Gwybodaeth Modiwlau

Module Identifier
EN33930
Module Title
THE RISE OF WELSH WRITING IN ENGLISH
Academic Year
2011/2012
Co-ordinator
Professor Damian Walford Davies
Semester
Intended for use in future years

Course Delivery

Delivery Type Delivery length / details
Seminars / Tutorials 20 Hours. Seminar. (10 x 2 hour seminars)
 

Assessment

Assessment Type Assessment length / details Proportion
Semester Assessment Continuous Assessment: 2 x 3000 word essays  100%
Supplementary Assessment Resubmit or resit failed elements and/or make good any missing elements 

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the module, students will be able to:

1. locate and discuss Welsh Writing in English in its cultural and historical context;

2. assess the influence of linguistic, economic, social and political factors on literary texts;

3. examine the tensions inherent in the cultural programme of Welsh Writing in English;

4. examine the way in which these texts interrogate issues of class, gender and national/ linguistic identity;

5. write about literary texts in a critically-focused and well-structured manner.

Brief description

How does a 'new' literature, or a literature in a new language, establish itself side by side with an ancient literary culture? What are the social and economic circumstances of its rise? How do its writers handle their relationship with that older literature with which they must co-exist - and what is their attitude to the dominant culture across the Border, with which they share a common language but not a common history? What tensions arise from class and gender difference, from the impact of the two World Wars, and from the divided loyalties of a newly bilingual nation? In trying to answer these and related questions, this option aims to illustrate a given community and its consciousness of itself at a crucial point in its development.

Content

The module will be taught by means of weekly two-hour seminars. Students are expected to purchase the five texts - by Caradoc Evans, Dylan Thomas, Glyn Jones, Hilda Vaughan and Emyr Humphreys - for which editions are designated (by an *) in the following programme.

_Programme

_1. A Culture in Transition (3 seminars)

_i) Introduction: 'The Anglo-Welsh Ideology'
  • Texts: selected critical material
_ii) Rural Revolt
  • Text: Caradoc Evans, My People, ed John Harris (Seren, 1997)*
_iii) Industrial Revolt
  • Text: Idris Davies, Gwalia Deserta and The Angry Summer
_2. Imagined Communities (3 seminars)

_i) Myth and War
  • Texts: selections from Alun Lewis's writings
_ii) Green and Nogood Boyos
  • Text: Dylan Thomas, Selected Poems, ed. Walford Davies (Penguin, 2000)*
_iii) Community and Loss
  • Text: Glyn Jones, The Island of Apples, ed. Belinda Humfrey (University of Wales Press)*
_3. Nation and Gender (2 seminars)

_i) A Passive Resistance
  • Text: Hilda Vaughan, 'A Thing of Nought', in A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales 1800-1950 ed. Jane Aaron (Honno Press)*
_ii) Forging a Female Identity
  • Texts: selected short stories and poems by Dorothy Edwards, Margiad Evans, Lynette Roberts and Gillian Clarke
_4. Language Conflicts (2 seminars)

_i) Bilingual Identities
  • Text: Emyr Humphreys, A Toy Epic, ed. M. Wynn Thomas (Seren Press)*
_ii) 'Border Blues'
  • Texts by R S Thomas

Notes

This module is at CQFW Level 6