Module description
The purpose of this module is to educate students in the main features of the art form, how to achieve them on the page, and how to recognize and appreciate the literary contexts out of which they emerge. Students will work through their notebooks and workshops to recognize their own poetic impulses and render them with greater precision in what they write. Students will be encouraged to write poems in the workshops, to be discussed by the group. There will be a mid-term essay in criticism, picking up on what has been learned, and an end of term examination of five poems written by each student.
Assessment details
1 x 1000 word essay (30%) and 6 Poems (70%)
Educational aims & objectives
- Introduce poetry as a practical artistic discipline.
- Focus on the different characteristics of the poem, looking at meter, pattern, rhythm, rhyme, structure, and modes of address.
- The emphasis will not be on criticism so much as on writing itself: students will be encouraged to find their voice in relation to the characteristics of the form.
- The module should promote an understanding of the main strands in poetry writing across the main movements in English literature, if only as a means of reference for the student poets themselves in their own creative process.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practicable skills appropriate to a Level 5 module and in particular will be able to:
- undertake the writing of poems with greater skill and understanding;
- demonstrate greater insight into the choices they have made and the traditions they might appeal to in supporting those choices;
- develop the knowledge and skills to reflect critically on the practice of writing poetry, demonstrated through writing a critical essay;
- produce five poems that, whatever they are in themselves, show a response to what students have learned, experimenting with form and the constituent elements of poetry.
Teaching pattern
1 x 1-hour lecture and 1 x 1-hour seminar, weekly
Suggested reading list
Background Reading
- C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914. Global connections and comparisons(2004).
- Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995).
- Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness. British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988).
- Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (2006).
- Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance. Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle(1998).
- Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1980).
- Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (1987).
- Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality. The British Experience (1990).
- Gail Ching-Liang Low, White skins/black masks: representation and colonialism (1995).
- Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the colonial context(1995).
- Thomas Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj (1995).
- Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel writing and transculturation (1992).
- Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s culture. Anthropology, Travel and Government (1994).
Core Texts
- Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ (1888).
- Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822).
- T.B. Macaulay’s ‘Minute of 2nd February 1835’
- H.H. Wilson’s ‘Education of the Natives of India’ (1835)
- Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug (1839) – Only the Rupa edition or the Oxford World Classics edition.
- Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868).
- J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883).
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901)
- E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
- Paul Scott, Staying On (1977)