English and drama

Special Topic (Writing Workshop Spring)

Module code: Q1234
Level 4
15 credits in spring semester
Teaching method: Workshop
Assessment modes: Portfolio

Love. Death. Bodies. Blue. Phantasy. Pain. Hope.

Each semester of the Special Topic module is dedicated to just one concept or condition. Over the course of the module, our understanding of that concept or condition will become deeper and more compelling. The topic will be chosen by one of our creative writing team depending on a lively area of research and our intuition as to your interests. All will be illuminating. For example:

What is love? A feeling? A condition? Is love tyrannous? It is all around, and yet no one can get enough. Laura Kipnis writes a polemic “against love” while Elizabeth Povinelli provides an ethnography of love as part of settler-colonial culture, rather than a universal condition. Our reading may include:

  • Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work
  • Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card
  • Banana Yoshimoto’s Moonlight Shadow
  • Frank O’Hara’s Love Poems (Tentative Title)
  • Nisha Ramayya’s States of the Body Produced by Love.

Bodies are often lumped together, but are our experiences of embodiment radically different, and always changing? Will we always need our bodies? We will study a range of bodily (mis)apprehensions, for example:

  • the racialised body
  • the maternal body
  • the ageing body
  • the consuming body
  • the body in pain.

Our reading may include Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism, Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfections, Snorton, C Riley’s Black on Both Sides, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight.

Special Topic Writing Workshops have a simple structure. Each week we read two short texts, one more or less creative (a short story, a poem), and one more or less critical (a philosophical essay, a manifesto). Writing exercises based on these readings build up over the module until you have a portfolio of your own writing exploring the topic. That might include short stories, poems, scenes from films or video games, and essay prose. Working in this way will demonstrate how wide and engaged reading in different genres can help us develop our own critical and creative writing.

 

Module learning outcomes

  • Experiment with writing creatively and imaginatively supported by helpful practices, including the inspiration of reading and listening to exemplary work
  • Practice close reading and analysis of texts, including one’s own, and from both creative and essayistic traditions.
  • Practice writing in a range of forms, genres, or styles.
  • Investigate factors that may inform the choice of writing style and its techniques.