Module: CW7011-30 Context Module: Writing and the Environment

Level: 7

Credit Value: 30

Module Tutor: Richard Kerridge

Module Tutor Contact Details: r.kerridge@bathspa.ac.uk

1.Brief description and aims of module

Like other context modules, this one aims to help students explore the relationship between their own creative writing and the large public world as represented by an important theme, tradition or genre, or by an aspect of contemporary literary culture. This is where students step back and situate their own work, understanding some of its wider implications and an aspect of its context. The aim is that this different set of questions and pressures should pose new challenges, invigorating the writing and taking it in new directions – or at least enabling the writer to consider new possibilities. Detailed aims are as follows:

• to help students to situate their work in a large social or literary context (or both) through exploration of the topic and comparison of their own work to the set texts
• to bring students’ work into contact with new intellectual challenges
• to help them identify their own artistic, intellectual and moral aims as writers more precisely by means of the challenges posed by the topic
• to help them adapt their creative work (or make a principled and articulate refusal to do so) in response to these challenges
• to help them understand the relationship between literary form and/or genre and subject-matter, and make decisions about their own work in response

2.Outline syllabus

Students will read a selection of texts, each of which has been chosen to provide a different perspective on the topic. Most of the texts will be identified in advance to allow for preparatory reading, but up to three may be chosen after group discussion. Most will be literary works, but a small proportion may be works of critical argument or theory. To some extent, the tutor’s selection of texts will reflect the composition of the group, especially in terms of the balance between prose-writers and poets.

Indicative text list for CW7011:

This module explores how ‘the environment’, in the broadest sense of the word, may come into your writing, and looks at how writers are responding to the contemporary sense of environmental crisis. This includes climate change, the fate of wild nature and the industrial transformation of landscapes, certainly, but also questions about how we live now – about food, health, the modern city, children, stress and alienation, slow living versus fast living and modern insecurity and paranoia. Environmental anxieties are some of the most uneasy, intense and edgy feelings of our times. Many take them as definitive of our times. They certainly lead to a searching exploration of contemporary emotions. We will look at how writers have explored them in fiction and poetry (depending on the composition of the group); perhaps non-fiction too.

The literature we look at will be tragic and comic, edgy and intense. It will explore some of these themes:

• fears and hopes for the future
• disasters
• personal emotion in the face of global problems
• attitudes to bodies
• links between people across the world
• all the energy we consume and waste we dump
• consumerist desires and their place in people’s lives (status symbols, competition etc)
• the love of nature
• visions of apocalypse and paradise

If any of these are important in your writing, this could be a good module for you. And the module will be helpful, too, for anyone writing about place or science.

We will focus on a selection of texts such as these, and on your own creative writing:

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl

J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

Laura Beatty, Pollard

Rob Cowen, Common Ground

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Ian McEwan, Solar

Helen Simpson, In-Flight Entertainment

Indra Sinha, Animal’s People

Harriet Tarlo, The Ground Aslant (poetry anthology)

A further selection of environmental poems by authors such as John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Ruth Padel, J.H. Prynne, Juliana Spahr etc.

3.Teaching and learning activities

• In groups of not more than twelve, students will attend weekly three-hour seminar-workshops, in which roughly half the time will be spent discussing a set text or aspect of the topic, or both, and half workshopping creative work written by students in response to the topic (these creative responses may be parts of the manuscript-in-progress, if there is a connection with the topic)
• They will be expected to write and redraft creative writing, either self-starting pieces or assignments set by the tutor, and bring their drafts for critical attention in the group
• They will be expected to articulate the relationship between their own work and the topic, and make and justify creative decisions in response to the perspectives revealed by the module
• They will be expected to articulate precise, detailed, constructive and courteous critical responses to each other’s writing, and to respond courteously, constructively and thoughtfully to points made about their own work
• They will discuss and practise techniques of argumentative essay-writing as appropriate to the topic

Assessment Item 1:

• Assessment Type: Course Work
• Description: A folder of 2,500 words (or the equivalent)
• % Weighting: 50%

Assessment Item 2:

• Assessment Type: Course Work
• Description: An essay of 2,500 words
• % Weighting: 50%