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Literature and Environment (TRU3016)

Module aims

This module reflects on the relationship between writing and land, considering how the physical environment shapes literary work and how reading and writing shape our perception of landscape. Narratives in this module include: the rise and fall of the English country house; land rights and the politics of ownership and access; the conception of nature; labour, gender and class in relation to the perception of landscape, and connections between travelling and narrating. The element of Sea Studies allows us to see the idea of land from a different vantage point, and to consider the extent to which there are alternatives to writing about land.

ILO: Module-specific skills

• 1. Demonstrate an informed appreciation of specific texts concerned with the representation of the environment.
• 2. Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the significance of the environment in a range of texts from the literature of the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.
• 3. Demonstrate an ability to relate literary texts to key cultural and political theories.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

• 4. Demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse the literature of previous historical periods and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its contexts.
• 5. Demonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history.
• 6. Demonstrate an advanced ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary texts.

ILO: Personal and key skills

• 7. Through seminar work, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups.
• 8. Through essay-writing, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose.
• 9. Through research for seminars and essays, demonstrate advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis.
• 10. Through the literary trail, learn to research independently, liaise with non-academic bodies and local interest groups, and present academic research in an accessible way.

Syllabus plan

Week 1: Introduction: William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’

Week 2: Wordsworth, The Two-Part Prelude

Week 3: Ann Yearsley and John Clare

Week 4: Voyages of James Cook

Week 5: The Bounty Mutiny narratives

Week 6: Persuasion

Week 7: North and South

Week 8: Return of the Native

Week 9: Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Week 10: South Riding

Week 11 : Beyond Black

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

•     William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’

•     William Wordsworth ‘The Two-Part Prelude’

•     John Clare, Selected Poetry of John Clare, ed. Jonathan Bate

•     Jane Austen, Persuasion

•     Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ed. Patricia Ingham (Penguin, 1996)

•     Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, ed. Penny Boumelha (Penguin, 2008)

•     Winifred Holtby, South Riding (Virago, 1988)

•     D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover ed. Doris Lessing (Penguin, 2006)

•     Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (HarperCollins, 2008)

Module has an active ELE page?

Yes

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

The module will have an ELE site where other resources will be available.

Indicative learning resources - Other resources

A course handbook will also be available at reprographics.

Available as distance learning?

No

Origin date

2010

Last revision date

2012

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