Module ENGL2911: Writing the Sea

Department: English Studies

ENGL2911: Writing the Sea

Prerequisites

• None

Corequisites

• None

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None

Aims

• Introduce students to ecocritical, especially Blue Humanities, and postcolonial approaches to the sea in literary and cultural texts.
• Interrogate the sea as a key place where the memory of empire intersects with the fragile ecosystems at play in watery and coastal spaces, through a survey of post-war and contemporary writings by global Anglophone writers.
• Encourage students to understand ecocritical and postcolonial theories in conversation with one another.
• Encourage students to engage with the ethical and aesthetic questions of writing history through fiction.
• Interrogate genre conventions relating to (post)historiographic metafiction, and related sub-genres of the contemporary period, including the neo-Gothic, dystopian and detective fiction, eco-poetics and climate fictions, and the neo-slave narrative.

Content

• Focuses on representations of the sea as a space of imperial memory and of ecological crisis in post-war and contemporary texts, in conversation with postcolonial and ecocritical/environmental humanities frameworks.
• Includes literary fiction, middle-brow fiction, film adaptations, poetry, memoirs, and songs.
• Explores themes such as imperial and national memory, trauma, resource extraction, pollution, climate change, gender and sexuality, religion and class, as discourses shaped by historical processes that include imperialism and capitalism.
• Combines close-reading analyses with geo-historical and philosophical texts, as well as with literary theory.

Learning Outcomes

• Develop students’ knowledge and awareness of post-war and twenty-first-century representations and theorisations of the sea, through postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives.
• Introduce students to key theoretical frameworks such as ecocriticism, the Environmental Humanities and the Blue Humanities, complementing areas of critical theory that students in English Studies examine on Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism, and Postcolonial and World Literatures.
• Cement students’ knowledge and confidence with key concepts from postcolonial and world literary studies, such as the Black Atlantic and the neo-Slave narrative.
• Introduce students to, or cement their knowledge of, refugee and migration literature.
• Encourage students to read postcolonial and ecocritical concerns in dialogue with one another, while looking at a wide range of literary genres, and various sub-categories of genre writing (e.g. historical fiction, neo-Victorian and neo-slave fiction, dystopian fiction, memoirs).

• Students studying this module will develop:
• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts
• sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies
• skills of effective communication and argument, in written and oral form
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated

• Students studying this module will develop:
• a capacity to analyse critically
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject
• competence in the planning and execution of assessed work
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others
• skills in critical reasoning
• skills in summarising complex information and presenting it in succinct, clear manner, in written and oral form
• an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information
• organisation and time-management skills

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of literary texts, and to gain familiarity and confidence with theoretical and critical apparatuses. Seminars, equally, allow students to develop skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology.
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills. Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for discussing their critically-informed ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar. Readings in preparation for seminars are in addition to the formative presentations, since students will be expected to come prepared to every seminar, while each student will be asked to present only once throughout the year.
• Coursework: tests the student’s ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions.
• Formative Presentations: allow students to conduct independent research, condense and summarise information and knowledge to be presented in class, in a friendly and supportive environment. The presentations will also enable students to receive and offer peer support, as presenting students will be able to receive questions and feedback from peers, while students in the audience will be able to offer suggestions to presenters. Finally, the presentations will enable students to make use of digital technologies, e.g. PowerPoint slides, to complement their delivery.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first summative assessment and the oral feedback given after the formative presentation allows students to reflect on examiners’ comments, and give them the opportunity to improve their work for the final assessment.
• Before the first essay, students will have an individual consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a list of points relevant to the essay and receive oral comment on these points. Students may also, if they wish, discuss their ideas for the second essay at this meeting. This session will not be centrally timetabled, and will be arranged via the seminar leader and student.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

■ Attendance at all activities marked with this symbol will be monitored. Students who fail to attend these activities, or to complete the summative or formative assessment specified above, will be subject to the procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University