Module overview
What does it mean to make literature new? What forms and reformations have offered starting points for rethinking literary convention? In this module, you will explore the revolutions, innovations, and boundary-crossings that have taken place in literature in English when writers have grappled with these questions across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each week, you will explore two texts, often from distinct literary contexts, that take a specific approach to experiment - from metafiction and documentary, from collage to life-writing, from chance to mythic structure. You will be encouraged to make connections across these texts, and to try out some literary experiments of your own as you understand what techniques or orthodoxies writers have revisited and rethought. In the two assessments for this module, you will acquire the skills to write about complex literary forms, to think through the aesthetic terms that can best describe modern and contemporary writing, and have the option of trying out and reflecting on your own creative writing experiments.