Lancaster University Creative Writing - Undergraduate .

Modules in depthYear 2 reative Writing at Lancaster is always taken as a joint major or a minor alongside another subject.CIt benefits greatly from being in combination with other subjects, and we offer many flexible pathways.In the module breakdown that follows, you will see how Creative Writing is combined with the studyof English Literature. For modules available in other joint major degree programmes, see page 16.BA (Hons) English Literature and CreativeWriting (50/50% split)BA (Hons) English Literature withCreative Writing (75/25% split)On this joint major degree, you will spend as much time onCreative Writing as you do on English Literature. CreativeWriting workshops, lectures, and readings will help you todevelop your own writing, and this will be accompanied bya rigorous and inspiring study of literature.This major-minor degree comprises three-quartersEnglish Literature and one-quarter Creative Writing. Thismeans that a very intensive focus on English Literature isaccompanied by a weekly creative writing workshops with apublished writer from our staff.CoreIntermediate Creative Writing WorkshopCoreThe Theory and Practice of CriticismIn a series of weekly lectures, you will study moreadvanced techniques and approaches to variousliterary forms, encouraging you to push theboundaries of your work. You’ll put the lectures intopractice in your weekly writing workshop, and beassessed by a portfolio submission.This module encourages you to reflect on yourapproach to the study of literature. Key concepts incontemporary literary studies such as ideology, theunconscious, discourse, and biopolitics are studiedthrough the work of major thinkers such as Marx,Freud, Foucault, and Derrida.English Literature and Creative Writingstudents take:English Literature with Creative Writingstudents take:We keep our degree programmes under constant review, and regularly introduce and update modules. In any academicyear, the modules offered may therefore differ from those presented here. Similarly, the structure of our degrees maychange, in response to curricular developments and following consultation with students. Please check our website for thelatest information: www.lancaster.ac.uk/studyYear 110CoreIntroduction toCreative WritingYou will examine the basictechniques of prose andpoetry. Divided into two parts,‘Approaching Writing’ and ‘Puttingit into Practice’, each is assessedby a portfolio of your work.CoreLiterature in CrisisThis broad introductory modulewill show how literature from theMiddle Ages to the contemporaryperiod has responded andbeen shaped by states of crisis,upheaval and radical change.Providing a taster of famous andless well known texts throughthe Renaissance, Victorian,Romantic, and modern periods,the module will explore manyand varied possible approachesto reading literature. You will beintroduced to the key debatesin literary study and given afoundation in the skills, tools, andknowledge that can open up newand exciting ways of readingOptionalWorld LiteratureYou will explore a wide andexciting range of texts from worldliteratures in English that haveinfluenced the developmentof English Literature, includingthe Bible and classical writerssuch as Ovid, Homer, and Dante.You’ll look at modern worldauthors in translation, like Kafka,and at today’s culture throughcontemporary authors such asSalman Rushdie and Mariama Bâ,as well as new media writing andthe graphic novel.OROptionalMinor moduleYou can select a module in anothersubject to complement yourstudies in Creative Writing. Wewill provide a list of minor moduleoptions prior to starting yourstudies at Lancaster along withinformation on how to register foryour preferred choice.OptionalSelect two term-long specialistCreative Writing modules Short Fiction: Genre and Practice Poetry: Genre and Practice Creative Non-Fiction: Genre and PracticeOptionalSelect one EnglishLiterature module Late Medieval to Early Modern Literature Victorian Literature Writing Place and Landscape Writing for the StageOptionalSelect one year-longEnglish Literature moduleOptionalSelect one further EnglishLiterature module L ate Medieval to Early Modern Literature American Literature to 1900 American Literature to 1900 Literature, Film and Media Victorian Literature British Romanticism British Romanticism Literature, Film and MediaBeyond Undergraduate EnglishWe offer a rolling programme of employability-focused events to all students in the Department. It will helpto enhance your existing knowledge of careers, employability and graduate research possibilities once youcomplete your degree.www.lancaster.ac.uk/creative-writing11

