Module: CW7014-30 Context Module: The Writer and Place

Level: 7

Credit Value: 30

Module Tutor: Gavin Bower

Module Tutor Contact Details: g.bower@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 CW7014:

This module looks at the different kinds of presence ‘place’ may have in writing: place as setting for plot, place as complex metaphor, myth or symbol, place as formative of self, place as objective reality, place as ecosystem, place as sacred, place as commodity. We will look at a number of writers in whose work place is important in these different ways. We will look at the postmodern, or globalized, sense of place. This module should be valuable for all writers for whom place is important: writers who want to use it and engage with it, in all its elusive and excessive qualities. You will be asked to write about your own favourite places, about imaginary places, about places you’ve never visited, about places you’ve never been before now.

Set Texts (indicative – they will be chosen when the composition of the group is known):

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Jim Crace, Continent

Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide

W.S. Graham, Malcolm Mooney’s Land

Alice Oswald, Dart

Tania James, The Tusk That Did The Damage

John Lanchester, Capital

Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

Jean Sprackland, Strands

Kathryn Stockett, The Help

Adam Thorpe, Ulverton

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%