Course Resources Archive

The course will develop the student’s capacity to describe and analyse literary language, and to relate their observations to a text’s technique, themes and effects. The course will deal with texts from a range of genres, historical periods and cultural contexts, and explore theoretical issues.

The module materials will include some free-standing textual material - whole texts and extracts - as well as some reflective material, and some more teacherly material on issues of rhetoric, metre, style and grammar. The main teaching sessions will relate these materials to a number of literary texts drawn from different literary periods, cultures and genres, such as: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Eliot’s Silas Marner, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, James’s The Turn of the Screw, Frost’s The Hill Wife, poetry by Stevens and Eliot, McEwan’s The Cement Garden, and Caver’s Elephant. The module will also seek to foster reflections into the nature of literary representation and criticism through accompanying module books by Terry Eagleton (How To Study a Poem) and Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle (An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory).

A student passing this module should be able to:

1. demonstrate a good working knowledge of key terms and methods for engaging with literary language
2. demonstrate an historically and generically appropriate awareness of literary texts and their language
3. relate detailed linguistic descriptions to critical readings
4. consider questions of literary theory as they develop from discussions of literary representation
5. develop close reading skills and critical vocabulary appropriate for level 4.

The Library Catalogue contains full details of the current reading list for this module. Further details may also be found in the Module Guide.