Nothing particularly interesting

  I have been pondering of late my new venture into teaching Creative Writing - which I will be doing this semester. It comes at the same time that I have been expending considerable thought on how to embed employability more explicitly into the English modules which I teach, and one of the first things I have had to address is the issue of how useful a Creative Writing module will be for students? After all, the idea of Creative Writing on an English Literature and Language degree might at first seem a little incongruous. Even the images associated with 'Creative Writing' tend towards the archaic and the disconnected: Old type-writers, pencils and fountain pens scratching away on parchment-type paper.  Unlike linguistics or the theoretical and historical weight of Language and Literature, the idea of sitting around discussing our own jolly wee stories might seem a little irrelevant - like an short vacation from the critical rigours of academic study.  ...

In preparation for a class, I am here posting my lecture presentation and notes.  All comments welcome... as long as they are nice ones...

Here we are again with another assessment to post.  So far I have not had any bad feedback on the various draft things I have been planning to inflict on my students - which either means that they are not so bad after all, or that people are simply too polite to say anything. This one is for a final year module on Cultural Studies.  The aim of the module is to encourage students to apply the methods of textual and critical analysis used in the study of literature, to a broader range of 'texts' drawn from culture and society. This element of the assessment is an assessed discussion.  It has always seemed to me that a discussion is a more effective way of measuring a students' capacity to synthesise and evaluate ideas than a mere presentation.  It demands that students engage with a less fixed or planned set of ideas, and means that there is a focus placed on the interactive skills which students are encouraged to practice during normal seminar discussions. Here ...

Once again I have been wrestling with the difficulties of a module designed to introduce students to critical theory.  This is particularly difficult on the degree course I teach, because English only constitutes 50% of the course - so however I try to fit critical theory in, it needs to be done effectively enough so that students have a confident grasp of it before they hit their final year, where an understanding of the relationships between text and theory become pre-supposed. I have been trying to grapple with this challenge for many years now, and have variously gone through phases of: questioning the value of critical theory altogether, and asking whether we really need it? (I eventually came to the conclusion that we do ). embedding critical theory in modules, rather than having a dedicated standalone module (but this led to repetition and confusion).   trying to crow-bar critical thinking into Research Methods modules , as a research method (a nice ide...

For me, the first English module of the course is always the most difficult.  Introductory modules are often given the near-impossible task of providing students with everything they need in order to continue studying the subject at a higher level - but particularly in literature this seems to be an increasingly difficult task. There are two reasons for this.  Firstly, while there are countless Study Skills guides now available for students to use, there is very little in terms of clear guidelines and support for how to do English literature .  In particular, the idea of 'textual analysis' remains on the whole largely undefined.  I have posted about this issue a couple of times already , so won't go into it again here . The other issue relates to what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as ' cultural capital ' or 'habitas'.  This notion relates to the extent to which there are often broad assumptions made about the basic levels of education people have - and I ...

The most basic core of a dissertation plan hinges on three main questions: What do you want to know? How are you going to find out? What will you do with the answers? The answer to the questions will hinge on your initial narrowing of a research area.   The range of research or project areas can be varied, but a very generic approach might suggest that for a literature project the answers could include: What do you want to know? How or whether a text, or texts within a particular period demonstrate a particular characteristic, or reflect a historical or sociological context. Whether concrete evidence can be identified which adds to our understanding of a particular text, or whether a group of evidences can be analysed in ways which allow for different conclusions How different critical approaches to a text or texts can add to our appreciation / understanding of it. How are you going to find out? Through primary research and close ana...

English Dissertation: Structure of your topic Your literary dissertation might be one of the following: • An argument for or against an existing critic (or critical position) in relation to the author or group of works you are studying • An argument about the importance of a particular influence of a writer, or influence exerted by him or her • An argument for the importance of some particular piece of evidence to the discussion of the work of some author or group of authors • An argument about the value of a theoretical approach to a text or set of texts • An argument about the significance of a particular authors work • An argument about some historical or literary-historical aspect of literature • An argument about existing scholarly texts on a particular work • An argument showing how a particular theme or concept may be related to a group of texts

Graham Gooch: A good opener I have often emphasised to my students the importance of a really good opening sentence. Beginning a piece of writing with a short, snappy opening line can grab attention. Beginning a piece of writing with a snappy opening that is at the same time provocative is even better. You not only grab attention, but you create questions in the mind of the reader that they will want to find out answers to. Don’t believe me? Well, think about the opening lines of some of the most famous novels ever written.  Think about how they provoke questions, stimulate curiosity and arouse interest in what the rest of the story will say:

I have been reading a lot about Shaun Tan in recent weeks.  His illustrated books are extraordinary things, and well worth a look.  Equally interesting though, is what Tan himself says about them - particularly in relation to his recurring themes of migration, displacement and belonging. In this keynote speech from the 2012 IBBY cogress (a full transcript of which is available on Tan's own website ), Shaun Tan explains about the themes of migration, identity and belonging in his books - and in particular in his book The Arrival. Tan highlights the relavance of stories of migration by suggesting that children develop a sense of their own identities by being able to measure it against 'otherness'. " Culture, nature, family, belief, work, play, language " Tan says, " are flexible realities, something we realise especially when we travel overseas, and discover that the commonplace is exotic and the exotic is commonplace, depending on what side of the tour-b...

In the forthcoming semester, I will be embracing something NEW and teaching a module on children’s literature – a significant shift from my areas of specialism in eighteenth-century literature, American drama and cultural theory. This is something I have been wanting to do for some time – before, indeed, I had the pleasure of becoming and parent and finding myself reading Maurice Sendak and Julia Donaldson so repetitively that at times I find myself reciting ‘a mouse took a walk through the deep dark wood’ to myself as I walk down the road, like a Gruffaholic zombie. It has always interested me largely because it seems to interest my students so much. Of all the dissertations I have supervised (and despite my best efforts to get people to write about Tristram Shandy) children’s literature has probably been one of the most recurring topics. Not surprising given the explosion of critical interest in the field, rather nicely demonstrated by this ngram chart: Indeed, it is e...

Throug hout the twentieth cent u ry, we can see a consistent degradation America’s own view of itself, through the work of the playwrights studied. Its dreams and idealisms have, for these playwrights, fallen down around them. The Depression destroyed the dreams of economic security and the confidence in capitalism. The McCarthy trials destroyed faith in American democracy, and its position as a ‘land of the free’ was challenged by those who pointed out the vast inequalities sustained by so-called American ideals.  Playwright’s responded to these various set-backs in a variety of ways. Some like Clifford Odets wrote plays designed to act as clarion calls: calls for social reform, as idealistic and as optimistic as those of the Founding Fathers. Others, like Tennessee Williams, responded with despondency, presenting a world of decayed values in which the individual soul was irretrievably lost amid the confused jockeying of societies...

The notion of the American Dream has now established itself fully into the mythological life not only of America, but of many nations around the world – including (arguably) our own. The term ‘American Dream’ was not a commonly used one until 1931, when the popular historian James Truslow Adams attempted to use it as the title for his short history of America. His publishers were not happy with the title, preferring the eventually chosen one of The Epic of America . Adams used the term ‘American Dream’ more than 30 times throughout his book though, and in the years to follow – during which the popularity of The Epic of America became immense - the term became commonplace. Now, Jim Cullen writes that the: American Dream” has long since moved beyond the relatively musty domain of print culture into the incandescent glow of the mass media, where it is enshrined as our national motto. Jubilant athletes declaim it following championship ga...