Module overview
What happens when writing positions itself against communication or expression? How can the form and content of a literary text be determined by chance, constraint or the operations of the unconscious? Can a text ‘perform’ on the page? How might oral performance or digital inscription activate writing? How can literary form reflect developments in our understanding of cognition and perception? What happens if meaning is not the only measure of literary value? Where do the borders between genres break down?
These questions have fascinated many modernist and postmodernist writers over the past hundred years. In this period, all forms of language art—including novels, poetry and theatre— have been marked by a consistent and thorough-going experimentalism. Poetic collage, stream of consciousness, conceptual writing, metafiction, concrete poetry, constructivist writing, performance writing, and other such strategies became practical investigations of the relations between language, signification, subjectivity and society. These innovations were often instigated, or influenced by, technological, scientific, economic and political change. The drive to develop radical modes of writing continues to provoke writers to experiment with how they conceive of, create and disseminate their writing. This module encourages students to explore—and, through creative practice, to extend—the implications of Creative Writing After Modernism.
Aims and Objectives
Learning Outcomes
Subject Specific Practical Skills
Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:
- Choose appropriate methods for a writing project;
- Write a well-structured text exploring the workings of language, or textuality, or poetics, or narrative time, that is internally coherent.
- Develop an intuitive grasp of the potential of different compositional techniques;
Knowledge and Understanding
Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:
- Techniques that explore the possibilities of reflexive narrative strategies;
- How to work with constructivist frameworks, found materials, chance, free writing, performance, and visual display, to produce literary works;
- How to manipulate bibliographic codes in order to create different reception effects.
- A wide range of modernist and postmodernist literary experiments in prose and poetry in Anglophone writing of the past hundred years;
Transferable and Generic Skills
Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:
- Assess the effect of a text performed for a live audience;
- Understand how different kinds of textuality work, and how to emulate them;
- Review, paraphrase, redact and otherwise process existing texts.
- Take further your potential as a writer;
Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills
Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:
- Contextualise creative writing within English studies;
- “Deconstruct” narrative practices;
- Explain how different textual practices create their effects.
Syllabus
This module will give you the chance to create innovative texts that go beyond realist writing. It will introduce you to a wide range of innovative practices developed by prose writers and poets who have experimented with the textual strategies on which all literature is founded. You will try setting yourself tight compositional constraints and removing them altogether, using chance, or visual elements, or sound, as the primary axis of composition. This experimental approach will also look at the components of narrative, and test what happens when they are removed or transformed. Your goal will be to produce a piece of writing that demonstrates an understanding of the possibilities of innovation, and achieves a coherent, meaningful result. Some texts are written for oral performance, and we will use the group as an audience to test different performance tactics. We will also investigate the potential impact of digital processing and internet distribution on compositional practice. Throughout the module we will be exploring the history of modernist and postmodernist writing to investigate what remains of use today.
Learning and Teaching
Teaching and learning methods
The module will be taught mainly through a series of formative creative writing exercises that will be begun in lectures and seminars and continued in your own time. In addition, the lectures and reading will provide history and context for these creative writing projects.
Teaching methods include
- Lecture workshops in which short exercises are carried out and reviewed;
- Seminar discussion of student work;
- Set exercises that give you a chance to try out new ideas;
- Use of a website to distribute your work
Learning activities include
- Studying a spectrum of modernist and postmodernist writing practices;
- Producing short written exercises;
- Performing texts to the group;
- Collaborative projects;
- Writing and revising an extended piece of writing;
- Use of online publishing methods that are increasingly becoming the norm in the literary world;
- Training in advanced writing skills at the level of the textual components of all writing
Employability
- You will develop advanced and specialist writing skills, learn how to critique the draft creative work of others in constructive and enabling ways, and will acquire some basic knowledge of how writing is now disseminated through the internet, all of which will be of value for future employment.
Activities: Creative and Critical writing, group discussion, analysis of each other’s work, advanced reading.
| Type | Hours |
|---|---|
| Completion of assessment task | 52 |
| Lecture | 12 |
| Follow-up work | 12 |
| Seminar | 12 |
| Preparation for scheduled sessions | 50 |
| Wider reading or practice | 12 |
| Total study time | 150 |
Resources & Reading list
Internet Resources
How2 is a good source of new women’s writing.
The online magazine Jacket is a good source of poetic texts and discussions of new writing.
Ubuweb has a large archive of innovative texts from the past century.
Pennsound has an extensive collection of readings and performances.
Textbooks
Susan Sellers (1991). Taking Reality by Surprise. Women’s Press.
Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds. (1995). Poems for the Millennium, Volume I: From Fin-de-siècle to Negritude. University of California Press.
Maggie O’Sullivan (1996). Out of Everywhere: linguistically innovative writing by women in North America & the UK. Reality Street Editions.
Jon Cook (2004). Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000. Blackwell Publishing.
Charles Bernstein (1992). A Poetics. Harvard.
Marjorie Perloff (2002). 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Blackwells.
Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds. (1998). Poems for the Millenium- Volume Two- Postwar to Millenium. University of California Press.
Hazel Smith (2005). The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing. Allen & Unwin.
Gertrude Stein (1975). How to Write. Dover Publications.
Julia Bell and Paul Magrs (2003). The Creative Writing Coursebook. Macmillan.
John D’Agata (2003). The Next American Essay. Graywolf Press.
Assessment
Assessment strategy
You will be expected to write at least one exercise per week, which will then be peer-reviewed and may also be read and critiqued by the module tutor.
Assessment Method
Writing Exercises (
Formative
This is how we’ll give you feedback as you are learning. It is not a formal test or exam.
Exercise
- Assessment Type: Formative
- Feedback:
- Final Assessment: No
- Group Work: No
Summative
This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.
| Method | Percentage contribution |
|---|---|
| Project | 100% |
Referral
This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.
| Method | Percentage contribution |
|---|---|
| Coursework | 100% |
Repeat Information
Repeat type: Internal & External