This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module will introduce key concepts and ideas in theories of narrative, and will provide students with the critical and creative tools they need to construct and understand complex narratives — as writers and critics. Taking as a starting point classic, influential texts, such as Hamlet, Cinderella, and the Odyssey, students will be encouraged to consider how and why stories are written. They will learn how to identify masterplots, recurring structures, heroes, heroines, quests, transformations and other elements of narrative, and to discuss and consider their importance to storytelling today. This module will ultimately encourage students to consider the ways in which reading leads to writing, and to what extent original, contemporary storytelling must always refer to other texts, stories and structures from the past and present.
Seminars will be based around discussion of the works on the reading list and will also include practical writing and reading activities. Students will learn the basics of prose writing, including how to work with voice, tense, register and different types of narrator. They will also focus intensively on narrative structure and experiment with different types of plot, from the Aristotelian to the impressionistic, experimental and postmodern, and begin to consider how artistic and cultural contexts have a bearing on the ways that narrative is structured, read and written.
Total contact hours: 30
Total private study hours: 270
Total module study hours: 300
100% Coursework:
Plot synopsis (2,000 words) (25%)
Work of original fiction (4,500 words) (65%)
Seminar and workshop contribution (10%)
Course booklet containing extracts from texts from twentieth century and contemporary fiction
Aristotle, Poetics, (Oxford: OUP, 2013)
Homer The Odyssey, (London: Penguin, 2003)
Homes, A.M. Things You Should Know (London: Granta, 2004)
Shakespeare Hamlet, (London: Penguin 2005)
Thomas, Scarlett, Monkeys with Typewriters (London: Canongate 2012)
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
The intended subject specific learning outcomes.
On successfully completing the module students will be able to:
1. Demonstrate a complex understanding of the conventions of narrative.
2. Be familiar with classical and contemporary terminology in relation to theories of narrative.
3. Identify different modes of narration and different types of narrator.
4. Confidently discuss, and make connections between, the structures and themes of different examples of narrative.
5. Apply the principles of narrative theory to the composition of their own creative work.
6. Apply sophisticated writing techniques to their own creative work (e.g. experimental narrative perspective and structure, form appropriate to theme).
The intended generic learning outcomes.
On successfully completing the module students will be able to:
1. Demonstrate their communication skills, particularly in responding to others' work in the context of the workshop.
2. Demonstrate their independence in critical and creative thought.
3. Make use of a range of critical and creative vocabulary and broaden their conceptual framework.
4. Demonstrate sophisticated critical and creative writing skills.
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