LT912-7-SP: THE TALE: TELLINGS AND RE-TELLINGS
Year: 2013/14
Department: Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies
Essex credit: 20
ECTS credit: 10
Available to year(s) of study:
Available to Study Abroad / Exchange Students: Yes
| Module is taught during the following terms |
| Autumn |  | Spring |  | Summer | |
Module Description
This course offers creative readings in shorter fictions in order to inspire new writing in the long and marvellous tradition of fabulism. We will read towards a definition of the tale, uncovering its ways and manners, characteristic modes and tone, plots and motifs. We will also look at its role in the making of cultural identity and its range of meanings and applications for contemporary experience. The Tale does not constitute a genre in itself, but inheres in different genres - fantasy, ghost stories, science-fiction, parable, fairytale, and magical realism. Writing a story by telling a tale has inspired dazzling inventions - by writers such as Lucian (True History), Frank Kafka, H.G.Wells, Jorge Luis Borges, Leonora Carrington. It has also frequently involved re-tellings and re-visionings. The Renaissance tradition of "imitation" (for example Christopher Marlowe's verse story "Hero and Leander" and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis") has regained fresh vigour with translations and versions of ancient texts today (Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Cook, Anne Carson). By twisting and reshaping old materials, reconfiguring traditional plots and motifs, many authors, besides those already mentioned above, have seized the fabulous inheritance and enriched it - for example, Edgar Allen Poe; Robert Louis Stevenson; Isak Dinesen). Students will be encouraged to bring to the course their own legacy of stories; writing assignments can be done in either prose or verse.
Final work of this course will include one or more tales, to a total length of between three and six thousand words, and an accompanying essay of between three and four thousand words, setting out the background to this creative work, its sources, inspiration, and so forth. By immersing ourselves in this zone of fictional narrative, we shall work towards adding to the fabulous inheritance of The Tale.
Each class will include discussion of the tales from the reading list, writing exercises, and further discussion and exchanges about them.
See CMR for details of course reader and week by week schedule of classes.
Learning & Teaching Methods
Weekly 2-hour seminar
Assessment
100 per cent Coursework Mark
Coursework:
One 5000-word essay
Exam Duration and Period
Bibliography
- Primary texts include tales from the following
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Bioy Casares, Aldofo. The Invention of Morel (l940)
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Borges , Jorge Luis. Labyrinths (l956-64)
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Carrington, Leonora.The House of Fear (l937)
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Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red (1999)
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Carter, Angela. Fireworks (l974).
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Cook, Elizabeth. Achilles (2001)
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Dinesen, Isak. Seven Gothic Tales (l934)
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Heaney, Seamus, trans., The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables, by Robert Henryson (2009)
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Hoffmann, E.T.A., The Golden Pot and Other Tales, trans. Ritchie Robertson ( l992)
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Kafka, Franz. Complete Short Stories
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Leskov, Nikolai, Short Stories
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Marlowe, Christopher,'Hero and Leander'.
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Poe, Edgar Allan, The Complete Tales and Poems (Penguin, l982)
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Shakespeare, 'Venus and Adonis'
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Wells, H.G., Complete Short Stories
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Wilde, Oscar, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
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Suggested Further Reading
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Bernheimer, Kate, ed., Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favourite Fairy Tales (2002)
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Calasso, Roberto. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim Parks (1993) Hearn, Lafcadio, Karma and other Tales (1921)
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Kincaid, Jamaic, SAt the Bottom of the River (c.1978-84).
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Kleist, Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise von O - and other stories. Trans. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (l978
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Lee, Vernon, Supernatural Tales
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Lucian of Samosata, True History (2nd c. AD)
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Lurie, Alison, ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales (Oxford, 1993)
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Park, Christine and Caroline Heaton, eds., Caught in a Story; Contemporary Fairytales and Fables (London, l992)
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