Fine Art and Creative Writing (Placement Year)

Critical Reflections explores a number of key interdisciplinary philosophical and cultural concepts which will enable you to analyse, engage with, and reflect upon artworks in your own discipline. It also allows you to establish a common set of concepts which can be shared by students from all LICA subjects. The structure of the module consists of six three-week blocks: (1) Aesthetics, Formalism and Beyond, (2) Phenomenology, (3) Semiotics, Structuralism and Deconstruction, (4) Class and Society, (5) Feminism, Queer Theory and Gender, and (6) On Difference.Weekly plenary lectures make connections across the arts, and are supplemented by weekly, two hour seminars/workshops which allow students to work in their subject groups (art, film, theatre, design) on ideas and examples specifically tailored towards these disciplines.

CREW 203 is the entry point into Part II of your undergraduate degree and forms the core offering in Creative Writing. For Joint Honours students, specialist half-units are also available with their selective focus on specific literary forms. CREW 203 allows you to write in any adult literary genre, drawing on the accompanying half-units or exploring new areas of creative work. You will be a member of a workshop group of approximately 12 students. For students taking the course as a minor component in their degree, or as part of a joint honours degree, CREW 203 offers continuity from Part I study in the compilation of a portfolio of original writing. The course is supported by a virtual learning environment (Moodle) that enables the exchange of creative work and critiques, whilst also providing virtual meeting spaces and offering a range of dedicated bibliographic resources to support your creative and critical development.

This module develops your knowledge and skills in fine art thinking and making. The module prepares and encourages you to direct your own research and to develop a self-reliant and independent approach to studio practice. You will work in your own dedicated studio space with 24/7 access. You will be supported by specialist tutors who are practicing artists. You will belong to a tutor group led by dedicated tutors with expertise in your area of practice. To support your creative development you will engage in one-to-one tutorials, group tutorials, technical workshops, and peer-feedback. You will also be encouraged to visit exhibitions and attend our visiting artist programme of talks.

This module looks at the many ways in which artists engage with writing, texts, language, and books and to understand art writing's relation to and difference from art criticism, including art writing as art criticism and when art criticism becomes art. It traces the relation between the visual and the literary in poetry, and examines the deconstruction of language, writing and the book and 'conceptual writing'. There will be a focus on artists who use writing and language in the gallery including Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Wiener, John Latham, and Xu Bing, and the use of text, writing and language in computer and digital art, from early experiments in algorithmic mark-making to online artworks. Other areas to be studied include autofiction, fictioning and Glitch Poetics. The module also examines the future of art and writing, especially in the light of AI writing systems such as GPT-3.

This practical fine art focused module will introduce the skills and sensitivities needed to work outside the studio through interactions with people, places, and technologies. The module introduces you to the way that current fine art practitioners employ a wide range of strategies for such interaction. You will work through practical projects and critical reflection. The course will begin with an art historical grounding for this area of practice. You will then experiment and test out new ways of working in a variety of locations and situations such as: in the rural or urban landscape, in the virtual online world, or in a social space such as a cafe. We will explore a range of processes such as conversation, performance, video, movement and digital interaction.

Throughout the module you will build a range of skills and knowledge of technologies, for example: practical considerations in working ‘off-site’ (responding to and researching a place, collaborating with the public, gaining permission to work in specific sites); digital tools for working with networks and strategies and sensitivities for working with people (ethics, interviews, collaborations etc).

This ten-week module will give you the opportunity to explore topics, techniques and methods involved in memoir and life writing. We will also pay particular attention to the risks and opportunities – technical, ethical and personal – inherent in this form.

Through a series of seminars and workshops tutor presentations we will explore set texts, do generative writing prompts, and give and receive feedback on works in progress. There you will work towards the creation of some memoir pieces of your own – either a short stand-alone work or works, or a chapter / section from a proposed longer work. You will also be supported in developing some independent research to set your own work in its context in your reflective essay.

At the end of term, each student will have a one-to-one personal tutorial to discuss the reflective essay and decide on the best approach to the portfolio submission.

This module will enable you to develop a range of graphic skills with the opportunity to approach and represent ideas, issues and experiences in a documentary manner. The module is designed to be relevant to creative practice in Fine Art, Theatre, Film and Design. You will have the opportunity to expand your knowledge and experience of observational and on-site drawing, and develop their learning and experience by engaging in further technical training and by introduction to drawing beyond the studio and 'in the field'. On completion of this module our aim is for you to have significantly developed their knowledge and awareness of drawing and the ability to engage in independent study and develop a substantial personal project for assessment.

The module provides training and experience in visual communication through painting in the broadest sense. Our aim is to provide students with an understanding of painting as an ‘expanded’ and interdisciplinary art form. Weekly workshops will introduce you to the scope of contemporary painting and some of its methods and approaches. You will develop skills through experimentation with a range of traditional and contemporary painting methods, approaches, ideas and equipment. Building on the teaching, you will develop an independent project that extends the language of painting beyond conventional bounds.

