BA (Hons) Creative Writing and English Literature

Key details

BA (HONS) CREATIVE WRITING AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

Start Year

2022

Attendance

Full Time

Award

Degree of Bachelor of Arts

UCAS course code

W8Q3

Entry Requirements

AAA

Duration (years)

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.

Our BA Creative Writing and English Literature is ranked 7th for Creative Writing by 'The Complete University Guide 2023'.

About

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 the gothic to children’s literature, crime writing to Latin American fiction, nonsense writing to biography. 

Whichever modules you choose to study, you’ll be taught by our world-leading writers and critics. UEA’s School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing is famous for innovation in teaching and for cutting-edge research – that’s why in the most recent Times Higher Education Analysis (REF2021), UEA was ranked 19th in the UK for the quality of its research in English Language and Literature.

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 our UEA Live: New Writing events, 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. 

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UEA English ranked 19th for Research Quality

We’re 19th for research quality!

UEA is ranked 19th overall in the Times Higher Education REF 2021 Analysis for research quality in English Language and Literature.

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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.

Assessment for Year 1

Throughout your degree, all modules in Creative Writing and in English Literature have no exams - we believe that the best way to express your thoughts about literature and to show off your creative development is through carefully crafted pieces of written coursework. On the creative side, you'll start by writing your own prose and poetry, developing fundamental skills in drafting, keeping a writer's notebook, and submitting to deadlines, before embarking on more experimental exercises. You'll produce work collaboratively (e.g. a text-image cross-media project) and reflect on the collaboration process. In your studies of literature, you'll develop renewed enthusiasm for writing academic essays, and express your thinking in a diverse variety of forms, like reviews or personal reflective writing.

Feedback
You'll receive feedback on your writing (creative and critical) from your tutors (e.g. in one-to-one tutorials) and your peers. Feedback on assessed work will be returned within 20 working days (after it has been carefully marked and moderated). As your first year does not count toward your overall degree result it's a great time to experiment and take risks.

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

Teaching (c.25%)
Nurtured by our world-leading creative writing tutors (in seminars of c. 15 people), you'll start to get to grips with creative writing's fundamentals, including strategies for creating character, writing dialogue, determining mood and maintaining atmosphere. You'll be mentored as you collaborate with students in other disciplines -- your first taste of the contemporary working writer's world. Lectures on literature will surprise you with new ideas, and seminar discussions led by your tutor will shape your thinking about what you've read that week. You'll meet your academic adviser who'll support you through your whole degree with everything from choice of modules to launching your career.

Independent Learning (c.75%)
You’ll spend time on your own creative writing and also work collaboratively. You'll throw yourself into the whirlwind of extra-curricular creative writing events and activities. You'll read some extraordinary books, with a framework of guided tasks to help you get the most out of them, and discover a wealth of new resources in the library. By the end of this year, you'll be equipped with the fundamental skills necessary for your creative and literary journey.

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Assessment for Year 2

You'll continue to submit 100% written coursework for all your creative writing and literature modules. Your creative writing will flourish as you produce more substantial pieces of prose (e.g. 1250-word short story or longer 2000-word narrative), portfolios of poetry, or scripts for stage or screen (c.20-30 minutes in length), and write reflective pieces to understand better your own creative processes. Your writing will be energised by encounters with real-life subjects as you experience the writers' world first hand, and you'll write reflectively about the ethics and complexities of drawing on real life subjects. You'll continue to hone your critical essay writing, and you might experiment with 'creative criticism', for instance by writing a short story to show off what you've learnt about that form.

Feedback
You'll continue to have the support and feedback of all your tutors, and your creative work will be deepened by your immersion in the workshop environment, where you receive feedback from your peers and learn to give feedback on their work, an enormously valuable skill in many careers.

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

Teaching (c.25%)
Your creative work will now be taken to the next level through the 'workshopping' process (pioneered in the UK by UEA), where you'll get feedback on your writing from your peers under the direction of one of our creative writing tutors, and learn the art of offering constructive critique of their writing, too. You'll bring your writing into the wider world in collaboration with a community group or organisation, supported by our creative writing team. Lectures and seminars will immerse you in particular eras of literature, and you'll take seminars in more vocational subjects like journalism or publishing (using our state-of-the-art Media Suite).

