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Special Topic (Writing Workshop Spring) (Q1234)

15 credits, Level 4

Spring teaching

Love. Death. Bodies. Blue. Phantasy. Pain. Hope.

Each semester of the Special Topic module is dedicated to just one concept or condition. Over the course of the module, our understanding of that concept or condition will become deeper and more compelling. The topic will be chosen by one of our creative writing team depending on a lively area of research and our intuition as to your interests. All will be illuminating. For example:

What is love? A feeling? A condition? Is love tyrannous? It is all around, and yet no one can get enough. Laura Kipnis writes a polemic “against love” while Elizabeth Povinelli provides an ethnography of love as part of settler-colonial culture, rather than a universal condition. Our reading may include:

• Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work
• Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card
• Banana Yoshimoto’s Moonlight Shadow
• Frank O’Hara’s Love Poems (Tentative Title)
• Nisha Ramayya’s States of the Body Produced by Love.

Bodies are often lumped together, but are our experiences of embodiment radically different, and always changing? Will we always need our bodies? We will study a range of bodily (mis)apprehensions, for example:

• the racialised body
• the maternal body
• the ageing body
• the consuming body
• the body in pain.

Our reading may include Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism, Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfections, Snorton, C Riley’s Black on Both Sides, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight.

Special Topic Writing Workshops have a simple structure. Each week we read two short texts, one more or less creative (a short story, a poem), and one more or less critical (a philosophical essay, a manifesto). Writing exercises based on these readings build up over the module until you have a portfolio of your own writing exploring the topic. That might include short stories, poems, scenes from films or video games, and essay prose. Working in this way will demonstrate how wide and engaged reading in different genres can help us develop our own critical and creative writing.

 

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 22 hours of contact time and about 128 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2024/25. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.