Course Aims and Objectives: The emphasis in this module is on reading as well as writing poetry; it will also explore how our lived experience translates into poetry through language; and poetry crystallizes or transforms experience through language and form. We will look at the base structures of poetry – from the line-ending to more complex forms like sonnets and sestinas. Students will be encouraged to seek out new reading as a result of seminar discussion. The writing of poetry is largely dependent on your abilities as a reader and interpreter of poems – and of experience. You are expected to keep a journal of your poems and thoughts throughout the course, the contents of which will be used to create the reflective essay for your portfolio.

Course Aims and Objectives:

The aims of this course are to provide an opportunity for second year students to develop a knowledge of the short story form, and to develop their experience of writing the form., as well as a knowledge of how the form has developed in the past 100 years. They will gain experience in reading, writing, workshopping and reflecting on short fiction, and will develop a knowledge of the history and development of the form, current theoretical approaches to reading and practice in this form, and an awareness of their own literary context. The course will offer students the opportunity to develop their oral and written communication skills, enhance awareness of their approach to the creative process, and enhance their skills in the critical analysis of texts. This course is then developed by the third year specialization in short fiction.

This module will explore the writing of short stories in a workshop environment through the development of the student’s own work, combined with the directed reading of selected texts. Over the course of ten weeks, you are expected to read and discuss each key text, respond to writing and generative prompts in relation to the workshop themes, and submit your own work for workshopping in two workshops. Students are also expected to explore some of the books and essays listed as ‘supplementary’ reading: the books are selected to offer different perspectives on the key issues raised. The course should be considered as having a cumulative effect, in that books discussed early on may be drawn upon in later weeks to illustrate different aspects of writing. During the course, you are also expected to keep a journal, in which you reflect upon your writing and reading. The journal will form the basis of the reflective element of your final portfolio.

This module aims to give students a grounding in “the contemporary” as a key critical concept used in artistic discourses, and provide a number of ways that students can explore and articulate their own contemporaneity. In conversation with cutting edge ideas from art, science, technology and popular culture, the module will enable participants to discuss and identify what they are contemporaries of, how they relate to their own time as artists, citizens and critical writers and what this necessitates in their own practices.

Students will engage in critical discussion of key terms used to define the current moment, such as Anthropocene, Singularity, Post-Truth, and Globalisation, as well as understanding how particular technologies and phenomena, such as distributed and decentralised networks, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are reshaping the contexts in which the arts are made. These topics are explored through lectures and seminar discussions in which students are encouraged to produce and define their own position and modes for articulating what makes them contemporary.

The module is designed for creative students who wish to use writing and material practice to explore their own relationship to the ecologies, politics, trends, technologies, and aesthetics that typify our experience of the world today.

The module aims to enable you to write for the theatre and develop your awareness of the processes by which a written script makes its way to performance. You will be taught through weekly seminars/creative writing workshops in which you will explore the effects that different staging approaches and performance strategies have on your scripts. Subject to timetabling and logistics, there will be a performance showcase in which you will be actively involved; the showcase will allow you to reflect upon your work in the light of audience feedback. Over the module of the module, you will develop your own writing styles and gain an awareness of the professional requirements of playwriting.

This module is designed for those students interested in writing imaginatively about places and/or landscapes, providing a grounding for writers of poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction in the broad field of nature, environmental and place writing (which has been undergoing something of a renaissance in recent years). You will study key texts that engage with different kinds of place and landscape – from fields and forests to rivers and urban edgelands – and explore your own emergent interests in place writing. You will be encouraged to consider your own work as part of a larger, ongoing literary conversation about place, and to explore those places and landscapes that interest and excite you. The module also contains an element of fieldwork, linking the act of physically walking through a landscape to the practice of reading and writing about it.

CREW 303 is the continuation of Part II of your undergraduate degree and forms the core offering in Creative Writing. For Joint Honours students, specialist half-units are also available with their selective focus on specific literary forms. CREW 303 allows you to write in any adult literary genre, drawing on the accompanying half-units or exploring new areas of creative work. You will be a member of a workshop group of approximately 12 students. For students taking the course as a minor component in their degree, or as part of a joint honours degree, CREW 303 offers continuity from CREW 203 in the compilation of a portfolio of original writing. The course is supported by a virtual learning environment (Moodle) that enables the exchange of creative work and critiques, whilst also providing virtual meeting spaces and offering a range of dedicated bibliographic resources to support your creative and critical development.

