ENGL3761: Literary Institutions

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• To examine the role of institutions including magazines, publishing houses, literary prizes and creative writing programs in modern and contemporary literary culture. To familiarize students with a range of critical approaches that reach beyond traditional close reading including periodical studies, book history, and literary sociology. To consider the production and reception of literary texts as social activities. To explore how institutions might shape the form and content of texts, as well as broader formations of literary taste and value.

• Spans from the early twentieth century to the present. Draws on a range of literary forms, including novels, short stories, poems and journalism.
• Encompasses both high and low culture, fostering comparisons between, for example, little and mass-market magazines, commercial bestsellers and small-press poetry.
• Pays special attention to issues of identity and diversity in the literary field. Introduces students to classic and recent scholars of literary institutions, including Pierre Bourdieu, Janice Radway, James English, Sarah Brouillette and John Thompson.
• Encourages attention not only to literary language, but to paratextual considerations, from magazine layout to book cover design.
• Looks beyond the traditional triad of writer, text and reader, considering intermediary figures such as editors, agents, prize judges, and reviewers.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• Knowledge not only of a diverse range of literary texts, but of key trends in the history of literary institutions from the modernist period to the present.
• New, interdisciplinary methods that augment their existing skills in close reading.
• Insight into the practicalities of literary production and reception today, which may be of particular interest to those seeking employment in the literary and creative industries.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies
• skills of effective communication and argument
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated

Key Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• a capacity to analyse critically
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject
• competence in the planning and execution of essays
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others
• skills in critical reasoning an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information
• organisation and time-management skills

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions. In individual Special Topics, the essay may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessed essay allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second essay.

Before the first assessed essay, students have an individual 15 minute consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a sheet of points, relevant to the essay and to receive oral comment on these points. Students may also, if they wish, discuss their ideas for the second essay at this meeting.

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