50256 Genre Study

Handbook description

This advanced study of literary texts is designed to bring students into further contact with both contemporary and canonical literature. Literary theoretical concepts and categories provide means of closely reading these texts, as well as opening up sophisticated ways of thinking about literary practice. In particular, this form of literary study of relates to creative practice and composition, including the student's own creative practice in writing. At the same time critical debate within the class explores the limits and the possibilities of the literary text together with the functional operation of categories like 'author', 'genre', 'narrative', 'performance', 'subjectivity', 'meaning', 'reading', 'writing' and 'text' - including in relation to innovative formats such as hypertext or other electronic formats.

Note for 2008: This semester students study a range of inter-related pieces of fiction. Those relationships, however, are not automatically constructed via ideas of influence or re-writing. In other words, genre is seen as a framework for experiment and variation (within which similarities can be perceived), more so than as an inherited structure or authoritative mode. Questions which are opened up in the subject include: what features make these texts innovative instances in relation to the genres within which they operate? How do these pieces work as fictions? What do the modern and contemporary texts tell us about the practices of reading and the concept of readability within the contemporary moment? What do the classic texts tell us about readability across time?

In the introductory weeks, a series of contemporary and historical views of fiction is studied in relation to key critical perspectives and selected excerpts. In each of the three modules which follow, a 'classic' work of fiction is read in the company of significant (celebrated, influential, often media acknowledged) recent works. Most of these have been published since 2000, some within the last year.

Throughout the subject, students are encouraged to read and think about works which frequently subvert or radically modify narrative conventions and which do not fit readily into traditional generic classification. In module 1, Society, questions to do with the treatment of personal (biographical) and epochal (period) definitions of experience and emotion are paramount. Introductory material in the subject refines these questions and also addressed key themes in module 2. In module 2, Broken Fiction, reflexivity and the boundaries where fictional structures and non-fictional forms converge, whether in contemporary and past fiction, is one of the connectives. 3. Module 3, Crime and Punishment, further studies themes present in the two previous modules and refines them in the context of both classic and contemporary representations of truth and motive. The analysis of the chosen texts should lead students to their own innovative readings and writing. The assessed writing which comes from the subject may be either essayistic or creative writing.

Subject objectives/outcomes

At the completion of this subject, students are expected to be able to:

1. experience the beauty and complexity of contemporary and non-contemporary writing;
2. increase understanding the function and effect of critical methodologies
3. understand and appreciate specific aspects of literary genres
4. to write insightfully about chosen texts
5. to have a working knowledge of recent issues and debates in literary writing and criticism.

Contribution to graduate profile

This subject:

• enhances creative and communicational skills
• builds critical understanding of contemporary cultural forms and innovative practices within those forms
• develops critical knowledge of cultural and aesthetic debates
• enhances the ability to think critically and creatively about future developments in cultural industries
• encourages sensitivity to multiple dimensions of social and cultural difference.

Teaching and learning strategies

Lectures followed by a tutorial for most sessions

• Study in seminar format of particular texts, passages and poems
• Discussion, research, group exercises and class presentations on topics relating to the subject
• In class individual seminar presentations on chosen texts
• Compilation of research dossiers and notebooks
• Writing of extended critical and essayistic pieces
• Writing of creative and reflective pieces
• Logging of assignments and other research material on UTS Online.

Content

The subject focuses around a small number of set texts and chosen examples and may often focus on a single genre of writing. A particular emphasis in the subject is literature which departs from traditional and canonical definitions of the literary, though this emphasis is not pursued to the exclusion of traditional texts. Issues to do with structure, authorship, critical methodology, genre and critical and readerly reception are paramount in the subject's themes and content.

Assessment

Assessment item 1

Submission of a short piece of writing in the form of a critical or creative or exploratory piece (1000 words maximum) and presented in class as a seminar topic for class discussion. To be presented on line on class website at designated date, revised if desired in relation to feedback and class response, and presented in hard copy by Week 10.

Assessment item 2

Submission of a longer piece (3500 words maximum)

Minimum requirements

Students are expected to read the subject outline to ensure they are familiar with the subject requirements. Since class discussion and participation in activities form an integral part of this subject, you are expected to attend, arrive punctually and actively participate in classes. If you experience difficulties meeting this requirement, please contact your lecturer. Students who have a reason for extended absence (e.g., illness) may be required to complete additional work to ensure they achieve the subject objectives.

Indicative references

A set of readings are recommended and are available on line. Other texts are available in UTS Library closed reserve.

Other key bibliographical references include:

Attwood, Margaret: Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, London: Virago 2003

Bakhtin, Mikhail, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics" in ed Michael Holquist, The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981

Barthes, Roland: The Rustle of Language, trans Richard Howward, New York: Hill and Wang 1984

Borges, Jorge Luis: Collected Fictions, trans Andrew Hurley, New York: Penguin Books 1999

Bradley, James, The Resurrectionist, Sydney: Picador 2006

Burke, James Lee, Tin Roof Blow Down, New York: Simon and Schuster 2007

Calvino, Italo: Why Read the Classics? trans Martin McLaughlin, London: Jonathan Cape 1999

Coetzee, J.M: Stranger Shores: Essays 1986 – 1999, London: Vintage 2001

Cunningham, Michael, The Hours, London: Fourth Eastate 1999

Dessaiz, Robert: Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev, Sydney: Pan MacMillan 2004

Doctorow E.L., Ragtime, New York: Random House 1975

Fischer, Steven Roger: A History of Reading, London: Reaktion Books 2003)

Gadamer, Hans-Georg: Truth and Method, trans Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G Marshall, New York: Continuum 1995

Garner, Helen, Joe Cinque's Consolation, Sydney: Picador, 2004/5

Franzen, Jomathan, The Corections, New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux 2001

Harrison, Martin: Who Wants to Create Australia? Sydney: Halstead Press 2004

Houellebecq, Michelle, The Possibility of an Island, trans Gavin Bowd, London: Orion Books, 2006

Kundera, Milan: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, newly trans Aaron Asher, New York: Harper Perennial, 1999 (first published Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1979)

Kundera, Milan, The Art of the Novel, trans Linda Asher, New York: Harper Collins 1988

Lodge, David: Consciousness and the Novel, London: Penguin Books 2003

Manguel, Alberto: A History of Reading, London: Harper Collins 1997

McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, London: Routledge 1987

Martin, Henri-Jean: The History and Power of Writing, trans Lydia G Cochrane, Chicago: Chicago university Press 1994

Munro, Alice: Runaway: Stories, Alfred A Knopf, New York 2004

Ondaatje, Michael, Coming Through Slaughter, New York: Vintage International 1996

Olson, David R: The world On Paper: the Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994

Ricoeur, Paul: Time and Narrative Volume 3, trans Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago 1988 pp 142 -157

Sebald, W.G.: The Emigrants, trans Michael Hulse, London: The Harvill Press 1996

Smith, Hazel: The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing, Sydney: Allen and Unwin 2005

Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, New York: Modern Library Classics 2004 (or other editions)

Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina, Ware: Wordsworth Editions 1995 (or other editions)

Winterson, Jeanette, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,

Wood, James, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, London: Jonathan Cape 1999