University of Sydney Handbooks - 2019 Archive

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Australian Literature Descriptions

Australian Literature

Minor

A minor in Australian Literature requires 36 credit points from this table including:
(i) 12 credit points of 1000-level selective units
(ii) 12 credit points of 2000-level selective units
(iii) 12 credit points of 3000-level selective units

1000 level units of study

ENGL1002 Narratives of Romance and Adventure

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 1 Classes: 2x1hr lectures/week and 1x1hr tutorial/week Assessment: 1x1000wd Assignment (20%), 1x2000wd Essay (45%), 1x1.5hr Exam (35%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
This unit explores the art of narrative from Greek and Roman antiquity to the present. What makes Homer's Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphoses defining texts for the history of narrative? Why are the early masters of English narrative so compelling? How does a film like O Brother, Where Art Thou? fit in? Issues of particular relevance include: genre, epic and myth; the unfolding of adventure and gender relations; intertextuality and the nature of humankind.
ENGL1007 Language, Texts and Time

This unit of study is not available in 2019

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 2 Classes: 2x1hr lectures/week, 1x1hr tutorial/week Assessment: 2x500wd assignments (30%), 1x2000wd Essay (30%), 1x1.5-hr exam (40%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
This unit of study equips students with some general tools for the close analysis of literary language. Grammatical concepts will be introduced and applied to the description of prose, poetry and drama, and students will explore the changing relations between form and meaning in English from the earliest times up to the present. A number of key strands in contemporary language study will also be presented, including semiotic theory, rhetoric and discourse studies and theorizations of the relationship between texts and subjectivity.
ENGL1011 Introduction to Film Studies

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 1,Summer Main Classes: 1x2hr lecture/week, 1x1hr tutorial/week Assessment: 1x800wd exercise (20%), 1x800wd exercise (20%), 1x800wd exercise (20%), 1x2000wd Take-home exercise (30%), Tutorial participation (10%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
How do form and style structure our experience of film? This unit provides a critical introduction to elements of film making and viewing, moving through an exploration of formal components of film to consider film aesthetics in relation to the history of film scholarship. We will consider films in a variety of cultural and historical contexts, from early cinema to youtube, and introduce a series of "case studies" to explore historical, cultural and material contexts of film production and consumption.
ENGL1012 The Gothic Imagination

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 2 Classes: 2x1hr lecture/week, 1x1hr tutorial/week Assessment: 2x500wd close reading exercise (30%), 1x2000wd research essay (40%), 1x1.5hr exam (30%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
This unit explores the Gothic, a transgressive literary mode that imagines haunted or hostile social worlds. Beginning with the early Gothic craze and ending with its popular on-screen renewal, we consider the aesthetics of horror and terror, and investigate the questions these texts raise about identity, place, and the imagination.
ENGL1013 Global Literatures in English

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 2 Classes: 2x1hr lecture/week, 1x1hr tutorial /week Assessment: 1x1000wd close reading (20%), 1x1500wd essay (35%), 1x2000wd take-home exercise (45%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
Global Literatures in English is a transnational and cross-period unit that examines how literary and cultural works from different periods from across the world engage with world historical events and social political structures operating on a global scale, with a particular emphasis on the representation of Empire and its legacies.
ENGL1014 Creative Writing

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 2 Classes: 1x1hr lecture/week, 1x2hr seminar/week Assessment: 1x1000wd reading response task (20%), 1x1000wd creative writing draft (20%), 1x 2500wd creative writing portfolio (50%), workshop participation (10%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
Creative writing, reading and thinking are core skills. This unit offers a practical and critical introduction to the development of a reflective creative writing practice across a range of different literary forms. Students will be guided through the process of generating ideas, drafting, workshopping, editing and revision to produce a portfolio of creative writing. The unit will emphasise creative writing as a dynamic mode of engaging with forms and ideas.
ENGL1026 Constructing the Fictive Self

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 1 Classes: 2x1hr lectures/week, 1x1hr tutorial/week Assessment: 1x500wd Assignment (15%), 1x2000wd Essay (45%), 1x2hr Exam (40%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
What makes the subject of identity so compelling? How are we ourselves involved in the construction of such identity? This unit explores the topic of self in literary and cinematic texts. It will provide an opportunity for students to analyse and creatively explore the construction of self in a variety of social contexts by focusing on textual representations of sexuality, race and gender in ways that are relevant to being and living in today's world.

