IMPORTANT DATES 2009-2010
AUTUMN TERM
Monday 5 October 2009 Beginning of Autumn Term.
Monday 5 October Introductory Meeting of all MA students at 6.00 pm (room tba). Wine to follow in H502.
Wednesday 7 October All module choices to be finalised. Hand in completed orange registration cards to Reception (H506).
Monday 9 November All Bibliography Exercises to be submitted to the English Office (H506) by 12.00 noon.
Saturday 12 December End of Autumn Term.
SPRING TERM
Monday 11 January 2010 Beginning of Spring Term.
Monday 15 February First Term 1 portfolio to be submitted.
Saturday 21 March End of Spring Term.
SUMMER TERM
Monday 26 April Beginning of Summer Term.
Monday 24 May Second Term 1 portfolio to be submitted.
Monday 28 June First Term 2 portfolio to be submitted.
Saturday 3 July End of Summer Term.
Wednesday 1st September Submit all remaining portfolios and/or Long Project by 2.00 pm.
Wednesday 20 October 2010 Taught MA Examination Board
1 THE WARWICK WRITING PROGRAMME
Master’s Programme in Writing
This handbook should be read in conjunction with the general MA Students’ Handbook for the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. The general handbook contains practical information on practical matters such as registration for options, mail and messages, use of Common Room, IT services, transport, portfolio / essay binding, complaints procedures, and so on. Please consult your personal tutor if you have questions not answered by this documentation.
STAFF CONTACTS
Director of Graduate Professor Room 024 76 573092 [email protected] Studies, Department of Jackie Labbe H523 English & Comparative Literary Studies
Graduate Secretary Mrs Cheryl Room 02476 523665 [email protected] Cave H505 MA in Writing: Maureen Freely Room 024 76 523348 [email protected] Convenor, Admissions H527 Tutor and Examinations (Autumn Term Room 024 76 524473 Secretary 09 Jeremy H526 [email protected] Treglown
Director of the David Morley Room 02476 523346 [email protected] Warwick Writing H521 Programme
2 INTRODUCTION
The MA Programme in Writing
The degree is intended for students who are already experienced as well as ambitious practising writers, whether published or not. While we don’t believe that creativity, as such, can be taught, or that it is only fulfilled in ‘the marketplace’, we do aim to help develop technical writing skills which students will find useful professionally, whether in full-time authorship or in related professions such as publishing, the media, or teaching.
Course content and methods of teaching and assessment involve a mixture of approaches based on workshops (see page xx) and portfolios, combined with more traditional academic pedagogies. At least as important as the teaching, though, are the space and stimulus to write within a community of people who have similar aspirations and are facing similar practical, imaginative and intellectual problems. The literary community at Warwick is a scholarly as well as a creative one: the University is one of the most highly ranked research institutions, nationally, to offer such a degree. Much of the value of the course comes from students’ working on the University campus and making use of the full range of activities which it offers.
‘Litbiz’, ‘Work in Progress’, ‘Writers at Warwick’ and other series and external links
Staff of the Programme have excellent links not only with other writers but also with publishing houses, literary journals and agencies, with national and regional organizations such as the Arts Council, PEN and the Royal Literary Fund, and with other creative writing schools in Britain, continental Europe and the USA. An exchange programme enables MA students undertaking long projects to work in Milan under the supervision of Tim Parks. A regular series under the title Litbiz brings literary professionals – among them, publishers and agents - to the Writers’ Room, where they meet students informally over sandwiches before giving a talk chaired by one of the MA students. Another occasional series, Work in Progress, gives an opportunity for writers – including Warwick staff - to read from and discuss their current projects.
In partnership with the Warwick Arts Centre, the Writing Programme also helps to organize Writers at Warwick, a weekly series of public readings and talks by visiting authors throughout the academic year. More than 300 writers have appeared in the series since 1997, among them Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, Bernardine Evaristo, Michael Frayn, Christopher Hampton, Tony Harrison, Nick Hornby, Clive James, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Hanif Kureishi, Hermione Lee, Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa, David Lodge, Ian McEwan, Anne Michaels, Andrew Motion, Tim Parks, Michèle Roberts, Salman Rushdie, Will Self, Wole Soyinka, Meera Syal, Derek Walcott, Marina Warner, Fay Weldon Edmund White and Gao Xingjian. We regard students’ active participation in these events as an essential part of their experience on the Writing Programme. Full details can be accessed at the Warwick Arts Centre website: www.warwickartscentre.co.uk.