This module supports you to develop your own distinctive voice as an artist. Our aim is for you to take increasing responsibility for the creative and conceptual direction of your artwork. You will work in your own dedicated studio space with 24/7 access and be supported by specialist tutors who are practicing artists. You will belong to a tutor group led by dedicated tutors with expertise in your area of practice. Teaching is delivered through one-to-one tutorials, group work and peer feedback. You will also be encouraged to visit exhibitions and attend our visiting artist programme of talks. The module culminates in a final end of year public exhibition.

This core module is directed towards completion of an independent research project on a topic of your choice, presented in the form of a dissertation. The course is taught through lectures focused on research skills and one-to-one supervision. Students of Film can choose to make a short film as part of their project, and students of Design are encouraged to do a practical design project.

In your final year you’ll return to Lancaster to complete your degree. Feedback from previous students is that their final year studies were enhanced by the real-world experience they were able to draw on.

Whatever your career path, having the skills to critically evaluate your own learning and development will considerably enhance your effectiveness in the workplace. During your final year, you will be asked to reflect on your experience of work based learning. Did you take part in any formal training during your placement? How did this benefit your work? What kinds of informal learning opportunities arose? What did you learn about your own preferences for professional development? How do your experiences compare to those of other placement students?

You will be asked to consider your future career aims and identify areas for further development.

This is an assessed module that provides 10 credits towards the 30 credits which successful completion of your placement year provides. These 30 credits are on top of the 360 credits of a standard degree, meaning that you will graduate with 390 credits; 30 more than if you took the same degree without a placement year. The additional credits recognise and reward the additional skills and experience that you have developed during your placement year.

Course Aims and Objectives

This unit will provide an opportunity for students to develop their knowledge and skills of the short story form, history and practice with a more advanced course, which develops from the second year course, Crew 204. Each week you will have the opportunity to discuss, in detail, one or two specimen short stories and workshop your own creative work. Students are also expected to explore some of the books and essays listed as ‘supplementary’ reading: the books are selected to offer different perspectives on the key issues raised. The course should be considered as having a cumulative effect, in that books discussed early on may be drawn upon in later weeks to illustrate different aspects of writing. During the course, you are also expected to keep a journal, in which you reflect upon your writing and reading. The journal will form the basis of the reflective element of your final portfolio. Topics covered will include:

• plot, misdirection, and the reveal
• flash and sudden fiction;
• genre (the ghost story);
• rewriting fairytales

The module has two aims. Firstly, it aims to explore methods of improvising or choreographing movement from the practice and study of drawing, and, reciprocally, approaches to drawing that emerge from the experience of movement and the analysis of motion. This is assessed through either a staff-supervised, student-led group choreographic project with documentation or, alternatively, a portfolio of drawings presented at the end of the module. Secondly, the module examines twentieth and twenty-first century works in which choreographers have collaborated with visual artists. This part of the module is assessed through an essay. Teaching is through lecture, seminar and practical compositional exercises in movement and drawing.

This module will explore the writing of Creative Non-Fiction through the development, in a workshop environment, of the student’s own work, combined with the directed reading of a selection of contemporary work and secondary texts. CREW 305 will concentrate on reviews, essays, and cultural reflection. Over the ten-week course you will be expected to read and discuss each key text, and to submit your own work for workshopping on a regular basis. Students are also expected to familiarise themselves with the texts listed as ‘supplementary’ reading below and ‘background’ reading (available on MOODLE): the texts are selected to offer different perspectives on the key issues raised. The course should be considered to have a cumulative effect, in that the texts discussed earlier in the term may be drawn upon in later weeks to illustrate different aspects of writing. During the course you are also expected to keep a journal, in which you reflect upon your writing and reading. This journal will form the basis of the reflective element of your final portfolio. This journal will be discussed in an end-of-term personal tutorial with your tutor.

Study of Creative Non-Fiction in year 3 will concentrate on the essay and review forms. “Essays and reviews” will be interpreted in the wider sense in this course. It will study the essay as a form that has evolved over the last four hundred years as a commentary on human existence, at both the deepest and most trivial level. It will treat the review as a form which, at its best, sets its subject in a cultural and personal context as well as dealing with issues of inherent quality and value, and is (often) only concerned in passing with what the writer likes or dislikes.

The module will be taught through workshops which examine the methods, process and approaches in drawing that are at the cutting edge of contemporary fine art drawing practice and at the boundaries of other disciplines. The workshops provide knowledge, skills, and opportunities to test and try approaches. This learning will be developed through independently researched work. This independent work is documented in a sketchbook and extended at the end of the syllabus to provide a final major project.

During this module you will examine, through set reading and writing prompts and tasks, the unique features of long fiction. Through tutor presentations and discussion of set texts, the workshopping of creative writing in progress and the writing of synopses and other planning documents, you will develop competence in approaching a long fiction project. This includes: strategies for planning and structuring, choosing point of view and tense, developing plot, working with setting, addressing theme and characterisation, experimenting with form and considering an ending. Tutor presentations may be provided as online lectures. You will receive regular feedback, according to a schedule that will be circulated in the first week. You will be expected to give written and oral feedback to your peers each week.

