This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module is designed to extend and develop skill, enjoyment and confidence in reading critical, literary and theoretical texts. We reflect on the pleasures and challenges of the reading process, moving slowly through a single major text. We will pause over exciting, complex or important passages, taking time to follow up references and footnotes, identify important themes and ideas, consult works of art and writings that share those themes, explore how the texts touch us and how they think. We will also consider different modes of reading, for example paranoid reading, reparative reading, and surface reading, with specific reference to affect theory and queer theory. The module is designed to help you come away with an in-depth knowledge of the main text and of texts and ideas surrounding it, as well as gaining deeper understanding of how you read.
Total Contact Hours: 20
Private Study Hours: 280
Total Study Hours: 300
Main assessment methods:
First Essay: 1,000 words – 20%
Second Essay (4,000 words) – 80%
Reassessment methods:
Like-for-like
Indicative reading list:
Nelson, Maggie. (2016). The Argonauts. House, UK.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (2003). "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid You probably Think This Essay Is About You" in Touching Feeling. Duke University Press
Ahmed, Sarah. (2006). Queer Phenomenology. Duke University Press.
Barthes, Roland. (1975). The Pleasure of the Text. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Derrida, Jacques. (2001). Writing and Difference. Routledge.
Butler, Judith. (2011). Bodies That Matter. Routledge.
Luciano, Dana & Chen, Mel Y. (2015). 'Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’ GLQ 1 June 2015; 21 (2-3): 183–207
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 competent, discriminating and confident reading critical and theoretical texts at an advanced level;
2 Demonstrate a precise sense of problems of reading and interpretation that arise out of in-depth study of critical and theoretical texts;
3 Demonstrate strong awareness of how critical and theoretical texts relate to one another and to literary texts.
The intended generic learning outcomes.
On successfully completing the module students will be able to:
1 Demonstrate the ability to work on complex material in considerable depth, drawing on the full range of the student's powers of understanding: critical, analytical, intuitive and creative;
2 Demonstrate a capacity for self-directed research and the development of independent critical judgement and imagination;
3 Demonstrate the ability to recognise and construct original, innovative and complex arguments.
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