Elective Units 2008

Note: A strict quota of 15 students applies to all elective units.

Semester 1
HEA419 Contemporary Travel Narratives
HEA435 Fictocriticism

Semester 2
HEA412 Postcolonial Narratives
HEA475 Shakespeare's Stage: The Play of Power

HEA419 Contemporary Travel Narratives
Travel narratives provide a rich opportunity to examine the relationship between texts and cultures. This unit explores 20th century travel narratives in conjunction with contemporary theories about travel and travel writing. It enables students to engage with a wide range of texts (from travel theory to travel writing, novels and film) in a stimulating critical framework. Key issues pertinent to contemporary literary and cultural studies are addressed, including questions about cross-cultural encounters; the legacies of colonialism and empire and continuing forms of imperialism; the tourist gaze; writing the travelling self; technology and modernity; postmodern travel and narrative; and metaphors of travel and their particularized use in contemporary theory.
Staff: Dr Victoria Burrows
Weight:   12.5%
Teaching Pattern: 27 contact hours
Assessment mode: 5,000-word essay

HEA435 Fictocriticism
Introduces students to developments within the discipline 'English' under the heading Fictocritism. Postmodern critical and creative work is moving rapidly away from, on the one hand, the traditional academic genres of essay, chapter and journal article and, on the other, the creative genres of fiction and poetry. A hybrid kind of writing, part critical, part theoretical, part creative, is proving influential in the reformulation of literary and cultural studies, not least for its recent exposure of what has always been the literariness of critical genres. This unit studies some of the influential work of cultural commentary that is being done by writers working outside and against disciplinary generic norms, and the crucial questions of subjectivity, objectivity, value and cultural politics they are facing. There is the opportunity for students to do fictocritical work for their assessment.
Staff: Dr Philip Mead
Weight: 12.5%
Teaching pattern: 27 contact hours
Assessment mode: 5,000-word essay

HEA412 Postcolonial Narratives
This unit examines the ways in which postcolonial writers represent connections between traditional humanist concerns - for example, race and gender - and the "natural" environment. Through a detailed analysis of selected works from Africa, India, Canada, the Caribbean and Australia, we will explore how writers from both the settler colonies and the former colonies of occupation express their sometimes similar (and often divergent) views on land, animals and humans. A secondary focus of the course will be the importance of the use of specifically literary techniques in re-creating the environmental past and imagining possible futures.
Staff: Prof Helen Tiffin
Weight:   12.5%
Teaching Pattern: 27 contact hours
Assessment mode: 5,000-word essay

HEA475 Shakespeare's Stage: The Play of Power
Elizabethan and Jacobean players were largely excluded from earning a living within the boundaries of respectable London. Instead they entertained the city from its margins, with plays of remarkable violence, wit and sensuality. Their theatre survived by reshaping narratives of the distant past or of exotic foreign locations, but the plays still engaged with the deepest conflicts and contradictions of their own time and place. Much recent work on Shakespeare and his contemporaries has been concerned with the difficult task of interpreting the relationship between the plays and the culture that produced them. This unit provides opportunities to test some of this work against a selection of Elizabethan and Jacobean histories, tragedies and comedies which depict dynamic power struggles within the family and the state.
Staff: Dr R Gaby
Weight: 12.5%
Teaching Pattern: 27 contact hours
Assessment mode: 5,000-word essay

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