English with Creative Writing, _MA

Compulsory Courses

Academic Writing for Language & Literature (AW1008)

This compulsory evaluation is designed to find out if your academic writing is of a sufficient standard to enable you to succeed at university and, if you need it, to provide support to improve. It is completed on-line via MyAberdeen with clear instructions to guide you through it. If you pass the evaluation at the first assessment it will not take much of your time. If you do not, you will be provided with resources to help you improve. This evaluation does not carry credits but if you do not complete it this will be recorded on your degree transcript.

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Getting Started at the University of Aberdeen (PD1002)

This course, which is prescribed for level 1 undergraduate students (and articulating students who are in their first year at the University), is studied entirely online, takes approximately 5-6 hours to complete and can be taken in one sitting, or spread across a number of weeks.

Topics include orientation overview, equality and diversity, health, safety and cyber security and how to make the most of your time at university in relation to careers and employability.

Successful completion of this course will be recorded on your Enhanced Transcript as ‘Achieved’.

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Acts of Reading (EL1009)

15 Credit Points

This course introduces students to the study of English by exploring the dynamic relationship between author, reader and text in a series of classic works of fiction and poetry. It covers a broad historical range (from Folk Tales and ballads to 21st century postmodernity) and offers a basic grounding in key elements of literary theory, literary history and the varieties of literary form.

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Controversial Classics (EL1513)

15 Credit Points

Literature can provoke, offend and disturb as well as entertain. This course considers some of the most powerful and controversial works of modern literature. It examines the circumstances of publication, the nature of the controversy, and the cultural and critical impact of each work. The course shows how poems, plays and novels can raise searching questions about national, racial and personal identity, and looks at the methods used by writers to challenge their readers, as well the responses of readers to such challenges.

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Rethinking Reading (EL1536)

15 Credit Points

'Rethinking Reading' complements the module ‘Acts of Reading’. Intended primarily for students with degree intentions in English, this course introduces key areas in critical theory that inform the current work of staff at Aberdeen. It asks students to consider the history of English studies and its relationship to colonialism, and how this impacts on conceptions of literature and authorship, alongside topics such as gender and sexuality, and genre. Through a series of modules, the course introduces each area of theory alongside a literary text used as a case study. The course supports students in learning to read and use critical theory in your work, incorporating reflective learning and a practical focus on the techniques involved in critical writing.

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Optional Courses

Select 90 credit points from courses of choice.

Compulsory Courses

Encounters with Shakespeare (EL2011)

30 Credit Points

So you think you know Shakespeare? This course invites you to think again. Studying a range of plays we get behind the mythology of Shakespeare, and rediscover the dynamic inventiveness of the Elizabethan theatre. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were the principal players in a period of literary experimentation that reinvented the possibilities of literature. Encounters with Shakespeare is your chance to find out more.

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Optional Courses

Select ONE of the courses listed below, plus a further 60 credit points from courses of choice.

Power, Empire and Equality (EL2518)

30 Credit Points

This optional course in literature allows students at pre-Honours to learn about the impact of global colonialism through the writings of those who experienced it and its repercussions. It includes theorists of our time and texts like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen. The texts on this course are necessarily concerned with enslavement and freedom, with how one encounters difference, and what it means to possess or claim territory. In examining these issues students will engage with issues of power and equality over centuries of writing about colonialism and empire.

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The Tragedy of Knowledge (EL2512)

30 Credit Points

This course traces the use of key Western myths from antiquity to the present to examine the way knowledge is often presented as both dangerous and compelling. As well as introducing students to a range of historical, social, and formal variations on the theme of knowledge, the course also highlights the role of storytelling and adaptation in the formation of knowledge and understanding.

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Compulsory Courses

Creative Writing: Creativity and Craft (EL35YB)

30 Credit Points

This course offers students the opportunity, through lectures and interactive workshops, to develop their understanding of, and practical skills in, the writing of prose fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. Taught by widely published, award-winning writers, it provides a thorough, practice-based understanding of creative process and of the technical challenges involved in developing an original idea into a completed literary artefact, presented to a professional standard. It also contributes to students' future career potential, whether as ‘creative’ or other kinds of professional writers/communicators.

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Optional Courses

Select ONE course from EACH of the following categories:

Medieval/Renaissance Literature

• EL30CP: Page and Stage: Renaissance Writings 1500-1640
• EL35DQ: Knights, Virgins and Viragos: Chaucer and Medieval Writing

Romantic/Victorian Literature

• EL30XR: Romanticism
• EL35SB: Britain and the Nineteenth-Century World
• EL35QA: Sympathy for the Devil: Scottish Short Stories
• EL35VC: Fallen Women, Self-made Men

Contemporary/Modern Literature

• EL35KN: Haunted Texts
• EL30FF: Modernism: Make it New
• EL30RD: American Voices: Self and Society,1850-1930
• EL35UT: Art and Atrocity: Representations of Violence and Trauma

Page and Stage: Renaissance Writings 1500 - 1640 (EL30CP)

30 Credit Points

This course explores the poetry, drama and prose of a period often referred to as the golden age of English literature. A period which saw Shakespeare and his contemporaries produce innovative new literary works in which the language of desire took centre stage.

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Knights, Virgins and Viragos: Chaucer and Medieval Writing (EL35DQ)

30 Credit Points

Knights, Virgins, and Viragos offers an introduction to the variety of medieval literature and culture. Turning a critical eye on the role misconceptions of the Middle Ages play in present day white supremacy, the course highlights genres from medieval drama to life writing, with attention to the medieval history of race making and modern responses to medieval texts.

