Important dates 2012-13 autumn term monday 1 October
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THE SEVEN BASIC PLOTS Tutor: Ian Sansom Spring Term: Wednesday 10-1, (venue TBA)
Week 2 Heroes/Heroines (Conan, Don Quixote, The Bourne Identity) Week 3 Monsters/Others (The Bible, Frankenstein, Stephen King, Homer) Week 4 Tragedy (Oedipus Rex, Ibsen, Chekhov, revenge) Week 5 Comedy (Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Emma, P.G.Wodehouse, slapstick, stand-up, and Henri Bergson) Week 6 The Quest (Heart of Darkness, Dan Brown, Super Mario) Week 7 Voyage and Return (Islands, Lord of the Flies, The Beach) Week 8 Transformation (Dostoevsky, Great Expectations, A Star Is Born, the Bildungsroman) Week 9 Anti-Plots (Clarice Lispector, Christine Brooke-Rose, Slaughterhouse-Five, Adaptation) Week 10 Plots: A Summary Aristotle, Poetics Sophocles, Oedipus Rex Jane Austen, Emma Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Charles Dickens, Great Expectations Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five SECONDARY READING Aristotle, ‘Poetics’, in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. Dorsch (1965) Bell, James Scott, Plot and Structure (1995) Booker, Christopher, The Seven Basic Plots (2005) Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot (1985) Burke, Kenneth, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1957) Chatman, Seymour, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978) Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1966) Lodge, David, Working with Structuralism (1981) McKee, Robert, Story (1999) Mittelmark, Howard and Sandra Newman, How Not to Write a Novel (2009) Polkinghorne, David, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (1988) Polti, Georges, The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, trans. Lucille Ray (1977) Prince, Gerald, A Dictionary of Narratology (2nd edn., 2003) Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed., Avatars of Story: Narrative Modes in Old and New Media (2006) Thompson, Kristin, Storytelling in Film and Television (2003) Vogler, Christopher, The Writer’s Journey (3rd edn., 2007) Assessment: A portfolio of 10,000 words (45 CATS), or 8,000 words (36 CATS) 6,000 words (30 CATS) or 5000 words (20 CATS). Students on the MA in Writing must submit a portfolio of 70% creative work and 30% essay; students on the MA in English Literature, Philosophy and Literature, Pan-Romanticisms or World Literatures may choose to submit a portfolio of 70% creative work and 30% essay OR 100% essay. Students will be expected to submit writing for class discussion every week. Sexual Geographies – Dr Gill Frith This module explores new ways of reading some of the most significant novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It offers an interdisciplinary approach to the representation of gender and place in literary texts, drawing particularly on the work of feminist geographers and philosophers, and cultural historians. The module will investigate the relationship between gender, place and nationhood, paying particular attention to the following: the meaning of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’; the depiction of domestic spaces and cultural iconography; the relationship between nation, empire and the formation of gendered subjectivity; the gendering of landscape; modernity, women and the city; spectatorship and surveillance. Indicative Set Texts 1. Introduction: Theorising Gender and Space 1 Handouts to be distributed. 2. Gendering the Nation Charlotte Bronté, Villette (1853) 3. Theorising Gender and Space 2 Handouts to be distirbuted 4. Domesticising Class Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855) 5. The Prisonhouse Charles Dickens, Bleak House 6. Sexing the City Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton 7. Empire Boys H. Rider Haggard, She (1886) 8. The House in History E.M.Forster, Howards End (1910) 9. Moving through Modernity Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) 10. Longing and Belonging Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934) [set in 1914] Shakespeare and His Sister – Dr Elizabeth Clarke This module studies, week by week, a famous Renaissance male writer alongside the work of his not-so-famous FEMALE sibling, lover, or friend. The point is to try and eliminate the differences between male and female writers that depend on class or culture so that we can really talk about gender as a category in the Renaissance. It is worth buying these books, which are both in paperback. eds. Gillian Wright and Jill Seal Millman, Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry (Manchester University Press, 2005) ed. Danielle Clarke, Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer; Renaissance Women Poets (Penguin, 2000) You might also consider getting hold of Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder ed. David Norbrook (Blackwell, Oxford; 2001) For the Introductory session it would be good to read chapter 3 of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own Shakespeare in Performance : Staging Domesicity – Prof Carol Rutter For the theorists of early modern English government, the idealised domestic household operated as a mini-commonwealth with a notional prince/patriarch at its head, subjects(wife, children) ordered hierarchically below him, and servants supporting the structure both with their service and with the loyalty their service entailed. For the early modern playwright, the household might be freighted with idealisation but in performance was a much more conflicted space: patriarchs proved dopes or dupes; children rebelled; servants schemed, connived, saved their undeserving masters' bacons; friends fell out, tuned homicidal; neighbours slapped lawsuits on each other; houses divided and went to war. Wherever you look in Shakespeare, you see the household functioning as a core trope. So how does it 'act' in performance? This year's Shakespeare and Performance module will begin with The Merry Wives of Windsor in performance at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, directed by Phillip Breen, a comedy some editors have termed Shakespeare's only domestic play (though we will trouble that descriptor, not least by considering the characters' former lives in plays called Henry IV 1&2 and Henry V). We will think first about how we read Shakespeare's playtext as a script and about how we become alert to the performances that are potential in that script – both ‘original’ early modern performances on the Elizabethan stage and ‘subsequent’ performances on our own ‘Elizabethan’ stage. We will be interested in actors' and directors' choices; in the visual world the designer creates for the play; in the role of the audience; and we will be developing a theoretically informed vocabulary of theatre studies. We will consider the uses of the theatre reviewer, and we will practice theatre criticism: one of our exercises will be to write a performance analysis of the RSC production. We will also practice theatre history: we will go into the performance archives of the RSC and Northern Broadsides to discover what kinds of records survive for productions and how we can use those materials to recover performance. Given domesticity in The Merry Wives of Windsor as the over-arching theme of the module, students will be invited to widen their gaze, to develop research projects on any play or in any area of Shakespeare performance studies that suits their interests. Note that there will be at least one required theatre trip (tba) and two additional trips to the Stratford performance archive. Topics in American Poetry – Dr Daniel Katz 2012-2013: Prose, Poet's Prose, and the Prosaic This module will devote significant attention to the American prose poem, but even more, to the crucial role of prose and the prosaic in various articulations of poetics throughout American literary history. In this respect, a foundation will be Stephen Fredman’s contention in Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse, that the question of prose has often functioned for American poets as a crucial tool with which to redefine the “poetic” itself, of finding a way of “including what poetry has been told to exclude” (10). Extending this insight, we can see that such concerns stretch from Whitmanian conceptualizations of free verse and Emily Dickinson’s epistolary poetics and stress on the letter as form through to Ezra Pound’s emphasis on “The Prose Tradition in Verse,” mixings of poetry and prose in W. C. Williams’ Spring and All and Jean Toomer’s Cane, and finally, Marianne Moore’s syllabic verse which can have the feel of lineated prose. Moving beyond modernism, we will examine how more recent poets such as Spicer, Ashbery, and Howe all reflect on the prose traditions of American verse in distinctive ways. Ultimately, no consideration of the question can bypass the precedents of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the module will begin with a brief consideration of their work. Primary Reading: 1. Introduction: A. Rimbaud, Illuminations (selections; J. Ashbery, trans.); C. Baudelaire, Little Poems in Prose(selections; K. Waldrop, trans.). 2. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855 edition). 3. Emily Dickinson, Poetry and selected letters. 4. W. C. Williams, Spring and All (New Directions, 2011; facsimile edition). 5. Marianne Moore, Complete Poems (Penguin Classics, 2005). 6. J. Toomer, Cane (Norton Critical, 2011). 7. E. Pound, The Pisan Cantos (New Directions: 2003); Guide to Kulchur (selections; New Directions, 1970); "The Prose Tradition in Verse." 8. Jack Spicer, After Lorca and Admonitions (from The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, Wesleyan UP, 2008). 9. J. Ashbery, Three Poems (in The Mooring of Starting Out, Ecco Press, 1998). 10. Susan Howe, The Midnight (New Directions, 2003). Travel, Literature, Anglo-empires – Dr Pablo Mukherjee Content: Travel Writing has emerged as a rapidly expanding and dynamic field of study that is structured by theoretical and interpretative concerns raised by Postcolonial Studies and Colonial Discourse Analysis, Cultural Materialism/Studies and contemporary Gender Studies. This MA module offers students an opportunity to analyse key nineteenth-century and contemporary British and Anglophone travel writing and investigate such questions as – what is the role played by travel writing in the formation of the structures of imperialist dominance and resistance to such dominances? What is the relationship between travel writing and issues such as transculturation and global networks of modern capitalism? How does travel writing form as well as investigate gendered subjects and subjectivities? What is the relationship between travel writing and various kinds of nationalisms? What is the traffic between travel writing and other literary genres such as novels? The module will require extensive literary and cultural research, engagement with critical theory, historical investigations, close textual analyses and will contribute to the student’s acquisition of the skills required to progress to a doctoral level. Students will introduce readings to the class, and produce a long essay on the course. Primary Texts Emily Eden, Up the Country Rudyard Kipling, The Man who would be King V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness; Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Tim Butcher, Blood River Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Medinah and Mecca(vol. 1) Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia Jonathan Raban, Arabia
Tutor: Leila Rasheed Autumn Term:, Week 1-10, Monday 1-4, Writers’ Room, Millburn House
1) to introduce students to specific issues relative to the writing and reading of contemporary children’s fiction. 2) to give them practical experience of writing for a wide age range of children and young people 3) to enable them to locate themselves as writers in the field of contemporary children’s literature. Around two hours of each three hour seminar is for introduction, discussion and writing; the rest is a workshop session in which we will examine between 2 and 3 students’ work per week, depending on group size. The best preparation for this module is to read as much contemporary (i.e. published in the last 10 years) fiction for all ages of non-adult as possible. The books mentioned below are a good starting point. However, don’t feel you have to restrict yourself to these titles. Although children’s books are generally shorter than adult fiction, it would be a good idea to get a head start on the reading during the summer. Also read some of the interviews with children’s authors on these two sites: http://www.achuka.co.uk/interviews/ http://www.justimaginestorycentre.co.uk/interviews and some or all of Write For Children; Andrew Melrose. (An extract is available online via the university library). COURSE PLAN Week 1 The child’s perspective: we discuss key principles of writing for children and explore the world from a child’s perspective. (no reading for this week) Week 2 One theme, three age groups; We discuss at least two books for different age ranges, each of which tackles the theme of death. Students explore how authors tailor their writing to the needs, wants and abilities of children of different ages and experiment with writing for different age groups. Core reading Gilbert the Great (pb ), Jane Clarke Ways to Live Forever; Sally Nicholls
The Great Hamster Massacre; Katie Davies Before I Die; Jenny Downham Michael Rosen’s Sad Book (pb); Michael Rosen Vicky Angel; Jacqueline Wilson Peter Pan In Kensington Gardens; J M Barrie Week 3 Retellings and revisions; We discuss children’s books which are retellings or revisions of traditional tales or classic novels. We will examine, amongst other issues, the different methods by which a traditional story can be made relevant to contemporary children and teenagers. Students produce their own writing arising from a traditional or classic story. Core reading: The Map of Marvels; David Calcutt Zelah Green, Queen of Clean; Vanessa Curtis
The Graveyard Book; Neil Gaiman The Garden; Elsie V. Aidinoff Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters; Rick Riordan Watership Down; Richard Adams Not The End of the World; Geraldine McCaughrean Week 4
From realism… In weeks 3 and 4 we will discuss realistic, fantastic and magical realist novels for children, focusing on realism in Week 3 and the fantastic in Week 4. Students practice writing on the sliding scale between reality and fantasy, exploring the ways in which the two can illuminate each other. Week 4 core reading: Millions; Frank Cotterell Boyce Feeling Sorry For Celia; Jaclyn Moriarty
Three ways to snog an alien; Graham Joyce Saffy’s Angel; Hilary McKay
…to the fantastic Week 5 core reading: Shadow Forest; Matt Haig Cold Tom; Sally Prue
Skellig; David Almond Stoneheart; Charlie Fletcher Devil’s Kiss; Sarwat Chadda Week 6 Image and Text. Students read a selection of illustrated books for different ages and explore ways image can expand on text and vice versa. They gain practical experience of ‘writing for pictures’. Core reading: Fix-it Duck (pb); Jez Alborough Voices In The Park (pb); Anthony Browne Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus! (pb); Mo Willems The Invention of Hugo Cabret; Brian Selznick Not Now, Bernard (pb); David McKee Secondary reading: Captain Underpants; Dav Pilkey Rosie’s Walk (pb); Pat Hutchins The Snowman (pb); Raymond Briggs (the version with no words at all) Monkey and Me (pb); Emily Gravett Week 7