Independent Learning (c.75%)
You'll deepen your confidence in the craft of creative writing, gain real-world experience of the demands and exhilarating rewards of collaborating with others, continue to enrich your writing through the study of literature, and finish the year with a real sense of how your degree might open out into future careers.

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Assessment for Year 3

You'll continue to be assessed by 100% written coursework. You'll have the option to take a module in which you turn your work into a book or performance that meets industry standards, and which is a full reflection of the writer you have become. You can also choose to participate in another workshop or to embark on a creative dissertation (6000 words writing / 2000 words reflection), the culmination of your achievements as a writer. Alongside your creative work, you'll have the chance to produce in-depth explorations of literature (3500-5000 words), and if you wish, you might continue to experiment with the forms in which you express your ideas about literary texts, writing Shakespearean sonnets or experimenting with the new boundary-defying genre of ‘auto-fiction’

Feedback
You'll have a book or performance that represents 'you' as a professional writer, and you'll be ready to launch yourself into the working writer's world. All the feedback you've received, too, enables you to graduate with highly developed transferable skills in writing across a host of forms and for an array of audiences, together with an ability to give sensitive but incisive critique of others' work.

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 organised into two option ranges– currently we offer topics covering everything from the global middle ages to contemporary children’s literature.  

Teaching and Learning

Teaching (c.20%)
Your immersion in the writer's world culminates as you're mentored through the intensive editorial and revision process needed to ensure your work meets industry standards for publication or performance. You might take a 3-hour workshop led by a member of our creative writing team, focussing on a particular form of your choice (poetry/prose/script), or choose to work one-on-one with a creative writing tutor to produce a substantial creative dissertation. Alongside this, you'll have the chance to explore cutting-edge literary topics in real depth, in 3-hour seminars taught by specialists passionate about their subject.

Independent Learning (c.80%)
You'll work with increasing confidence and independence as a literary critic, and you'll bring together all your experience as a creative writer to complete the year (and the degree) with a tangible product of everything you've been learning -- your own book or performance.

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Assessment for Year 1

Compulsory Modules

CREATIVE WRITING: AUTUMN SEMESTER

Code LDCC4001A

Credits 20

This module is exclusive to students enrolled on the following degree programmes: English Literature with Creative Writing; Creative Writing and English Literature; American Literature with Creative Writing. This module is designed to give students a solid basis on which to build their understanding of Creative Writing practice and themselves as writers. Students will be introduced to concepts, skills and tools, relevant to many forms of writing, and asked to consider how they might engage with these in their own work, through in-class exercises and discussions. You will be asked to read texts (critical, technical and creative) and engage in discussion around the ideas presented and how these might affect your own practice. Students may be asked to consider and experiment with forms and genres they do not usually write in. Pushing outside of our comfort zone puts us into the learning zone, and is extremely beneficial in our attempts to find our voice and identity as a writer. Learning to understand ourselves as legitimate writers, with valid, lived experience from which to draw from, is a core tenet of this module.

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.

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Important Information

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the modules listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the annual monitoring and review of modules. Where this activity leads to significant change to a programme and modules, the University will endeavour to consult with affected students. 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. Availability of optional modules may be restricted owing to timetabling, lack of demand, or limited places. Where this is the case, you will be asked to make alternative module choices and you will be supported during this process.

Assessment for Year 2

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 of Europe.

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 travel, exploration and the beginning of the later nineteenth-century British empire. 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. 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 will 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 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

In this module you will explore how words open out onto worlds in eighteenth-century literature. The first half of the module focuses on texts in which people, real or imagined, move out into the world. The writers in the first half will include authors such as Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and Olaudah Equiano. We will see how new ideas about what it meant to be human emerged from these travels and examine the intertwinement of eighteenth-century literature with exploration, empire, and enslavement. While the first half of the module focuses on the wider world, the second half of the module focuses on the inner world of the mind and moves our focus from prose to poetry. Writers in the second half of the module include writers such as Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Anne Yearsley, and Phillis Wheatley. In this part of the module, we will see how writers represent the workings of the mind using the resources of literary form, trace connections between the mind and its immediate environment, and move back and forth between the mind and the world as a whole. By taking this module, you’ll gain an awareness of the experimental and exploratory energies behind so much of the literature the eighteenth-century produced. You’ll also gain sharpened analytical and research skills that will help you see significant textual patterns in texts and trace connections between literary texts and the larger world in which they move. THIS MODULE FULFILS THE PRE 1789 REQUIREMENT.

