106-472 Writing Genealogies of Place

Usually admission to the postgraduate diploma or fourth year honours in English literary studies or creative writing.

In this subject students will engage with creative and intellectual concepts that deal with an understanding of place (and places) and its relationship to individuals, communities and cultural formations. These places may be physical, social or psychological, and can include 'natural' landscapes, urban/industrial environments, the genealogies of family or place and the connections between memory and physical space. This subject asks students to engage with writings by novelists and poets in addition to non-fictional texts to stimulate their own creative writing project that will be developed and workshopped in the seminars. Students will explore the relationship between the creative process and the development of written and performative texts. On completion of the subject students will have produced a folio of writing that can include prose-fiction, poetry, performance/script or non-fiction.

• have developed skills in Creative Writing that draw upon materials and concepts presented and discussed in seminars;

• have acquired a transportable set of interpretive skills;

• have developed their capacity for independent thinking;

• have developed their ability to communicate ideas through Creative Writing.

Written work of 5000 words 90% (due at the end of semester) and class participation 10%.

A subject reader will be available from the University Bookshop.