Module Information

This module offers students the opportunity to engage critically with a range of literary texts (short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction) that take the sea and/or the shoreline as their subject. The module will introduce students to range of authors (e.g. Conrad, Woolf), theoretical concepts (e.g. ecocriticism, postcolonialism) and writing practices which form the base knowledge on which later modules (such as Literary Modernisms, Literary Theory: Debates and Dialogues, and Writing and Place) can build. The module will consist of ten 50-minute lectures and ten 2-hour seminar/workshops. It will be an alternative assessment module, open to both Creative Writing and English Literature students. Students will have the option of workshopping either a short piece of creative writing or a few paragraphs of literary analysis.

This module offers students the opportunity to engage critically with a range of literary texts (short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction) that take the sea and/or the shoreline as their subject. The module will begin with Rachel Carson’s poetic exploration of the sea’s primeval origins, before considering representations of the sea’s capacity for instilling wonder and wreaking devastation, in both Victorian and Modernist texts. The sea’s role in the slave trade will be explored in work by Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. The last part of the module will examine contemporary literature on the sea in the genres of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction – with a special focus in weeks 8 and 9 on Welsh writing in English. The module will introduce students to range of authors, theoretical concepts and writing practices which will form a base knowledge on which later modules can build. Teaching delivery will consist of ten 50-minute lectures and ten 2-hour seminar/workshops. It will be an alternative assessment module, open to both Creative Writing and English Literature students.