ENG5722 - Writing and War

Objectives:

On successful completion of the module, students will be able to:
demonstrate detailed knowledge and understanding of distinctive themes, issues, and complexities that have become central in modern writing about war.
demonstrate an ability to analyse texts in relation to innovative literary techniques, individually and in combination, that have been developed to direct attention to those themes, issues, and complexities.
Demonstrate an ability to work as part of a team on a shared task, allocating roles, conductive collaborative research and meeting deadlines to pre-agreed standards.
demonstrate an ability to relate subject knowledge to complex ethical debates by evaluating specific historical events, including reflection from an international perspective on the student’s own assumptions and practices as participants in such debates

Content:

This module explores the various experiences of war from diverse perspectives – examples might include: soldiers in combat zones; bomber pilots / military planners outside combat zones, and non-combatants. The set texts have been chosen to reflect a growing historical awareness, during the C20, of the complexity in comprehending, communicating, and evaluating war experiences and this complexity is related to the adoption of specific experimental writing techniques in the production of war literature. The teaching explains the rationale behind the adoption of those techniques and the students explore the various developments in those techniques and the ethical and critical use to which they are put in the set texts. The final assessment is the culmination of the module and focuses on getting beyond simple good-vs-evil employment of the module concepts, for example, by reflecting upon texts and representations of victims of British or Allied bombing campaigns.

Learning and Teaching Information:

The module is an example of problem-based study, in which a strong central problematic, such as the complexities of communicating war experiences or the ethics of aerial warfare, is established at the start through a combination of presentation, discussion, group work and workshops and then the set-texts are offered as various types of solutions to that problematic. The texts are introduced and ‘constructively aligned’ to the central concept through a combination of short presentations and groupwork. As the module progresses the students are given more responsibility for selecting passages for discussion and also leading those discussions. In addition specific guidance and support is given on essay writing and presentation skills, including the consideration of draft-essays, presentation technologies and packages (Prezi, Xmind, &c.), and the provision of rehearsals (formative assessment).

Workshops
Contact hours: 30
intended Group size: 25

Guided independent study
Hours: 170

Further details relating to assessment
The report is a structured study of one of the given set-texts. This will include a study of the literature on the effect of combat conditions on the soldier’s mind and examples of ways in which the given writer has innovated literary techniques to convey some of these combat-stress features or impacts.

Assessment: