Module: CW7012-30 ontext Module: Writing with a Poet’s Eye

Level: 7

Credit Value: 30

Module Tutor: Tim Liardet

Module Tutor Contact Details: t.liardet@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 CW7012:

All our reading and writing on this module circles round one word: poetry. (Particularly: what does poetry mean when it is in the form of prose, not verse)

Poet’s Eye will accommodate a wide diversity of literary tastes. It is equally suitable for

1. students already specialising in poetry, to widen their range;
2. people planning to major in other forms, who are also practising poets;
3. fiction writers with little previous experience of poetry, who want to enrich their writing with those qualities.

What you actually find yourself writing during the next thirteen weeks – be it prose, poetry or a species of either or neither – will depend on your current literary ambitions. It is certainly true to say that certain literary techniques (…..though no technique is owned exclusively by poets) normally figure in a wholly successful poem. Ingredients brought to a fine pitch by the writing of poetry might be said to include:

1. The power of the visual image and the ‘telling detail’
2. The transformation of the commonplace through language
3. The control of tone and rhythm
4. The role of the unspoken and the inexplicit
5. Compression and economy of means

You will be invited to conduct experiments in all of these, but you will not be made to do exercises which prescribe the content of what you write. Come with your own notebook of ideas in progress, and use the module to develop them. Other features we will explore that possibly can be carried over from poetry into other forms of writing include (and you can add your own to this list…..):

Allusiveness: connections hinted at but not spelled out.

Ellipsis: stretches of narrative, or key moments, left to the reader’s Imagination

Ambiguity: the reader kept in controlled uncertainties, open to more than one interpretation; the ‘dreamlike’ state.

Anecdote: memories and incidental stories interspersed, with or without the connections being made explicit.

Relishing the words: language, especially specialised language and naming, that becomes a focus of interest in its own right.

Metaphor and simile: the single clinching visual image, that encapsulates a scene or feeling.

Our consideration of each book will focus on the following nucleus of questions:

1. What does the word ‘poetic’ mean?
2. Where in these novels does a ‘poetic’ approach allow the writer to extend or strengthen their range of effects?
3. What special demands does this writing make of readers, and what does it offer in return?
4. At what stages do the books consciously draw on ‘poetic technique’ to intensify experience and accelerate plot?
5. Can such a thing as ‘subliminal poetry’ be said to exist in these books?
6. Are there moments when – especially in the case of Woolf – we are looking at neither poetry nor prose, but something in between?
7. And of course: what can you find here to use in your own writing?
8. 
   

Required reading:

We will look closely at three novels, and one selection of short stories:

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, (Penguin) William Golding, Pincher Martin (Penguin)

Virginia Woolf, Selected Short Stories (Penguin)

Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons (QPD)

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%