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

Code LDCL5042A

Credits 20

In this module, you’ll discover a huge variety of writing from one of Britain's most exciting and turbulent periods of cultural, political and intellectual transformation: the seventeenth century. We begin by exploring how English literature was formed out of its encounters with classical texts and how women established a place for their writing within English literary culture for the first time. In the centre of the module, we discover how seventeenth-century people wrote about their encounters with other cultures, whether as travellers to the Ottoman Empire (which stretched across the Middle East), or as colonists meeting Native Americans in Massachusetts. In the module's latter section, we ask how literature was transformed by the tumultuous upheavals of the English civil war and the execution of the monarch, events which have sent shockwaves through the centuries which still resonate today. The modules’ themes come together in the study of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, one of the first novels and a pioneering work of women’s writing, which tells the terrible story of an African prince who was enslaved in Surinam. Authors we study include famous figures such as Ben Jonson 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, or the astonishing Turkish travel writer, Evliya Çelebi. 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.

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

To read medieval writing is to encounter otherness, to engage with a culture (really a variety of cultures) that at times seems familiar, recognizable, yet which repeatedly reminds us of its difference and distance from us. When a huge and intimidating green knight enters King Arthur’s court at Camelot and issues his challenge, he is disturbing not because he is entirely alien, but because he is alike enough to unsettle the court’s sense of identity. The fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most complex and challenging works of literature ever written, might serve as a metaphor for our experience of medieval writing, and of the language in which it is written: Middle English. It is strangely familiar. Yet through the experience of otherness we find our multiple identities, and in studying Medieval Writing you will (re)discover the genres and modes that have shaped our literary histories: lyric, comedy, tragedy, romance, allegory, satire, historiography, autobiography and fantasy, to name but a few. The module is configured along the themes of ‘pilgrimage, travellers and exiles’, which allows us to understand the diverse forms of interaction — real and imagined — between European and non-European cultures: military, religious, and mercantile exchanges, for example. You will discover a culture of dazzling intellectual richness and variety that will dispel any lazily pejorative modern clichés about the term ‘medieval’. And you will be given the tools to make those discoveries – in addition to learning how to read Middle English, you will learn about the materiality of medieval texts (e.g. how to understand manuscripts), and of the historical coordinates of those texts: the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, religious persecution, the feudal system and its decline. Whether it’s the cosmopolitan intellectual brilliance of Chaucer, the fantastic realities of Arthurian romance, the autobiography of Margery Kempe, the travel writing of Sir John Mandeville, or the ethical dilemmas posed by the Gawain-poet, Medieval Writing has something for you.

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, Zadie Smith, Deborah Levy and Kamila Shamsie. 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.

Optional B Modules

(20 credits)

TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES

Code AMAL5081A

Credits 20

This module will explore the diversity and histories of literatures emerging from transatlantic crossings and exchange. Taught through a lecture circus format, it will draw on the research expertise of colleagues in both AMA and LDC, in order to demonstrate the breadth of the Transatlantic as both a geography and an imaginary. Materials will include literary responses to the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, writing from the Caribbean, the work of writers whose careers took them from America to Paris—or from London to New York—and transatlantic literary networks. Each lecture will be given by a different academic, based on their own areas of research, and include Q&A's on how they conceive of the Transatlantic as a critical concept and constellation, and as a crucial site for understanding decolonisation.

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.

VIDEOGAMES: THEORY, PRACTICE, AND RECEPTION

Code HUM-5008B

Credits 20

This module offers students the opportunity to develop a comprehensive understanding of the cultural, political, and economic contexts of the videogames industry, and the techniques and principles used in game design. The module will give an overview of the key academic debates from video game history from production to reception, considering the current state of the industry, issues of representation in games, and study of games culture within a broader context. The module will provide students with the opportunity to play and critique a variety of games hardware and software. In addition, the module provides an understanding of hardware platforms and software tools used in the creation of videogames, making use of UEA's Media Suite to offer a practice-based component to aid in the understanding of the principles behind games development. Students will be able to learn entry level games design practices. No previous experience of coding or games development is required to undertake the module, just an interest in the subject.

