Animal Forms: poetry and the non-human

Learning Outcomes

Cognitive Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• debate philosophical questions drawing upon cultural knowledge
• develop intellectual and creative links between culture and ethics
• respond creatively to questions of historical and current importance

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• the historical and ethical contexts for our depiction of the non-human in literature
• a range of poetic forms and techniques
• the philosophical questions raised by studying human and non-human relations

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• use poetry analysis as a prompt for creative work
• draw on philosophical and ethical arguments in literary analysis
• plan and develop a research essay on poetry

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• develop creative confidence
• design and implement your own intellectual and creative projects
• explore and identity patterns across a range of different textual material

This module will explore a range of formal, technical and philosophical questions raised by the depiction of animals in poetry. Weekly readings will allow you to make connections across poetry collections, within specific poetic movements, and between poems, theoretical texts, and wider ethical questions. While the focus will be predominantly be on modern and contemporary writing, we will also explore the role of animals in medieval bestiaries and Renaissance allegory. Throughout the module, we will encourage you to develop creative, critical, and philosophical responses to the texts. Indicative poets you will encounter on this module include William Cowper, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Lear, Marianne Moore, and Danez Smith.

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods include

• Seminars
• Learning support hours
• Individual consultations

Learning activities include

• Independent study, including reading and writing
• Group discussion
• Peer appraisal of writing

This module includes a Learning Support Hour. This is a flexible contact hour, 5 in total, designed to support and respond to the particular cohort taking the module from year to year. This hour may include (but need not be limited to) activities such as language, theory and research skills classes; group work supervisions; assignment preparation and essay writing guidance; assignment consultations; feedback and feed-forward sessions. In this module, these hours will be particularly focused on supporting and workshopping your creative responses.

Resources & Reading list

Textbooks

Alisdair Cochrane (2010). An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan.

Cheryll Glotflety and Harold Fromm (1996). The Ecocriticism Reader. University of Georgia.

Mike Malay (2018). The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan.

Tom L. Beauchamp and R.G. Frey, (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics. Oxford University Press.

Onno Oerlemans (2018). Poetry and Animals: Blurring and Boundaries with the Human. Columbia University Press.

Laurence Buell (1995). The Environmental Imagination. Harvard University Press.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External