The Writers’ Lab: Responding to Literatures in English

Course goals

Successful students will:

• Have developed the sophisticated critical vocabulary and analytical tools required to enable them to respond in a complex fashion to literary and cultural texts from the English-speaking world and the Celtic-speaking world (in English translation);
• Display a high level of proficiency in written and spoken English and a command of academic referencing in these responses.

 

Content

In this course, you will engage deeply with literary texts and translations from the Anglophone and Celtic-speaking world from the early Middle Ages to the present, encountering a range of forms and genres whilst learning the discipline-specific tools and tactics you’ll need to effectively discuss and write about literature in the coming years. Over the course of the term, you will learn how to read and interpret literary texts—specifically, texts that share themes of translation, transformation, and conversation. In thinking across medieval and modern literatures, you will learn to make critical judgements about different forms of editing, translation, and the presentation of texts in modern editions, all while working to develop your own particular writing and revision process. Our thematic focus on conversation will also lend itself to the ways in which we’ll often talk about writing and close reading as forms of conversation: an individual writer’s conversation with primary texts (in the form of annotation and close reading), intertextual conversation and reading texts (primary and secondary) as lenses for one another, the writer’s engagement and positioning within broader literary-critical conversations, and of course, the conversations around texts and ideas that will take place in collaborative seminar activities and via shared digital reading responses. Through lectures, seminars, and your own independent reading and writing, you will get a handle on discipline-specific writing, speaking, and research skills: utilizing terms of literary analysis; thinking analytically; engaging in critical discussions (orally and in writing); reading and interpreting scholarly articles; and correctly utilizing and citing the ideas of others in your own writing.

 

Additional information

If you have already taken English Literature & Culture (EN1V14003), you may not take Writers' Lab due to excessive overlap in content.