| Module Identifier |
WR30830 |
| Module Title |
READING FOR WRITERS |
| Academic Year |
2007/2008 |
| Co-ordinator |
Professor Jeremy P Poster |
| Semester |
Intended for use in future years |
| Next year offered |
N/A |
| Next semester offered |
N/A |
| Other staff |
Dr Matthew C Francis |
| Pre-Requisite |
WR10220 |
| Course delivery |
Seminars / Tutorials | 10 X 2 hour seminar/workshops |
| Assessment |
| Assessment Type | Assessment Length/Details | Proportion |
|---|
| Semester Assessment | ASSIGNMENT 1: TOTAL WORD-LENGTH 2500 WORDS: a portfolio of creative writing (poetry or prose or a combination of the two) connected with one or more of the texts discussed in class during the first half of the semester. The portfolio must be accompanied by a commentary linking the critical readings and the creative outcome: it should display skills in close reading of the set texts and the student's own creative work. Total word-length 2500 word, of which the commentary should account for a minimum of 750 words and a maximum of 1000 words. | 50% |
| Semester Assessment | ASSIGNMENT 2: TOTAL WORD-LENGTH 2500 WORDS: as above, but related to the texts and issues addressed in the second half of the semester. | 50% |
| Supplementary Assessment | RESUBMIT FAILED ELEMENTS Resubmit any failed elements and/or make good any missing elements. Where this involves re-submission of work, a new topic must be selected. | 100% |
|
Learning outcomes
On completion of this module, students should be able to:
1. demonstrate their ability to read with attention to textual detail, as well s to the wider literary and social context from which the texts in question have emerged;
2. demonstrate their ability to make appropriate and illuminating comparisons among a variety of texts, including their own;
3. demonstrate awareness of the problems involved in verbal communication, as well as recognizing the strategies used by writers to overcome or minimize these problems;
4. demonstrate, through both their critical and their creative writing, the application of their enhanced critical undertstanding of their own creative work.
Aims
This module is designed to encourage close reading of significant passages of prose fiction and poetry, with emphasis on the idea that analytical reading of the writings of others provides essential groundwork for our own writing. It offers a particularly good opportunity for students to enhance their understanding of the critical elelment which plays a part in all undergraduate creative writing portfolios.
Brief description
Each session will focus on extracts from a particular text or texts, the relevant poems or passages being supplied in advance; students will be expected to have prepared each poem or passage in advance of the relevant session. Although students are naturally encouraged to read as many of the texts as possible in their entirety, this will not be compulsory: the tutor will contextualise the passages during the sessions. The list below suggests specific texts likely to be used, but these may be varied, within the framework of the overall description, from year to year or from tutor to tutor.
Content
1 - 2 Writing and memory
William Wordsworth's The Prelude; Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier; Philip Larkin's `I Remember, I Remember';
3 - 4 Writing and the here and now
Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal; Simon Armitage's Killing Time
5 - 6 Voicing narrative
Robert Browning's `My Last Duchess' and `Porphyria's Lover'; Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang
7 - 8 Words and music
Gerard Manley Hopkins's `Hurrahing in Harvest' and `The Sea and the Skylark'; D H Lawrence's The Rainbow;
9 - 10 Speech and silence
W B Yeats's `The Circus Animals' Desertion'; Virginia Woolf's The Waves.
Module Skills
| Problem solving |
Yes: the assessment will require attention to issues of a broadly problematic nature |
| Research skills |
Yes: the assessment will require research into the work of other writers |
| Communication |
Yes: interaction in group discussion |
| Improving own Learning and Performance |
Yes: development of knowledge and understanding of students' own work and that of others |
| Team work |
Yes: see 3 |
| Information Technology |
No |
| Application of Number |
No |
| Personal Development and Career planning |
No |
| Subject Specific Skills |
None |
Notes
This module is at CQFW Level 6