this writing form. Rather than see the practice of journalism and the critical study of journalism as distinct activities, this module aims to engage you as critical readers and writers whose work is informed by both contexts. In so doing, you’ll gain a greater understanding of the demands and conventions of journalistic writing, develop and sharpen your own work, and gain the discursive flexibility which will allow you to navigate the writing of journalism today.

THE WRITING OF JOURNALISM (SPR)

Code LDCC5014B

Credits 20

FEMINIST THEATRES

Code LDCD5058B

Credits 20

What was the feminist theatre movement and what does it mean for you now as a writer, theatre maker and/or scholar? Feminist Theatre allows you to explore key feminist theatre makers from the Suffrage movement to the present, focusing on radical companies and writers of the 1970s and 1980s. Combining seminars and practical workshops, you will investigate what feminist historiography is and how you can engage creatively with archives. The module invites you to draw on a lineage of feminist ideas and methods to consider and challenge the continued under representation of women in theatre (and beyond). Assessment will be part analytical and part creative or creative-critical work, with an option to create a performance. All welcome! No need to identify as a woman or feminist to take part.

ADAPTATION: SHAKESPEARE ON STAGE AND SCREEN (PRE-1789)

Code LDCL5021A

Credits 20

This module explores the rich dramatic and cinematic traditions of Shakespearean adaptation. It considers a range of adaptations, from the seventeenth-century versions of Macbeth, King Lear and Henry V to more recent film versions of Shakespeare's plays, examining the light that adaptive transformations may cast on both the original plays and on the different social and cultural circumstances of the new productions. The module focuses in particular upon cinematic adaptations of Richard III, Henry V, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and King Lear, though will also discuss many other examples from stage and screen. In seminars linked to weekly screenings this module offers an introduction to the theory and practice of adaptation as well as an outline view of how to read Shakespeare on film.

AUSTEN AND THE BRONTES: READING THE ROMANCE

Code LDCL5035B

Credits 20

This module considers texts by Austen and the Brontes in relation to a wide variety of literary and historical contexts: feminisms, colonialism, impact of war, the social status of the woman writer, representations of governesses, madness, mad women and mad men, rakes, foreigners and strangers. We investigate the forms of communication which seem to be offered by and in the romance novel and the ways in which the lives of these authors have been told and read as romances. Opportunities will be available to work on film versions and students will also have, as part of the assessment, the opportunity to produce their own piece of creative writing in response to the primary texts.

FROM PUSHKIN TO CHEKHOV: NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN FICTION

Code LDCL5048A

Credits 20

‘Russia is old; her literature is new. Russian history goes back to the ninth century; Russian literature, so far as it interests the world, begins in the nineteenth…. Russian literature is the voice of a giant, waking from a long sleep, and becoming articulate. … And what he has said has been well worth the thousand years of waiting.’ What has nineteenth century Russian literature said that the world has waited so long to hear? This is a question you will begin to answer as you read some of the age’s great authors, such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. You’ll gain insight into what makes this writing distinctive and an awareness of the political, social and cultural conditions that created it. You’ll discover why it was so important to other European writers and learn about the intriguing literary relationship between Russia and the West. You’ll start by familiarising yourself with some of the historical background, concentrating on the ‘westernisation’ of Russia, a process begun by Peter the Great and made visible in the construction of the city of St Petersburg. At the beginning of the module you’ll be given some key themes and questions to think about; these will help you to focus your reading during the coming weeks. You’ll learn through seminars and independent study and research. You’ll be assessed on one essay, which can be developed from a class presentation. By the end of the module you’ll have read some of the great nineteenth century Russian writers and gained an understanding of the political, historical and social background of their work. You’ll have discovered why these novels had such a profound impact in Western Europe and how they were instrumental in the development of the Modernist movement in Britain. You’ll have gained a wider literary perspective and reading in translation will have made you think in new ways about your own language too.

THREE WOMEN WRITERS

Code LDCL5050B

Credits 20

‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.’ Virginia Woolf wrote these words in A Room of One’s Own, her polemical essay about women and fiction. Woolf suggests that historically women have been reticent about openly declaring themselves as writers. Elsewhere in the piece she argues that literary language itself is unfit for women’s use and that women’s writing is distinct, undervalued and hampered by women’s social, economic and political history. This module puts Woolf’s assertions to the test. In this module you’ll read the work of Woolf and two of her contemporaries, for example, Katherine Mansfield and Edith Wharton. You’ll explore their writing in its historical and cultural context and you’ll think about how it may or may not have influenced later thinking about the position of women. You’ll consider whether or not you think their writing was innovative and what relevance it might have for us today. Each week you’ll read a work by one of the three writers on the module alongside a short piece of critical writing, either contemporary with the main text or an extract from a later time that in some way engages with the themes of the week’s central text. You’ll learn through close reading, class discussion and independent study. Each week there’ll be opportunities for members of the group to present their ideas and research on either the main or the critical text – work that can be developed in your summative assessment which will consist of one essay submitted towards the end of the semester. Your growing knowledge and understanding of the concerns and debates that were current at the time the texts were written will enable you to unlock some of the preoccupations that can lie hidden beneath the visible surface of these women’s writing. These books were written at the turn of the twentieth century, but by the end of the module you’ll not only be able to assess their impact in their own time but also discuss just how significant they are to society today.

GOODBYE TO BERLIN? LITERATURE & VISUAL CULTURE IN WEIMAR GERMANY

Code LDCL5051A

Credits 20

You will explore some of the exciting developments in verbal and visual culture of the Weimar Republic between the First and Second World Wars, e.g. experimental theatre, Weimar cinema, cabaret, visual arts, the Bauhaus, etc. Texts considered may include writings by Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Joseph Roth and others as well as key films by e.g. Pabst (Threepenny Opera), Lang (Metropolis), von Sternberg (Blue Angel) and others. A particular focus is likely to be representations of gender on page, stage and screen. Active seminar participation is expected. A knowledge of German, while useful, is not a prerequisite; translations are available.

I AM

Code LDCL5054A

Credits 20

How do our literary choices inform our sense of self? What do our critical and theoretical interests say about our values and concerns? How do we make connections between our academic studies and the outside world? 'I Am' explores ideas concerned with the self, being, consciousness, and identity through engaging with a range of texts, from literature and literary criticism through to personal essays and online blogs. The aim is to help you, through the practice of reading and writing, reflect on your own values and intentions and to discover a language in which to articulate, with greater confidence, who you are. You should commit to participating in a process of uncovering your reality. This process will include classroom discussion, peer review, learning new approaches to writing and engaging in exploratory practical exercises. You’ll also be expected to keep a journal in order to reflect on connections between your reading and yourself. 'I Am' is grounded in a commitment to help you consider your future beyond university. An increased level of self-awareness will undoubtedly support you as you approach the task of making decisions about jobs and careers in the future.

WRITING THE WILD

Code LDCL5059B

Credits 20

It is a popular conception that writing about the natural world and its fragility is a particular fixation of the late twentieth and early twenty first century. However, concern about the natural world and man's place in his environment became a major preoccupation in the eighteenth century. Writing the Wild asks to what extent nature writers in our period may be read as being in dialogue with their eighteenth century predecessors. Texts will be predominately non-fiction and will give students the opportunity to study the less familiar writings of such authors as Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen alongside contemporary nature writing by Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie and Tim Dee. Topics will include: nostalgia, the impact of war on writing about the countryside, the relationship between nature, writing and the mind and the notion of 'landscape'. This module offers students the opportunity to write 'creatively' as well as 'critically'.

READING AND WRITING TRANSLATIONS

Code LDCL5061A

Credits 20

How do we convey the experience of one language and culture in the words of another? What is at stake intellectually, artistically, and politically in translation? This module will provide you with a descriptive vocabulary for the analysis of literary translation and an introduction to key theoretical explanations of what happens when we translate. You’ll study translations from a range of historical periods, genres and languages. In the past, we have worked on authors such as Alexander Pushkin, Pablo Neruda, Adonis, Thomas Mann, and Knut Hamsun. Theories have included the classic controversies of St. Jerome and Vladimir Nabokov as well as debates about cultural equivalence and political issues such as the representation of the foreign. The module is taught by seminar where we engage with translation in a variety of ways, for example comparing different translations of a single text, translating the Bible from multiple languages into English, rewriting existing translations, and studying draft manuscript translations of a novel by Georges Perec. Assessment is by summative coursework for which you can either produce a comparative analysis of existing translations or an original translation with commentary. On successful completion of this module you’ll be able to describe the linguistic and stylistic features of a variety of texts as well as critically assess and apply different theories of translation. A thorough reading knowledge of another language besides English is advisable, but not essential.

READING AND WRITING IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND (pre-1789)

Code LDCL5062B

Credits 20

In this module we will study some of the most important poetry and prose of the English Renaissance, including masterpieces by Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, as well as Shakespeare's early narrative poetry (not covered on the Shakespeare module). We will be studying these writers in a unique way. Behind this great outpouring of Elizabethan writing lay a vibrant literary culture which valued rhetoric, argument, elaborate and often playful self-presentation, and which insisted that good reading helped you to develop an individual style as a writer. In response to your reading of Renaissance literature, you will put the tenets of this culture into practice, building up over the course of the module a collection of short pieces of writing in prose (or sometimes, if you wish, poetry). When reading Sidney's ground breaking 'Defence of Poetry', for instance, you might draw on his rhetorical and argumentative techniques to write your own defence of any modern art form of your choice. Or when looking at the way Thomas Nashe plays with the form of his printed books you might have the opportunity to experiment with innovative ways of presenting your own writing to its readers. Revised versions of these short pieces of writing, built up across the module, constitute your summative assessment. This module allows you to think critically in genres other than conventional academic essays, and in doing so aims to foster connections between critical and creative writing. You will have the chance to develop more confidence and self-awareness as a writer and critic through studying some of the greatest English literature.

PUBLISHING (AUT)

Code LDCL5064A

Credits 20

Have you ever wondered how books are chosen for publication, or do you want to set up a literary magazine? This module address conceptual as well as practical aspects of the publishing of texts, including discussions around readership the meaning of editorship and what constitutes an editorial policy. You will be taught how to set up, run and market your own publication (such as a magazine, a book, a fanzine), to consider the principles of good design, and will learn the rudiments of finance, scheduling and copyright law. You'll begin with an introduction to the concepts behind cover and page design, and an opportunity to put your new knowledge into practice by designing and writing copy for a book jacket. You go on to present and develop an idea for a short publication and, via discussion, class exercises and private research, learn to write or select, then edit, material for it. You will engage with the processes involved in its hypothetical production and learn to identify and address its readership. You'll also benefit from taught sessions on Adobe Indesign software in our Media Suite to enable you to design your publication at a simple, basic level. As you study you'll gain experience in communicating your ideas to a class and in tutorial, as well as through word and image in your formative work and portfolio.

PUBLISHING (SPR)

Code LDCL5065B

Credits 20

WORDS AND IMAGES

Code LDCL5068B

Credits 20

In this module, you will explore the relationship between words and images in contemporary literature. You will cover what is meant by reading images, examine the varying but related stories that words and pictures tell, and analyse the narrative techniques employed in illustrated texts. As well as developing a critical vocabulary with which to discuss how these two media can be combined, you will survey shifts in the generic conventions of such literature over the last few decades so you develop an awareness of the various narrative techniques utilised by the medium. Rather than assuming comics are simplistic, debased or ‘illiterary’, you will address the medium as a site of exciting and innovative literary and artistic experimentation. You will also have the chance to carry out your own creative work in the genre.

LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY

Code LDCL5072A

Credits 20

This module will offer a series of different approaches to the question of how Literature and Philosophy can speak to each other as academic disciplines, demonstrating the breadth and diversity of the two fields, as well as acquainting students with the research in literary criticism and philosophy currently being pursued at UEA. As well as examining the ways in which literature can illuminate and trouble philosophical argument, it will explore literature and 'the literary' as a topic for philosophical analysis, and the kinds of thinking such a topic would demand. Setting literature and philosophy into dialogue in this way will engender a more capacious understanding of the particular philosophical issues, and literary techniques, under discussion. The course will allow students to develop an awareness of the limits and advantages of various modes of literary and philosophical expression, and to foster more sophisticated skills in both literary and philosophical criticism. The module will be made up of a lecture circus, with two weeks given to each lecturer on a particular topic related to their current research (there will be five in all, including a lecture from the module convener, plus two from Philosophy and two from Literature, Drama and Creative Writing). The seminars will discuss issues arising from these lectures, working with texts set by the lecturer.

READING AND WRITING CONTEMPORARY POETRY

Code LDCL5073B

Credits 20

Using the reading and study of poetry from the post-war context up to the present day, you'll consider some of the concerns of poetry including voice, form/structure and the 'poetry of witness'. You'll also look at contemporary visual art to consider correspondences between the arts. The poets studied will be drawn principally from an Anglo-American tradition and may include such writers as Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carol Ann Duffy, Carolyn Forché, Patience Agbabi and Emily Berry among others. Formative work includes creating a mini-anthology of contemporary poetry and there will be the chance to discuss poems you've written or read. You'll be able to write creatively and/or critically for assessment.

THE SHORT STORY (AUT)

Code LDCL5074A

Credits 20

What is a short story? What do short story writers have to say? What about short story critics and theorists? Is the short story a narrative in miniature? Or is there more to a short story than simply being 'short'? And why are critics so concerned with whether the short story is alive or dead? These are the kind of questions this module will investigate by asking you to think as a short story reader, theorist, critic and writer. Reading will be drawn from short story writers - and writing about the short story - roughly spanning the 19th century to the present, and from a range of cultural contexts. Our interest will not be to establish a history of the short story, but instead to explore the range of thematic preoccupations, changing definitions, and critical debates surrounding the form. You will have the opportunity to respond to these questions in critical and/or creative forms of assessment. Writers studied might include Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, Julio Cortazar, Anton Chekov, Ali Smith and Ryunosuke Aqutagawa. This list is suggestive only.

THE SHORT STORY (SPR)

Code LDCL5075B

Credits 20

What is a short story? What do short story writers have to say? What about short story critics and theorists? Is the short story a narrative in miniature? Or is there more to a short story than simply being 'short'? And why are critics so concerned with whether the short story is alive or dead? These are the kind of questions this module will investigate by asking you to think as a short story reader, theorist, critic and writer. Reading will be drawn from short story writers - and writing about the short story - roughly spanning the 19th century to the present, and from a range of cultural contexts. Our interest will not be to establish a history of the short story, but instead to explore the range of thematic preoccupations, changing definitions, and critical debates surrounding the form. You'll have the opportunity to respond to these questions in critical and/or creative forms of assessment. Writers studied might include Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, Julio Cortazar, Anton Chekov, Ali Smith and Ryunosuke Aqutagawa.

THE WRITING OF HISTORY

Code LDCL5077A

Credits 20

What makes a good history essay? What makes a good literary critical essay? How are they different? How do the disciplines of History and English Literature approach argument and evidence, narration and description? What are the generic, formal and stylistic expectations that govern academic writing in each of these disciplines? Some version of these questions will have occurred to any student attempting to meet the assessment criteria in a university degree. They are perhaps particularly pressing for students studying both literature and history, where somewhat different approaches are required by each discipline. This module brings historians, literary critics and creative writers into a multi-disciplinary conversation designed to explore the tensions as well as the continuities between history and literary studies. By asking faculty members from the two schools to investigate similar territory from contrasting perspectives, you will explore how very similar subjects and sources can be treated differently by different disciplines (and by different methodological orientations within those disciplines). Historians, literary critics and creative writers will give guest lectures that describe and analyse their research process and writing practice. There will also be some more theoretically driven weeks where the work of key philosophers and theorists of history and literature will be read and discussed. You are encouraged to reflect on your own approach to the writing of history and literary criticism and will have the opportunity to learn reflexive writing. The summative assessment asks you to analyse a source text using the resources of both disciplines, and then to write a reflexive essay positioning your own approach in relation to other historians and critics studied on the module.

WORKING WITH WORDS

Code LDCL5078B

Credits 20

This module offers you the opportunity to develop both critical understanding and practical skills in writing and the communication of ideas within and for professions in the creative industries, and to gain an appreciation and knowledge of the sector and its place in the creative economy. Through a combination of lectures, masterclasses, seminars and workshops, students will be exploring both the form and context of writing within the publishing industry, journalism, film and broadcast, new media writing (digital content, blogging), and other forms of writing within the creative industries. The module is closely aligned to ‘Working with Words’, the annual, UEA-based student conference that explores communication and writing in the workplace. Both formative and summative assessments will be informed by this event, and therefore attendance will be compulsory. You will also participate in a project supporting a live, national website, ‘After English’ hosted and managed by UEA. Selections of writing produced in the module will be uploaded to this site. The module demands a high level of participation and students will be expected to engage in regular writing exercises, individual and group research and project work. Students will be expected to undertake a summative project which requires them to research a specific area of practice in the creative industries sector, create examples of written work pertinent to this, and reflect on their own development. This module is designed for students who are interested in exploring their own career identity as ‘writers’ but are prepared to scrutinise and contextualise this identity through wider industry and career research and practice.

FICTIONS OF HISTORY

Code LDCL5082B

Credits 20

'What is historical fiction and what do historical writers have to say? What are the pleasures and challenges of reading and writing in the genre, and how does a historical writer conduct and employ their research? What do critics and theorists think? In this module you will explore such questions and more. Your studies will stimulate and support your own critical and creative responses. You will learn about the development of the literary genre in its various forms, including the experimental, consider the differences between writing history and writing historical literature, study debates about authenticity, the relationship between historical subject and contemporary viewpoint and about appropriation and entitlement when writing about a culture’s history. You will have the opportunity to respond to these questions in critical and/or creative forms of assessment. Writers studied, are likely to be from the 19th to the 21st centuries, and might include Margaret Atwood, Emma Donaghue, Salman Rushdie, Andrew Miller, Andrea Levy, Sarah Waters and Virginia Woolf, as well as poets such as Robert Browning.

FAKES, FRAUDS AND HOAXES

Code LDCL5083A

Credits 20

Would you present your own poetry as if it were the translation of an ancient manuscript, or the writings of a medieval monk? Would you write a memoir documenting your addictions which mostly consisted of made-up people and events? What about writing an autobiography of your life as a former teenage prostitute (never having been a prostitute)? These crimes – and more – were perpetrated in the past: in 1760 James Macpherson ‘translated’ a text by the third century poet Ossian, the original of which never existed; later in the same decade Thomas Chatterton claimed to have ‘discovered’ the writings of the fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, but actually wrote the poems himself. More recently, too, with James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, and JT LeRoy’s Sarah, we witness similar attempts to con or defraud unsuspecting readers. On this module, you will concentrate on four questions: the difference between the fake and the real; the skills a faker needs to produce an inauthentic version of the real thing; the ways a fake might reflect on the value of the original; and the process of discovering and detecting fakery. You will examine a series of test cases, from a range of historical periods, which will sharpen your sense of literary property, literary propriety, and literary ethics, and also provide you with a sense of the debates that shape and inform literature as a discipline and an institution. Formative assessment will include the opportunity to produce your own fake!

WAR LIVES: WRITING BRITAIN IN WORLD WAR II

Code LDCL5083B

Credits 20

World War II brought the horror of war home to the British. War invaded the country in new ways: it reshaped Britain's landscapes, radically altered the social practices of everyday life, and shattered people's very sense of what it meant to live. As one writer remarked, the war worked at a thinning of the membrane between the 'this' and the 'that'. War life was hallucinatory, and the struggle to write about the home-front invades the writing of the 1940s in strange and unpredictable ways. Many of us have personal family stories about the war but very few people studying literature today have read fiction from the period. In fact, this module is one of the only ones in the UK where you can study fiction from and about the period. To do this, we'll be asking five questions: what did 'war lives' actually look like? How did writers from the period represent life on the home front? How does literary criticism read these representations? How do contemporary writers re-imagine the period? And how can we, as critical and/or creative writers, use all these materials from and about the period to find creative and critical innovation in our own work as we read and write war lives. In this module we'll be studying four kinds of materials. We'll look at actual archival work from the period (and i hope we'll be able to do some research trips and use digital archives to support this). We'll read fiction (short stories and novels) and non-fiction (essays and letters) by writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, A. L. Barker, Angus Wilson, Henry Green and Patrick Hamilton - you probably haven't heard of them, but that's because literature of the period is only recently reemerging from critical neglect. We'll read this new critical work on the literature of the period. And we'll read fiction written in the past thirty years or so that is set in, or about, the British home front in WWII. This module will give you the chance to develop an understanding with an area of literature you probably have never encountered. But it will also give you an opportunity to consider the relationship between historical context and literary form or representation in a very concentrated, research specialist way. You'll get a chance to work an exciting range of academic materials: archives, letters, fiction, and criticism. And you'll get a chance to develop your critical understanding of how your own writing - whether creative or critical - can find innovative ways of representing your research.

WATCHING YOUR LANGUAGE

Code LDCL5084A

Credits 20

We all know our own language, but a great deal of that knowledge is automatic: we’re not aware of what we know. This module uses an assortment of concepts, exercises and texts to develop a more precise consciousness of the way language is used. It will exploit the resources of the Oxford English Dictionary to see how individual words grow and change their meanings. It will ask what ‘standard English’ is, and why some writers choose to deviate from it. It will explore the idea that language may be corrupted, with disastrous political effects. And it will look at some historical attempts to control words, including current debates about the language of prejudice and hatred. Literary texts will include George Orwell’s 1984 and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Critical materials will include extracts from M.M. Bakhtin, Victor Klemperer, Raymond Williams, Deborah Cameron. Written work will consist of short reports and analyses, some of them drawing on students’ own experience of language in use.

HE SAID, SHE SAID: GENDER AND PERSPECTIVE IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Code LDCL5085B

Credits 20

This module asks: - How does gender affect our perception of the world? - Why is it important to critique ideas of gender at this point in history? - How does the perceived gender of an author affect our interpretation of their work? - How does our own gender affect how we write and interpret fiction? - What about the intersection of gender and race? Gender and sexuality? - How does our position on the axis of oppression and privilege affect our personal experience and our ability to write from the perspective of those with intrinsically different experience? - How does our position on the axis of oppression and privilege affect our ideas of authenticity? - In a time of human social and political upheaval, is all art inherently political?

