Module Information

This module will offer ways in which various forms of information technology can be integrated with the teaching of literary studies. It will result in a body of databases which, when loaded up onto the web, may be useful twentieth-century literary resources for future students: a slowly gathering corpus of useful web items composed and designed by undergraduates which may, in themselves, become models for future students to build upon.

The module will involve some theoretical work on the implications of the new technology for the ways in which we read and write, as well as the ways in which we conceptualise data. It will encourage students:

• to think more closely about the functional units of text - what is a text; what are the relevant links between texts?
• to encourage students to think more carefully and emphatically about the nature of structure and the presentation of connecting data;
• to make visible and explicit mental processes that have always been part of the total reading experience;
• to make for a more reader-centred encounter with and experience of texts as part of a network of navigable paths and relations;
• to learn nonsequential reading practices, characteristic of more advanced study, and the integration of scattered evidence into a more complex intellectual structure.

In general, the module aims gradually to increase the competence and confidence of students in the exploration of innovative uses of computers and IT in the learning and teaching process.

This option will seek to link twentieth-century literary studies with information skills, offering students an opportunity to pursue an academic project within the context of learning, developing and ultimately constructing, web pages.

The sorts of projects that might be envisaged here are:

• a database on a particular literary project (e.g., the thirties generation);
• a database on a particular movement (e.g., Imagism, Constructivism);
• a database on a particular author (e.g., T.S. Eliot or Thomas Pynchon);
• a cultural study of a particular period / decade / genre / city (e.g., New York, London);
• an edited version of a particular text(s) (e.g., 'The Waste Land', several poems by a First World War poet).

Another approach might be to compile a database of the web resource on a particular subject, author, etc., which might be compared with written resources, which in turn might serve a useful source of information for future students.

Innovative approaches to particular problems, interesting links, attractive designs for web pages and helpful guides to readers, will be considered as significant to the final assessment as the substantiveness of the academic content and the nature of the information that is imparted on the project's site.