The Writing Programme is closely involved with the CAPITAL Centre - Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/capital/ - a joint project between the University and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Centre facilitates a number of activities which overlap with those of the Writing Programme - among them, writing for performance. The Centre is housed in a large, newly converted block next to University House, ten minutes’ walk from the Humanities Building. It contains studios, exhibition space, IT facilities and a new Writers’ Room which we use for a range of literary activities. It has a resident theatre company and fellowship programme of its own which has brought to Warwick people like the poet and editor Fiona Sampson and the dramatist Adriano Shaplin, both of whom worked with the Writing Programme.
3 Other aspects of the Writing Programme’s work include international conferences and public debates on topics which have included Censorship, The Needs of Writers, Minority Cultures and the Establishment Press, Science Writing, Creativity, Women in the British Theatre, Writing for Children and Journalism and Public Policy. In 2008, students on the Programme organized Pencilfest: the First National Student Writers' Festival.
Writers’ Lunch: Please make a point of bringing your sandwiches to the Writers’ Room on Thursdays, any time between 12.00 and 2.00, and feel free to invite a friend with an interest in writing. The Writers’ Lunches are an opportunity for staff, students and visiting writers to meet informally. They are usually followed by an event at 2.00, and the visiting speaker is usually at the lunch.
4 THE COURSE STRUCTURE IN OUTLINE
There are two pathways through the Warwick MA in Writing. A) involves five taught modules in which a wide range of written work is produced. B) - the 'Long Project' route - involves three taught modules plus, as the title suggests, a long written project in any genre which the Programme is able to supervise. Permission to follow the 'Long Project' route depends on an assessment of the student's prior experience of writing as well as the availability of a qualified supervisor or supervisors. This decision is made after an interview in the first week of the autumn term.
Route A: five taught modules Full-time students take three modules in the autumn term, two in the spring. The summer is given to ‘writing up’, supported by additional workshops and 1:1 tutorials. The course is structured so as to give students a strong basis in creative work in the first term, followed by an element of optionality afterwards. What follows describes the normal pattern, but there is some flexibility over it. For example, a student who chose to switch to more ‘academic’ study in the second term would be able to do so, subject to her / his previous academic experience.
Part-time students work out their programme in conjunction with the MA Convenor.
We try not to make last-minute changes in course plans but modifications are sometimes necessary because of staff illness or other unforeseen circumstances.
AUTUMN TERM
All of the following:
Research Methods (for module details, see page 8)
Warwick Fiction Workshop I (for module details, see page 9)
Life Writing since 1900: History and Practice (for module details see page 11)
Participation in workshops and other events
SPRING TERM
Module choices for the second term need to be made by the end of September. As numbers may be restricted on some modules, students will be asked to name their second and third choices.
Two of the following:
Warwick Fiction Workshop II (for module details, see page 15)
Writing and the Practice of Literature (for module details see page 13) or Another module selected from those offered at MA level by the Faculty of Arts, subject to the permissions both of the director of the MA in Writing and of the module convenor.* Modules change from year to year and may be restricted in terms of student numbers but the list might include: Society, Economic & Empire in the British Novel: 1688- 1815; Literatures of War; The British Dramatist in Society, 1965-2005; Crossing Borders: Writing, Language, Cultural Transfer; Feminist Literary Theory; Shakespeare in Performance. More details can be found on the websites of individual departments – in the case of English, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/postgrad/current/masters/modules/
5 *Because some Warwick MA programmes involve foundation elements such as a preliminary training in literary theory, students interested in a particular module should be careful to find out whether their previous academic experience gives them sufficient grounding for it.
Plus participation in workshops and other events
SUMMER TERM
Continuation of written projects under supervision Participation in workshops and other events
Route B: Long Project Permission to follow the 'Long Project' route depends on an assessment of the student's prior experience of writing as well as the availability of a qualified supervisor or supervisors.
Part-time students take two taught modules in the autumn term, one in the spring, while developing their work on the long project throughout their time at Warwick. The summer - or, in the case of part-time students, the whole of the second year - is given to ‘writing up’, supported by additional workshops and 1:1 tutorials. The course is structured so as to reinforce students' existing strengths in creative work in the first term and to give them a wide range of choice in the second, while enabling them to focus on a long piece of writing. We try not to make last-minute changes in course plans but modifications are sometimes necessary because of staff illness or other unforeseen circumstances.
