ENGL3901: Life-Writing and Mental Health

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• To examine the changing relationship between life-writing and mental health from the early twentieth century to the present.
• To understand the distinctive ways in which imaginative literature might communicate lived experiencean increasingly influential concept in health and social care.
• To develop an appreciation of how mental health issues and their literary expression differ between diverse communities of race, class, gender and sexuality.
• To expand students understanding of psychology beyond familiar psychoanalytic ideas, exploring the literary applications of a range of research in clinical psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry.

• Enables students to study a diverse selection of life-writing, while providing a unifying emphasis on the genre of the mental health memoir.
• Primary texts foreground writers with lived experience of mental health issues, and range from commercial bestsellers to overlooked works by marginalised voices.
• Provides a historical and comparative survey of twentieth-century mental health. discourse, ranging from classical psychoanalysis to medical psychiatry, anti-psychiatry, and contemporary debates around class politics, sexuality and decolonisation.
• Extends beyond traditional literary texts, including various opportunities to engage with visual culture in the form of graphic memoir, paintings, and TV shows.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• A detailed knowledge of a rich and increasingly popular genre of creative nonfiction, studied across multiple historical, social and theoretical contexts.
• An understanding of why writing about mental health might be of value to both individuals and society at large, and a nuanced awareness of the complexities and sensitivities surrounding the literary expression of mental health issues.
• An appreciation of the specific lived experiences of diverse populations.
• A knowledge of psychological frameworks reaching beyond familiar psychoanalytic theories, directly suited to students who might be contemplating careers in the caring professions, the mental health field, or the charity sector.

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 assessment may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessment allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second assessment.

Before Assessment 1, 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 assessment and to receive oral comment on these points. Students may also if they wish, discuss their ideas for Assessment 2 at this meeting.

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