Rationale
To expand current first year provision on the BA Creative Writing so as to provide a more thorough grounding in creative practice, while encouraging students to engage creatively with primary texts from other first year literature courses, especially LT111.
Syllabus
This module will explore creative writing practice in seminars, workshops, and writing exercises, using literary traditions as a springboard for writing. Texts to be explored will in part be drawn from LT111, Introduction to Literature, but will also include additional material, such as ballads and stories, sonnets and sestinas, and alliterative verse. The aim is to work synergistically with LT111, exploring seminal literary themes and genres such as epic and literary underworlds to reveal and re-examine some of the roots of literature, and how these can inform contemporary practice. Translations and updatings of older material will be explored, as well as works that explore dialogic approaches to writing, such as the mock epic. Typical writing exercises will engage with forms and tradition and will explore ways of adapting traditional approaches to a contemporary audience.
Topics will vary from year to year but would be drawn from: theories and methods of translation and adaptation; Ovid and reworkings of Ovid; fairytales and contemporary revisionings; Homer and Joyce; Genesis and creation myths; versions of Utopia and Dystopia; writing and the environment ( Gilgamesh and flood stories); Dante and imaginings of Hell; hero and antihero in the Epic tradition; tragedy and tragic structures; comedic transgressions; Dante, Petrarch and poetic form; ballads and alliterative verse; folksong from Shakespeare to the present.
Module Supervisor's Research into Subject Area
Adrian May is the author of Myth and Creative Writing (Longmans, 2011).
To expand current first year provision on the BA Creative Writing so as to provide a more thorough grounding in creative practice, while encouraging students to engage creatively with primary texts from other first year literature courses, especially LT111.
Syllabus
This module will explore creative writing practice in seminars, workshops, and writing exercises, using literary traditions as a springboard for writing. Texts to be explored will in part be drawn from LT111, Introduction to Literature, but will also include additional material, such as ballads and stories, sonnets and sestinas, and alliterative verse. The aim is to work synergistically with LT111, exploring seminal literary themes and genres such as epic and literary underworlds to reveal and re-examine some of the roots of literature, and how these can inform contemporary practice. Translations and updatings of older material will be explored, as well as works that explore dialogic approaches to writing, such as the mock epic. Typical writing exercises will engage with forms and tradition and will explore ways of adapting traditional approaches to a contemporary audience.
Topics will vary from year to year but would be drawn from: theories and methods of translation and adaptation; Ovid and reworkings of Ovid; fairytales and contemporary revisionings; Homer and Joyce; Genesis and creation myths; versions of Utopia and Dystopia; writing and the environment ( Gilgamesh and flood stories); Dante and imaginings of Hell; hero and antihero in the Epic tradition; tragedy and tragic structures; comedic transgressions; Dante, Petrarch and poetic form; ballads and alliterative verse; folksong from Shakespeare to the present.
Module Supervisor's Research into Subject Area
Adrian May is the author of Myth and Creative Writing (Longmans, 2011).