Part-time students work out their programme in conjunction with the MA Convenor.
AUTUMN TERM
All of the following:
Research Methods (for module details, see page 8)
Warwick Fiction Workshop I (for module details, see page 9) [or, if the long project is, for any other form, Writing and the Practice of Literature (page 13)] Long Project: initial discussions plus small-group workshops. Participation in workshops and other events
SPRING TERM
Module choices for the second term need to be made by the end of September. As numbers may be restricted on some modules, students will be asked to name their second and third choices.
Long Project: 1:1 tutorials begin
6 Plus one of the following:
Warwick Fiction Workshop II (for module details, see page 15)
Another module selected from those offered at MA level by the Faculty of Arts, subject to the permissions both of the director of the MA in Writing and of the module convenor.* Modules change from year to year and may be restricted in terms of student numbers. See exemplary list above.
*Because some Warwick MA programmes involve foundation elements such as a preliminary training in literary theory, students interested in a particular module should be careful to find out whether their previous academic experience gives them sufficient grounding for it.
Plus participation in workshops and other events
SUMMER TERM
Long Project: continuation of work under supervision
Participation in workshops and other events
7 INDIVIDUAL MODULES
RESEARCH METHODS FOR THE MA
Convenor / Tutor: Autumn Term: Weeks 1-9: Wednesday, 12:00-2:00.
All students taking the MA in Creative Writing must pass the English Department’s introductory course on Research Methods. The course provides skills which everyone involved professionally in literary work is likely to need at some point in his or her career. By the end of the course, it is expected that students will demonstrate: a sound understanding of research methods, including the use of electronic sources; an ability to reference sources in a scholarly manner including any essays / commentaries written as part of a creative writing module; an ability to conduct literary research; an ability to integrate research into their creative writing projects as well as the essays / commentaries which accompany these projects; and a thorough understanding of the university’s provision of library and online resources.
This module introduces students to the basic issues and procedures of literary research, including electronic resources. Sessions are conducted by English Department staff members and by the subject librarian, Mr Peter Larkin.
The seminars will take place in weeks 2-8 of the autumn term. All sessions are on Wednesday afternoons from 1.00-3.00. Full details and venues will available on-line at the beginning of the year. Note that the week 2 and 3 meetings will take place in the Library.
Week 2: Bibliography, Style and the Book – Prof. Jonathan Bate Week 3: Resources in Research (i) – Mr. Peter Larkin Week 4: Resources in Research (ii) – Mr. Peter Larkin Week 5: tbc. Week 6: Authors and Editors – Professor Jeremy Treglown Week 7: Uses of History in Literary Criticism – Professor Karen O’Brien
Assessment Students will be required to complete a short two-part exercise. Part I will consist of a bibliographical exercise, and Part II of a number of advanced electronic search exercises. Both must be submitted to the English Graduate Secretary by 12 noon on Monday, Week 6. The exercise is marked as Pass/Fail. If you receive a Fail, you will receive appropriate feedback and will be required to resubmit. The award of an MA is contingent upon successful completion of the assessment for this module.
8 WARWICK FICTION WORKSHOP I
Tutor: Rebecca Abrams (H527) Autumn Term Weeks 1-10 Monday 12.00-3.00 [The Writer’s Room, Capital Centre)]
This module mainly focuses on short fiction but may lead on to ‘Warwick Fiction Workshop II’ for students who wish to specialise in longer work.
The main purpose is broadly to enable students to develop writing skills specific to fiction, and to produce a body of work of this kind. They will also gain critical insights into contemporary literature and the processes of literary production.
SYLLABUS and workshop procedures
While the module emphasizes short fiction, those already at work on novels will be free to submit extracts. Most of the term will be devoted to writing workshops. As a rule, the aim will be to workshop three pieces of fiction every week.
Week
1 Introduction and preparation of the workshop schedule
NB: Students who have fiction ready to be workshopped and who would like to reserve a slot in Week Two are encouraged to bring in hard copies in the first week of term to hand out to the class.
2-10
Weekly 3-hour workshop, divided into three one-hour units. (Writing by one student is the focus of each unit, on a rotating basis.)