Year 2modulesEnglish Literature modulesLate Medieval to EarlyModern LiteratureYou will examine the literature of acentury of revolutionary change,both in politics and culture. The focusis generically and historically wideranging, from Spenser’s provocativeElizabethan verse epic The FaerieQueene, to the brilliant and edgytheatre of the likes of ChristopherMarlowe, Ben Jonson and the prosewritings of revolutionaries like JohnMilton and monarchist libertines likeAphra Behn.Specialist Creative Writing modulesEnglish Literature and Creative Writing students choose two term-long modulesin Year 2.This list is indicative of current and future options, but these remain subject tochange from year to year depending on staff availability.12Short Fiction:Genre and PracticeYou will gain experience in reading,writing, workshopping and reflectingon the short story, as well as flashfiction. The module seeks to developa knowledge of the history anddevelopment of the form, currenttheoretical approaches to reading,and an awareness of your literarycontext. During the module, you arealso expected to keep a journal, inwhich you reflect upon your writingand reading. The journal will formthe basis of the reflective element ofyour final portfolio.Poetry: Genre and PracticeThis is an intensive ten-week studyof poetic form and technique,coupled with a workshop where youwill give and receive feedback onyour own poems.The emphasis is on reading as wellas writing poetry; it will explore howyour own experience translates intopoetry and how poetry becomes anexperience generated by language,memory, imagination and form.The writing of poetry is dependenton your abilities as a reader andinterpreter of poems and on thetextures of lived experience.Writing for the StageThe module enables you to writefor the theatre and to develop yourawareness of the processes bywhich a written script makes itsway to performance, culminatingin a performance showcase inwhich you will be actively involved.You will be taught throughweekly seminars/creative writingworkshops to explore the effectsthat different staging approachesand performance strategies have onyour scripts. Over the course of themodule, you will develop your ownwriting style and gain an awarenessof the professional requirements ofplaywriting.Writing Place and LandscapeThis module is designed forstudents who are interested inwriting imaginatively about placesand/or landscapes, providing agrounding in the broad field ofnature, environmental and placewriting (which has been undergoingsomething of a renaissance in recentyears). You will be encouraged toconsider your own work as part of alarger, ongoing literary conversationabout place. The module alsocontains an element of fieldwork,linking the act of physically walkingthrough a landscape to the practiceof reading and writing about it.Victorian LiteratureWhat is a ‘Victorian attitude’? You willaddress this question by examiningthe role played by literature in thedefining cultural debates of thetime, concerning progress, science,religion and gender. You will examinea wide range of Victorian literature,including novels, poetry, shortstories, drama, social criticism, travelwriting and children’s fiction.American Literature to 1900What do we mean by ‘AmericanLiterature’ and how do we defineAmerica and ‘the Americanexperience’? How has AmericanLiterature evolved from its colonialorigins? You will answer thesequestions by engaging with manydifferent voices, many conflictingand contrasting views, a diversity ofcomplex experiences, and a greatrange of writing in form and style.British RomanticismThis module develops a wellrounded sense of Romanticism,a movement that includes thepoetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge,and Shelley, but also relates tothe development of Gothic writingand to the novels of Jane Austen.Themes of politics and poetics andof imagination and identity will beexamined across a range of texts.Literature, Film and MediaYou will survey formal, generic,historical, cultural, narrative andtheoretical relationships betweenliterature and film across a range ofperiods, genres, topics and cultures,examining the practice and analysisof literary film adaptation. You willalso study other modes of literaryadaptation, such as televisionor graphic novels. Questionsof originality, authorship andintertextuality will be addressedacross the module as a whole.13– Dr Andrew Tate talks to students aboutAmerican literature at Walden pond,USA, on a vacation travel trip, 2019.Creative Non-Fiction:Genre and PracticeThis module specialises in memoir,travel writing, reviewing and thepersonal essay, and explores theways in which non-fiction writersuse creative writing techniques intheir work.You will explore the writing ofcreative non-fiction throughthe development, in a workshopenvironment, of your own work,combined with the directed readingof a selection of contemporary workand secondary texts.The above modules are only availableif you study Creative Writing as a jointmajor, rather than a minor, subject.www.lancaster.ac.uk/creative-writing

