Making Meaning, Making Myself: Creative-Critical Encounters
Leader
Dr Cho and Dr Lexton
Cohort
Max 12 Students
Timing
TBC
Course Overview
Night after night, I went around recognizing myself in an idea that suggested general disintegration and, at the same time, new composition. -- Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child (2015)
You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being. -- Katherine Anne Porter
How do literary works help us to understand and create ourselves? Through a series of creative-critical encounters with contemporary writings and critical voices, this course will explore questions of self-fashioning and identity, deliberately dissolving the distinctions between the ‘creative’ and the ‘critical’ in our responses. Five seminar-style sessions will examine diverse traditional textual forms in which the self is performed and articulated – memoir, dramatic monologue, song lyrics, manifestos – as well as the curating of a digital self or selves online. Actively engaging with a variety of materials, students will be guided towards dialogic exploration and creative tasks. For their group research project, students will be encouraged to draw on the productive continuum of critical-creative work across a range of media to develop their own original ‘unessay’ response.
Image Attribution: Poem by Georgiana, OW, Orange. Illustration by Scarlett, OW, Hopeton
Key Benefits
- Develop independent research and critical thinking
- Build confidence in articulating complex ideas and engaging in intellectual discussion
- Deepen understanding of a range of literary forms and the interplay between form and content
- Explore creative responses to a variety of texts and media
Course Structure
The course combines teacher-led seminars, skills workshops, and independent research. Pupils will work in small groups to investigate a question of their choice, drawing on creative ideas and critical skills.
Indicative Session Outline
Seminar 1: Who do you think you are? The curation of digital self and the creative-critical continuum.
Seminar 2: Self and other. Manifestos and creative critical interventions.
Seminar 3: Gender and performativity. Lyrics, dramatic monologues and critical debates on gender.
Seminar 4: Self-fashioning and subjectivity. Memoir, image and textual meaning.
Project Launch: What the ‘unessay’ might look like.
Skills Workshop: research methods, sources, and creative-critical thinking
Independent Group Work and project refinement
Independent Group Work and project refinement
Final Presentations (5 minutes per group) and submission of ‘unessay’