Gwybodaeth Modiwlau

Module Identifier
EN30420
Module Title
Writing in the Margins: Twentieth-Century Welsh Poetry in English
Academic Year
2020/2021
Co-ordinator
Semester
Semester 1
Other Staff

Course Delivery

 

Assessment

Due to Covid-19 students should refer to the module Blackboard pages for assessment details

Assessment Type Assessment length / details Proportion
Semester Exam 4 Hours   Individual Oral Presentation  10 minutes individual oral presentation  30%
Semester Assessment Essay Assignment  1 x 3000 word essay  70%
Supplementary Assessment Revisit the Individual Oral Assessment  30%
Supplementary Assessment Resubmit failed or missing essay assignment  Resubmit 1 x 3000 word essay (writing on a fresh topic from previous essay submitted)  70%

Learning Outcomes

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

1. Locate and discuss Welsh poetry in English in its cultural and historical contexts;

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 poetry in English;

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

5. Write confidently and fluently about the texts on the module in a focused and conceptually nuanced manner.

Brief description

This module introduces students to the vigorous and diverse tradition of Welsh poetry in English that flourished during the twentieth century. Organised chronologically, it engages with key publications, important moments of collective creative energy, and significant individual writers in the life of Anglophone Welsh poetry since 1900. It explores the ways in which Welsh poets writing in English have engaged with defining issues such as class, gender, and place. Throughout the module, students will be encouraged to examine the ambivalent relationships between poetry and national identity. At the same time, a key objective of this module is to give students a clearer and more nuanced understanding of what makes Welsh poetry in English distinctive in the wider field of Anglophone literatures.

Content

Week 1 - Welsh poetry in English at the start of the twentieth century
Week 2 - Poetry of the First Flowering (1930s & 1940s)
Week 3 - Readings from Dylan Thomas’s Selected Poems
Week 4 - Writing out of war: selections from David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937)
Week 5 - From energy to decline: the 1940s to the 1950s
Week 6 - The early work of R.S. Thomas
Week 7 - The Second Flowering: key figures of the 1960s      
Week 8 - New poets of the 1970s and 1980s
Week 9 - Welsh poetry in English in the final decade of the twentieth century
Week 10 - Revision session; assessment advice

Module Skills

Skills Type Skills details
Application of Number N/A
Communication Written: By developing a sustained critical argument. Oral: Through class discussion, small group exercises, and individual oral presentations
Improving own Learning and Performance Through independent and directed research and reading
Information Technology By using word-processing packages; using AberLearn Blackboard and other e-resources to research and access course documents and other materials; by submitting assignments via Turnitin.
Personal Development and Career planning Through increased critical self-reflection and the development of transferable, ICT, communication and research skills.
Problem solving By evaluative analysis and the use of critical skills
Research skills By directed and independent research; by synthesizing information in an evaluative critical argument.
Subject Specific Skills Through the reading, writing and researching skills involved in the interrogation of literary texts; through comparative models of reading and understanding; and through the conceptual/theoretical analysis of works of imaginative literature in relation to a range of other non-literary texts.
Team work Through group work in seminars; and through preparation for paired presentations in seminars.

Notes

This module is at CQFW Level 6