Creative and Critical Writing Workshop

0 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

This core module on the Creative and Critical Writing course will comprise a two-hour session each week in the Autumn and Spring. Each session will consist of a one-hour lecture followed by one hour of directed study (either on your own or in an organised group) specifically relating to material treated in the foregoing lecture. The aim of the core module is to provide students with a solid grounding in the work of a variety of seminal thinkers and texts addressing issues of creativity and criticism. While some lectures will consider classical or more traditional texts or topics (such as Plato and Lucretius), the emphasis will be on the modern period (from Marx, Freud and Nietzsche through to the contemporary). Each lecture will include a close reading of one or two passages or short texts from a specified writer. The one-hour study period after each lecture aims to enable you to articulate, clarify and elaborate an understanding and appreciation of the work of the writer under consideration with regard to their own creative and critical thinking.

Creative and Critical Writing Workshop

0 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This core module on the Creative and Critical Writing course will comprise a two-hour session each week in the Autumn and Spring. Each session will consist of a one-hour lecture followed by one hour of directed study (working either on your own or in an organised group) specifically relating to material treated in the foregoing lecture. The aim of the core module is to provide you with a solid grounding in the work of a variety of seminal thinkers and texts addressing issues of creativity and criticism. While some lectures will consider classical or more traditional texts or topics (such as Plato and Lucretius), the emphasis will be on the modern period (from Marx, Freud and Nietzsche through to the contemporary). Each lecture will include a close reading of one or two passages or short texts from a specified writer. The one-hour study period after each lecture aims to enable you to articulate, clarify and elaborate an understanding and appreciation of the work of the writer under consideration with regard to your own creative and critical thinking.

Creativity and Utopia

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module explores the intimate relationship between creativity and utopia, as it is played out in literary and theoretical texts from More to the present day. It examines the extent to which the art work can create new worlds (brave or otherwise), and traces the historical changes in the utopian function of literature, in its various philosophical, literary and theoretical manifestations. After an initial grounding in More's "Utopia", the module moves through some key eighteenth and nineteenth century utopias, before focusing on the ways in which utopian thought is refashioned in modernist and contemporary writing. In paying attention to the changing function of utopian thinking in twentieth century literature, the module also explores how the theoretical developments of the modern and contemporary period have inherited a utopian legacy. How has Marxist utopian thinking informed modern and contemporary utopianism? How does the Frankfurt School investment in utopian thought relate to Derridean and Deleuzian conceptions of utopian possibility? The relationship between creativity and utopia will be explored both through the reading of several key utopian texts, and through reflections on the practice of creative writing.

Marxism and Creative Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

In the wake of the end of the Cold War and especially since September 11, as neoconservatives replaced Marxism with 'terrorism' as their new and irrational enemy, many writers in America and Europe sought with redoubled commitment to revitalise elements of Marxist thinking in their creative practice: to confront the new dominant form of rationality with a creative rationality of the dominated.

This module will investigate the history and present significance of that commitment in several ways: through study of the tradition of Marxist thinking about the relation of aesthetics to social and political life; through consideration of mainstream trends in contemporary literature and the economic and political interests they reflect and fortify; and through the evaluation of theoretical claims made by contemporary writers themselves, both in creative writing and in criticism, about their own strategies of opposition and the problem of their potential efficacy.

Psychoanalysis and Creative Writing

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

Psychoanalysis has exciting and major implications for all kinds of writing, not least that sort called 'creative'. This module will focus on some of the ways in which a close reading of psychoanalytic texts, especially those of Sigmund Freud himself, can be linked to the theory and practice of creative writing. We will look in particular detail at how Freud's work illuminates the question of literature (and vice versa) in relation to such topics as the uncanny, fantasy and day-dreaming, story-telling and the death drive, chance, humour, mourning and loss. Concentrating on detailed reading and discussion of a series of psychoanalytic, critical and literary texts, the module will lead you through to having an opportunity to submit a term-paper work that may (if you wish) include a creative writing as well as a critical component.

Sexuality and Creative Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

This module will explore the relationship between literary production, authorship, and gender and sexual identities. The module will introduce neo-Classical and Romantic theories of creativity before asking how twentieth and twenty-first century authors have grappled with these inherited narratives. For example, how do writers who dis-identify with received categories deal with literary traditions that are often construed as a meeting (or battle) between the 'masculine' and the 'feminine'? Where do feminism and same-sex desire fit into this story? And how have recent innovations in reproductive technology affected the familiar analogy between parenthood and literary production? Possible topics for study include: lesbian, gay and bisexual revisionings of literary tradition; historically varying representations of Sappho; the author as (male) Romantic genius; 'Nature' as literary mother; transgender identity and literary androgyny; erotic representations of the writer-muse relationship; authorship as maternity and/or paternity; writing as erotic collaboration; writing and celibacy; new narratives of reproduction and the family; writing and masturbation. Students will have the opportunity of presenting a combination of creative and critical writing should they wish to.

The Migrant Writer: Postcolonialism and Creativity

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

`To write is to travel', according to Iain Chambers, and the module will use this idea to explore the displacement of the writing subject within the historical context postcolonial migration. We will analyse the work of key immigrant writers in relation to central concepts in literary and cultural criticism, including: hybridity and dialogical discourse, the development of `border languages', mimicry and the migrant subject, homelessness and the creation of new cartographies, and diasporic and non- originary histories. In the process the centrality of migration, exile and displacement to a range of critical and theoretical approaches will be highlighted.