Literary Transformations

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• the reasons for which different stories are told and retold
• the connections between high and popular culture, the notions of cultural authority, appropriation, imitation, and invention, and how these differ from plagiarism
• the dissemination and circulation of cultural items through different media
• appropriation, imitation, and invention, and how these differ from plagiarism
• the continuities and discontinuities between traditions of literature across centuries
• the “constructedness” of the past

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• acquire, select, structure, and present materials in relation to a particular critical argument
• compare and contrast apparently similar material from different periods

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• analyse and explain the artifice of texts and visual images
• analyse and relate to each other complex written texts and associated visual images
• evaluate, and criticise tendentious claims for the naturalness or authority of cultural traditions

This module will focus on the imitations and re-inventions of a story that has gained the status of an ‘origin’. You will read poetic texts from the classical (Graeco-Roman) world in translation and will examine a selection of works inspired by these, including poetic, prose, and visual forms from the first to the twenty-first centuries. We will ask you to both value and question what it means for a story to gather classic status. We will investigate the implications and effects of the transfer of narrative elements from one form or genre to another, and between periods and cultures. While the story-tradition under investigation may change from year to year, the long stretch of history and cultural reach that defines this module will always draw you into discussions about the formation of power, and about the relationship between past, present and future: between intimate moments and public structures; between humans, animals and the supernatural; between life and death.

Teaching methods include

• lectures
• seminars
• private consultation
• feedback on written work

Learning activities include

• reading books and engaging with other cultural productions
• seminar discussion
• visual and textual analysis
• creation of a commonplace book
• writing essays

This module includes a Learning Support Hour. This is a flexible contact hour, 5 in total, designed to support and respond to the particular cohort taking the module from year to year. This hour will include (but not be limited to) activities such as language, theory and research skills classes; group work supervisions; assignment preparation and essay writing guidance; assignment consultations; feedback and feed-forward sessions.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.