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Courses / Modules / ENGL3092 Great Writers Steal: Creative Writing and Critical Thinking

Great Writers Steal: Creative Writing and Critical Thinking

When you'll study it
Semester 1
CATS points
15
ECTS points
7.5
Level
Level 6
Module lead
Toby Litt
Academic year
2023-24

Module overview

T.S. Eliot is paraphrased as saying: “Good Writers Borrow, Great Writers Steal”. In this module, we will look at how writers steal: how they draw upon other writers for knowledge about craft and for inspiration. We will look at two pairings of creative work, seeing how a contemporary writer responded creatively to a classic book. We will also look at related critical essays by writers about those works. In doing so, we will go backward to examine a writer’s influences; inward to a writer’s own writing; and forward to the writers they have influenced, analysing as we do so ideas of theme, structure, inspirations, and the craft of character, place, and narrative.

While thinking about the symbiotic relationship between these works, you will be creating your own response to the works on the module, first in a series of writing exercises in which you write either creatively or critically about the work we are reading, then in an extended creative piece that is your own response to a classic or current piece of literature. You will analyse that process in a critical essay as well.

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