50256 Genre Study
UTS: Communication: Creative PracticeCredit points: 8 cp
Result Type: Grade, no marks
Requisite(s): 50134 Culture, Writing and Textuality
These requisites may not apply to students in certain courses. See access conditions.
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 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.
Subject objectives/outcomes
At the completion of this subject, students are expected to be able to:
- experience the beauty and complexity of contemporary and non-contemporary writing
- increase understanding the function and effect of critical methodologies
- understand and appreciate specific aspects of literary genres
- write insightfully about chosen texts
- have a working knowledge of recent issues and debates in literary writing and criticism.
Contribution to graduate profile
This subject:
- enhances creative and communication 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 UTSOnline.
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 reader reception are paramount in the subject's themes and content.
Assessment
Assessment item 1: Submission of a short piece of writing
| Objective(s): | a, b and c |
| Weighting: | 45% |
| Task: | 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 criteria: |
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Assessment item 2: Submission of a longer piece of writing
| Objective(s): | a, b, d, e |
| Weighting: | 55% |
| Task: | Submission of a longer piece (3500 words maximum) |
| Assessment criteria: |
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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
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2002 (or other editions)
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
Dessaix, 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)
Flaubert, Gustave, Sentimental Education, trans Robert Baldick, Harmondsworth, Penguin Classics 1964 (or other editions)
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, Jonathan, 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
Kundera, Milan, Immortality, New York, HarperPerennial, 1999
Kundera, Milan, Identity, New York, HarperPerennial, 1999
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
Millet, Catherine, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., trans Adriana Hunter, New York, Grove 2003
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
Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2000 (or other editions)
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)
Turgenev, Ivan, Smoke trans Harry Stevens, New York, Vintage (Alfred A. Knopf and Random House), 1986 (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