Optional C Modules

(40 credits)

CREATIVE WRITING: PROSE FICTION (AUT)

Code LDCC5001A

Credits 20

This module will enable you to test your abilities and potential as a writer of prose fiction, building on the experience you already have in a formal creative writing environment. The first half of the course will be exploratory and practical, using structured exercises and handouts. You’ll be asked to consider such issues as character, genre, voice, dialogue and point of view. In the second half, the emphasis will shift to constructive group discussion of your own work, along with that of your peers. The overall aim of this module will be to develop your expressive and technical skills in writing prose fiction, and to improve your abilities as an editor and critic of your own and other people's work. This module is exclusive to English Literature with Creative Writing students and for other students who have achieved a mark of 68%+ (or equivalent for Visiting students) in a previous Creative Writing module. All other students should enrol on Creative Writing: Introduction (Aut) or Creative Writing: Introduction (Spring).

CREATIVE WRITING: SCRIPTWRITING (AUT)

Code LDCC5002A

Credits 20

Scriptwriting develops your ability to create and understand dramatic texts, through exercises in writing drama and the analysis of a range of plays and/or film scripts. In this module you’ll explore differing forms and styles and your work will receive feedback from both the tutor and your peers. Your first assignment will be a portfolio of shorter pieces, and then you’ll write a play, radio drama or screenplay of up to 20 minutes length. The course is hands-on, inspiring and practical, and you’ll be writing every week. You’ll be invited to specialise in writing for stage/radio or film/television after you are allocated a place. Scriptwriting and Performance students take this module and the Spring module Creative Writing: Scriptwriting (Spr) as compulsory modules. Students on other programmes may take either the Autumn module or the Spring module, but not both and must have achieved a mark of 68%+ (or equivalent for Visiting students) in a previous Creative Writing module. All other students should enrol on Creative Writing: Introduction (Aut) or Creative Writing: Introduction (Spring).

CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY (AUT)

Code LDCC5003A

Credits 20

This module enables students to test the range of their abilities as writers of poetry. The first half of the course will be exploratory and practical, using structured exercises and handouts to consider such issues as voice, persona, sound, imagery, metaphor, structure and form. In the second half the emphasis will shift to constructive group discussion of students' own work. Aims: The aim of this module is to develop students' expressive and technical skills in writing poetry and to improve students' abilities as editors and critics of their own and other people's work. This module is exclusive to English Literature With Creative Writing students and for other students who have achieved a mark of 68%+ (or equivalent for Visiting students) in a previous Creative Writing module. All other students should enrol on Creative Writing: Introduction (Aut) or Creative Writing: Introduction (Spring).

CREATIVE WRITING: PROSE FICTION (SPR)

Code LDCC5006B

Credits 20

This module will enable you to test your abilities and potential as a writer of prose fiction, building on the experience you already have in a formal creative writing environment. The first half of the course will be exploratory and practical, using structured exercises and handouts. You’ll be asked to consider such issues as character, genre, voice, dialogue and point of view. In the second half, the emphasis will shift to constructive group discussion of your own work, along with that of your peers. The overall aim of this module will be to develop your expressive and technical skills in writing prose fiction, and to improve your abilities as an editor and critic of your own and other people's work. This module is exclusive to English Literature With Creative Writing students and for other students who have achieved a mark of 68%+ (or equivalent for Visiting students) in a previous Creative Writing module. All other students should enrol on Creative Writing: Introduction (Aut) or Creative Writing: Introduction (Spring).

CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY (SPR)

Code LDCC5007B

Credits 20

This module is for those who want to write better poems and it enables you to really test the range of your abilities in writing poetry. You’ll develop and improve your expressive and technical skills in writing poetry, and be encouraged to improve analytical awareness of both the craft elements and the wider contexts of writing poetry, and also to improve students' abilities as editors and critics of their own and other people's writing. The first half of the seminar will be exploratory and practical; we'll be using structured exercises and the writing of (mostly contemporary) published poets to consider issues like voice, persona, imagery, structure and form, with time also dedicated to sharing student work. In the second half the emphasis shifts to constructive group discussion of your own work, alongside your peers, in a workshop setting. Whether discussing published poems or our own, we will be 'reading like a writer' and discussing how poems are put together. This module is exclusive to English Literature With Creative Writing students and for other students who have achieved a mark of 68%+ (or equivalent for Visiting students) in a previous Creative Writing module. All other students should enrol on Creative Writing: Introduction (Aut) or Creative Writing: Introduction (Spring).

CREATIVE WRITING: SCRIPTWRITING (SPR)

Code LDCC5008B

Credits 20

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Important Information

In Year 3 students must accumulate at least 60 credits in Creative Writing (modules with LDCC-prefix).In years 2 and 3 combined, students must accumulate at least 20 credits in writing before 1789.In level 6 the pre-1789 module is worth 30 credits.Students can do only one Dissertation Module in Year 3.

Assessment for Year 3

Your coursework is supported by seminar discussion, peer feedback and tutorials with your seminar leader.

Compulsory Modules

PUBLICATION, PRODUCTION, PERFORMANCE

Code LDCC6107B

Credits 30

**NEW FOR 2022/23** This module asks you to present your writer’s voice and the skills you have gained throughout your degree with professional rigour, to develop pieces from your portfolio of work into either a published book or a performance or production that represents ‘you’ as a professional writer. You will be introduced to the role of publication, performance and/or production in your chosen area of speciality (prose, poetry, script or hybrid form). Depending on which strand you will be focussing on, you will be led by a specialist tutor in seminar groups through a professional-level iteration of your work. Independent work and workshopping in editorial or rehearsal groups will form key activities in the module. Advanced strategies of prose, poetry and script writing will be developed in the first weeks, giving you an opportunity to revise and refine a piece of creative writing with the support of an ‘editorial’ (or production/rehearsal) group. The outcome of the revision/rehearsal/production will be presented either in a self-published hardcover book, an online digitally produced piece, or a performance. Along with your tutor and ‘editorial/rehearsal’ group, you will investigate the professional/industry standards required in book publishing, digital publishing, or production of a play or a screenplay. Indicative Texts: CP4 Course Proposal Academic Design Approved by LTC November 2017 Page | 34 Benjamin, Walter. (1970) “The Author as Producer.” New Left Review 1/62, July-August 1970; Smith, Kelvin. (2012) The Publishing Business: From p-Book to e-Book. Lausanne: AVA Books Taylor, Stephanie and Susan Luckman, eds. (2018) The New Normal of Working Lives: Critical Studies in Contemporary Work and Employment. London: Palgrave. Vogler, C. (1998) The Writers Journey. Studio City: Michael Weise Productions. Yorke (2013). Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them. London: Penguin. Naropa University Talks Series https://archive.org/details/naropa  Electronic Poetry Centre http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/connects/portals.html

Optional A Modules

(30 credits)

CREATIVE WRITING DISSERTATION (AUT)

Code LDCC6003A

Credits 30

This is an advanced level module which is for final year CW minors. The module allows students an opportunity to write a substantial short story (approximately 6000 words) or drama script (60 pages) or collection of poems (15-25 poems, totalling between 270 and 290 lines) and to develop an understanding of their own motivations, influences and processes through the production of a reflective self-commentary (2000 words). This module aims to encourage independent learning and the initiation and development of new creative material in a way that provides a grounding in the disciplines necessary both for postgraduate research and the professional practice of writing. Students must be on the English Literature with Creative Writing course OR have received a mark of 68%+ in a previous creative writing module AND have a project proposal approved by the module convenor as well as a faculty member.

CREATIVE WRITING DISSERTATION (SPR)

Code LDCC6004B

Credits 30

This is an advanced level module which is for final year Creative Writing minors. The module allows students an opportunity to write a substantial short story (approximately 6000 words) or drama script (60 pages) or collection of poems (15-20 pages) and to develop an understanding of their own motivations, influences and processes through the production of a reflective self-commentary (2000 words). This module aims to encourage independent learning and the initiation and development of new creative material in a way that provides a grounding in the disciplines necessary both for postgraduate research and the professional practice of writing. Students must be on the English Literature with Creative Writing course OR have received a mark of 68%+ in a previous creative writing module AND have a project proposal approved by the module convenor as well as a faculty member.

CREATIVE WRITING: PROSE

Code LDCC6101B

Credits 30

Under the guidance of an experienced practising writer, seminars will take the form of workshops in which you’ll take part in group discussion surrounding both your own work and the work of established authors. With exercises, relevant text analysis and the generation of original material, the small seminar group structure will offer you a unique opportunity to stretch and hone your writing skills, and push your originality and expression to its full potential. You’ll find that the group feedback model is a richly symbiotic one to participate in: you’ll benefit not only from being heard by your peers, but by taking responsibility for your contributions both in writing and in giving constructive feedback. Seminar leaders will work closely with you to discuss and support the transfer of your creative writing skills to internships and the workplace, with consideration and attention given to the potential for employability. Close consideration will be given to the technical and expressive aspects of drafting and re-drafting, enabling you to shape and complete a substantial portfolio of work. The module will allow you to develop your potential as a writer, while simultaneously refining your ability as an editor and critic. The course will provide you with a bridge between the study of creative strategies at undergraduate level and the study of writing as a professional activity encouraged at MA level. This module is exclusive to English Literature with Creative Writing students (and for other students who have achieved a mark of 68%+ in a previous Creative Writing module).

CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY

Code LDCC6103B

Credits 30

Under the guidance of an experienced practising writer, you'll take workshops designed to promote group discussion both of students' own work and the work of established authors. Consideration will be given to the technical and expressive aspects of drafting and re-drafting in the strand chosen with a view to shaping and completing a substantial piece of work. This module is exclusive to English Literature with Creative Writing students (and for other students who have achieved a mark of 68%+ in a previous Creative Writing module).

Optional B Modules

(60 credits)

CONTEMPORARY DRAMA AND FILM

Code LDCD6103B

Credits 30

In this module you will examine emergent voices and trends in recent theatre, film and television (mainly British but with some American or European contributions). Topics covered include the (questioned) demise of explicitly political drama and the appearance of previously silenced voices (e.g. gay and lesbian themes, feminist playwrights and writing ethnicity, physical theatre practitioners). In this course you will also examine recent works related to representations of (for example) religious controversy, sexual identity, politics and the social impact of scientific discovery.

TRAGEDY (pre-1789)

Code LDCD6106A

Credits 30

You will look at the long history of tragedy in an effort to understand what, if anything, allows us to call both Oedipus Rex and Death of a Salesman tragedies. We will begin with the age-old question of what is the difference between tragedy in “real life” and on stage. Our answers to this question will help us isolate what it is that makes a performance specifically tragic rather than “merely” dramatic, moving, emotional. Our first readings will focus on the ancient Greeks, the inventors of tragedy, and the religious, artistic, and political circumstances that helped create this genre. Throughout the semester we will repeatedly return to the Greeks to see how more modern tragedies adapted or rejected their notions of the tragic and created new tragic criteria particular to their own time and place. We will look at the ways in which ancient tragic notions of personal responsibility are affected by new ideas about mental health, socioeconomic pressure, nature, and Christianity. Also, as we see tragedy moving into different media, such as opera, the novel, and film, we will examine the ways in which the different media of music, prose, and cinema affect the tragic effect.