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.

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.

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 Marina Tsvetaeva, Pablo Neruda, Adonis, Clarice Lispector, 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 (SPR)

Code LDCL5065B

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.

I AM/WE ARE

Code LDCL5066A

Credits 20

What do you identify with and what are you identified by? How are you embodied, how you inhabit space and communicate? Which groups and communities are you as an individual connected to, or perhaps assigned to by others? The ways in which we as individuals and groups are read in the world shape our experiences. These experiences in turn, shape our ways of knowing and understanding ourselves, our world, and each other. This module will encourage students to think in fresh ways about themselves, their university work and the world around them, through critical reading and experimental writing. It will give students tools, skills and ideas which they may apply to their studies and further research more broadly. This module replaces the modules I Am and He Said, She Said: Gender and Perspective in Contemporary Fiction

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, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carol Ann Duffy, Carolyn Forché, Patience Agbabi and Hannah Silva 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, including its political and ideological perspectives. 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 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.

Optional C Modules

(40 credits)

CREATIVE WRITING: PROSE FICTION (AUT)

Code LDCC5001A

Credits 20

This module will enable students to develop their abilities and potential as writers of prose fiction, building on the experience they already have in a formal creative writing environment. The overall aim of this module will be to develop students’ expressive and technical skills in writing prose fiction, to improve their abilities as editors and critics of their own and other people's work, and to develop their critical engagement with what it means to be a prose fiction writer in their current cultural context. The first half of the module will be exploratory and practical, using reading, discussion, and structured exercises in order to consider a variety of relevant concepts, including: character, plot and structure, time and place, point of view, and editing and revising. In the second half of the semester, the seminar sessions will be split into one hour on new topics such as language and style, form and theme, genre, and publishing, and one hour dedicated to workshops: constructive group discussions of students’ works-in-progress.

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 students to develop their abilities and potential as writers of prose fiction, building on the experience they already have in a formal creative writing environment. The overall aim of this module will be to develop students’ expressive and technical skills in writing prose fiction, to improve their abilities as editors and critics of their own and other people's work, and to develop their critical engagement with what it means to be a prose fiction writer in their current cultural context. The first half of the module will be exploratory and practical, using reading, discussion, and structured exercises in order to consider a variety of relevant concepts, including: character, plot and structure, time and place, point of view, and editing and revising. In the second half of the semester, the seminar sessions will be split into one hour on new topics such as, language and style, form and theme, genre, and publishing, and one hour dedicated to workshops: constructive group discussion of students’ works-in-progress.

SCRIPTWRITING: STAGE/RADIO

Code LDCC5015B

Credits 20

Scriptwriting: Stage/Radio deepens your ability to create and understand dramatic texts, through exercises in writing drama and the analysis of a range of plays and/or radio scripts. In this module you’ll explore different 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 or radio drama of up to 30 minutes length. The course is hands-on, inspiring and practical, and you’ll be writing every week.

SCRIPTWRITING: TV/FILM

Code LDCC5016A

Credits 20

Scriptwriting: TV/FIlm deepens your ability to create and understand dramatic texts, through exercises in writing drama and the analysis of a range of screenplays for film and TV. In this module you’ll explore different 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 screenplay of up to 30 minutes length. The course is hands-on, inspiring and practical, and you’ll be writing every week.

SCRIPTWRITING: TV/FILM

Code LDCC5016B

Credits 20

SCRIPTWRITING: SCREEN AND STAGE

Code LDCC5017A

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 different 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 30 minutes length. The course is hands-on, inspiring and practical, and you’ll be writing every week.

SCRIPTWRITING: SCREEN AND STAGE

Code LDCC5017B

Credits 20

Clearing and Admissions Live Chat

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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

Compulsory Modules

Optional A Modules

(0-30 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.

Optional B Modules

(30-60 credits)

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 (AUT)

Code LDCC6103A

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 ELCW and Creative Writing and English Literature CWEL (and for other students who have achieved a mark of 68%+ in a previous Creative Writing module).