Here and now; then and there. We look at speculative and historical fiction in tandem. We explore ways of writing past and future for today’s child and teenage readers. Core reading: Feed; M T Anderson Witch Child; Celia Rees
The Knife of Never Letting Go; Patrick Ness Exodus; Julie Bertagna The Hunger Games; Suzanne Collins The Carbon Diaries 2015; Saci Lloyd Uglies; Scott Westerfield The Incredible Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor To the Nation; MT Anderson Wolf Brother; Michelle Paver Fleshmarket; Nicola Morgan
Taboos and Issues. We will discuss messages, morals, (in)appropriate subject matter. We will ask: who writes and who reads children’s books? And does or should children’s literature have different aims and priorities to literature written for adults? Core reading Red Tears; Joanna Kenrick Sold; Patricia McCormick
Forbidden; Tabitha Suzuma Oranges in No Man’s Land; Elizabeth Laird Guantanamo Boy; Anna Perera The Breadwinner; Deborah Ellis The Truth about Leo; David Yelland Boy vs. Girl, Naima B Robert. Does my head look big in this?; Randa Abdel-Fattah Week 9 Poetry for Children: we read a selection of poems ‘within the hearing’ of children and write our own. What is a children’s poem? Core reading: Love That Dog; Sharon Creech Collected Poems for Children; Ted Hughes Revolting Rhymes and Dirty Beasts; Roald Dahl Secondary reading: The Scumbler magazine Make Lemonade; Virginia Ewer Wolff Poems by (among others) the following poets: Andrew Fusek Peters; Phillip Gross; Mandy Coe. Week 10 Concluding discussion We gather students’ final impressions of the module and direct them to further writing and reading according to their interests. ASSESSMENT FICTION PORTFOLIO 1) Fiction for children/ young people amounting to no more than 8,000 words. The age range that the fiction is intended for must be specified at the start of each piece (guidance will be given on this) and picture books must be laid out as specified in Week 6. plus: 2) a commentary of 2,000 words on the aims and processes involved in the fiction. Writing about Human Rights and Injustice 2012-13 Tutors: Maureen Freely, Andrew Williams, and Naomi Alsop Term 2 Tuesdays 1-3
People from many and diverse walks of life feel compelled to write in response to past and present injustices: journalists, creative writers, lawyers, historians, philosophers and sociologists. They may write to seek redress or policy change, or they may simply want to bring wrongs to public attention. But to do so, they face common problems of representation. What forms of writing are appropriate? Which are possible? What ethical and political sensitivities and sensibilities are constraining? Are any liberating? What skills do they need to develop to write effectively and well? How is the matter of ‘truth’ addressed in different media and how does this affect the nature and content of representing wrongs? This module consists of two strands. The first strand, will examine the ethical and practical elements of writing about human rights or social injustice in varying contexts and media, looking at classic and contemporary non-fiction and fiction. Throughout the strand we will look at:
The second strand, will offer you a chance to investigate and write about topics of your own choosing. We shall begin to think about these projects when we meet for our first workshop, and we shall use subsequent workshops to work towards final drafts. Along the way we shall examine writing on selected contemporary crises to illustrate questions of technique, competing political and media agendas, ethical dilemmas and legal constraints that those writing about injustice commonly face. You will be placed in one of two groups. Although we will meet altogether at the beginning and end of the term you will also have group sessions with Maureen and Andrew, alternating between the two. You will also have one-to-one sessions with assigned tutors to discuss and develop your writing for the module. Preparation for the Module: All students will meet with the tutors in week 9 or 10 of Term 1 to be introduced to the module and set out a reading and writing schedule for the beginning of the following term. We will also distribute a collection of readings at this time so that you may read ahead. We would also like you to read (or re-read) the following two books during the Christmas vacation: Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Writing Wrongs Project: To enhance the module and develop your experience of writing about wrongs, we also try to provide space to develop writing skills, share work, discuss issues of publication, and explore ideas. This will hopefully include guest speakers, expert workshops, reading groups and anything else that you might like to initiate. Indicative calendar for Term 2 (subject to confirmation): Week 1: Full module meeting with the tutors in the Writing Room. We will introduce the detail of the module and also begin to explore the difficulties and issues involved in writing about wrongs. Reading: George Orwell, ‘Why I Write.’ Week 2: UNDERSTANDING INJUSTICE |