Introductory description

This is a core module for second years of QP36 ‘English Literature and Creative Writing’ only. It is available only as a 100% fully assessed module. It proceeds in the form of lectures, writing workshops and seminars. Absence from these workshops will severely limit your capacity for achieving strong work. It is not available as an optional module.

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: SHORT FICTION

Weeks 1-5:

In the first 5 weeks of Composition, we’ll be focusing on Short Stories. We’ll be looking at structure, characterisation, sustaining a voice and advancing theme. We’ll be then looking at non-fiction, focusing on experience-based writing, problematizing wordiness and opting for precision and concision to more effectively provoke affective responses with our writing.

It is very important that you do the reading and prepare for each seminar. While the focus of each class will be practical, your tutor will be asking for your notes on the reading (this can be anything that sparked your curiosity) so that you can present them to your peers and we can then start a fruitful discussion.

Week 1: Common People, Unusual Situations – The plotting board

• Raymond Carver, Cathedral.
• Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants.

Week 2: Grounding Abstractions

• George Saunders, Pastoralia.

Week 3: The Drama in Everyday Lives

• Sherman Alexie, ‘The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless’, ‘Salt’ and ‘Bird-Watching At Night’ in War Dances.
• Lorrie Moore, 'You're Ugly, Too'

Week 4: Characterisation Methods

• Rebecca Watson, Little Scratch
• Joe Dunthorne, Submarine

Week 5: Building Resolutions

• Alice Munro, 'Runaway' in Runaway.

WEEKS 7- 10 WORKSHOPS

TERM 2: NON-FICTION
The second unit will examine the process of writing non-fiction investigations into the alien, the familiar, and the personal. In particular, the unit will aim to develop students beyond the narrow focus on the self and the tyranny of the “I”.

Week 1:
NON-FICTION, INFORMATION, AND INSIGHT
The making of memory. Finding a way into making a picture of the past. Joe Brainard’s I Remember. https://eng10165511.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/brainard-i-remember.pdf
Inventory, by Carmen Maria Machado (from Her Body and Other Parties)

Week 2:
Writing, watching, listening: The Loser by Gay Talese. https://thestacks.deadspin.com/the-loser-the-most-honest-sports-story-ever-written-772260237
Also H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald. Wonderful podcast here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wnj7t and a great discussion about Jeanette Winterson’s Why be Happy When You Could be Normal here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2015/jul/17/jeanette-winterson-helen-macdonald-h-is-for-hawk-podcast

Week 3:
Cultural History by personal means Bad Blood by Lorna Sage. Also Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood and, if we have time,
Go Gentle into that Goodnight:
https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/go-gentle-into-that-good-night.

If we have time…

George Orwell, The Hanging http://www.george-orwell.org/A_Hanging/0.html

Week 4:
Politics, objectivity and emotion; exterior and interior reportage. This is the Place to be, by Lara Pawson. Also, Arundhati Roy’s essay Democracy: Who’s She When She’s at Home? https://sedosmission.org/old/eng/roy.htm

Week 5:
Documenting setting and focusing on theme

• Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment

Weeks 7-10: Workshops

NOTES FROM OTHER VERSIONS BELOW:

Week One:
Now. What are writers writing at the moment? Imagining a situation, peopling and furnishing that situation. Reading: Cat Person, Kristin Roupenian https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person
Carmen Maria Machado, The Husband Stitch: https://granta.com/the-husband-stitch/
Week Two:
Where to start: playing with time, large and small.

