Criticism: Practice Course Descriptor

Course Overview

This course provides a foundation to literary studies: it will help students to develop the skill of close reading, to understand and identify figurative language and literary tropes, and to identify rhetorical strategies and techniques of persuasion. The careful, precise analysis of literary language will be a constant concern throughout the course, but alongside literary works students will also practice close reading political speeches, advertising slogans, and visual art. Authors and set texts may vary by year, but might include poems by Emily Dickinson and Danez Smith, a play by William Shakespeare, and a short story by James Joyce. The course will be run as a series of highly interactive workshops, in which students are introduced to key terms, forms, and techniques, and then apply these to a small number of set texts

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and Understanding

Subject Specific Skills

Transferable and Employability Skills

Teaching and Learning

This course has a dedicated Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) page with a syllabus and range of additional resources (e.g. readings, question prompts, tasks, assignment briefs, discussion boards) to orientate and engage students in their studies The scheduled teaching and learning activities for this course are:

Lectures/Seminars 

40 scheduled hours – typically including induction, consolidation or revision, and assessment activity hours.

• Version 1:all sessions in the same sized group.

OR 

• Version 2: most of the sessions in larger groups; some of the sessions in smaller groups.

Faculty hold regular ‘office hours’, which are opportunities for students to drop in or sign up to explore ideas, raise questions, or seek targeted guidance or feedback, individually or in small groups. 

Students are to attend and participate in all the scheduled teaching and learning activities for this course and to manage their directed learning and independent study.

Indicative total learning hours for this course: 150 

Assessment

Both formative and summative assessment are used as part of this course, with purely formative opportunities typically embedded within interactive teaching sessions, office hours, and/or the VLE. 

Summative Assessments

The written assignment and examination require students to analyse literary and non-literary texts of limited length with closeness, acuity and precision, describing how their formal features contribute towards their meaning, and demonstrating awareness of the distinct capacities of different types of formal analysis and close reading.

Feedback

Students will receive formative and summative feedback in a variety of ways, written (e.g. marked up on assignments, through email or the VLE) or oral (e.g. as part of interactive teaching sessions or in office hours). 

Indicative Reading

Note: Comprehensive and current reading lists for courses are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative reading list provided below is used as part of the approval/modification process only.

• Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)
• Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” (1842)
• M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957)

Indicative Topics

Note: Comprehensive and current topics for courses are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative topics provided below are used as a general guide and part of the approval/modification process only.

• Rhetorical modes of persuasion 
• Literary tropes
• Poetic metre