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: NONSENSE AND MODERN WRITING

Code LDCL6015A

Credits 30

It's widely recognised that modernist literature is characterised by a revolution of the word. Less widely recognised, and little explored, is the relationship between modernist linguistic experimentation and literary nonsense. Beginning with two 19th-century writers, Carroll and Dickinson, you will go on to explore various of the radical disruptions in ordinary sense and meaning practiced across 20th-century writing, asking about their purposes and possibilities, and inquiring into what they tell us about ordinary language. You will take in such subjects as William’s Empson’s analysis and practice of poetic ambiguity; surrealism’s Freudian inquiry into the illogical language of the unconscious; Joyce’s invention of new words to express this illogic; Plath’s surrealist play with metaphor; the early Auden’s distortion of syntax, pronoun, and tense; and Ashbery’s indeterminacy. We will read such work against various theories of nonsense, laughter, and play. Your principal focus will be on poetry and language itself and there will be detailed discussions of word-history, ambiguity, broken syntax, incomplete metaphor. Major topics will include the relation of nonsense to dreams, jokes, games, and madness, and this will be informed by psychoanalytic theory, especially in Freud’s writing. This is not a course on children's literature, but on some very challenging modern literature, mostly poetry. You will need to enjoy uncertainty and have good close-reading skills. There will be opportunities for creative writing of nonsense and creative writers are encouraged to take the module. By the end of the module you should have an understanding of the various ways in which modern writers have revolutionised and distorted language, and the reasons why they did so. You should be able to analyse the differences to meaning made by such distortions, and to trace the gaps in sense that they open. You should be able to draw on relevant theories of nonsense, laughter, play, childhood, and language, to enrich your analysis. You could offer your own creative writing in the same mode of nonsense, and if so, this will show an understanding of the techniques of the writers studied. In either case, you will have done some of your own original reading, thinking, and research, beyond the texts and topics covered in seminars.

DRAMA AND LITERATURE: THE QUESTION OF GENRE

Code LDCL6017B

Credits 30

You will explore the relationship between the study of literature and the study of dramatic performance both creatively and theoretically. Its practical aspect consists of an adaptation for the stage of a literary text, which you will freely chosen and test by workshop performance, and its theoretical aspect consists of attempts to define the narrative modes of the epic, the lyric and the dramatic, with the dramatic further dividing into tragedy and comedy. These two aspects of the course converge in considerations of how you have drawn on these narrative modes in your own adaptations, and how great writers throughout the centuries have created works which stand on thresholds between them e.g. theatrical novelists or lyrical dramatists. One question which underlies all critical engagement with the subject of genre is whether generic awareness should be understood as an historical encumbrance which stands in the way of representing or expressing personal experience, or whether it is a necessary and enabling resource for increasing the receivers’ pleasure or extending their philosophical horizons. Critics have stood on either side of the debate.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (AUT)

Code LDCL6018A

Credits 30

You’ll be provided with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1789 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (SPR)

Code LDCL6019B

Credits 30

WRITING LIFE: BIOGRAPHY AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Code LDCL6026B

Credits 30

‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ and it’s often more moving, powerful, inspiring and funnier too. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to discover some extraordinary ‘true’ stories on this module as well as the possibility to write one of your own. You’ll think about the ever-shifting boundaries between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ as well as the ethical questions that arise when you’re writing about real people and situations. This is a module that enables you to do something very different in your final semester at UEA. During this module you’ll consider if and how non-fiction writing differs from fictional literature. You’ll learn about research, how to read and interrogate personal documents and the challenges presented by memory and anecdote. How do you assemble facts so that the resulting story is as compelling as fiction? What clothes can the non-fiction writer steal from the novelist’s wardrobe? Throughout the module you’ll read different types of non-fiction and think about how individual authors weave their research material into narrative form. You will have the opportunity to write your own piece of non-fiction for your summative assessment if you wish. This is a 5,000 word creative or critical piece which everyone will workshop during the semester. There will also be tutorials in which you can discuss your summative work. By the end of the module you’ll have gained an understanding of the craft of non-fiction and you’ll have developed your ability to ask pertinent questions of any non-fiction you read, be it a newspaper story or a highly researched account of a life or situation. You’ll have honed your research abilities and perhaps your interview skills too if you decide to write something that involves interviews. You’ll also have thought about the ethical implications that may arise when writing about ‘real life’ - all qualities that are highly valued by employers.

QUEER LITERATURE AND THEORY

Code LDCL6033B

Credits 30

This module offers you the chance to learn about LGBTQ literature and its development in English-speaking countries, as well as approaches to queer theory, and the relationship of both literature and theory to culture and current events. This means analysing sexuality and gender and the representation of such identities in literature and society, and discussing topics such as intersectionality, the body, and heteronormativity. Authors studied may include James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Gore Vidal, and Sarah Waters, as well as children’s books and young adult novels by Nancy Garden, Ellen Wittlinger, and Marcus Ewert. Authors of theoretical texts looked at may include Nikki Sullivan, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, and Teresa de Lauretis. Understanding how LGBTQ characters are featured in literature also helps us to see how queer people are understood in a given society in general, so you will also discuss current events and their links to literature and theory. You will look at a variety of genres in order to see how these different text types work, how they queer genre, and how they approach similar themes in different ways.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Code LDCL6038A

Credits 30

This module offers you the chance to learn about children’s literature and its development. It starts with the history of children’s literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through Aesop’s fables, fairy tales, Victorian and Edwardian literature, and examining authors that might include A.A Milne, Dr. Seuss, Sherman Alexie, and Melvin Burgess, amongst others. The course looks at issues of genre and content as well as at historical context. Theoretical readings on children’s literature are also closely engaged with. By studying the development of children’s literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society. This module is creative and critical and students have a chance to write for children in it.

MADNESS AND MEDICINE: WOMEN'S WRITING IN THE REGENCY

Code LDCL6042A

Credits 30

This module will study late 18th-century and early 19th-century writings in the context of scientific and medical innovation. We consider whether it may be appropriate to view the work of novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley as a response to, and even a protest against these newly (or, more correctly, nearly) professionalised, male-dominated worlds. These women writers often concern themselves with the 'consumers' as well as the providers of the services offered by these professions; this module considers why that might be and how this kind of contextualisation might impact upon our readings of their work.

NERVOUS NARRATIVES

Code LDCL6046A

Credits 30

‘We all say it’s nerves, and none of us knows what it means’, says a character in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel, The Woman in White. Our aim is to think about how a discourse of the ‘nerves’ – the ‘nervous temperament’ and nervous illness – can be both so pervasive culturally and so slippery in its meaning. This interdisciplinary module takes you from the late 17th century, when the concept of ‘neurologie’ first emerged, to the 21st century, linking literary, medical and philosophical writing to explore the representation - the discursive formation - of the ‘nerves’. The historical range of the module is not meant to imply a transhistorical understanding of nervous illness or temperament, but rather will enable us to analyse the historically specific nature of the nervous body and what it is made to mean, culturally, within different contexts. In this way, we will be working with issues as diverse as religious ‘enthusiasm’, hysteria and hypochondria, sensibility, sensation, fear of modernity, neurasthenia, manliness and effeminacy, shell-shock, PTSD and the concepts of the healthy or fragile body of the nation. Spanning time and genre, the literary texts studied will take us from the earliest, Jonathan Swift’s satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704) up to Siri Hustvedt’s analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010). The module equips you to work within an interdisciplinary frame and across historical periods from the late 17th century to the present.

CHAUCER (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6053A

Credits 30

This module explores the rich and complex writings of Geoffrey Chaucer which we read in relation to their social and cultural contexts (literary, political, theological, philosophical). The module is structured in three parts: after an introduction via a selection of Chaucer’s shorter poems and one of his dream visions (the “Prologue” to 'The Legend of Good Women'), we spend four weeks concentrating on 'Troilus and Criseyde' (in my opinion Chaucer’s very greatest work) and then another four on the riches of the 'Canterbury Tales'. We approach Chaucer’s writing in a number of complementary ways. We attend to the brilliance of Chaucer’s poetry formally by considering his use of literary and generic convention; we approach his writing comparatively by looking at Chaucer’s engagement with classical (Ovid, Boethius, the traditional stories of Troy) and older French and Italian writing (Dante and Boccaccio); we consider the ways in which Chaucer’s writing records and responds to the historical circumstances of late-fourteenth-century England (particularly in the royal court and within London); and we look at the manner in which Chaucer’s works were written and read (‘published’ and circulated) within a medieval manuscript culture and at the implications this has for an understanding of his work. For we might propose that the aim of this module is essentially twofold: to explore together some superlative Chaucerian poetry and, at the same time, to allow you to develop further as medievalists and Chaucerians, encountering the distinctive challenges and possibilities that come with working with this material.

VIRGIL'S CLASSIC EPIC (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6054B

Credits 30

After the Bible, the 'Aeneid' is probably the single most important and influential work in the Western cultural tradition. For T. S. Eliot, it is the “classic of all Europe.” It is also one of the most extraordinary – moving, complex, formally and philosophically subtle and ambitious – poems we have. This module is devoted to exploration of the 'Aeneid' and to its medieval reception. In the first half of the module we will look at Virgil’s poem in relation to its literary models, particularly in Homer’s great epics, 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey', within its own Roman (Augustan) context, and in its formal complexity. The second part attends to the medieval reception of the Aeneid: the accommodation of its challenging pagan difference and the co-option of its remarkable cultural authority within new religious, political, and literary contexts. We will explore Dante’s response to Virgil’s poem in the Divine Comedy alongside those of Augustine and Chaucer; we read medieval Romance reworkings of Virgil’s classical epic; and we consider the variety of ways in which medieval writers looked to continue the 'Aeneid' in their own distinctive ways.

SHAKESPEARE: SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6056B

Credits 30

Platonist epistemology permeated Elizabethan culture: the aim of this module is to explore the relationship of Shakespeare's topic of the world as a stage to Neoplatonic conceptions of perception, politics, poetry and love. We will consider Plato as a poetic philosopher and Shakespeare as a philosophical poet by asking what difference the ‘dramatic’ form of Plato's Socratic dialogues makes to their 'ideas', and, conversely, how in Shakespeare's plays, particularising plots unfold into generalising arguments. In both cases, the concern is with how dramatic form with its special mixture of what is seen, what is said, what is known and what is enacted, can clarify perennial philosophical questions. We'll also touch on several possible mediators between Plato and Shakespeare, including Castiglione, Erasmus and Sir Philip Sidney.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: (pre-1789) (AUT)

Code LDCL6061A

Credits 30

You’ll be provided with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period before 1789 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: (pre-1789) (SPR)

Code LDCL6062B

Credits 30

MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN TRADITIONS (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6066B

Credits 30

Who has not heard of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table? Yet why, of all medieval traditions, is this legend the most pervasive medievalism of modern culture? To answer this question we return to the Middle Ages to discover the development from its 12th century Celtic roots, through heroic and romance cultures to its final flourishing in the 15th century in a work by Malory, which all modern versions (including film and tv) are today based upon. The source base of the medieval Arthurian legend is diverse, encompassing chronicle, ballad, courtly and popular romance in verse as well as prose. A variety of English Arthurian texts will be read alongside the folklore of the Welsh Mabinogion collection, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influential Latin work and French Romance texts (in translation). This module focuses on the literary and ideological innovations of Arthurian writers and on the intertextual relations which hold between medieval Arthurian texts. Students will examine the genres and voices of medieval Arthurian narratives, including its resort to prophecy, epic discourse, pseudo-historical discourse, pseudo-exegesis and courtly romance. The various national responses to ideas of myth, legend and history, the cultural significance of differences in the representations of women in the various texts, as well as questions regarding individuality and selfhood that arise in literature produced in a volatile period of religious and social uncertainty and dissent will be explored. This module will enable students familiar with medieval Romance to enhance their awareness of the Arthurian traditions, but is also suitable for students who are encountering medieval literature for the first time.

