Module Identifier ENM0620  
Module Title RESEARCH SKILLS IN ENGLISH STUDIES (2): TACKLING TEXTUALITY  
Academic Year 2004/2005  
Co-ordinator Dr Matthew R Jarvis  
Semester Semester 2  
Pre-Requisite ENM0520  
Co-Requisite ENM0520  
Course delivery Seminars / Tutorials   10 x 1-hour seminars  
Assessment
Assessment TypeAssessment Length/DetailsProportion
Semester Assessment 1. A textuality `case study' or `audit' for a text from the area of the student's intending specialization. This will aim to cover the full spectrum of textuality for the selected text. (2000 words)40%
Semester Assessment 2. A detailed study of one aspect of the textuality of a text, from the area of the student's intending specialization. This will aim to demonstrate an awareness of the methodological and theoretical foundations on which the approach is based. (3000 words)60%
Supplementary Assessment RESUBMIT FAILED ELEMENTS   

Learning outcomes

On completion of this module, students should be able to:

1. Demonstrate an understanding of the nature and scope of the many facets of textuality which   
   feature in literary research;

2. Demonstrate an ability to embody this theoretical knowledge and understanding in the research and
   analysis of specific literary works;

3. Demonstrate an ability to contextualise and justify a preferred methodological approach in the
   context of the totality of the approaches which might have been taken.

Aims

The purpose of this module is to develop to postgraduate level the interpretive, evaluative, and research skills on which English Studies are based, using the focal idea of 'textuality' in its broadest sense.

Brief description

The module will illustrate, and interrogate the different kinds of 'textuality', or aspects of the literary text, which need to be taken into account in the study of literature at postgraduate level and beyond. A brief list of selected literary texts, chosen to highlight the issues raised, will be used to give specificity to the exposition and discussion.

Content

Week-by-week breakdown

(1)   Textuality   
 'The words on the page' - a checklist of interpretive procedures and strategies.   

(2)   Co-textuality   
 Textual 'complexes' or 'link-ups' (e.g. 'informally grouped' texts, like Coleridge's 'Conversation Poems' and `formally composite' works, like sonnet sequences or short story sequences; ekphrastic poems, in which texts are linked to specific images, etc).

(3)   Intertextuality
'The actual presence of one text within another' (Genette) (e.g. 'allusive' texts like The Waste Land, where the allusions can be musical or pictorial as well as literary).

(4)   Contextuality   
 'The words off the page' - historicist, neo-historicist, and related approaches.

(5) Material-textuality
'The text as a material object', whether manuscript, holograph, transcript, typescript, page-proof, printed text, variorum text, or hypertext.

(6)   Peri-textuality
'Ambient features' (e.g. titles, chapter-titles, headings and sub-divisions, epigraphs, divisions into parts, prefaces, prologues, notes). Especially relevant here are the effects of serial publication, and differences between magazine and book versions of the same text.

(7)   Epi-textuality
'The words around the words on the page' - interviews, publicity, illustrations, reviews, letters, autobiographical data, quoted dicta, etc. The text considered as a contested and promoted cultural object within the public domain.

(8)   Meta-textuality   
 'The words on the words on the page' or 'When a text takes up a relation of commentary to another text' (Genette), that is, the critical and interpretive tradition, the 'archive of critique', and the (con)formative paradigm which gathers about a canonical text.

(9)   Multi-textuality
The 'non-hierarchical' versions of the same text, rather than 'drafts' and 'final versions' (e.g. 'The Ancient Mariner' with and without the 'gloss'; the 1832 and 1842 versions of 'The Lady of Shallot'; the 1879 and 1907 texts of Daisy Miller; the four versions of Owen's 'Strange Meeting', all of them 'not finished, but not private' etc).

(10) Total Textuality   
 Integrated strategies for 'tackling textuality'.

Reading Lists

Books
** Recommended Consultation
Susan Hockey (2000) Electronic Texts in the Humanities: Principles and Practice Oxford University Press
Lynette Hunter (2001) Literary Value/Cultural Power: Verbal Arts in the Twenty First Century Manchester University Press
D. F. McKenzie (1999) Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts Cambridge University Press
Graham Allen (2000) Intertextuality Routledge
Maureen Bell, et al., (eds.) (2001) Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission Ashgate

Notes

This module is at CQFW Level 7