Year 3modulesYear 3CoreAdvanced Creative Writing WorkshopSpecialist Creative Writing modulesEnglish Literature and Creative Writing students choose four term-long modules in Year 3.A series of lectures will look at the practicalities of life as a writer, including approaching editors, publishing inmagazines, and getting work commissioned for the stage. Our core staff are typically joined by guest speakersfrom the industry. This will feed into further workshops, developing a portfolio with an experienced andpracticing tutor.English Literature and Creative Writingstudents will take:English Literature with Creative Writingstudents will take:OptionalSelect four Creative Writing modules L onger Fiction: Skills and Techniques forApproaching a Novel Creative Non-Fiction II Writing/Reading Poetry14 Narrative and New Media Advanced Short Story: Form and PracticeCoreDissertationThis is a long essay on a subject of your choice.It could be something that caught your attentionearlier on in the course that you want to approach inmore depth, or a long-standing enthusiasm that youwould like to study in a more systematic and focusedway. Whatever you choose, you will be helped byregular supervision from a member of staff. Poetry and Experiment OptionalSelect further modules in English Literature tomake up 60 creditsSee pages 16-17 for example module options.You may also choose to complete a dissertation: a10,000 word project on a subject of your choosing. OptionalSelect two 15-credit English Literaturemodules such as: Science Fiction in Literature and Film Women Writers Victorian GothicSee page 16-17 for more module options.This list is indicative of current and future options, but these remain subject to changefrom year to year depending on staff availability.Creative Non-Fiction IIYou will develop your practice acrossa range of creative non-fiction formsand topics and extend your readingin this area.This module will concentrateon reviews, essays, and culturalreflection. The module should beconsidered to have a cumulativeeffect, in that the books discussedearlier in the term (as well as thosediscussed in the second yearCreative Non-Fiction module) maybe drawn upon in later weeks toillustrate different aspects of writing.Narrative and New MediaThis module will provide the spacefor you to work on a creative projectthat utilises opportunities affordedby new interactive media. Duringthe module we will examine newmedia narratives. The topics willrespond to your own project ideasand interests, but may include:interactivity and immersion; space,place, mapping and journeying; theproblem of character; or explorethe question of authorship incollaborative fictions. You do notneed to have any special computerprogramming skills – only an interestin the opportunities afforded towriters by new media forms.Advanced Short Story:Form and PracticeYou will study structure, time,genre and endings and write yourown short fictions. This moduleprovides the opportunity for you todevelop your knowledge and skillsof the short story form, history andpractice with a more advancedcourse. Each week you will discuss,in detail, one or two specimen shortstories, as well as workshop yourown creative work. Topics coveredwill include: plot, narrative and‘the twist in the tale’; the epiphanyand other ways of ending; writingextreme experiences, and rewritingfairy tales, folk tales and myth.Poetry and ExperimentThis module challenges the receivedstructures of language in your ownpoetry through a close reading ofexperimental poets. The first hour ofevery seminar will look at how poetsfrom Alice Oswald to Ezra Poundstretch or break the lyric formula.We will encourage you to experimenteither as a continuation of the radicaldepartures first implemented by thepoets in question, or to break fromcomfortable notions of confessionalor lyric poetry.Longer Fiction: Skills andTechniques for Approachinga NovelDuring this module you will examine,through the set reading and inclass writing prompts and tasks,the unique features of long fiction(novellas and novels). Throughseminar discussion of set texts, theworkshopping of creative writing inprogress and the writing of synopsesand other planning documents,you will develop competence inapproaching a long fiction project.This includes: strategies for planningand structuring, choosing pointof view and tense, developingplot, addressing theme andcharacterisation, experimenting withform and considering an ending.Writing/Reading PoetryThis module will deepen yourengagement with both the writingand the reading process. Bothclosed and open forms will beexplored through a wide-rangingselection of poems. A portionof each seminar will be spentdiscussing the set poems for theweek. The dual assessment (aportfolio of your own poems plus aclose reading of two of the syllabuspoems) reflects the course emphasison the inter-relationship betweenreading and writing. OptionalSelect further modules in English Literature tomake up 30 creditsSee page 16-17 for module options.The above modules are only available if you study Creative Writingas a joint major, rather than a minor, subject.www.lancaster.ac.uk/creative-writing15