CREATIVE WRITING: SCRIPTWRITING

Code LDCC6105B

Credits 30

This module will enable you to explore the theory and practice of writing for stage, screen and radio through the work of produced writers, secondary reading and your own writing. You’ll study 4 key texts for stage, film, TV and radio. 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 or Adaptation and Transmedia Storytelling or Writing the American Script).

Optional C Modules

(60 credits)

DRAMA AND LITERATURE: THE QUESTION OF GENRE

Code LDCD6017B

Credits 30

Through creative workshops and seminars, this module explores genre and how it interacts with social categorisation. We'll think about genres such as westerns, horror, tragedy, and comedy through contemporary and historical artworks that trouble genre and defy categorisation. We'll engage with a wide range of forms, such as live art, short stories, graphic novels, musicals, and stand up. The work you produce will be creative and critical. You'll choose a source to adapt into performance, workshopping your piece with the group and discovering what's possible in a performance medium. You'll also write a critical essay focusing on one of the artworks analysed together.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (AUT)

Code LDCL6018A

Credits 30

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words. The topic of your dissertation is largely up to you, though does depend on the availability of a supervisor who can work with you on it. You do not need to have a specific topic already decided before enrolling on the dissertation: you can develop the topic in conversation with your supervisor. All you need in the first instance is a preferred subject area for the dissertation, so that supervisory arrangements can be put in place.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (SPR)

Code LDCL6019B

Credits 30

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words (6000 words for 20 credit). The topic of your dissertation is largely up to you, though does depend on the availability of a supervisor who can work with you on it. You do not need to have a specific topic already decided before enrolling on the dissertation: you can develop the topic in conversation with your supervisor. All you need in the first instance is a preferred subject area for the dissertation, so that supervisory arrangements can be put in place.

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.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Code LDCL6038A

Credits 30

This module offers students 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 such as A.A. Milne, Dr. Seuss, Shaun Tan, and Sally Nicholls, 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. In addition, we also discuss writing, translating, editing, marketing, reviewing, mediating, and teaching children’s literature.

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.

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

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words (6000 words for 20 credit). The topic of your dissertation is largely up to you, though does depend on the availability of a supervisor who can work with you on it. You do not need to have a specific topic already decided before enrolling on the dissertation: you can develop the topic in conversation with your supervisor. All you need in the first instance is a preferred subject area for the dissertation, so that supervisory arrangements can be put in place.

LITERATURE DISSERTATION: (pre-1789) (SPR)

Code LDCL6062B

Credits 30

In the Literature Dissertation, you get to conduct independent research on a literary topic of your choosing, with supervision from an academic with relevant expertise. In addition to guidance from your supervisor, you will have group workshops helping you to define and delimit your topic, to plan your research and writing, to structure your argument, and to contextualise your work within broader critical debates. By the end of the semester you will have completed an extended essay of 8000 words (6000 words for 20 credit). The topic of your dissertation is largely up to you, though does depend on the availability of a supervisor who can work with you on it. You do not need to have a specific topic already decided before enrolling on the dissertation: you can develop the topic in conversation with your supervisor. All you need in the first instance is a preferred subject area for the dissertation, so that supervisory arrangements can be put in place.

MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN TRADITIONS (pre-1789)

Code LDCL6066B

Credits 30

From Welsh folklore to Monty Python, the tales of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have excited and intrigued generations. We explore the development of the legend from its twelfth-century Celtic roots through heroic alliterative verse to medieval romances, and some select later adaptations. How the legend has been translated across form, genre but also cultures and ages will be studied through creative and critical exercises. The intent of this approach is to illuminate deep historical structures – mental, linguistic, social, cultural, aesthetic, religious, political, sexual – that underlie readings of the Arthurian literature in history.

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'.

