Module: CW7015-30 Context Module: The Short Story

Level: 7

Credit Value: 30

Module Tutor: Gerard Woodward

Module Tutor Contact Details: g.woodward@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:

There are six set texts for this context course, all of them collections of short stories, one in translation. Each week we will discuss stories in one of these collections in detail – thinking about them both as readers and as writers. As well as trying to characterise the distinctively different ways each writer uses the form, we can talk about how length affects meaning, how much the beginnings and endings of stories matter, what kinds of plot and character development the story has room for - and whatever else we're interested in.

In roughly half of each session we will discuss short stories written by members of the class.

For the first week, you don’t need to have read anything in preparation – I will bring along a couple of very short short stories, and we’ll talk about those, as well as finding out about each other’s reading and writing.

Set texts:

Chekhov, The Essential Tales, ed. Richard Ford, Granta Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples, Penguin

Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories, New York Review Books Classics John McGahern, Creatures of the Earth, New and Selected Stories Alice Munro, Love of a Good Woman

Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women

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%