MEDIEVAL MONSTROSITIES (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6081B

Credits 30

Did medieval people really believe in monsters? Giants, dragons and half-human hybrids are just some of the fantastical creatures that populate Middle English literature. Too readily dismissed by modern readers as mere whimsy, or else the product of credulous minds, instead this module takes monsters seriously as revealing facets of a sophisticated myth-making society. You will consider monsters in a range of genres such as romance, saints' legends, travel writing and visual imagery, as well as their reception by medieval and modern readers and critics. You will interrogate the various discourses of monstrosity and consider what makes a monster through consideration of topics such as: the horror and allure of the monstrous body; monstrous appetites; sexuality and sexual deviance; geography and racial alterity. You will also explore the literary and cultural construction of 'human monsters' (women, pagans, Jews) rendered 'other' due to their perceived divergence from societal and religious norms. You will be able to apply your developing understanding of the discourse of monstrosity in a range of practical contexts such as field trips. Previous experience of Middle English literature will be an advantage but is not required. By the end of the module you should have a more nuanced understanding of the place of monstrosity in medieval literature and have an increased awareness of the ways in which language is used to both shape and respond to perceived differences.

LYRIC (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6087A

Credits 30

The module will incorporate a historical survey of Western lyric, looking at its inception in the poetry of Pindar and Sappho, and the Aristotelian division of poetic arts in lyric, dramatic and epic. It will cover lyrics from Provencal troubadour poets through the Italian and English renaissance to Romantic lyric. Finally, it will cover the fate of lyric in the present day, from 'conceptual writing' and 'post-humanism' which offer a thoroughgoing rejection of lyric, to the embrace of lyric in contemporary young poets. The module will start by considering the question: 'What is lyric'? The purpose is not to establish a transhistorical concept of lyric as genre or mode, but rather to see how different thinkers at different times have approached it. This is a particularly timely question for literary criticism and poetics. We will isolate certain tropes, ethics, and focal points that are taken to be characteristic of lyric, whilst at the same time probing the historicity of lyric as a concept, especially regarding the ideology of the lyric 'I' that is associated with romanticism.

ROMANTIC AND GOTHIC ORIENTALISM, 1720-1830

Code LDCL6091B

Credits 30

The fascination with the mysterious East and the Exotic was an important element of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century writing and has serious consequences for global politics today. Stereotypical representations of eastern religions, Holy Wars, ruthless and cruel tyrants, and eastern women still resonate today in how we view ISIS, Jihad and eastern 'despots' from Saddam Hussein to Kim Jong-un. In this module you’ll explore the material history of the increasing British colonial involvement in the 'East' in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; how that 'East' was constructed and represented for a western metropolitan audience; and explore the rich cultural productions of that involvement in poetry, fictional, prose and visual art. Texts that you’ll discuss will include writing by well-known Romantic writers, such as S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Thomas de Quincey, as well less familiar works by William Beckford, Sir William Jones, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and Thomas Moore. You’ll explore the extraordinary influence of the magical and sensual tales Arabian Nights (including Aladdin) on both Gothic and Romantic period writing. Areas we will discuss will include: India, Persia, the Levant, and China. You’ll also consider such writings in the light of contemporary postcolonial theories of Orientalism including criticism by Edward Said, Gayatori Spivak, Srinivas Aravamudan and others. In this module you’ll concentrate in particular on the representation of the Indian people, places and cultures of the Indian sub continent. You’ll address issues such as Sati, opium addiction, the supernatural, featuring genies, demons, gods and goddesses as we encounter eastern cultures and religions though western eyes. We will visit fantastic gardens and enter the closely-guarded harem. During this module you’ll also speculate on how our contemporary opinions about eastern peoples and customs are influenced by the Oriental Renaissance of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

LATIN AMERICAN NARRATIVES

Code LDCL6093A

Credits 30

'Who would have imagined fifteen years ago that writings of the outcast Chilean Roberto Bolaño who washed ashore in Barcelona via Mexico, would exercise so wide an influence on writers in Spain, Latin America and across the world?' (Granta, Issue 113) And yet, Bolaño's literary output is unthinkable without Borges, just as the Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez's Secret History of Costaguana is inconceivable without Conrad’s Nostromo. Throughout this module you’ll discover the ways in which literatures travel across national boundaries. You’ll explore the web of literary influences woven into some of these Latin American narratives, as well as trace the itinerary of these influential threads as they travelled from the South of the American continent to other literatures. You’ll explore the core of storytelling that underpins Latin American literature and which surfaces in various forms of writing, from the short story to the prose poem and the novel, as well as the 'rewriting' exercise/critical appraisal, such as Alejandra Pizarnik's The Bloody Countess. You’ll read works by Borges, Cortazar, Bolaño, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Clarice Lispector, Alejandra Pizarnik, Valeria Luiselli, amongst others. You’ll be encouraged to close read texts and share your ideas in seminars and one-to-one tutorials, as well as through written work.

THE CONTESTED PAST: LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

Code LDCL6097A

Credits 30

How do we negotiate the darker aspects of our past, particularly when individuals' experiences clash with official history? This module explores the public and private practices of remembering and forgetting in the aftermath of civil war, totalitarianism, colonialism or otherwise repressive rule. In particular, we'll examine the writer's role as collaborator, witness, archivist or dissident: how does the writer facilitate access to, and debate about, contentious, painful or obfuscated history? Our approach to the politics of commemoration is interdisciplinary and draws on ideas from philosophy, historiography, memory and cultural studies as well as heritage and museum studies. The primary material encompasses a range of fictional, non-fictional and visual material from a wide range of genres; most of it is postwar and relatively recent. Since these are global issues, you will also encounter writers from formerly colonised nations in Africa and Asia and from Central and Eastern Europe: be prepared to read in translation.

TRAVEL LITERATURE (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6108B

Credits 30

The 18th-century reading public eagerly devoured narratives of travels around the world. You’ll survey the diverse range of travel literature this century produced. You’ll read accounts of actual and fictional travels, as well as narratives that fall somewhere between the real and the imaginary. Key questions for you will be how travellers' identities and ideas are reshaped through the experience of journeying, how our texts both articulate and question the ideologies underpinning Britain's maritime empire, and how voyage literature connects to other literary genres, including the novel, romance, history, utopia, and anecdote. The readings include texts such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters from Turkey.

THE ART OF EMOTION: LITERATURE, WRITING AND FEELING

Code LDCL6118B

Credits 30

According to Roland Barthes, emotion is 'a disturbance, a bordering on collapse: something perverse, under respectable appearances; emotion is even, perhaps, the slyest of losses'. This module takes this 'perversity, under respectable appearance' as the starting point for asking how an attention to our emotions - our feeling, affects, and intimacies, as well as our aversions - can make us rethink what it means to be critical and creative readers and writers. Drawing on a range of theoretical and critical work from literary studies, cultural theory, art, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience, psychology, creativity and creative writing studies, cognitive science, history and anthropology, we will ask what it means to read, and write, 'with feeling'. What is the relationship between language and feeling? Between the body and emotion? How does literature touch and move us? Are our 'aesthetic' emotions real? How does technology - the digital, virtual, prosthetic and online - affect our ideas about emotion? Are emotions universal and timeless, or historically and culturally specific? Private and personal, or collective and public? How do emotions construct gender, class, race, nationality, and other kinds of identity? Why do some feelings attract more critical interest than others? How does an attention to emotion affect our work as readers and writers? We will begin by building a theoretical and critical literacy for thinking feeling, before focusing our inquiry around specific themes that might include: Animal Passions; Psyche, Pathology and Resistances to Psychoanalysis; Feeling Texts: Touch, Texture and Fictional Fabrications; Moving Fictions: Cinema, Virtuality, and E-motion; Zombies: Can Dead Subjects Feel?; Affective Economies; Queering Feeling; and Feeling Human: Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Clones. We will engage with a range of literary texts and other aesthetic forms (such as art, film, etc.) chosen to correspond with our critical concerns. Please note that this is an indicative description only, and the weekly themes and reading are revised each year to stay up to date with current work in the field. You will have the opportunity to engage both as critical and creative readers and writers, and there will be critical and creative assessment options. This module is open to all students. It will complement level 3 options such as 'Literature and Deconstruction', 'Nervous Narratives', 'Traumaturgies', ' Literature and Human Rights' and 'Queer Literature and Theory'.

T.S. ELIOT AND TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY

Code LDCL6122B

Credits 30

The poetry of T.S. Eliot has a unique place in modern verse as a body of writing that combines mass popular appeal with intense intellectual challenge. The first part of your module will take you chronologically through the various stages of Eliot's Collected Poems, from the 19th-century influences that combined to produce 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1915) to the wartime contexts of his final major poem, Four Quartets (1935-1942). It will also offer an introduction to Eliot's literary criticism as well as to criticism written about him. The first coursework essay will take the form of an editorial commentary on a chosen poem or passage, giving you an opportunity to follow up allusions and interpretations through wider reading. The second part of your module will look more broadly at Eliot's influence as a poet, critic, and editor. Beginning with his own views of the need to reinvent poetry's cultural significance for the 20th century, you will consider the importance of Eliot's example to the next generation of modernist poets (such as W.H. Auden, W.S. Graham, Lynette Roberts) as well as later poets in Britain and Ireland (such as J.H. Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney) and the Americas (such as John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Octavio Paz). The final project will be a 3,000-word essay on any Eliot-related topic of the your choosing, and may take the form of a creative-critical poetry portfolio and self-commentary in response to the reading for the course.

THE BUSINESS OF BOOKS (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6127B

Credits 30

What kinds of mechanisms, processes, and negotiations turn a writer’s work into a marketable commodity? How do the social and economic conditions of writing (who, when, what for) affect the kinds of work writers produce? And what kind of impact might printed works, and print technologies, have on the activity of reading, and on how subjects conceive of their relationship to the wider world? On this module, you’ll discover how a new and commercial booktrade contributed to broader kinds of literary, cultural, and social change: you’ll see how books as a market driven business challenged traditional notions of authorship; gave rise to modern concepts of copyright and intellectual property; and forged new kinds of correspondence between books and an emergent reading public. You’ll investigate the workings of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century booktrade under three interconnected headings: bookselling (key publishers, such as Bernard Lintott, Jacob Tonson, and Edmund Curll, alongside ‘trade’ publishers such as Morphew and Roberts); writers and writing (a variety of authors, such as Delarivier Manley, Elizabeth Rowe, Mary Wortley Montague, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and more obscure ‘hack’ writers); and reading (kinds of circulation, from the manuscript, to subscription publication, to the lending library). This module will sharpen your sense of writing as an activity that is shaped by economic factors, and it will deepen your understanding of what it means, historically, to be an author. There are no pre-requisites for this module, although it will be of interest to those who have studied Eighteenth-Century Writing in the second year.

THE ART OF MURDER

Code LDCL6130A

Credits 30

Crime, like death, has always been with us, yet it was only in the 19th century that de Quincey proposed considering murder as one of the fine arts and Poe established many of the central tenets of crime fiction with his 'tales of ratiocination'. Currently, crime fiction is the most bought, and read, literary genre and one diverse enough to include 'whodunits'; Baker Street's most notable resident; the genteel amateur detectives of the 'Golden Age'; hard-boiled thrillers; noir; psychological fiction and even the post-modern iterations of anti-detective fiction. Narratives about crime and criminals, detection and sleuths (not forgetting the violence and victims) can be both conservatively formulaic and radically diverse. It can articulate dangerous and disturbing transgressions against society (the crime) while also revealing the ideological forces of law (what constitutes a crime) order (the various detective figures) and the systems of justice and ill-justice (courts and punishment, state and government) with which a society protects and proscribes itself. Crime fiction is also concerned with interpreting clues, discovering secrets and solving enigmas, much in the way that critical theory investigates and analyses literary texts. In this module you will explore key texts and writers in the development of crime fiction as well as examining critical and theoretical responses to such texts. It will allow you to respond both creatively and critically to the concerns of, and thinking about this diverse genre.

