THEO55130: Literature and Religion

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• To introduce students to a wide range of literary texts in the medium of the English language by writers who engage with theological, religious or faith issues or issues relating to spirituality
• To develop critical confidence in engaging with literary texts at an appropriate level
• To explore boundary crossing argument and insight enabling creative and confident academic discourse to bridge literary and theological academic preoccupations

• This module, which takes the form of fortnightly seminars, explores the work of a range of influential writers, from the post-Romantic to the post-Modern periods, from a theological and critical perspective. Attention and debate in seminars is focused on key texts, whether fiction or poetry.
• In all times, literature, whether oral or written, has engaged with the chief preoccupations of human culture. Extraordinary rich examples in English concern texts written during the Reformation and seventeenth century period, when writers such as John Donne, George Herbert and John Milton engaged explicitly in theologically inspired writing. Since the Romantic period, however, as Iris Murdoch among others argued, literature has tended to take over the work of religion in terms of engagement with orthodoxy outside the framework of faith communities or academic theological discourse.
• This course focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the first term. The second term however opens up subjects and writers of wider choice in order for students to commit and pioneer new territory.
• The module is in two parts, corresponding roughly to the first two terms of the academic year. Part One moves through the historical and cultural perspectives offered by several major writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Michaelmas Term sessions will focus on the Brontes, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins and finally the very different responses to the post-Christian world found in the work of D.H.Lawrence and T.S.Eliot. Part Two aims to engage with writers on whom there is much less critical and academic work available, thus encouraging students to build up their own critical confidence in writing and thinking. The five sessions of the Epiphany Term are likely to focus on writers such as Edwin Muir, Stevie Smith and Elizabeth Jennings, Ngugi wa Thiongo, R.S.Thomas and Iris Murdoch. Past sessions have considered William Golding, Kazue Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie and there is room for response to interests which may be expressed by the group at the first session before final decisions are made about the end of the module.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Develop mature literary judgement and critical ability to relate theological insight to literary texts

Subject-specific Skills:

• Demonstrate an ability to write and speak with appropriate critical maturity in the bridge area between modern and contemporary serious literary writing and theological academic discourse

Key Skills:

• Oral skills: Chair a seminar in the second term relating to a writer on whom comparatively little critical background analysis in this area exists to demonstrate: the ability to argue coherently orally.
• Writing: Producing the set formative and summative work will express sophisticated critical literary skills and the ability to develop mature theological argument in writing.

• Teaching is in fortnightly seminars. During the first term, the course is predominantly taught enabling students, particularly those who do not have much literary experience, to follow and model productive literary critical approaches.
• The formative and summative essays, common to all MATR modules, develop written confidence and mastery of academic and biographical conventions in formal annotation and reference techniques, ultimately developing scope for ideas both synthesised and original.

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