Reading as a Creative and Critical Writer
Convenor: Bethan Stevens
Arts B223
b.k.stevens@sussex.ac.uk
This module invites you to explore how critical and imaginative thinking work productively
together. In regular workshops, you develop your own writing, both of essays and creative texts.
The module is divided into three units. In the first, ‘Close Reading and Creativity’, you are
introduced to writing that describes and performs the experience of reading, looking at work by
authors such as Ali Smith, Marcel Proust, John Ruskin, and William Wordsworth. This unit
encourages you to examine what is meant by ‘close reading’, and to explore links between reading
and creativity. In the second unit, ‘Intertextuality and Creative Writing’, we consider literary
influence, examining works that are shaped by earlier texts. You will study texts by authors such as
Angela Carter, Hélène Cixous, J. M. Coetzee and Nalo Hopkinson. From both a practical and
theoretical point of view, we consider what these writers can teach us about the use of reading to
create new works. In the third unit, ‘The Critic as Writer’, you will study writers for whom acts of
critical reading and writing overlap and co-habit with creative work. We consider writers such as
Denise Riley, Salman Rushdie, Edmund Spenser and W. B. Yeats. The creative potential of critical
forms (such as the essay and biography) will be explored. The three units help you develop key
skills as a reader and writer of literary texts, building up to the creative-critical portfolio which you
will produce by the end of the module. Each week you will have a lecture, followed by a seminarworkshop in which you discuss your critical thinking and creative practice in small groups.
Further information about the module, including assessment and further reading, will be available
on Study Direct at the start of term. In most weeks we will be reading extracts from the selected
texts. Where page ranges have not yet been confirmed, this will be specified at the start of term.
Meanwhile, to prepare over the summer, you will benefit from reading widely in these texts. If you
have questions do send an email (b.k.stevens@sussex.ac.uk)
Introductory: Creative Reading/Writing
Week 1. Week beginning Monday 22nd September
Lecture: Nicholas Royle
Core reading: Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, 'Creative Reading' and ‘Creative Writing’
[publication forthcoming – this will be provided on Study Direct in advance of the session]
Unit 1: Close Reading and Creativity
Week 2. Week beginning Monday 29th September
Lecture: Bethan Stevens
Core reading: Marcel Proust and John Ruskin, On Reading, trans. Damion Searls (London:
Hesperus Press, 2011), pp. 45-94, plus handout.
Week 3. Week beginning Monday 6th October
Lecture: Keston Sutherland
Core reading: Manuscript drafts of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude [details to follow]
Week 4. Week beginning Monday 13th October
Lecture: Nicholas Royle
Core reading: Ali Smith, Artful (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), pp. [tbc].
Unit 2: Intertextuality and Creative Writing
Week 5. Week beginning Monday 20th October
Lecture: Peter Boxall
Core reading: J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (1999; London: Vintage, 2004), pp. [tbc]
Week 6. Week beginning Monday 27th October
Lecture: Denise deCaires Narain
Core reading: Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads (New York: Hachette, 2003), pp. [tbc]
Angela Carter, ‘Black Venus’, in Black Venus (1985; London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 1-14
Charles Baudelaire, handout
Week 7. Week beginning Monday 3rd November
Reading Week
Week 8. Week beginning Monday 10th November
Lecture: Nicholas Royle and Bethan Stevens
Core reading: Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing
(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 98-102
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (London: Faber and Faber, 1967)
Unit 3: The Critic as Writer / The Writer as Critic
Week 9. Week beginning Monday 17th November
Lecture: Bethan Stevens
Core reading: W. B. Yeats (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1936), pp. v-xlii, 1, 80-87
Week 10. Week beginning Monday 24th November
Lecture: Andrew Hadfield and Charles Nicholl (?)
Core reading: Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
pp. [tbc].
Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Jonathan Cape,
1992), pp. [tbc].
Week 11. Week beginning Monday 1st December
Lecture: Sam Solomon
Core reading: Denise Riley, The Words of Selves and Selected Poems, pp. 22-40 and 93-112.
Week 12. Week beginning Monday 8th December
Lecture: Minoli Salgado
Core Reading: Salman Rushdie, selected essays from Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1981-1991.
Extracts from Rushdie’s Midnight's Children, Shame and Shalimar the Clown [details to follow].