FEMINIST WRITING

Code LDCL6132B

Credits 30

We are witnessing an upsurge in feminist activism which some claim is forming the fourth wave of feminism. It is timely then to reconsider how feminist writing (literary texts, literary theory, and literary criticism) has helped to shape, influence, and articulate debates about gender, sexuality, and society in the past and how contemporary feminist writing is continuing to be part of that conversation now. You'll have the opportunity to read and analyse some of the most influential feminist literary texts and literary theory. Writers studied on the course may include Margaret Atwood, Henrik Ibsen, Angela Carter, Jean Rhys, Jeanette Winterson, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ali Smith, Beyoncé, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. You'll study the ways in which feminist criticism and theory (including Kristeva, Cixous, bell hooks, Haraway, and Butler) has reshaped the canon, challenged the ways literature is taught as well as making us consider what literature can, might and ought to be. Feminism has also exacted different forms of writing and challenged dominant modes of representation. We will take a particularly close look at the relationship between feminism and the gothic, the short story, and experimental writing. Assessment will be by course work and project and you'll be assessed in both critical and creative modes. Students of all genders are equally welcome.

WRITING RELIGION IN THE AGE OF JOHN MILTON (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6134A

Credits 30

This module begins by introducing you to the central mythic drama of Christianity: in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and 'fell' from perfection; to save humankind, God had to turn his own son into a mortal man and let him be crucified. This story raises the most profound questions about the origins of evil, free will, redemption, and the nature of God. The module seminars unfold through intensive close-reading of the early-modern literary masterpieces which were shaped by these questions, culminating in an in-depth study of all the major late poetry of John Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Before reaching Milton, we read major works by his influential predecessors, which might include authors such as John Donne and Edmund Spenser, and we also pay close attention to writing by women, especially that of Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681), who wrote her own poetic account of the Fall at the same time as John Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Summative assessment takes the form of a 5000-word project in which you will explore the module’s central questions by tackling at least two of the texts we’ve studied. You will be given formative questions every week (and writing exercises in some weeks) to help structure your learning. The module assumes no knowledge of religion, John Milton, or of early-modern literature in general.

CHARLES DICKENS: BEYOND REALITY

Code LDCL6136A

Credits 30

Charles Dickens has been described, and cherished, as one of the great chroniclers of the panorama of mid-Victorian society. At the same time, much modern criticism has rightly emphasised what a strange and innovative writer he is, less a documentary social realist than an early practitioner of what might now be called 'magical realism'. You will examine works from across Dickens's writing career, in a variety of different modes - fiction, journalism, essays, and public speaking - reading them not only in the context of Dickens's times, but also in the context of how other writers in those times dealt with comparable questions, and as part of a larger investigation of art and its relations to the world. As a result, you will be able to develop your interests in the relationships between social reality and its literary representations, in a module which combines in-depth study of Dickens with a broader engagement with theories of realism.

URBAN VISIONS: THE CITY IN LITERATURE AND VISUAL CULTURE

Code LDCL6138A

Credits 30

This interdisciplinary module explores how 'the city' has been thought about and represented through a selection of writings (fiction, poetry, theory), visual material (painting, photography, film, street art) and occasionally other sensory material (sound, smell), spanning around 1850 to the present day and focused on two particular cities and great capitals of modernity, Paris and London. In this period the growth of the great European cities has created a new and diverse set of environments and possibilities. Utopias, dystopias, sites of ruin and construction of all kinds; what different, contradictory or coherent versions of urban experience do these texts and images offer? We'll investigate what kinds of writing, art, discourses and attitudes cities seem to generate. Was modernism, for example, as Malcolm Bradbury asserts, an ‘art of cities'? How do textual and pictorial techniques intersect, for example, in the case of nineteenth-century Impressionist art and writing, twentieth-century Surrealism, Situationist provocations, or contemporary street art and photography? What is ‘psychogeography’? In the company of the flâneur/flâneuse, the detective and other urban wanderers, we'll consider aspects such as space, place, urban being and time, love and eroticism, hauntings, crime, memory and the presence of the past, the individual and the crowd, consumption, nature and the natural, urban Gothic, and the pressures, preoccupations and thrills peculiar to urban living and imagining. The main mode is seminar discussion, supported by short lectures, virtual gallery visits and film viewings. Assessment is by means of an individually designed project which is supported by individual tutorials and formative work of various kinds, including the opportunity to practise reading images and spaces, as well as literary texts. There is scope to produce creative-critical (including visual) work as part of your assessment.

ADOPTING/ ADAPTING/ UPDATING

Code LDCL6140B

Credits 30

Is all creative writing really a form of re-writing? And can creative writing itself be a form of literary criticism? From Virgil's imperialist taming of Homer, to Helen Fielding's homage to Jane Austen by way of Bridget Jones, writers have always engaged their literary predecessors in ways that claim new imaginative and critical space. In this creative-critical module you will explore the many modes in which homage, parody, borrowing, repositioning, intervention and creative (mis)reading may be practised and developed. You will examine exciting examples, and write some of your own. You will discover what literary adaptations, adoptions and updatings reveal about important moments and movements in literary history. You will explore how re-writing may also be a rogue and subversive form of reading; one that functions both as critique of canonical literature, and a means of generating fresh directions in your own creative writing. NB this is not a technical course in film/screen adaptation.

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6144A

Credits 30

You’ll be reading two of the most important novels of the 18th century over several weeks so that you can attend to them closely as they unfold in time. The novels are Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. The secondary readings will engage the central debates happening in novel studies today. You’ll have the opportunity to experiment with ways of working with texts beyond close reading and draw on the methodologies of book history and of the digital humanities.

MINOR LITERATURES: RESISTANCE, RADICALISATION AND READING

Code LDCL6146A

Credits 30

You'll explore writing as a site of resistance and protest and consider representation itself as inherently political. Does this make the work of a reader radical, or how can that work be radicalised? Taking a lead from the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, you’ll ask what it means to write or speak a dominant language in such a way that it stutters or stammers? What would such writing or speaking look or sound like? Deleuze and Guattari suggest that minor literature (minoritarian form in general) takes a dominant, hegemonic, major language and forces it to ‘say’ something different, and to do so differently, dislocating (deterritorialising) it so that a new voice (speaking from a new constituency) can be heard. They use the works of Kafka, a Czech Jew writing in ‘official’ German, as a representative example of how a dominant, major language can be pressed into the service of a minor literature, as a way of inscribing new constituencies, while other critics have considered sub-cultures’ re-appropriation of language, post-colonial writing back, musical subgenres and alternative/underground cinema as also being iterations of minoritarian impulses. You’ll explore various aspects of writing or speaking back, writing against the grain, saying the things major language finds itself unable or uncomfortable to speak about, and articulating the unheard. Writers and texts might include Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, Elias Khoury, Dana Spiotta, Jennifer Egan, along with punk ‘zines, samizdat writing and manifestoes.

FROM KAFKA TO SEBALD: ASPECTS OF 20TH CENTURY 'GERMAN' WRITING

Code LDCL6148A

Credits 30

You will be presented with an opportunity to study in depth a number of key works of 20th century German literature and to explore ways in which they respond to, and reflect, the upheavals of 20th century history. While the focus will be largely on works of prose fiction, this does not preclude the study of other genres. Starting with the modernist crisis of language ( Chandos-crisis ) we will look at works by authors such as Kafka, Rilke, Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf and W. G. Sebald. All works studied are available in translation so that a knowledge of German, while always welcome, is not a requirement.

REALITY BITES: CREATIVE NON-FICTION AND CULTURAL HISTORY

Code LDCL6154B

Credits 30

This module is concerned with three genres that are ostensibly non-fictional: travel writing, the memoir, and literary journalism. All of these texts are written in the first-person and yet often claim to be objective and factual. What precisely is the difference between fiction and non-fiction? And what is 'creative' in creative non-fiction? Much of this prose examines issues of identity and cultural history, mixes the exotic and the mundane, and assembles a peculiarly hybrid text that might include photography, ethnographic passages, anthropological techniques, and quite a bit of social history. Above all, it offers us literary reflections on a reality often perceived to be peculiar, ‘other’ or disturbing. Note that much of the writing here comes from continental Europe and the Americas. We will examine the stylistic, typographical or visual means by which writers make claims on authenticity or, conversely, undermine our faith in their complete veracity. We will reflect on how personal experience and research have been translated into engaging prose without narcissistic wounds being paraded, libel threats looming, or an armada of footnotes crowding the page. What are the techniques, in memoir, travel writing and literary journalism, that account for the pleasure readers take in the company of a narrating, wandering or reflecting first-person persona? How and why is (creative) non-fiction so often also an intertextual space for commenting on reading and on the nature of the literary? NB: This module is independent of the practice-based 2nd option The Writing of Journalism and is not concerned with news journalism, blogs, or feature writing; however, it continues that module’s concern with prose style and voice and interrogates issues of verifiability.

GLOBAL MODERNISMS

Code LDCL6156B

Credits 30

Anglo-American modernism is one part of a movement that spread from 19th-century Europe across the globe. This module investigates the ways that English has engaged with modernism as it reaches outward to the European periphery and beyond. International modernist authors are available to English readers in multiple translations. You’ll learn to assess different English versions of each text, relating stylistic analysis to questions about the intellectual, artistic, and political legacies of modernism. You’ll study lesser-known poets and novelists such as Italo Svevo in Trieste, rescued from oblivion by James Joyce and author of the comic psychoanalytic memoir Zeno’s Conscience; Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, who wrote under multiple poetic identities, each with its own fictional biography; Clarice Lispector, brought as a child from Ukraine to Brazil, where she produced meticulous, unsettling accounts of consciousness; and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, creator in Trilce of one of the most daring lexical and syntactic experiments of the avant-garde. On successful completion of this module, you’ll be able to produce comparative analysis of different translations, evaluating them critically in relation to key modernist concepts, claims and writing practices. You’ll have expanded your understanding of modernism’s international reach and the ways that we understand that reach in English. The module is taught by seminar and assessed by summative project. It will be of particular interest if you’ve studied modernism, translation, or international literature earlier in your degree. There is no language requirement but if you have knowledge of the relevant source languages, you’ll be given the opportunity to use that knowledge.

GHOSTS, HAUNTING AND SPECTRALITY

Code LDCL6160A

Credits 30

From Defoe’s True Relation of Mrs Veal’s posthumous visit to her friend Mrs Bargrave through the classic English ghost stories of MR James to the ghosts in the machine of modern media, the ghost, shade, revenant or spectre continues to haunt human imagination. Subtle shadings of the spectre materialise at different times, in different contexts – materialised reminder of unquiet remains; manifestation of memory or the unconscious; physiological disturbance; psychical stain. These undecidable and ambivalent presences, or uncanny sensations of hauntedness, will be explored in this module. Writers studied on the module might include Daniel Defoe, M.R. James, Henry James, Margaret Oliphant, May Sinclair and Susan Hill. The module will draw on studies mapping the development of the belief in ghosts (Sasha Handley’s Visions of an Unseen World) and exploring the cultural history (Andrew Smith’s The Ghost Story 1840 – 1920). It will also consider critical engagements, such as Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis.