Each student will be able to reserve 2-3 slots per term for discussion of his/her work, depending on the size of the class. They should be ready to hand out hard copies of their stories/extracts to the tutor and their fellow students one week before they are to be workshopped. It is very important for all students to have read all stories/excerpts by the time they are due to be workshopped: they will learn as much by (constructively) criticising their classmates’ writing as they will by presenting their own work for review. We always begin with the texts to hand, though we go on to more general discussions about character, point of view, style, voice, narrative framing, plot, setting, the uses and abuses of autobiographical material, and dialogue. Where it seems helpful, the tutor will offer small tailored talks on these and related issues, as well as suggesting books that speak to the students’ particular interests.
BACKGROUND READING
Short fiction
Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths, 2000 Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities, 2002 Carver, Raymond, Cathedral, 1999 Crace, Jim, Continent/Quarantine, 1987 Ford, Richard, The Granta Book of the American Long Story, 1999 Ford, Richard, ed The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, 2007 Kelman, James, Selected Stories, 2001 McEwan, Ian, First Love, Last Rites, 2006 Messud, Clare, Hunters, 2001 Munro, Alice, Selected Stories, 1997
9 Plimpton, George, ed., Beat Writers at Work: the Paris Review Interviews, 1999 Plimpton, George, ed., Women Writers at Work: the Paris Review Interviews, 2003 Rushdie, Salman, East, West, 1994 Simpson, Helen, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, 2001 Elisabeth Taylor, The Blush, 1958 Richard Yates, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, 1962 Tim Winton, The Turning, 2005
Books about fiction
Booker, Christopher, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, 2005 James Wood, How Fiction Works, Jonathan Cape 2008 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead, Virago 2007 Morley, David, The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing, Cambridge University Press 2007 Mullan, John, How Novels Work, Oxford University Press, 2006 Lodge, David, Consciousness and the Novel, Harvard University Press, 2002 Prose, Francine, Reading Like a Writer; Haper Perennial 2007
ASSESSMENT
The submission must consist of the following:
FICTION PORTFOLIO
Fiction amounting to no more than 8,000 words and preferably consisting of 2-3 short stories. Students already at work on a novel may submit an 8,000-word extract instead, but should consult with the tutor before they do so. plus: a commentary of 2,000 words on the aims and processes involved in the fiction.
10 LIFE WRITING SINCE 1900: HISTORY AND PRACTICE Tutors: Jonathan Bate(H513) and Jeremy Treglown (H526) Autum Term: Thursdays, 10.00-12.00 (room tbc)
The module will roughly alternate literary-historical and practical sessions, all taught by practitioners. The literary-historical aspect will be focused on an area of current research of interest to the teacher(s), so will vary. The following is a sample syllabus, only, focused on the Bloomsbury Group (members of which both took a particular interest in new forms of biography and themselves became biographical subjects).
Bloomsbury Biography
Week
1. Introduction. Brief history of life-writing. Reasons for focus of this module. Teaching methods and assessment. Discussion of a relevant recent work, eg Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and the Stephen Daldry film.
2. Freud, Bloomsbury, ‘modern and artistic biography’ and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.
3. Archives (MRC). Introduction to archive use, online archive catalogues, and to the specific holdings of the MRC. During this session students will be helped to identify possible topics for their assessed project.
4. Victoria Glendinning’s Vita cf Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. A traditionally researched and narrated biography and an earlier fictional approach: the questions raised by the comparison about some key assumptions which historical biography is based on.
5. Workshop: gossip, ‘faction’ and biography. Writing-course workshops characteristically involve each student in the group in preparing a short piece of writing of a specified kind and circulating it to everyone else before the class. During the class, these pieces will be discussed and, in some cases, re-worked. Well before the week 5 workshop, for example, students might be given a letter from one member of the Bloomsbury Group to another (eg Lytton Strachey to Clive Bell, 14/2/1918), reporting gossip involving some of their friends. A certain amount of background information would be supplied, as well as suggestions about possible other sources for broad historical contextualization and also more immediate clarification. Students would be asked to treat the letter either as a text to be annotated, or as an item providing material for part of a narrative. The results would be worked on in class, and the issues they raise (here, to do with criteria of evidence as against unreliable ‘human interest’) would be discussed.
6. Letters and diaries: Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf (selections): editorial processes; letters and diaries as evidence; problems concerning missing material.
7. Workshop / case history: an unwritten life. Mary Hutchinson (1889-1977) was an author and one of the cultural ‘great and good’. The bisexual wife of a QC, she had long affairs with Clive Bell (husband of Vanessa) and with both Aldous and Maria Huxley. Her papers, which include correspondence from T.S.Eliot and Samuel Beckett, are now in the Harry Ransom Center at Austin, Texas. The workshop might include involve drafting a proposal for a biography.
8. Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf cf. Quentin Bell’s. Two fully researched biographies are compared, one thematic in approach, one chronological; one more scholarly, including in literary-critical terms, the other more intimate (Quentin Bell was Woolf’s nephew).
11 9. Workshop: copyright, libel and other legal issues. Before the class, students will be introduced in outline to relevant laws concerning copyright and libel. They will be given a body of material, some of it in copyright, some referring to living people (eg, descendants of Bloomsbury figures), and will be told which of those people can be supposed to be co-operating with the hypothetical project, which not, They will be asked to write and circulate a publishable narrative based on the material supplied, together with an analysis of the problems involved and solutions adopted.
10. Questions and conclusions. This class will step back from the specialist area considered in the module and will focus on a current biographical work (possibly by one of the tutors or by a recent visiting speaker) which offers different perspectives on some of the issues raised by the module, while opening up new avenues of thought.
11. Illustrative Bibliography: List the core texts only. The illustrative bibliography should provide an indication of the focus and level of the reading required by this module, rather than the full range (this should not be more than half a page):
(Will vary: list relates to illustrative syllabus on Bloomsbury, above)
Primary:
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 1972 Vanessa Bell, Selected Letters, ed. Regina Marler, 1998 Michael Cunningham, The Hours, 1998 David Garnett, ed., Carrington: letters and extracts from her diaries, 1970 Victoria Glendinning, Vita: the Life of Vita Sackville-West, 1983 Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, 1995 Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, 1996 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, 1996 Paul Levy, ed., The Letters of Lytton Strachey, 2005, Desmond MacCarthy, Portraits, 1931 Lytton Strachey,. Eminent Victorians (1918), introd Michael Holroyd, 1986 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925), ed. Stella McNicholl, 2000 Orlando (1928), ed Brenda Lyons, 1993
Secondary:
Ian Donaldson et al., eds., Shaping Lives: Reflections on Biography, 1992 Peter France and William St Clair, eds., Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, 2002 Ian Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, 1992 Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and autobiography, 2002 Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, 1996 Margaretta Jolly, ed., Encyclopaedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, 2001 James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing, 1998 Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, eds., Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, 1996
Legal:
Peter Carter-Ruck, Libel and Slander, 1972 Michael F. Flint, et al., A User’s Guide to Copyright, 6th edn., 2006 Robert H.Phelps and E. Douglas Hamilton, Libel: rights, risks and responsibilities, 1978 Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: the invention of copyright, 1993
12 Assessment:
Either an essay of 10,000 words on a topic arising from the module, agreed with the tutor; or a piece of original biographical writing, 8,500 words in length, on a topic agreed with the tutor, with a 1,500-word commentary on the aims and processes involved
13 WRITING AND THE PRACTICE OF LITERATURE
Tutor: Jeremy Treglown (H526) Spring Term: Thursdays, 10.00-12.00, H526 [numbers permitting]
The module considers a range of literary texts in the context of their authors’ professional careers. Its main purposes are: to introduce practical, professional aspects of writing via a selection of C20 fiction and poetry by British and American writers, along with biographical material about the authors; and to develop students’ skills as readers and critics through different forms of writing, imitative as well as argumentative, and in discussion.
Note: a lot of reading is required on this module. Students should read as many of the texts as possible before the course begins. Most texts are available cheaply second-hand, eg through amazon.com and other websites.
The module is open to ‘auditors’ – ie, students not taking it for credit. Auditors read the texts, attend regularly, contribute to discussion and in all other ways are full members of the group. They don’t do written assessments for assessment. Any auditor may give up the module at any point, but coming and going ad lib isn’t allowed.
SYLLABUS
Week
1 Introduction.
2 Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God
3 Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: A Boiography of Zora Neale Hurston
4 V.S.Pritchett, Essential Stories and A Cab at the Door
5 Jeremy Treglown, V.S.Pritchett: A Working Life
6 Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems and Robert Lowell, Selected Poems
7 Saskia Hamilton and Thomas Trevisano, eds., Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
8 Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day and Baumgartner’s Bombay
9 Interviews with and biographical materials about Anita Desai
10 Concluding discussion.
REQUIRED READING
All texts set for classes: see syllabus above.