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Sympathy for the Devil: Scottish Short Stories (EL30QA)

30 Credit Points

While the short story is often said to have developed in America, nineteenth-century Scottish writing is in fact instrumental in the emergence of the form. Often drawing on oral and folk traditions Scottish writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employ the supernatural, or our fear of it, to explore subjects such as guilt, fear, remorse and the extent to which we can control our own destinies. This course will explore the ways in which the short story in Scotland develops from the early nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. It will include writers such as Walter Scott, James Hogg, John Galt, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jane Findlater.

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Britain and the Nineteenth - Century World (EL35SB)

30 Credit Points

The Romantic (1782-1832) and Victorian (1832-1901) periods were ones of remarkable activity for British citizens abroad. Imperial expansion, increasing international trade, major conflicts and growing mass migration all drew more British citizens than ever into contact with the wider world. This course explores the footprints left by these interactions in nineteenth-century literature. Writers covered may include Henry Derozio, Jane Austen, Mary Prince, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.

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Modernism: Make IT New (EL30FF)

30 Credit Points

The early twentieth century was a time of great literary experimentation as literary modernists rose to the challenge to make it new. We will explore modernism’s stylistic experimentation while also considering the social contexts and changes that shaped this literature. The course will examine a range of writers, genres, movements and locations which prompt us to consider what, when and where was modernism.

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American Voices: Self and Society, 1850 - 1930 (EL30RD)

30 Credit Points

This course examines an important and diverse period in the development of American literature, lasting from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s. During the course we will be analysing works by a variety of American writers from this period in their historical, social and political contexts as well as considering the ways in which they pioneered innovative literary forms and techniques.

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Haunted Texts (EL35KN)

30 Credit Points

This course offers an overview of a wide range of twentieth-century Scottish literature, focusing on themes of haunting, death, and place. Including novels, short stories, poetry, and drama, the course explores questions of the relationship between self and society, the legacy of the past, and the formation of gendered and regional identities. There are lots of ghosts.

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Art and Atrocity: Representations of Violence and Trauma (EL35UT)

30 Credit Points

How is the artist to respond when the virtual becomes the real and when words cannot carry the weight of trauma? How can an author avoid the accusations of voyeuristic prurience or crass opportunism when he or she attempts to re-present events of public violence? This multi-disciplinary course examines work from a wide range of modes, including fiction, poetry, film and graphic art, and looks at the difficulties of inscribing trauma and the ethics and praxis of remembrance. Key events covered include the Holocaust, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, 9-11, the Gulf War and the conflict in the Balkans.

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Romanticism (EL30XR)

30 Credit Points

The Romantic movement swept Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and produced some of the most innovative and exciting literature that has ever been seen. This rule breaking art helped shape the way that we consider art today and underpins many of our ideas about imagination, originality, creativity and self-expression. This course will explore the ways in which the Romantic movement manifested itself across Britain and Ireland and will consider writers such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Austen and Byron.

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Fallen Women and Self - Made Men (EL35VC)

30 Credit Points

The Victorian period is often seen as a time of sexual repression and rigid gender roles, in which men and women were expected to perform in accordance with established codes of behaviour that were based on assumptions about innate masculinity and femininity. While this perception of Victorian attitudes may be true to some extent, many Victorians were well aware of the dangers of gender stereotyping, and wrote fiction in order to interrogate and challenge these expectations. Focussing mainly on the novel, but including some poetry and drama, this module explores how Victorian writers engaged with gender stereotypes, and considers the literary tactics that authors used to re-examine, overthrow and sometimes reaffirm them. We will also consider how these stereotypes changed during the nineteenth century in response to public controversies and campaigns that kept questions of gender at the forefront of public consciousness. Figures such as the Fallen Woman, the Self-Made man and the Angel in the House will be explored in texts by authors including Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy.

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Compulsory Courses

Creative Writing Folio Dissertation (EL4508)

30 Credit Points

This course will provide students with the opportunity to write an extended folio of creative work in either poetry or prose. It will provide students with the opportunity to explore and extend their creative ambitions in writing and, through the reflective commentary element, enable them to contextualise their own creative achievements in relation to works by established writers. Throughout the evolution of the folio, the student will develop a thorough practical awareness of some of the key stylistic, formal and expressive possibilities available to the skilled creative writer.

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Optional Courses

Select ONE from the following options:

• Screenwriting: The Narrative Within the Frame (EL45TM)
• Brief Encounters (EL40TL)
• Creative Writing: The Essentials (EL40PB)

Plus select further courses from level 4 courses in English to gain 60 credits in the discipline.

Creative Writing: the Essential Skills (EL40PB)

30 Credit Points

This course will focus on the practical techniques of writing short stories, extended fiction and some poetry. It will encourage students to consider assembling a block of skills which they will require to repeatedly construct functioning narratives. The course will examine the practical skills of creating subtle fictional depictions – or high drama – and consider how we establish what is at stake for the readers of our fiction. By the completion of the course, students will have assembled a skill set to tackle creative work in a variety of modes, and present and structure it to a professional level.

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Screenwriting: the Narrative Within the Frame (EL45TM)

30 Credit Points

This course will investigate different forms of scriptwriting by writers from a range of historical periods. We will be considering narrative form and content as shaped by subject selection and storytelling devices and structures. The filmic themes will be considered from aesthetic, historical and theoretical perspectives. Through a series of seminars, workshops and screenings, students will develop approaches to visualising film narratives, culminating in a scriptwriting folio of work.

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Brief Encounters (EL40TL)

30 Credit Points

Writing has not always been viewed as self-expression but for long periods of history was perceived as a branch of rhetoric or ‘persuasive speech’. ‘Brief Encounters’ examines some of the implications of this, combining textual analysis from a writerly perspective with creative writing practice in a workshop format.

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