English Courses 2017

Transcription

1 English Courses 2017 ARTS1030 Forms of Writing: Literature, Genre, Culture S1 This course introduces you to English through the study of literary form. Focusing on the major literary genres of poetry, prose and drama, the course will examine ways of writing in English from a range of periods and cultural traditions including non- British and pre-twentieth century. It will also introduce you to the specialised vocabulary of literary and textual analysis. ARTS1031 Reading Through Time S2 This course will develop your skills in English through a focused introduction to the development of English literature in time and place. Taking as its starting point the notion that each period sees itself as modern, the course will concentrate on key historical shifts in English literary culture from 1500 to the present. Your understanding of literary movements will be extended through a focus on other kinds of contexts, such as national and transnational frameworks. Further, by considering the extent to which modernity is about rewriting the past, it will associate periodization with issues of canonicity. Canonicity will be approached mainly in terms of literary fashion and literary value: we will consider when and why some texts remain read and taught, and in what ways they are consumed. The course will develop your skills in literary analysis as a basis for textual interpretation and aesthetic judgement. ARTS1032 Literature Laboratory S2 This introductory course challenges you to think about writing as experimental, world-building, adventurous, challenging, radical, and even dangerous, and to write as though it can change the way things are. It teaches that literature has been the engine-room of many of history s most decisive changes to social, cultural, ideological, and behavioural norms. Divided into four primary modules Utopian Speculation, The Urgency of Now, Beyond Form and Formlessness, Rhetorics of The Inhuman it exposes you to some of the most exciting and unconventional writing in English, and equips you with some of the skills necessary to resist the cultural conformities that deaden the mind. Treating literature as process, intervention, and experiment, the course asks you to see writing as a lifelong education in how - to use Samuel Beckett's phrase - to fail better.! 1

2 ARTS2031 Australian Literature S1 This course introduces students to major issues and works in Australian literature, with a particular focus on material from the past two centuries. It will contextualise important works in terms of a range of local and global literary and cultural formations, thus providing a map of the complex and changing nature of national culture. ARTS2033 Poetry and Poetics S2 In this course we will study some of the most accomplished and influential poems written in English between 1680 and We will read the works of a wide range of poets in a variety of genres, from biting satire to ravishing love poetry, and will consider these works in relation to their historical contexts, from political revolution to scientific developments. We will also discuss a set of key problems in poetics, or the theory of poetry, from rhyme and metre to the social functions of poetry. We will thus use each week s group of poems to test a key feature of poetic theory, and we will use that theory to gain a better understanding of the poems historical meanings. The aim is to develop a thorough grounding in the development of poetry in English, to hone our skills in analysing poetry, and to develop a sophisticated grasp of contemporary debates about the theory of poetry. ARTS2034 Shakespearean Drama S1 You will study a range of Shakespeare's plays from different genres (history, tragedy, comedy, romance) and be presented with a range of critical approaches to these plays. The course will provide you with opportunities to understand and to interrogate Shakespeare's position as a benchmark of excellence in western cultural tradition and a core component of English literary education. While you will focus mainly on the Shakespearean script as a form of literature, you will also consider how this script is related to performance on stage and screen. ARTS2035 American Literature S2! 2

3 This course provides a rich survey of the major movements and dynamics of American literature, situating some of the most significant works of American prose and poetry within historical and social frameworks. The course is structured around coherent modules that juxtapose contemporary and historical texts, and argue for a distinctive national tradition. Themed modules such as Roads and Outsiders will blend primary with secondary reading materials and construct a compelling literary and critical portrait of the world s most powerful nation. ARTS2036 Modernism: Text and Screen S1 This course introduces you to the wave of experimentation in the arts that we have come to call modernism. During the first forty or so years of the twentieth century, traditional art forms underwent an unprecedented process of revolution and innovation, as artists and writers sought radically new ways to express the experience of modernity. We will consider the works of a range of individual European and North American modernist writers and film-makers, as well as examining some of the many collective movements, groupuscules and isms that sprang up during this period. A touchstone of our inquiry will be the vexed relationship between modernity as a historical condition and modernism as a cultural movement. What does it mean to be modern? What happens to art when traditional beliefs and ways of life enter a period of permanent crisis a period, that is, when all that is solid melts into air? And does modernist culture teach us ways to feel at home in modernity, or does it remind us of our alienation? ARTS2037 Reading Women s Writing S1 This course introduces students to the work of some of the major and avant-garde women writers and film-makers in the twentieth and twenty-first century, drawing on the genres of novel, short story, poetry, drama and involving visual and textual media. A wide range of issues will be explored, including formal innovation, lines of influence and radical traditions in women's writing, identity formation and the interaction of gender, race and class within the practices of writing and reading. ARTS2038 Popular Fictions: Novels and their Afterlives S2 This course introduces students to the study of the novel through a consideration of its diverse and changing forms since the eighteenth century. The focus of the course is on the ways the novel has persisted as a mass genre, adapting in response to shifts in its audiences and to the technologies through which they access long-form! 3

4 narratives. We will consider questions of canonicity, celebrity, global proliferation and contemporary reference in relation to the novel. Possible modules include: celebrity authors; nineteenth- and twentieth-century true crime writing; film and television remakes of canonical novels; the early novel as an adaptation of older narrative forms such as romance and epic. ARTS2050 Academic Writing for the Humanities S1 This course develops students capacity to write academic essays according to the conventions of the Humanities. It provides the knowledge and vocabulary by which students can critically analyse the work of others as well as their own. The course focuses sustained attention on various modes of academic writing that are used in essay writing and shows how these may be deployed to present a strong argument. The course includes analysis of a range of exemplars as well as essays from academic journals researched by students and related to their disciplinary interests. This study will be accompanied by writing exercises, writing workshops and detailed feedback from both peers and staff. ARTS3030 Seeing Australia / Reading Australia Online/Summer Seeing Australia' is an online course that examines the way Australia has been seen over the last two centuries, in visual art and literature. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of seeing itself, we will investigate how Australia has come to exist in the mind of its own people and those from other countries. In this process you will discover some of the fundamental cultural myths that have gone to shape Australian society by encountering different ways of 'seeing' besides the purely visual. At the conclusion of the course you will be able to identify the range of representations by which 'Australia' has come into being. ARTS3040 Postcolonial Literature S1 This course investigates some of the major questions and critical debates that arise in literatures written in English by colonised and formerly colonised peoples around the globe. This course will examine aspects of colonial and postcolonial literary representation in relation to race, gender, geography, ethnicity, indigeneity and language transformation. The Oriental, the global, the cosmopolitan, the subaltern, the third world and the settler colonial are the key areas of postcolonial literary theory! 4

5 that will support work in this course. This course allows students to reflect on national, transnational and global spheres of cultural production and to think in structured ways about the emerging new field of world literature. ARTS3045 Worlds of Crime S1 To go wrong in one s own way is better than to go right in someone else s writes Dostoyevsky in Crime & Punishment. Taking Dostoyevsky s observation as a starting point this course explores crime as an idea and as a fiction of reinvention, resistance, alternative worlds, and subjectivities. Why are we so compelled by maverick detectives, violent crimes, elicit schemes, deception and betrayal? From its beginnings in the late 18th Century, crime fictions of various kinds have captivated readers and challenged literary, cultural and moral conventions. This course will trace the historical emergence and circulation of this genre from Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle through to its contemporary global proponents. You will explore key issues that have shaped the history of consuming crime fictions the emergence of mass culture, taste and 'the art of murder', sensationalism, violence, the nexus of literary and cinematic storytelling, horror, and the grotesque. ARTS3047 Critical and Cultural Theory S1 This course introduces you to some of the central texts and concepts in the key intellectual movements and theories from the early twentieth century to the present as these bear on literary analysis. You will examine a range of related issues including: 1. how the very assumptions of language, communication and meaning have been questioned from early twentieth century to the present; 2. the re-conception of identity and its impact on literary construction; 3. the ways political structures construct the relationship between human subjects and objects such as commodities. ARTS3048 Gothic Cultures: Literature and Screen S2 This course tracks the cultural history of the gothic genre from the sublime landscapes and haunted castles of Horace Walpole to the Southern inspired excesses of Anne Rice. From its inception the Gothic genre has been a popular and controversial cultural phenomenon, which has dramatised the darker side of the senses and imagination, as well as testing the boundaries of literary taste. In Gothic fiction nothing is ever certain. The domestic and familiar are merely comforting illusions that veil the darker reality of unspoken fears and desires. Home, city, work,! 5

6 identity, sexuality, the body and the mind are all sites that are open to the destabilising play and uncanny effects of the Gothic imagination as this course s selected texts, films and TV series, which range from the popular to the canonical, exemplify. ARTS3049 Literary Animals, Monster and Machines S1 Widespread in the humanities at the moment is a rethinking of what it means to be human. This course will look at how literature and film use the nonhuman subjectivity of animals, monsters and machines to shape our understanding of the human. By examining the changing presentation of animals, monsters and machines in a range of texts from the seventeenth century through to the beginning of the twenty first century, the course will show how aesthetic practices such as literature and film extend and test our sympathetic imagination by allowing us to inhabit subject positions that we are normally unable to inhabit. Students taking the course will develop a sense of the ethical, social, political and philosophical value of literature and film. ARTS3050 Literature and the Environment S2 Literature and the Environment examines the inter-relationship between between literary texts and concepts of Nature. From the vantage point of contemporary concerns with climate change and environmental sustainability, this course questions literature's representation of the natural world and human society's place within it. It will compare various understandings of Nature from a range of contexts and ask whether it is possible to model an environmental practice of reading and writing. ARTS3053 Love Pray Kill in the English Renaissance S2 You will study representations of loving, praying, and killing in a wide range of literary genres from one of the principal periods of English literature: the Renaissance. You begin with the dangerous loves, private devotions, and executions at the court of Henry VIII as they are recorded and suffered by poets such as Wyatt and Surrey. You then move to modes of loving, prayer, and homicide as they are experienced and dramatized by some major dramatists and poets (such as Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser) during the reign of Elizabeth I. You will consider the refined, erotic love lyrics of Donne alongside his impassioned speculations about God and suicide in his verse and prose. You observe the piety of religious poets, such as Herbert, and read refined speculations about love, divinity, and regicide in the poetry of Marvell, Mary Wroth, and Katherine Philips. You will conclude with Milton s sublime treatment of all! 6

7 three themes in his epic poem, Paradise Lost. Contexts for your reading of these works will be Graeco-Roman tradition and the Reformation a movement in western Christendom that issued in the difference between Protestant and Catholic which motivated sectarian violence across western Europe during the period. ARTS3054 The Getting of Wisdom S2 What do you want to be when you grow up? At some point during the eighteenth century, this question went from being more or less meaningless to one of the central preoccupations of Western literature and culture: the driving principle of countless if not most classic novels, and the occasion for many canonical works in other genres and media. The idea that the shape of an individual life follows a basic pattern of development, leading from the open-ended possibility of youth to the stable identity of adulthood, seems self-evident to us, but this idea has a history: it has been figured, configured and reconfigured in many different ways over the past 250 years, and continues to mutate and develop under our eyes today. The aim of this course is to track the related ideas of youth, adulthood and development over this period, as they are represented in key works of literature and cinema, and especially within the genre of the Bildungsroman. Our inquiry will be guided by the assumption that narratives of development, in prose, poetry and film, are not only passive reflections of reality, but rather that these literary and film representations are essential tools for making sense of our time-bound lives. Accordingly, your engagement with these questions will take the form of class discussion and a traditional essay, but also an original narrative in which you implement your understanding of the genre. The course is designed as a history of ideas and representations, but also as a toolkit, which will help us think about what it means to come of age in our own society and how best to approach the problem of education. ARTS3052 English Internship S1, S2, Summer This course provides you with an opportunity to undertake work-integrated learning and gain industry experience with a host organisation closely related to your Major in English. You may also apply to work on attachment on an academic research project or work in an editorial role for an academic journal. Ideally, you will undertake an internship after you have completed 1.5 years of full-time study (or equivalent) and completed a minimum of 18 UOC in the Major. At the end of the internship you will provide a summative report of your experiences and work examples completed during the internship. The internship requires a total commitment of hours of work with a host organisation and may normally be taken in first, second or summer semester. Internship opportunities are advertised via the School of the Arts and Media Internship Newsletter. Alternatively you may approach a relevant organisation to! 7

8 apply for an internship. Prior to seeking an internship, you should attend an internship information session run by the School of the Arts and Media. To be eligible for this course, you must have a minimum WAM of 70.! 8