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

In the words of Sara Ahmed “Feminism is bringing people into the room”. We are witnessing an upsurge in activism that some are describing as the fourth ‘wave’ of feminism. It is timely then to reconsider how feminist writing - the essay, memoir, the novel, poetry, and literary criticism and theory - has helped to shape, influence and articulate important past debates about gender, sexuality, race, class and society, and how it continues to be part of that conversation in the present. The Feminist Writing module is taught via a combination of lectures and seminars. On Feminist Writing, we are committed to offering an inclusive learning environment to all students of any gender identity and to teaching diverse world views and ways of knowing. Feminist Writing is an intersectional and antiracist module that includes a transhistorical and transnational range of creative and critical texts. The module considers: Feminist Positionality, Early Feminist Arguments and Texts, The Feminist Essay and Memoir forms, Queer Feminist Love Poetry, Trans Queer Families and Motherhood, and Speculative Eco-Feminist Futures. The module is assessed via two assignments – the first is a response to a passage from one of the module texts, and the second is an independent project. Either assignment can be critical, creative-critical, creative, or a personal essay.

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.

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.

DARK ROMANTICISM: THE GOTHIC INHERITANCE

Code LDCL6166B

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.

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 CONSCIOUSNESS: STYLE AND MODERNIST FICTION

Code LDCL6186A

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.

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, this module examines 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 as they can be located in two of the most popular forms of the period (the sonnet and the epic), 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, and Shakespeare responded to Italian models. It also illustrates the important and vocal interventions made by Italian women poets such as Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco. 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. (Pre-1789)

FANTASTIC REALISMS (PRE-1789)

Code LDCL6204B

Credits 30

This module invites you to explore how novelists from Miguel de Cervantes to Machado de Assis have created new kinds of fiction by bringing fantasy and realism—often thought of as mutually exclusive categories—together. Our starting point is Part One of Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote (1605), which juxtaposes the fantastic delusions of the titular character and the mundane reality he mistakes for the magical world of romance. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) will draw our attention to how fantasy is bound up with even our ordinary apprehensions of reality. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novel The Romance of the Forest (1791) plays off against each other natural and supernatural explanations for the reports of ghostly happenings at the abbey at the centre of the novel. Finally, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) draws on Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy in order to create new kinds of fantastic realisms in the context of multi-racial, nineteenth-century Brazil. Far from telling a story of the triumph of realism over fantasy, this module instead draws attention to the persistence of fantasy and the self-reflexive impulse within the novel tradition. Through this module we shall address the overarching questions: “how does reality enter into fantasy?” and “how does fantasy enter into the representation of reality?” We will be reading novels over several weeks, which will give us the opportunity to investigate “fantastic realisms” from many different angles. Our critical readings will allow us to think about different thematic approaches each week including the uncanny, self-reflexivity, connections between literary and pictorial art, and fantasy as a means of engaging with social reality and politics, including the politics of colonialism. The module, then, both traces out a significant tradition of “fantastic realisms” across three centuries and also introduces students to a series of thematic paradigms for understanding the novels. The summative work on the module will be split between one essay on a pre-1789 text and another essay in which you will have a choice to write on another pre-1789 text or a post-1789 text.

WOMEN'S WRITING IN EARLY-MODERN BRITAIN: THE EMERGENCE OF FEMALE AUTHORSHIP (PRE-1789)

Code LDCL6212A

Credits 30

At the end of the seventeenth century, Aphra Behn became the first woman in England who could be called a ‘professional writer’. But in this period, it was still seen as transgressive for women to write at all, and especially to publish their own imaginative writing. How did early-modern women develop and defend their identities as writers and authors? How did the material forms in which women wrote and circulated their work shape their writing? And how did women situate their writing in traditions and spheres that were usually the preserve of men? This module explores the vast and inventive array of writing by early-modern women, ranging from lyrical poetry to personal letters. You will read writing by women who were successful in the print marketplace, such as Katherine Philips, a figure also celebrated today as a pre-eminent writer about lesbian experience. You will encounter women who kept their writing in manuscript, and whose work challenges canonical conceptions of ‘authorship’, such as the diarist Anne Clifford and the letter-writer Dorothy Osborne. We will explore key places and contexts from which women’s writing emerged, including the vibrant and complex domestic space of the ‘household’. And we will travel outside of England, too, including to Massachusetts, where we will confront the relationship between the emergence of female authorship and the growth of English colonialism, as we read Anne Bradstreet: the first colonial American poet to be published. This module’s major focus is seventeenth-century women’s writing, but you will also read some texts by medieval and sixteenth-century women. This module may appeal to students who took ‘Seventeenth Century Writing’, but no prior knowledge of the early-modern period is needed or assumed.