Note: this is a course for the development of long fiction projects for adults – work meant for children or young adults is not suitable for this course. You may work in any genre you wish, but we will focus on literary, historical, science fiction, speculative and crime genres during this course.

This module will provide the space for you to work on a creative project that utilises opportunities afforded by new media. New media narratives (please see the list of set ‘texts’ for examples) are often interactive, participatory, immersive and cross-platform and you will be encouraged to design and provide writing samples from a project that engages with these features. During the module you will examine a variety of new media narratives, compare them to non-linear ‘old media’ narratives (books!) and you will work towards placing your own creative work in a literary and critical context.

The topics we will cover will respond to your own project ideas and interests, but may include:

• Interactivity and immersion,
• Space, place, mapping and journeying,
• The problem of character,
• Who is the author? Collaboration and crowd-sourced fictions.

Note: while we will talk about the ways these narratives can resemble games, this is not a module where you will be designing a computer game. You do not need to have any special computer skills – only an interest in the opportunities afforded to writers by new media forms.

Course Outline:

This course aims to challenge the received structures of language in the students' own poetry through a close reading of poets who opened up new frontiers of 20th/21st century literature through their approaches to language. Every seminar will be split in two halves; the first section will be devoted to a close reading of work by a published poet, from Alice Oswald to Ezra Pound, looking at how they stretch or break the lyric formula; the second hour will be a workshop based on critiquing the students' own poetic experiments. In week two, students will receive a basic introduction to Wittgenstein's theory of language games, with each subsequent poet examined in the light of how they try to break the rules of the game. The students' own experiments are encouraged as either continuations of the radical departures first implemented by the poets in question, or the students' own attempts to break from comfortable notions of confessional or lyric poetry.

Course Outline: The module will be taught through a combination of seminars and workshops. Earlier weeks will be focussed on introducing students to the key elements of adapting for radio and theatre; there will be specific tasks relating to the weekly subject. As the term progresses, students will develop their own longer pieces for assessment. Specific adaptations will be analysed in script form, in broadcast form and (where possible) through viewing live recording archives. Topics covered will include:

• ‘Faithful’ versus ‘unfaithful’ adaptations
• Finding soundscapes and stage images in the source materials
• Beginnings and endings
• Locating characters and character voices
• Working within and changing existing story structures
• Script format (and software resources)
• Juggling forms: novels, short fiction, poems and non-fiction in to script; moving between film, theatre and radio.

The module aims to enable students to write script adaptations for the stage and radio. Students will explore the effects of choice when it comes to source text (prose fiction, poetry or non-fiction) and the medium for adaptation (radio or theatre). They will experience the editorial demands of the adaptation process, and will engage with both the overlapping and different strategies for realising work in theatre and radio.

The module will introduce students to the constraints and opportunities of writing for children and young adults (YA). By reading, analysing and responding creatively to the set texts, students will become more familiar with: contemporary practitioners of writing for young people; the expectations of the audience, and the opportunities for innovation.

The module develops chronologically, beginning with picture books and concluding with young adult novels. From the constraints of paper engineering to the opportunities of a multi-modal narrative in picture books; from the constraints of coming-of-age tropes to the opportunities for fresh, inventive language in YA fiction, students will come to appreciate the complexities of writing fiction for young people.

As each week passes, students will engage in a close reading of the set texts and will respond creatively to them. Students will be encouraged to revise their responses for their portfolio. This format will allow students to improve as writers themselves, while also gaining a better critical understanding of the field. They will also form part of a creative community with their peers, encouraging and supporting each other’s learning.

Students will have the opportunity to discuss contemporary children’s reading experiences and expectations. As these readers will grow to become the adult readers of tomorrow, students will consider how childhood reading contributes to the wider ecosystems of literature.

Course Outline:

‘No art without the resistance of the medium’, Raymond Chandler once said. This module will build on CREW 205 (Writing Poetry), deepening student engagement with both the writing and the reading process. Poetic form will be explored through a wide-ranging selection of poems (all of which can be found in the set text for the course: The Making of a Poem (ed. Boland and Strand) and Poetry By Heart’s online anthology. We will consider form as historical poetic model and a tradition that has been questioned, adapted, subverted, upcycled, reaffirmed—rather than the binaries of free/formal verse, open/closed form, etc—and there will be particular emphasis on those forms regularly employed or reimagined in a twentieth century and a more recent contemporary context.

A portion of each seminar will be spent discussing the set poems. Students will submit their own poems on a fortnightly basis. The dual assessment (a portfolio of students’ own poems plus a close reading of two of the syllabus poems) reflects the course emphasis on the inter-relationship between reading and writing.