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Rewriting our World

Overview

Module description

In this module we bring to the classroom one of the mottos for our BA: ‘write the worlds you need, not the one you have’. The seminars and lectures are devoted to making you learn about key questions of today through the world’s literature in all its different genres: from diary and poetry to fiction, graphic novels and essays.

Ideas you will be studying include ‘conceiving’, ‘communities’, ‘the Anthropocene’, ‘the everyday’ and ‘love’. Expect a dazzling range of writers and writings, from Margaret Atwood to Emily Dickinson, taught in lectures by world experts in those fields. In seminars, you will be guided to find your voice in writing. You will be studying what different writing genres do, and you will also be learning to use them in your own writing as you re-write your world.

Indicative syllabus

  • Conceiving: conception and birth (Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale)
  • Communities: writing about communities and community life (Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’; Raymond Williams on ‘the knowable community’ in The English Novel; novels by Thomas Hardy and George Eliot)
  • The Everyday: diaries of writers; writing based on students' own diaries
  • Anthropocene: how dystopian writing addresses the climate crisis, e.g. the eco-noir, queer ecology
  • Aquatica: water ecologies (The Water Babies, Moby Dick, The Beach)
  • Wellness: using graphic novels to discuss the body in good health and in pain
  • Animals: writing about animals (Virginia Woolf’s Flush)
  • Love: the poetry of Emily Dickinson
  • Individual presentation to the group of written materials

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • recognise the role of literature in how the world is imagined
  • understand and engage with key concepts used by writers to write our world
  • evaluate key debates within the relevant critical fields dealing with the relations between ideas and types of writing
  • recognise and evaluate different types of writing
  • produce independent writing that demonstrates proficiency in critical thinking, research and writing
  • write confidently in different genres
  • read critical materials confidently.