Year 3modules16English Literature15-credit modulesEnglish Literature30-credit modulesThese half-unit modules are typically designed around the current research ofmembers of staff, and so are subject to frequent changes. This list, therefore, is offeredas a snapshot of some of our current modules rather than as an indication of what maybe running in future years. We usually offer around twenty half-unit modules each year.These full-unit modules are taughtover the course of two terms.Science Fiction in Literatureand FilmModernism towardsPost-modernismYou will trace the development ofscience fiction, providing an insightinto the conventions of the genreand in particular how key themeshave been successfully adaptedfor the screen. You will interrogatethemes such as war and trauma(Starship Troopers, The Forever War,Akira), encounters with the alien orother (War of the Worlds, Monsters)the imagination of dystopia (TheDispossessed, Children of Men,Moxyland), and questions of humansubjectivity, transcendence, love,and loss.Jane AustenThis module will give you theopportunity to study all the majorworks of one of the most celebratednovelists in English literary history.It will combine close attention tothe stylistic textures and narrativestrategies of Jane Austen’s fictionwith broader consideration of keythemes and preoccupations suchas friendship, desire, matchmaking,snobbery, illness, resistance,transgression and secrecy.Victorian GothicIn the Victorian period, thedecaying castles, corrupt priests,and ancestral curses that wereso prominent in the first phase ofthe Gothic novel gave way to anincreased emphasis on spectraland monstrous others: ghosts,werewolves, vampires, mummiesand other creatures of the night.You will explore these phenomena intheir historical, cultural, and literarycontexts, with particular focus onemerging discourses of gender,sexuality, colonialism and class.Postcolonial EnvironmentsThis module explores howpostcolonial writing grapples withenvironmental change, crisis andcollapse. You will read a wide rangeof twentieth and twenty-first centuryliterature from places such as SouthAfrica, Nigeria, Israel/Palestine,and indigenous North America, andtherefore develop an understandingof modern and contemporarypostcolonial/world literatures, andthe environmental sensibilitiesthey articulate and contest. Topicsmay include land, enclosure, waste,toxicity, climate change, and urbanspace.Bible and LiteratureThis module considers the Bible asliterature and looks at the reciprocalrelationship between the Bible andother literary texts. We will considerthe ways in which knowledgeof biblical texts provokes moreprofound readings of literature andask whether rewritings of the Biblerefine or subvert the original text.Women WritersVirginia Woolf famously asked‘what would have happened hadShakespeare had a wonderfullygifted sister?’ and went on to explorethe obstacles to literary successencountered by women writers.This module follows Woolf’s leadby seeking to redress the historicalmarginalisation of women writers inthe English literary canon throughan exploration of how women havecome to writing at different historicalmoments, what they have chosen towrite, and how.You will look at a range ofexperimental Anglo-Americanwriting from the early twentiethcentury – the period of modernismproper – to the emergent postmodernism of the 1960s. Throughclose examination of path-breakingworks from T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,and Wallace Stevens throughto Samuel Beckett and ThomasPynchon, you will examine themeaning and usefulness of twoof the most powerful aestheticconcepts of the last century.Employability 15-credit modulesYou can select one of thefollowing modules which offerhands-on opportunities to applyyour knowledge and skills in areal-life environment. Theseopportunities aim to help youapproach your professional lifewith more confidence.ShakespeareThis module examinesShakespearean drama in its owntime, as a platform on which earlymodern debates about agencyand government, family andnational identity were put into play.By examining texts from acrossShakespeare’s career, we will exploretheir power to shape thoughts andfeelings in their own age but alsoin ours. Texts might include JuliusCaesar, Twelfth Night, Henry IV Part I,King Lear, and The Tempest.Schools Volunteering ModuleIf you are considering training tobe a teacher, this module gives youinvaluable hands-on experience ofworking alongside a teacher in theclassroom for half a day a week overthe course of a term. You will devisea special activity to do with studentsand reflect on the experience in anend-of-placement essay.Contemporary LiteratureYou will encounter the explosionof new literatures from thedecolonising/newly post-colonialworld and the rise of new literaryforms in the post-war period.The module foregrounds literaturein English in its internationaldimensions, from South Asiaand the Caribbean, as well asfrom multicul

Late Medieval to Early Modern Literature Victorian Literature American Literature to 1900 British Romanticism Literature, Film and Media American Literature to 1900 British Romanticism Literature, Film and Media Year 2 In a series of weekly lectures, you will study more advanced techniques and approaches to various