BANNED BOOKS

Code LDCL6162B

Credits 30

The right to free expression is seriously threatened in many places in the world; it has also never been so passionately defended. You will focus on the history of banned books from the early 20th century to contemporary literature. Novels, poems and plays have often been banned on the grounds of political sedition, obscenity, and blasphemy. You will consider the changing nature of literary censorship, the legalistic and philosophical arguments for and against censorship, the nature of arguments in defence of free expression, why literary writers have so frequently pushed the boundaries of the acceptable and the impact of technology on the history of censorship and free speech. You will trace a series of shifting arguments about why free speech matters: from the drive to explore sexuality in literature, to the politicisation of free speech during the cold war, to current debates about blasphemy and free speech, as well as the idea that free speech is a so-called key Western value. Some of the texts studied on the course will be set because they are, in themselves, explorations of the boundary of prohibition and free expression. Of importance too will be the impact of global communication networks on free speech debates: in the context of the internet, does the nation state control the dissemination of literary texts? If not, what are the implications of the absence of legal control? You will consider both English language texts and texts in translation. Authors considered will probably include James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Boris Pasternak, Salman Rushdie, Elif Shafak and Margaret Atwood, but the authors studied on the course are likely to change to include unfolding censorship events and issues.

AFTER NATURE: LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

Code LDCL6164B

Credits 30

Where do debates in environmentalism, cultural geography and literary criticism meet? What does contemporary literature have to tell us about our relationship with space, place, landscape, nature, rurality, ecology, and even a ‘sense of planet’? On this module you will encounter a range of post-war and contemporary forms, from poetry, short stories, the novel, and literary non-fiction to visual art, the radio essay and film. Each will offer fresh and surprising ways of thinking about a range of different contemporary environments and about our place in a changing world. We will consider in what ways literary genres and traditions have helped to create and produce our understanding of geography in the past and how recent literary works have reworked some of these genres and traditions to mark contemporary changes. We will consider, for example, how authors since the environmental crisis have engaged with/inherited/reworked early modern chorography, the Romantic travelogue, the naturalist’s journal, and the rural essay. To what new ends are these forms put in an uncertain and unstable modern world? Among others, the course will explore work by Alice Oswald, Rana Dasgupta, Tim Robinson, Kathleen Jamie, Patrick Keiller, J.G. Ballard, and Robert Macfarlane. It will also include trips to investigate the nature writing holdings at UEA’s British Archive for Contemporary Writing. Assessment will give you the opportunity to, initially, create your own critical or creative radio essay/podcast (formative) and, later, develop a deeper knowledge of one of the week’s themes, building your own critical (or creative non-fiction) project around it (5,000 word summative). While there are no pre-requisites, this module complements and develops themes explored on level 5 ‘Writing the Wild’ and level 6 ‘Urban Visions: The City in Literature and Visual Culture’.

DARK ROMANTICISM: THE GOTHIC INHERITANCE

Code LDCL6166A

Credits 30

Who hath not loiter'd in a green church-yard, And let his spirit, like a demon-mole, Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard, To see scull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stole; Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr'd, And filling it once more with human soul? (John Keats, 'Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil (1817) 'Dark Romanticism' is a literary subgenre of 'Romanticism', reflecting a fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. Intimately related to Gothicism, it has haunted the Romantic movement ever since its beginnings in the eighteenth century. Romanticism's celebration of unity, creativity, and sublimity has always been menaced by a dark and contrary fascination; with melancholia, insanity, nightmare, criminality and death; with ghosts, monsters and vampires; and with the grotesque and the irrational. The term 'Dark Romanticism' was coined by Mario Praz in his classic study, The Romantic Agony (1933) to discuss European Romanticism's obsessive concern with duality, desire, agony, suicide, morbidity and decadence in the decades following the French Revolution. Numerous recent scholars have since discussed Romantic writing's preoccupation with the psychologically unusual and aberrant from a variety of perspectives including the literary, historical, philosophical and, more recently, a medical point of view. In this module, we will explore this compelling but dangerous interrelation between Romanticism and the Gothic at work in a range of 'agonies' preoccupying our writers: addiction, depression, insanity, cannibalism, monstrosity, homosexuality, the femme fatale, the double, the demonic lover, the vampire, and the Romantic pre-occupation with Lucifer himself. Our module will focus on writers such as J. W. Goethe, S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, Thomas De Quincey, James Hogg, and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre and Dr John William Polidori, author of that most influential story 'The Vampyre' (1819). We will read key Romantic period texts including Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Byron's Don Juan, Keats's 'Isabella or the Pot of Basil', Coleridge's 'Christabel', James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Percy Shelley's drama, The Cenci, as well as lesser known but influential works. You will be encouraged to deliver group presentations on these key texts and subjects, developing your own interests and ideas and working towards the longer research essay by which the module will be assessed.

RACE, WRITING AND IDENTITY IN POST-WAR BRITAIN

Code LDCL6168B

Credits 30

How did the legacy of its empire affect and shape British society during the period of increasing immigration from its former colonies following the Second World War and even now? How did the writing of those immigrants represent the social conflicts and tensions of that period, especially experience of racism and the resistance to it? How have contemporary minority ethnic writers responded to the challenges of the contemporary period, in which racism has taken new forms, such as Islamophobia and anti-refugee movements? You’ll focus on the ways in which postcolonial ideas can help us to understand and reflect upon the aftermath of empire in Britain. You’ll use selected writings by Black and Asian British writers to explore questions of race and racism, culture and ethnicity, religion, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, identity, and belonging that have been stimulated by post-war migration to Britain by residents of its former colonies. These issues will be set in the context of past and contemporary debates about British identity, and how these debates have been shaped and reshaped in response to the successive arrivals of migrants from other parts of the world, and by the creative, intellectual and everyday interventions of those migrants themselves. The main topics of study will be The literature of arrival – post-war Britain and ‘first generation’ migrants; The cultural politics of race, racism and anti-racism; Multiculturalism, belonging, hybridity and negotiation – the re-shaping of British identities; The new politics of exclusion – asylum seekers and Islamophobia.

LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 1660-1750 (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6170A

Credits 30

What is science? What is scientific language? Did you know that there was no such thing as a scientist until 1833? We’re accustomed to thinking of literature and science as separate disciplines – science deals with cold hard facts, literature with the imaginary and fictional – but to the occupants of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such a distinction would have been strange and unfamiliar. On this module, you’ll investigate how the current separation between literature and science came about. You’ll explore the social, cultural, and ideological imperatives that secured the dominance of science in intellectual discourse; you’ll examine how notions of scientific objectivity emerged; and you’ll discover how the new and allegedly more ‘rational’ knowledge produced by scientific practice was received by its first audiences. You’ll read a variety of texts, ranging from advocates of the new science (such as Thomas Sprat, part founder of the Royal Society in 1660, and Richard Bentley, proponent of later Newtonian philosophy); to early modern scientific writing (such as Robert Hooke, who famously described a fly’s eye seen through a microscope, and Robert Boyle, whose experiments with a bird inside an air pump became one of the most well known images of the enlightenment); to literary estimations of the value (or otherwise) of scientific knowledge. This module will provide you with a sense of historical perspective, and an understanding of the kinds of agenda implicit in the modern claim that STEM subjects make the humanities seem both impracticable and unprofitable.

NEW NARRATIVE

Code LDCL6172A

Credits 30

New Narrative began as a late 20th century creative rebellion. From its origins in 1970s punk, second-wave feminism and the gay rights movement, New Narrative writers explored and exploited the relationship between the personal and the political, gossip and literature, high and low art. It is the place where the tell-all memoir meets critical theory, and the place from which writers talked about their own desires and their own experiences in order to challenge the status quo. It is also a writing of friendship and coterie, a place to collaborate and to be influenced: many texts from the New Narrative movement were worked on in workshops that took place in the back rooms of bookshops or in each others’ apartments in San Francisco. Over the last 40 years, New Narrative has spawned generations of radical, experimental, genre-defying writers, from Kathy Acker to Chris Kraus to Maggie Nelson. You'll explore the major themes of New Narrative through reading key texts from the movement. You'll also explore the theoretical and cultural influences surrounding the movement. You will think carefully about the role of the writer in relation to the text, particularly the phenomenon of the ‘cult’ writer; you'll be encouraged to focus your critical studies on one particular New Narrative author in order to explore their life and legacy alongside their body of work. Finally, there will be opportunities to produce your own ‘freak’ and genre-defying texts.

IMAGINARY ENDINGS: BRITISH FICTION AND THE APOCALYPSE

Code LDCL6176A

Credits 30

‘It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)’ —R.E.M. (1987) ‘The etymological root of the word apocalypse is the Greek apokalypsis, meaning “unveiling” or “uncovering”.’ —Rosen (2008) This module will explore the origins and development of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction by British writers from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular emphasis on late twentieth and twenty-first century writing. In this module you will consider how in apocalyptic fiction the moment of catastrophe is also a moment of truth-bearing revelation, an unveiling which brings with it the opportunity to make a fresh beginning. You will also examine the biblical narratives and other ancient stories that frequently underpin such fictions; reflect on what apocalypse means to us culturally; consider the way such fictions reflect the anxieties of the cultural moment in which they were written; and explore some of the major trends of apocalyptic fiction, such as eco-catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, pandemics, survivalism, apocalyptic visions, and technology gone wrong. You will also attend to the way such narratives frequently participate in the genres of dystopian and speculative fiction. The module will conclude by interrogating what apocalypse means to us today through the study of recent works of apocalyptic fiction. You will be encouraged to explore and discuss a range of associated literary criticism and theory. You will, in the second of the summative assessments, have the opportunity to write your own apocalyptic fiction with an accompanying critical reflection.

WRITING VERNACULAR, WRITING VOICE

Code LDCL6178B

Credits 30

How does one give voice to the self? This question has preoccupied Twentieth and Twenty First century writers who, in a quest to successfully define themselves and others, have pioneered new language forms. In this module we’ll consider writing voice and vernacular as a language performance aimed at articulating a particular identity. We’ll examine Modernist writers who held orality as a high virtue, Feminist writers determined to develop writing approaches independently of men, writers of colour who have resisted imposed languages, and working class writers committed to presenting true-to-life speech, profanities and all. The writers we’ll examine share a sense that an established literary language has hindered or silenced them, and the module will ask questions which explore the responses to this predicament, such as: how can natural speech be rendered on the page? How do texts achieve an audible and recognisable voice? What does it mean to make use of linguistic codes which are condemned or deemed inferior? Reading may include essays, novels, memoir, short stories, theatre monologues and journalism. For instance, Trainpotting by Irvine Welsh, The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit, How Late It Was How Late, by James Kelman, ‘The Life of Ma Parker’ by Katherine Mansfield, ‘Story in Harlem Slang’ by Zora Neale Hurston, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, ‘The Case for Reparations’ by Ta Nehisi-Coates and Bitch Doctrine by Laurie Penny. In the first half of the module we’ll examine the many ways in which writers use language to challenge literary conventions, salvage histories and reclaim voices and we’ll draw on relevant ideas and criticism including Feminist Theory (such as, The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, Gender Trouble by Judith Butler) Critical Race Theory (such as, The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates, The Race for Theory by Barbara Christian, Africa’s Tarnished Name by Chinua Achebe, and we’ll consider questions of language and power explored by critical thinkers like Mikahail Bakhtin in Speech Genres and Other Essays, Gayatri Spivak in Three Women’s Essays and Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks. In the second half of the module, you’ll have the opportunity to workshop your own writing inspired by the module. You’ll reflect on your own identity as a writer, consider how different texts speak to you and discover the challenges and opportunities offered through exploring and producing you own vernacular writing.

