19-20 CW1010: Introduction to Creative Writing
An introduction to Creative Writing.
19-20 CW1020: Why Write? The History and Theory of Creative Writing
Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
19-20 CW2010: Playwriting
CW2010 is a course option available to all second year Creative Writing students. It aims to develop your familiarity with the variety of creative techniques available to the contemporary playwright. You will write individually and collaboratively and in doing so learn about the various dramaturgical and creative stages required to work on a play. The course will involve practical exercises, reading and discussion of plays and ideas, aimed to further enhance your creative abilities within this particular form and also your ability to critique your own and others’ work sensitively and productively.
19-20 CW2030: Poetry
In this course we will work through some of the fundamental elements of poetry: subject, duration, image, language, sound, rhythm, visual poetics, performance, etc. We shall do so through encountering and discussing different approaches to and examples of these fundamental elements as they arise in poetry as well as in background readings across an historical range and between disciplinary boundaries. The course aims to develop your familiarity with a variety of techniques available to the contemporary poet, thereby informing and enhancing your own creative practice. It likewise aims to further your understanding and appreciation of poetry as an artistic medium of thought and communication. The course will concentrate on lyric rather than dramatic or narrative poetry; however, throughout the course you will be encouraged to expand your creative practice alongside your thinking; to write and consider longer sequences of poems as well as alternative styles of poetic practice.
19-20 CW3030: Poetry 2
The course is taken by all third-year Creative Writing students. In one sense the ‘final project’ is equivalent to the ‘dissertation’ undertaken by English students: a test, amongst other things, of the student’s ability to work independently in order to produce a substantial piece of creative work. This course aims to provide Creative Writing students with a supervised environment in which they can work upon a substantial piece of creative writing, whether in poetic, dramatic or prose form. Students will work individually, supervised by a member of the teaching staff. A lecture series on professional practice and how to develop long-term projects will run during Term 1. In addition, small student-run/organised workshopping groups will provide a forum for students to comment upon one another’s ideas and works in progress. These may have an online component.
19-20 CW3103: Creative Writing Special Focus
This course is designed to introduce students to the different theoretical and contextual practices which might have particular relevance to their own practice as writers. It will encourage them to contextualise their own practice as writers in relation to writing in an expanded field, and to widen their stylistic range from the three forms that they have studied in the course of the degree, fiction, poetry and drama. Added to these forms will be a focus on various types of creative non-fiction, including memoir and different forms of essay writing. An option in screenwriting will also be offered as a new creative form. This course will involve some historical material, cultural and theoretical debate and place emphasis on the development of the student’s own writing practice with reference to contexts relevant to the contemporary writer. This will make an important connection between the creative ambitions of the course and the contextual practices in writing beyond the University.