Tobias Wolff, ‘Bullet in the Brain’
http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_27/section_1/artc2A.html

TC Boyle, ‘Chicxulub’ New Yorker podcast plus discussion with Lionel Shriver
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/lionel-shriver-reads-t-c-boyle
If we have time, we’ll also discuss inventive use of time in fiction, including Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life; Paul Auster’s 4,3,2,1 and Laura Barnett’s The Versions of Us. You don’t have to have read any of these (bonus points if you have), but they provide interesting starting points for talking about how writers use time.
Week Three:
Shape and scale (voice, perspective and a whole world in 5000 words) Alice Munro, Axis, available via The New Yorker podcast https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/lauren-groff-reads-alice-munro/amp

Lorrie Moore, Paper Losses https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2008/jul/04/lorrie.moore.paper.losses?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
We’ll also refer to Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout
Week Four:
Voice, dialogue and pace…experimentation and the tyranny of the dreaded Muse (or absence thereof).

George Saunders, Adams (via The New Yorker Fiction podcast) https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/joshua-ferris-reads-george-saunders

We’ll also refer to some extracts from Days without End, by Sebastian Barry and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson.
Week Five:
Endings. Working towards that final point. The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson https://sites.middlebury.edu/individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf
The Spot, by David Means (discussed on The New Yorker podcast with Jonathan Franzen): https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/jonathan-franzen-reads-david-means

We may also discuss at some point (or you may like to look at) the following:
Writers on writing: David Foster Wallace, The Nature of The Fun
https://www.penusa.org/blogs/mark-program/bookmark-david-foster-wallaces-nature-fun

Lorrie Moore, ‘How to Become a Writer’ http://www.sfuadcnf.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/How-to-Become-a-Writer-Lorrie-Moore.pdf

Orwell: Why I write. http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw

Zadie Smith, Fail Better: http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/failbetter.htm
Big ideas: Free Speech https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/02/hitchens200902(Christopher Hitchens)

The New Commandments, Christopher Hitchens
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/04/hitchens-201004

The tyranny of the ‘I’. Stream of consciousness and making it work.

Édouard Levé, When I look at a strawberry I think of a tongue (incomplete) https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/6078/when-i-look-at-a-strawberry-i-think-of-a-tongue-edouard-leve

Humour: Kurt Vonnegut, Dispatch from a Man Without a Country. http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/Spokesman/PDF/90Vonnegut.pdf
Bad Behaviour, Rebecca Starford
Freakonomics, Steven Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner
The Wild Ways, Robert Macfarlane
A Writer’s Coming of Age, Joyce Carol Oates
Notes from a Big Country, Bill Bryson
On Writing Stephen King
Family Life, Akil Sharma
The Last Act of Love, Cathy Rentzenbrink
Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs

Learning outcomes

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

• Deploy a reflective approach to the process of composition.
• Embark on research to support their writing.
• Deploy the rules, conventions and possibilities of written and spoken language in several forms.
• Demonstrate a creative engagement with the expressive and imaginative powers of language.
• Demonstrate a commitment to their own writing.
• Read and respond critically to published work and to work in progress.
• Engage with the historical and cultural dimensions of language use and literature, including media technologies.
• Demonstrate a working understanding of editorial skills.
• Demonstrate a working understanding of issues around reading in translation.
• Engage with others in order to improve their own and others' work.
• Generate original creative work.
• Grasp the importance of creative and intellectual experiment, risk-taking and process over product.

Indicative reading list

Reading lists can be found in Talis

Subject specific skills

This module introduces students to the question of narrative in all its forms. It acquaints students with the processes involved in writing narrative fiction and non-fiction, including traditional and experimental methods, revision, drafting, editing and considerations of audience, also endowing them with critical insights into works of contemporary and classic literature and the traditional and modern processes of literary production.

Transferable skills

generate original creative work

• grasp the importance of creative and intellectual experiment, risk-taking and process over product
• demonstrate a working understanding of editorial skills
• demonstrate a working understanding of issues around reading in translation
• deploy a reflective approach to the process of composition;
• embark on research to support their writing
• deploy the rules, conventions and possibilities of written and spoken language in several forms
• demonstrate a creative engagement with the expressive and imaginative powers of language
• demonstrate a commitment to their own writing
• read and respond critically to published work and to work in progress
• engage with the historical and cultural dimensions of language use and literature, including media technologies
• engage with others in order to improve their own and others' work