14 BACKGROUND READING
Per Gedin, Literature in the Marketplace, 1977 Ian Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography, 1994 W.N.Herbert and M.Hollis, (eds.), Strong Words. Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, 2000 Zachary Leader, Writer’s Block, 1991 Q.D.Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, 1932 Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, 2008 Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, 1991 J.A.Sutherland, Fiction and the Fiction Industry, 1978 Richard Todd, Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today, 1996 Jeremy Treglown and Bridget Bennet,, eds., Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet, 1998 Philip Waller, Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918, 2006 James Wood, How Fiction Works, 2008
ASSESSMENT
The submission will consist of
(1) a creative writing portfolio, arising out of a response to work read on the module: either two short stories, each between 2,000 and 3,000 words; or an extract from a longer work of fiction of no fewer than 5,000 words and no more than 6,000 words; or a portfolio of poetry totalling about 250 lines
[a mixed submission of fiction and poetry may be offered by prior arrangement with the tutor] plus
(2) a critical essay of 3,000 words on a subject agreed with the tutor
15 WARWICK FICTION WORKSHOP II
Tutor: Maureen Freely (H527) Spring Term Weeks 1-10 Wednesday 10.00-13.00 (Room H401)
This module leads on from ‘Warwick Fiction Workshop I’, which is a prerequisite.
The main aim is to enable students to develop advanced writing skills in fiction and to produce a body of work of this kind. Students will continue to develop critical insights into contemporary literature and the processes of literary production.
SYLLABUS
The module will operate along the same lines as Fiction Workshop I, though the focus will be long fiction. Those who wish to continue writing shorter fiction are free to do so.
NB: Students who wish their writing to be workshopped early in the term should arrange to distribute hard copies of their stories/extracts BEFORE the Christmas break.
Weeks 1-10
Weekly 3-hour workshop, divided into three units. (Writing by one student is the focus of each unit, on a rotating basis. So the current work of three students is discussed each week, and each student is the focus of two to three workshops in the course of the term).
BACKGROUND READING
Novels
Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart, 2001 Ballard, JG, Supercannes Baldwin, James, Giovanni’s Room, 1990 Barnes, Julian, Arthur and George, 2006 Coe, Jonathan, The House of Sleep, 1998 Danticat, Edwige, The Dew Breaker, 2004 Delillo, Don, White Noise, 1985 Greene, Graham, The Quiet American, 1955 Ishiguro, Kazuo, An Artist of the Flying World, 1999 McEwan, Ian, On Chesil Beach, 2007 Mitchell, David, Cloud Atlas, 2005 Morrison, Toni, Beloved, 1997 Sinclair, Ian, Downriver, 1991 Vargas Llosa, Mario, The Feast of the Goat, 2003. McGahern, John, Amongst Women, 1990 Moore, Brian, Lies of Silence, 1992 Kennedy, A.L., Day, 2007 Michaels, Ann, Fugitive Pieces, 1998 Coetzee, JM, Disgrace, 1999 Roth, Philip, American Pastoral, 1998 Mistry, Rohinton, A Fine Balance, 1997 Pamuk, Orhan, The Black Book, 2006 Gordimer, Nadine, The Pickup, 2002 Smiley, Jane A Thousand Acres, 1992
16 Books about fiction
See list for Fiction Workshop I
ASSESSMENT
The submission must consist of the following:
FICTION PORTFOLIO
A piece of fiction of no more than 8,000 words, preferably part of a planned longer work. (Students who have decided to concentrate on shorter work may submit several pieces adding up to 8,000 words, but should consult with the tutor before they do so.) plus:
A commentary of about 2,000 words on the aims and processes involved in the fiction, including (where appropriate) its place in the longer work.
17 GENERAL
Attendance According to Unviersity regulations, attendance of seminars is obligatory. The learning that goes on during seminars is an integral part of the MA programme. If you cannot attend owing to illness or other personal circumstances, you should inform your module tutor, preferably in advance. If you miss more than four seminars for any 10-week module, without good cause, then you may not submit for the essay for the module, and so will not be able to earn credit for it. Students in this situation will need to make up the module(s) in another way, for example, by taking another module the following term, or changing to part-time status and taking the same or comparable module the following year. Note that this rule also applies to Critical Theory, and that for the purposes of this rule, two mini-modules count as one full-length module.
As mentioned earlier, students are expected to make full use of their involvement in the Writing Programme.
Workshops.
All writing modules use workshops to some extent, and the two fiction modules are almost entirely workshop-based. How a given module is taught will be outlined in the first session. What follow are some preparatory notes intended for anyone who hasn’t previously attended writing workshops.
