Cirrus@Austlit

This course focuses on contemporary literary texts, including the novel, short fiction, and poetry. It contains a creative-writing component.

The course fosters attentive reading, careful thinking, and effective critical writing. You will be introduced to a range of the most exciting, most challenging, and most pleasurable contemporary writing in English. You will have the opportunity to discover some key critical concepts and terms for literary studies and creative writing. Together we will examine how contemporary writers engage with and write about the contemporary world; how literary fiction relates to literary traditions, popular cultural forms, and the media; what currently characterises literary authorship, genre, tradition, and reading; and whether reading and writing change how we think about the past, the present, the everyday, and the unusual. Topics for discussion will include: literature, culture, and the contemporary world; the local and the global; the present and the past; the postmodern and the post-postmodern.

As well as developing skills in the practices of reading and literary critique, you will have the opportunity to explore your own creative writing skills.

Each tutorial will function as a research community as you work together to improve your verbal discussion skills, as well as your reading and writing skills.