STORIED BODIES: GENDER, SEXUALITY, WRITING AND THE VISUAL AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

Code LDCL6180B

Credits 30

This interdisciplinary module investigates the interweaving of literature and visual culture in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focused on Britain and France, and paying particular attention to the ways in which gender, sexual and working identities, bodies and relationships are depicted, performed, disrupted, questioned and sometimes radically reimagined. The writers and artists at work in this period produced a rich stew of aesthetic and literary innovation, often experimental and provocative in tone, style and subject matter. The cultural movements which are combined under the general heading of the ‘fin de siècle’, including Symbolism, Aestheticism and Decadence, also contributed to the development of modernism and this module is intended as an opportunity for students who wish to extend their studies from the Level 5 Victorian Writing and Modernism modules and to explore both interdisciplinary and creative-critical opportunities. We will examine different kinds of writing (novels, short fiction, drama, essays, experiments in art criticism, science and pseudo-science) and art (painting, photography, early film), as well as dance and performance.

DISCOVERY AND RECOVERY: THE LITERARY ARCHIVE

Code LDCL6182B

Credits 30

On this module, you will encounter different historical ideas and theories of the literary archive, and consider its potential purposes, ethics and politics. We will discuss recent critical notions of literary archives alongside early modern letters, commonplace books, notebooks and marginalia. We will also consider literary representations of archives in novels such as A.S. Byatt’s Possession, as well as the published letters and notebooks of writers like Samuel Beckett, Agatha Christie and V. S. Naipal. Your thinking about the literary archive will then be extended through practical archival experience and research. This will include work with a range of unpublished archival materials, including letters, faxes, objects, manuscripts, postcards, marginalia and more, perhaps including the physical, material archives of writers such as Doris Lessing, and digital archives of writers such as Naomi Alderman and Hanif Kureishi. In this way, the module will create opportunities for you to undertake and practice your own archival research, culminating in a final project. Overall, the module will ask you to consider: the ethics of working with public/private documents; the role of gender and ethnicity; the purposes and politics of ‘recovery research’; the place of archival materials in/beyond biographical and historical readings of literature.

RENAISSANCE OBSCENITIES (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6184B

Credits 30

The Italian Renaissance was predicated on the recovery and imitation of classical models, and subsequently by an artistic (re)turn to the natural. But what if those models were deemed obscene or pornographic by Christian morality? Are they any less valid intellectually or artistically? Should we (or can we) ignore the imitation of such models? And are all forms of the natural to be celebrated, or are some to be suppressed? This module examines the culture of artistic, moral and intellectual freedom that emerged in the early sixteenth century in Italy, coincident with the advent of print, a culture which was suppressed by Church and State via the Counter-Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century. Obscene and pornographic texts and images which explicitly illustrated diverse sexual practices and sexualities were produced, disseminated, copied, censored, prohibited and destroyed. The module examines the classical precedents and models for Renaissance erotic and pornographic works, their late medieval precursors, and the spread of such literature by English imitators following the Counter-Reformation. It examines the threat that libertine culture posed to the Church and State (which were not always in agreement), the legal and intellectual responses in England and on the continent, the establishment of the papal Index of Prohibited Books and the Italian Inquisitions in Rome and Venice, and early forms of censorship. Crucially, these obscene materials were not alien to humanism, the core intellectual project of the Renaissance, but were defended as being entirely in-keeping with its classicizing impulses. In fact, the obscenities were produced for the most part by those with a humanist education. The module ultimately examines the moment at which print culture, Renaissance idealism, and State control intersected and clashed. Each week opens with a discussion of a particular piece of Renaissance art deemed obscene or scandalous, pertinent to the texts that week. Students will present on the art in order to introduce the week’s focus.

WRITING CONSCIOUSNESS: STYLE AND MODERNIST FICTION

Code LDCL6186B

Credits 30

What is style? It is the most essential and yet most elusive property of writing. How can we possibly describe something so intangible? and how can we discover and develop our own distinctive styles as writers, of fiction and non-fiction? These questions were raised with new urgency, precision, and ambition by modernist writers, who urged both that an attention to style was the first aim of good criticism, and that any good writer must develop by trying their hand at imitating and parodying the styles of previous writers, in the way that painters once were taught by imitating previous painters. This creative-critical module approaches these questions and explores these techniques through a particular focus on one of the central strands in modernist fiction, the representation of consciousness. We will focus on novelists and writers including Henry and William James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Dostoevsky, Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Eimearr McBride, subjecting to close analysis each writer’s style: among many other topics this will include the way they break up the linearity of the sentence to do justice to the non-linear nature of the mind; how they explore self and other through the figure of the double and the full range of characters across a novel; and how they render the story-telling property of consciousness through experiments in plot. We will consider such subjects as desire, anxiety, memory, sexuality, gender, and race. Students will be expected both to analyse style and to seek to imitate it: we will, to give one example, write about Dorothy Richardson and also try to write like her, and in doing so to develop both our critical understanding and our own writing skills. This is meant to be a ‘bridge module’ of particular use to students who wish to develop as writers of fiction, whether or not they are students in English and Creative Writing. But it will also help all students develop their distinctiveness as writers of non-fictional prose and their capacity to reflect on the implications of different ways of making sentences and paragraphs.

THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATING LOVE, DEATH AND ADVENTURE (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6188A

Credits 30

For something to be reborn it must first die. The Italian Renaissance ('rebirth') sought to disinter the past in order to reanimate the present, but in order to do so the present had to come to terms with its loss – as Petrarch asked, 'who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?'. How can we best understand this process of loss and reanimation? How did Renaissance writers understand it, and how did they bridge the gulf between death and rebirth? And can we do the same? In order to answer these questions, you’ll examine the twin practices of imitation and translation in English responses to some of the most exciting and influential texts of the Italian Renaissance. It does so in two ways: through a sustained analysis of those practices in their diverse forms and genres (sonnets, epic, dialogue, drama), and by imitating the process of creative imitation ourselves. In other words, we step into the shoes of the Renaissance imitator. The module allows us to understand how Italian poets such as Dante, Petrarch and Ariosto responded to the classical past (and each other), and how English poets and playwrights such as Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare and Jonson responded to Italian models. By imitating the imitators – for example by writing sonnets – we gain a deeper understanding of how imitation is both a creative practice and a critical process, both a reading and a rewriting. Students are not expected or required to know any Italian in advance.

CULTURES OF SUBURBIA

Code LDCL6192B

Credits 30

The history of twentieth-century literature is often told from the perspective of the metropolitan avant-garde. Modernist writers and intellectuals by turns celebrated or abominated the modern metropolis, but they tended to agree that the urban and the modern were inextricably linked. They were also often united by a hatred of suburbia, which they associated with the rise of a pooterish middle class and in turn with an irredeemably philistine, socially conservative middlebrow culture. Wyndham Lewis famously blasted 'the purgatory of Putney'. Yet in certain respects the twentieth century was the suburban century, as the cities continued their horizontal expansion and the separation of 'life' and 'work' that is the suburban response to industrialism became widespread. The growth of suburbia from the late nineteenth century to the present day has provoked a fascinating variety of cultural responses, including, but not limited to, hostile denunciations. Writers, artists and filmmakers found much opportunity for comedy in suburban habits, values and aspirations. They considered the emergence of the suburban housewife and the implications for this for women and for feminism. They debated the architecture and planning of the suburbs, notably through engagements with the Garden City and Garden Suburb movements. They speculated about the political implications of the growth of a literate, home-owning suburban middle class. They depicted the effects of mass immigration on suburbia and the development of suburban multiculture. They pointed to the uncanny and even the surreal aspects of suburban life. This module explores the literature and cultural geography of suburbia in Britain and the United States, and in so doing it suggests an alternative history of modernity, told not from the centre but from the periphery. Writers covered might include: George and Weedon Grossmith, Arthur Machen, William Morris, C.F.G Masterman, Ebenezer Howard, H. G. Wells, Dorothy Richardson, George Orwell, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, Richard Yates, Hanif Kureshi, J. G Ballard and Julian Barnes. We will also consider examples of suburban film and television.

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Entry Requirements

A Levels

AAA including English Literature or AAB including English Literature with an A in the Extended Project

BTEC

DDD alongside grade A in A-Level English Literature (or equivalent). Excludes BTEC Public Services, BTEC Uniformed Services and BTEC Business Administration.

Scottish highers

AAAAAA including English Literature

Scottish highers advanced

BBB including English Literature

Irish leaving certificate

6 subjects at H2 including English Literature

Access course

Pass the Access to HE Diploma with Distinction in 45 credits at Level 3 including 12 credits in English Literature.

European Baccalaureate

82% including English Literature

International Baccalaureate

34 points including HL 6 English

GCSE offer

You are required to have Mathematics and English Language at a minimum of Grade C or Grade 4 or above at GCSE.

Additional entry requirements

If you do not have an A-Level or equivalent qualification in English Literature (or English Language and Literature), once you have submitted your UCAS form we may then contact you to ask you to submit a short analysis of a passage of a literary text in support of your application.

If you do not meet the academic requirements for direct entry, you may be interested in one of our Foundation Year programmes.

If you do not meet the academic and or English requirements for direct entry our partner, INTO University of East Anglia offers guaranteed progression on to this undergraduate degree upon successful completion of a preparation programme, and successful submission of a creative writing portfolio. Depending on your interests, and your qualifications you can take a variety of routes to this degree:

International Foundation in Business, Economics, Society and Culture (for Year 1 entry to UEA)

International Foundation in Humanities and Law (for Year 1 entry to UEA)

Special Entry Requirements

Candidates who are shortlisted will be asked to provide a sample of their creative writing: we ask for around 7 pages of work, which can be on any subject and in any genre of the candidate's choice. Most choose to send poetry, prose, or a mixture of the two.

Alternative Qualifications

UEA recognises that some students take a mixture of International Baccalaureate IB or International Baccalaureate Career-related Programme IBCP study rather than the full diploma, taking Higher levels in addition to A levels and/or BTEC qualifications. At UEA we do consider a combination of qualifications for entry, provided a minimum of three qualifications are taken at a higher Level. In addition some degree programmes require specific subjects at a higher level.

Students for whom english is a foreign language

Applications from students whose first language is not English are welcome. We require evidence of proficiency in English (including writing, speaking, listening and reading):

IELTS: 6.5 overall with a minimum of 5.5 in each component

We also accept a number of other English language tests. Please click here to see our full list.

If you do not yet meet the English language requirements for this course, INTO UEA offer a variety of English language programmes which are designed to help you develop the English skills necessary for successful undergraduate study:

Pre-sessional English at INTO UEA

English for University Study at INTO UEA

Interviews

Most applicants will not be called for an interview and a decision will be made via UCAS Track. However, for some applicants an interview will be requested. Where an interview is required the Admissions Service will contact you directly to arrange a time.

Gap year

We welcome applications from students who have already taken or intend to take a gap year. We believe that a year between school and university can be of substantial benefit. You are advised to indicate your reason for wishing to defer entry on your UCAS application.

Intakes

This course is open to UK, EU and International applicants. The annual intake for this course is in September each year.

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Course Reference Number: 667257

BA CREATIVE WRITING AND ENGLISH LITERATURE