Introductory description

CW317-30 The Practice of Fiction: Context, Themes & Techniques

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1
Week 1 – The Place We’re In
Richard Ford, Wildlife. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop (Secondary Reading: John Williams, Stoner. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Helen Simpson, Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, Constitutional, Cockfosters.)
Week 2 – Other Minds and Other People
“Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People”, Lorrie Moore, Birds of America. “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”, Alice Munro, from the book of the same title. (Secondary Reading: William Trevor, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel. Agota Kristof, The Notebook.)
Week 3 – Times, Echoes, Foreshadowings
William Golding, The Inheritors. (Secondary Reading: David Malouf, An Imaginary Life. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian.)
Week 4 – Beyond Genre
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. (Secondary Reading: Philip K. Dick, The Man In The High Castle. Brigid Brophy, The Finishing Touch.)
Week 5 – The Idea: Concepts, Paradox, Satire
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths. (Secondary Reading: Danilo Kis, The Encyclopaedia of the Dead. Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose” in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. Paulette Jonguitud, Mildew.)
Weeks 7–10 – Fiction Workshops and Readings
Please Note: it is essential that students read the primary named texts for each weekly section throughout the year. Familiarity with the books on the secondary and suggested reading lists is also highly desirable.
Term 2
Week 1 – Beyond the Short Story
Snow, Orhan Pamuk
Week 2 – Journeys, Shapes, Maps
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Week 3 – Keeping Time
On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
Week 4 – Voices
Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins
Week 5 - Endings, Finales and Conclusions
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
Week 6 – Reading Week
Weeks 7-10 – Writing Workshops

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate an engagement with creative and intellectual experiment, risk-taking and an understanding of process over product.
• Demonstrate a satisfactory range of editorial skills.
• Undertake research to support their writing, while seeing their own writing as a form of research in itself.
• Deploy to a satisfactory level the rules, conventions and possibilities of written and spoken language in a range of forms, genres and media.
• Demonstrate a creative engagement with the expressive and imaginative powers of language.
• Demonstrate an independent commitment to their own writing.
• Demonstrate a critical and practical understanding when reading and responding to published work and to work in progress.
• Demonstrate a satisfactory understanding of the historical and cultural dimensions of language use and literature across print and digital media.
• Generate and develop original creative work to a satisfactory standard.
• Understand writing as communication, with a variety of audiences, possible destinations and purposes, involving different priorities and skills.
• Engage effectively with others in order to improve their own and others' work.
• Demonstrate a satisfactory understanding of issues around reading (and where appropriate, writing) in translation.

Indicative reading list

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself, The Birthday Boys, Injury Time
Kevin Barry, Dark Lies the Island
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
Anton Chekhov, Short Stories (especially: Ward No 6 and Other Stories)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Maureen Duffy, That’s The Way It Was
Félix Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring, Human Voices, The Blue Flower
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (translated by Lydia Davis), Three Tales
E. M. Forster, Howard’s End
Graham Greene, The Quiet American
M. John Harrison, Light and Climbers (one sci-fi, one not)
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Strangers on a Train
James Hilton, Lost Horizon
Alan Hollinghurst, The Spell, The Line of Beauty
Homer, The Odyssey (translated Robert Fagles, Penguin, 1996.)
Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris (translated by John Sturrock)
Hilary Mantel, Every Day is Mother’s Day, Beyond Black, Wolf Hall
W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing With Feathers
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (Vol 1 of In Search of Lost Time, translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin, with revisions by D. J. Enright)
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Jeannette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry

Subject specific skills

• generate and develop original creative work to a satisfactory standard
• demonstrate an engagement with creative and intellectual experiment, risk-taking and an understanding of process over product
• demonstrate a creative engagement with the expressive and imaginative powers of language
• demonstrate an independent commitment to their own writing
• demonstrate a critical and practical understanding when reading and responding to published work and to work in progress

Transferable skills

demonstrate a satisfactory range of editorial skills
undertake research to support their writing, while seeing their own writing as a form of research in itself.
deploy to a satisfactory level the rules, conventions and possibilities of written and spoken language in a range of forms, genres and media
demonstrate a satisfactory understanding of the historical and cultural dimensions of language use and literature across print and digital media
understand writing as communication, with a variety of audiences, possible destinations and purposes, involving different priorities and skills
engage effectively with others in order to improve their own and others' work
demonstrate a satisfactory understanding of issues around reading (and where appropriate, writing) in translation