Writing the Planet
Overview
- Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
- Convenor: Isabel Davis and/or Stephen Willey
- Assessment: a 3000-word (except poetry) creative piece (80%) and 2000-word critical essay (20%)
Module description
This creative writing module uses the theme of environment and environmental crisis to develop your craft as a writer. It includes lectures from writers whose work concerns environmental politics, representations of place, aesthetics and activism. You will also attend seminars to investigate key pieces of set reading, considering how the environment shapes and influences the work of others.
Most of the class contact time in this module will be dedicated to creative writing workshops. You will contribute by writing short pieces that engage with different aspects of climate and environment or environmental concepts and ideas. The workshops will involve evaluating each other’s work, offering a chance for substantial feedback and the opportunity to engage evaluative and editing skills. You will be able to work in any mode (script, poetry, prose - whether fiction or non-fiction).
Indicative module syllabus
- Introduction: Writing the Planet
- Environmental poetry and song
- Performing the environment
- Environmental fiction
- Non-fiction writing and the environment
- Writing workshops
- Seminars
Seminar reading might include:
- Song and performance poetry
- Ecopoetics and ecocriticism
- Policy papers
- Natural history writing
- Science writing on climate
- Memoir and its relationship to environmental writing
- Dystopian and utopian writing
- Theoretical writing on the environment
Learning objectives
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- identify some key themes, arguments and techniques in select textual readings on the environment
- write effectively about environment and environmental crisis
- demonstrate an understanding about the ethics and politics of writing about the environment.