Module description
This module looks at ways of writing throughout the long history of experimentation with critical form: from essays and auto-fictions to critical fabulations and diaries, the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ in writing have often deeply intermeshed. We will consider ways of thinking about the relationship of formal innovation and structure to the content or air of the text; to ways writers enact performative relationships with their real or imagined interlocutors; and to ways we ourselves can examine and reinvent our own manners of shaping written thought. Affect, race, gender, aesthetics and politics, as well as archives and documents will all occupy our attention, as we navigate some radical and long-lasting experiments in the history of critical thought.
Assessment details
Coursework
3000 word final essay/portfolio (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module introduces students to key writings and debates in the long history of experimentation with critical form. From early experiments with written meditations and self-observations, to didactic and autodidactic notes and confessions, to essays and consciously hybrid genres, writers and others have for centuries used the act of writing as a way better to understand themselves and their world. The module will look closely at questions of style or genre, performativity, theatricality and intention, as well as to political, social and aesthetic concerns, while also inviting students to query their own approaches to writing as an everyday practice. Through close examination of writing methods, as well as to resultant written forms, e.g. in fictionalised archives, performative documents, letters, and more, students will gain a thoughtful, rigorous and engaged relationship to their writing and to the world-shaping possibilities that acts of writing afford.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will have gained in-depth knowledge of the history of writing practices across a wide, transnational body of literary and discursive methods and styles. They will be able to situate these writing practices in their political, historical and critical context; and to identify how writing has been used across cultures and time periods as a tool for acquiring, as well as disseminating, self-understanding and reflections on broader social and political change. Students will have analysed and practiced deploying their own critical writing skills with nuance and rigour, experimenting with aspects of critical form.
Teaching pattern
Weekly lecture 1 hour and seminar 1 hour