THE BUSINESS OF BOOKS (PRE-1789)

Code LDCL6214A

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 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 prerequisites for this module, although it will be of interest to those who have studied Eighteenth-Century Writing in the second year. THIS MODULE FULFILS THE PRE-1789 REQUIREMENT.

READING MODERN JAPANESE FICTION: TRANSLATION AND CANONISATION

Code LDCL6217A

Credits 30

One of the major cultural concerns that arose from Japan’s decision to modernise, following its renunciation of isolationism post-1868, was the need to create a bespoke modern literary canon that would compete with those of other nations. In terms of fiction, this was not a straightforward task. The literary form that we call “the novel”, simply hadn’t existed hitherto in Japan; there was no prose fiction that sought to be “authentic” in its inscription of contemporary Japanese language, or self-consciously “literary”, or intellectually as rigorous. Japan has been successful not only in creating such a canon, but also in ensuring that it has become a global phenomenon through which the home country is now able to wield considerable soft power. Various acts of translation, both into and out of Japanese, were necessary to achieve this. What were these acts? Who carried them out? How did the texts they resulted in contribute to the creation of a modern Japanese canon, and what has been omitted from that canon? This module offers a broad introduction to those questions through the reading (in translation) of selected major Japanese texts. The module will start by giving an overview of the major genres that existed in Japan prior to the late 19th Century by studying The Tale of Genji. Through this foundational text we will examine how Japanese literature evolved over centuries through different forms of literature, drama and the visual arts. In particular, here we will focus on how any potential meanings of the text shifted as it took on new forms through translation and adaption by different generations. We will then compare correlating chapters of three or four different modern English translations of The Tale of Genji, including: the very first translation by an attaché to the Japanese Embassy in London, Kenchō Suematsu in 1882; Arthur Waley’s iconic version (1925-33); and the first post World War II translation by Edward Seidensticker (1976). In reading these chapters we will consider how the literary and cultural context of the translator informs the meanings which are generated through each. In approaching this material we will draw upon literary and translation theory, such as: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’; Laurence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility and Roland Barthes’ introduction to S/Z. Next, we will turn to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when key academic figures from the US worked to select and translate the texts they felt would most appeal to a Western readership while writing literary critical accounts of them in order to establish Japanese Literature as a western academic subject. We will examine discussions by and between scholars and translators such as Donald Keene, Ivan Morris, Edward Seidensticker and Howard Hibbert on their means of selection and translation alongside reading key novels translated during this time. These may include: Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s The Makioka Sisters and Mishima Yukio’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. After this, we will spend one week looking at the movement by female translators, from 1970s onwards, to introduce Japanese women writers (such as Enchi Fumiko, Ohba Minako, and Tsushima Yūko) to an anglophone audience through either three or four short stories, or one novel, and examine how such texts allow us to question the role that gender plays in determining canonicity, especially in the case of Japan. One week will be dedicated to considering the emergence of Murakami Haruki’s globally successful oeuvre and the role that (freelance) translation played in that success. This will include comparing across different translated versions of the same extract from a novel or short story. Finally, a week will focus on one contemporary novel (for instance: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of the Hills, or Tawada Yōko’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear) and examine how it challenges our very conception of a national literary canon. No knowledge of Japanese is required as all texts studied in class will be in English; and there is no requirement for you to have studied Japanese literature or society. Final assessment will take the form of one 1500-word and one 3500-word critical essay

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Entry Requirements

A Levels

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

T Levels

No acceptable pathways for 2022 entry.

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 36 credits at Level 3 including 12 credits in English Literature and Merit in 9 credits at Level 3.

European Baccalaureate

82% including 8.5 in 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 such as BA English Literature with a Foundation Year

INTO University of East Anglia

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 Entry Requirements

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.

Important note

Once enrolled onto your course at UEA, your progression and continuation (which may include your eligibility for study abroad, overseas experience, placement or year in industry opportunities) is contingent on meeting the assessment requirements which are relevant to the course on which you are enrolled.

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.

INTO University of East Anglia

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 and International applicants. The annual intake for this course is in September each year.

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Course Reference Number: 4479794

BA (Hons) CREATIVE WRITING AND ENGLISH LITERATURE