This is a 3 day training course that will enable you to develop your academic reading and presentation skills through a series of online tasks.

Aims and objectives

The course will:

* familiarise students with and expand the necessary linguistic means to be able to understand complex written material of different styles, i.e. biographies, literary texts, historical texts, etc., from different sources, including online resources and the internet.
* discuss and present a variety of issues connected with the individual language specific topics they research
* Give students the opportunity for independent study, creative and analytical thinking, problem-solving and disciplined time-management, as well as practical presentation skills.
This course offers creative readings in shorter fictions in order to inspire new writing in the long and marvellous tradition of fabulism. We will read towards a definition of the tale, uncovering its ways and manners, characteristic modes and tone, plots and motifs. We will also look at its role in the making of cultural identity and its range of meanings and applications for contemporary experience. The Tale does not constitute a genre in itself, but inheres in different genres - fantasy, ghost stories, science-fiction, parable, fairytale, and magical realism. Writing a story by telling a tale has inspired dazzling inventions - by writers such as Lucian (True History), Frank Kafka, H.G.Wells, Jorge Luis Borges, Leonora Carrington. It has also frequently involved re-tellings and re-visionings. The Renaissance tradition of "imitation" (for example Christopher Marlowe's verse story "Hero and Leander" and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis") has regained fresh vigour with translations and versions of ancient texts today (Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Cook, Anne Carson). By twisting and reshaping old materials, reconfiguring traditional plots and motifs, many authors, besides those already mentioned above, have seized the fabulous inheritance and enriched it - for example, Edgar Allen Poe; Robert Louis Stevenson; Isak Dinesen). Students will be encouraged to bring to the course their own legacy of stories; writing assignments can be done in either prose or verse.

Final work of this course will include one or more tales, to a total length of between three and six thousand words, and an accompanying essay of between three and four thousand words, setting out the background to this creative work, its sources, inspiration, and so forth. By immersing ourselves in this zone of fictional narrative, we shall work towards adding to the fabulous inheritance of The Tale.

Each class will include discussion of the tales from the reading list, writing exercises, and further discussion and exchanges about them.

See CMR for details of course reader and week by week schedule of classes.


Multivox is a multilingual, multi-subject speech repository for interpreting training.