BA Single Honours English Literature and Creative Writing

Your First Year (Part 1)

As well as providing you with an opportunity to develop understanding and practice your techniques in a range of creative writing projects, this degree also encourages and provides a training in critical reading and thinking. It seeks to equip you with the reading, writing, and presentational skills sought after by employers in many spheres, including journalism, arts administration and publishing.

The English Literature and Creative Writing degree is conceived of as a critical-creative programme of study. Consequently, working on the assumption that you need to be a good reader to be a good writer, you will take a combination of creative modules alongside critical-interpretative modules throughout your degree scheme. In your first year you will take three core modules - Ways with Words: Getting Started in Creative Writing and Encountering Texts in Semester One, and Aspects of Genre in Semester Two. In Semester One, students may also take Rewriting, Revisioning Texts. In Semester Two, Contemporary Writing and The Writer's Art: Transpositions are popular choices.

Core Modules

Ways with Words: Getting Started in Creative Writing is designed to introduce students to different kinds of writing practice through an integrated programme of workshops and plenary lectures; you will gain experience of the genres of poetry, prose fiction and life-writing, and of the kinds of research essential to creative work. This module is a compulsory core module for QW38 English Literature and Creative Writing.

Encountering Texts acts as a bridge between A-level study and advanced degree work. The module familiarises students with the expectations and opportunities related to the study of literature at University level. It introduces you to the Higher Education learning environment, and develops research, writing and presentation skills that will help you to make the most of your degree scheme. The module is taught by a combination of lectures and seminars and is a compulsory core module in all of the department's degree schemes.

Aspects of Genre explores the genres of poetry, drama and the novel through a detailed study of texts from different periods. This module gives close consideration to the three main literary genres - poetry, prose and drama. We have selected one aspect of each of these for special study: so for poetry, the module centres on longer poems or sequences of poems; for prose, we focus on ‘tales of the uncanny'; and for drama, we focus on comedy from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde. This module also provides a foundation in specialist writing and research skills suitable for the remaining years of the degree.

Optional Modules

Rewriting, Revisioning Texts: a module which focuses on literature as a process of rewriting. One if its main features will be the adaptation of literary texts into films and the interesting culutral and generic issues to which these 'transformations' gives rise. It provides you with the skills you need to read and analyse texts from different genres, in different contexts and across different media. Available in semester one.

The Writer's Art: Transpositions, which is based upon a series of writing tasks which involve ‘transposing' a pre-existing piece of material in some way - for example, either from one medium to another, or from one genre to another. Instead of getting you to start with a blank sheet of paper, this module asks you to perform a series of tasks in which you transform existing material in some way - a picture is used as a stimulus for a poem, a biblical story is re-written as a detective story, the viewpoint in a story in transposed or altered - and so on. Available in semester 2.

Contemporary Writing, which introduces you to a range of recent poetry, drama and fiction, including short tales, postmodernist fiction, best-seller fiction, poetry, and film adaptations. The texts are chosen to represent facets of contemporary identity (including social, ethnic, class, gender, sexual, and generational aspects). These categories anticipate some of those that will become important in your study of literature on Part Two modules in your second and third years. All the texts studied on this module first appeared in the 1990s or 2000s. Generally, most students enrolled for English Literature and Creative Writing take these two modules. Available in semester 2.

American Literature and Culture is an introduction to the study of American literature and culture from 1800 to the present day. It focuses on the role of literature in dramatising and debating the myths and realities of the American experience. Available semester two.

The following two modules have also been tailored to provide students of English Literature and Creative Writing with an introduction to the Classical forms, genres and ideas that often form a basis for creative works in English Literature.

Greek and Roman Epic and Drama, which requires no previous knowledge of Classics, introduces students to the epics of Homer and Virgil. It also explores a range of Greek and Roman plays, focusing on issues of gender and society. Semester one.

The Classical Tradition: A History of Greek and Roman Ideas introduces students to Greek and Roman ideas and literary genres, paying particular attention to those aspects that became important to English Literature. It includes Attic Tragedy and Old Comedy, Senecan drama, the novel, satire, Greek and Roman poetry, and Classical mythology. Semester Two.

Assessment

Creative Writing modules are are assessed by means of task-based assignments; English and American Literature modules by a combination of coursework and end-of-module examinations.

Part Two

At Part Two, the English Literature and Creative Writing programme consists of a ‘core' taken by all students, comprising the following modules:

• Restoration and Eighteenth Century Writing
• Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Writing

plus one of

• Medieval and Renaissance Literature
• Romantic and Nineteenth Century Writing

These modules do not try to teach you absolutely everything about the writing of the periods concerned, but they do allow you to engage with a range of texts that will help you to understand important developments in British literary history. These are historical survey modules, designed to open doors into various thematic, generic, political or socio-historical issues which might be pursued in other modules in more detail.

Feeding into this historical core, are three modules on literary theory and technique. The first entitled Reading Theory / Reading Text I, allows you to develop the skills and methods necessary for literary analysis, and to engage with important issues in literary theory - what is it we're doing when we analyse texts? How has this process of interpretation and analysis changed over the centuries? How do our individual interests and prejudices affect our literary judgements? How does the analysis of literature interact with other disciplines, like history, film, art, or politics?

The second module in Year Two is entitled Writer's Art 3: Set Forms. This module develops students' understanding of established forms in prose and poetry. Students also gain experience in a range of contemporary written forms - the book review, the short story, and the poem.

The core module in year three is entitled Textual Interventions, and is aimed at developing students' critical engagements and creative interactions with theoretical ideas.

The final ‘core' module taken in Year Three, is the Writing Project module. This module allows you the opportunity to produce a substantial body of sustained creative work (a collection of poems or one or more pieces of short fiction), that might have developed out of your studies in other modules. You also complete a critical commentary that articulates the creative and conceptual structure and decisions in your portfolio. The module provides you with advanced writing skills, as well as workshops on planning, shaping and structuring your creative work. Thereafter, you will work on a one-to-one basis with your supervisor in writing and completing the portfolio. Seen as the culmination of your Creative Writing work, this Writing Project module will provide you with space and opportunity for your most sustained and advanced creative work during your degree, and it will also equip you with the necessary skills for higher degree work, if that is your future inclination. Aberystwyth offers both an MA and a PhD in creative writing, and a substantial number of our undergraduates choose to remain here to continue their creative studies.

In addition to these core modules, each student of English Literature and Creative Writing will choose (over the two years of Honours), two Writing options. Each Writing option lasts for one semester, and involves students working together in seminar workshop classes on various exercises and discussing each other's work under the overall guidance of a writing tutor. The option modules usually derive from the particular writing specialisms and enthusiasms of the option tutor, and they are designed to complement and extend the work undertaken for the other writing technique modules. Assessment is usually by writing portfolio.

Students will select two of the advanced level specialist literature modules, in addition to the two Writing options.