This introductory course challenges you to think about writing as experimental, world-building, adventurous, challenging, radical, and even dangerous, and to write as though it can change the way things are. It teaches that literature has been the engine-room of many of history’s most decisive changes to social, cultural, ideological, and behavioural norms. Divided into four primary modules – Utopian Speculation, The Urgency of Now, Beyond Form and Formlessness, Rhetorics of The Inhuman – it exposes you to some of the most exciting and unconventional writing in English, and equips you with some of the skills necessary to resist the cultural conformities that deaden the mind. Treating literature as process, intervention, and experiment, the course asks you to see writing as a lifelong education in how - to use Samuel Beckett's phrase - to fail better.