A workshop is a forum in which members of the group, under the guidance of the module leader, analyse and respond to examples of each other’s work, whether circulated in advance or written during that particular session. The workshop gives feedback to each individual, while advancing everyone’s critical skills. It should also help to develop professional attitudes, whether in terms of self-critical awareness or of a capacity to handle criticism from others. Module leaders emphasise the importance of a combination of a candid, exacting response to work being discussed, with tact and constructiveness. Certain personal boundaries are also set. In particular, it’s expected that people’s writing will respect the privacy of other members of the group.
Approval / Submission of written work
Ideas for and titles of portfolios or essays must be discussed with relevant tutors or supervisors, and the titles handed in to the English Graduate Secretary for entry on to the central list. In the case of ‘academic’ modules, work whose title has not been agreed with the module tutor will not be accepted.
Deadlines for assessed work are centrally timetabled and there are penalties for late submission. Students are expected to plan their work in advance, on the basis of the deadlines. Extensions on medical grounds, or for other reasons beyond the student’s control, must be requested in advance from the Convenor of the MA in Writing, Maureen Freely. Supporting evidence (such as a doctor’s certificate) is always required.
All portfolios / essays must be typed with double spacing, and paginated. Other stipulations may be added for individual modules. Your name, the module tutor’s name and the title of the work should appear on each page. The work should be submitted in triplicate to the Graduate Secretary in the English Office by 12.00 noon of the relevant deadline. A copy of the MA mark sheet should be attached to 2 copies of the submission (available outside H506 or can be downloaded from the Departmental website http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/postgrad/current/masters/forms/
18 You must sign a sheet left outside H506 to confirm that you have submitted your work. An example of the cover sheet appears on page 22
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the theft of other people’s work. It consists first of direct transcription, without acknowledgement, of passages, sentences and even phrases from someone else’s writing, whether published or not. It also includes the presentation as the author’s own of material by someone else – including from the web - with only a few changes in wording. There is of course a grey area where making use of secondary material comes close to copying it, but the problem can usually be avoided by acknowledging that a certain writer holds similar views or has expressed or described things in a similar way, and by writing your work without the book or transcription from it open before you. When you are using another person’s words you must put them in quotation marks and give a precise source. When you are using another person’s ideas you must give a footnote reference to the precise source.
All quotations from other sources must therefore be acknowledged every time they occur. It is not enough to include the work from which they are taken any bibliography, and such inclusion will not be accepted as a defence should plagiarism be alleged. Whenever you write anything that counts towards university assessments, you will be asked to sign an undertaking that the work it contains is your own.
The University regards plagiarism as a serious offence. A tutor who finds plagiarism in a piece of work will report the matter to the Chairman of Department. The Chairman may, after hearing the case, impose a penalty of a nil mark for the piece in question. The matter may go to a Senate disciplinary committee which has power to exact more severe penalties. If plagiarism is detected in one piece, other work by the student concerned will be examined very carefully for evidence of the same offence.
In practice, few students are deliberately dishonest and many cases of plagiarism arise from bad intellectual and imaginative practice. There is nothing wrong with using other people’s ideas. Indeed, citing other people’s work shows that you have researched your topic and have used their thinking to help formulate your own argument. The important thing is to know what is yours and what is not and to communicate this clearly to the reader.
Further notes for MA students in the Department of English can be found in the main MA Handbook.
19 WARWICK WRITING PROGRAMME: REGULAR STAFF
Rebecca Abrams is an author, journalist and broadcaster. Her most recent book, Touching Distance (2008) won the MJA Open Book Awards for Fiction 2009. Her other titles include The Playful Self, (1997), Woman in a Man’s World (1996), and When Parents Die (1991), shortlisted for the MIND Book of the Year Award. Rebecca has been a regular contributor to the UK national press for many years: as a producer and presenter for BBC R4; as a columnist on the Daily Telegraph, and as a regular reviewer of fiction and non-fiction for the Guardian and other papers.
Peter Blegvad is a rock musician and cartoonist whose discography includes solo albums as well as collaborations with The Golden Palominos, Faust and Slapp Happy. He is the cartoonist of ‘Leviathan’ and ‘The Pedestrian’ for The Independent on Sunday, the author of Headcheese and The Impossible Book, and appears regularly on BBC radio’s The Verb.
Maureen Freely is the author of six novels, among them Enlightenment (2008), Mother's Helper (1979) and The Other Rebecca (1996). Her non-fiction books include Pandora's Clock (1993), What About Us? (1995) and The Parent Trap (2000). She is the English-language translator of five books by the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk, and a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Sunday Times, and the Independent. Maureen Freely is Convenor of the Warwick MA in Writing.
Michael Gardiner is an academic and creative writer who has edited poetry magazines and published a book of short stories, Escalator, and is currently working on a Scottish Arts Council-funded novel- length fiction project.
Michael Hulse has won numerous awards for his poetry, among them first prizes in the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Competition (twice) as well as the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award and Cholmondeley Award. His selected poems, Empires and Holy Lands: Poems 1976-2000, were published in 2002 and in September 2009 he published a new book of poems, The Secret History. The translator of some sixty books from German (among them titles by Goethe, W.G.Sebald, Nobel prizewinner Elfriede Jelinek, and in 2009 Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), he is also a critic, has taught an universities in Germany and Switzerland, and has read, lectured, and conducted workshops and seminars worldwide. He was general editor for several years of a literature classics series, scripted news and documentary programmes for Deutsche Welle television, and has edited literary quarterlies, currently, The Warwick Review. A.L.Kennedy
Alison Kennedy’s novel Day won the Costa Book Award, 2008 and she is the winner of several other leading literary UK and US prizes, among them a Lannan Award. The author of eight other works of fiction, collections of short stories as well as novels, of a book on bullfighting of a study of the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Kennedy also performs as a comedian, particularly in Edinburgh’s Stand Comedy Club. She did her first degree at Warwick.
20 China Miéville
One of Britain’s leading fantasy writers, China Miéville describes his work as ‘weird fiction’, a genre in which he offers critical seminars at Warwick alongside his 1:1 sessions and workshops with student writers. His novels include King Rat, Perdido Street Station (which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award) and Un Lun Dun. After reading anthropology at Cambridge he did a PhD in International Relations at the LSE. China Miéville is an active member of the Socialist Workers’ party.
David Morley A former environmental scientist, Professor Morley has published 18 books including 9 volumes of poetry, won 13 literary awards and gained two awards for his teaching including a National Teaching Fellowship. Warwick University awarded him a personal Chair in Creative Writing in 2007 and a D.Litt. in 2008. David has written essays, reviews and criticism for The Guardian, Poetry Review, PN Review and The Times Higher Education Supplement. Recent books include The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing from CUP, The Invisible Kings from Carcanet, an anthology of new Romanian Poetry, an edition of Geoffrey Holloway's Collected Poems and a new anthology of poems by children. The director of the Warwick Writing Programme since it began, he also runs the new Warwick Prize for Writing. He is currently co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing, writing a new book of poems and carrying out several public art poetry commissions with ecological themes.
George Ttoouli is an Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme, and an alumni of the Programme, graduating from the MA in Writing during its first year of running. He is editor of the British Pensioner, Polarity Magazine UK (launching 2010), and co-edits online blogzine, Gists & Piths, with poet Simon Turner. He is also Reviews Editor for Horizon Review. A co- founder of The Heaventree Press, he has edited and published various books and magazines and picked up a modest selection of commendations and awards for writing and publishing. His poetry, reviews, articles and stories have been published variously online and in print. His debut collection of poetry will be published winter 2009 (Penned in the Margins), with a pamphlet expected to follow in 2010.
Jeremy Treglown
Is a biographer, cultural historian and literary editor. His most recent book, V.S.Pritchett: A Working Life (Chatto, 2004) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award for Biography and the Duff Cooper Prize for Literature. Previous books include: Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green (Faber, 2000: ‘Dictionary of Literary Biography’ Award), Roald Dahl: A Biography (Faber, 1994), and the Everyman edition of Dahl’s adult stories (2006). He was Editor of the TLS from 1981 to 1990, has chaired the judging panels of both the Booker and the Whitbread (now Costa) Prizes and has written for Granta and The New Yorker, among other magazines. He founded the Warwick Writing Programme in 1996.
21 (FORMAT FOR COVER SHEET FOR ALL ASSESSED WORK for the MA in Writing)
THE UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK Department of English & Comparative Studies: Warwick Writing Programme
MA in Writing
Module Title______
Module Tutor ______
TITLE OF PORTFOLIO OR ESSAY______
______
______
STUDENT’S NAME: ______
DATE: ______
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