2000 level units of study

ENGL2668 Australian Gothic

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 2 Prerequisites: 12 credit points at 1000 level in English Prohibitions: ASLT2619 Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
ENGL2669 Australian Stage and Screen

This unit of study is not available in 2019

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 1 Classes: 2x1hr lecture/week, 1x1hr tutorial/week Prerequisites: 12 credit points at 1000 level in Australian Literature or 12 credit points at 1000 level in English Studies Prohibitions: ASLT2616 Australian Stage & Screen Assessment: 1x 5-10 minutes/500wd (based on textual analysis of selected text/passage) oral presentation/summary (20%), 1x 2000wd essay (40%), 1x 2000wd take-home exercise (40%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
Australian theatre and cinema have lively, at times intersecting, histories, and have played significant roles at both national and international levels, from the depiction of various local 'types' on stage and screen, to the work of Australian actors, directors and cinematographers overseas. This unit examines selected plays and films over the last century or so through a number of thematic focuses, including: race, gender and national identity; comic traditions; Australia and the world; modernity and innovation.
ENGL2670 Revolutionary Writing: 1960s and Beyond

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 1 Prerequisites: 12 credit points at 1000 level in Australian Literature or 12 credit points at 1000 level in English Prohibitions: ASLT2602 Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
ENGL2671 Australian Writing in the Postmodern Age

This unit of study is not available in 2019

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 1 Classes: 2x1hr lecture/week, 1x1hr tutorial/week Prerequisites: 12 credit points at 1000 level in Australian Literature or 12 credit points at 1000 level in English Studies Prohibitions: ASLT2609 Assessment: 5x 200wd Online posts (10%), 1x 1500wd Essay (40%), 1x 2000wd Take-Home Exercise (50%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
Is one country's postmodernism the same as another's? Concentrating on works produced since the 1980s this unit looks at some of the early texts of Australian postmodernism, thinking about the range of local, domestic and international contexts with which they engage. It asks whether Australian postmodernism has any distinguishing features, trying to explain what these might be, and how they might have come about, and how it has developed in the contemporary era of digital and social media.

3000 level units of study

ENGL3701 Major Australian Authors: Depth Study

This unit of study is not available in 2019

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 2 Classes: 1x2hr seminar/week Prerequisites: 12 credit points at 2000 level in Australian literature or 12 credit points at 2000 level in English Studies Prohibitions: ASLT3608 Assessment: 1x 2000wd Short essay (40%), 1x 4000wd Long essay (60%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
This unit provides students with the opportunity to undertake in-depth study of the life, work, career and reception of one or more major Australian writers, such as Peter Carey, Helen Garner, Alex Miller, H.H. Richardson, Christina Stead, Patrick White or Judith Wright. While focusing on close reading of texts that have come to be regarded as outstanding both nationally and internationally, students will also use methodologies that include career biography, reception history, and analysis of key works of literary criticism and the economy of literary prestige.
ENGL3703 Writing Australian Nature

This unit of study is not available in 2019

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 2 Classes: 1x2hr seminar/week Prerequisites: 12 credit points at 2000 level in Australian literature or 12 credit points at 2000 level in English Studies Prohibitions: ASLT2620 Assessment: 6x 250wd Online Writing Tasks (10%), 1x 2000wd Critical Concepts Journal (40%), 1x 2500wd Essay (50%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
How is 'nature' represented in Australian texts and from whose perspective? Recognising the complex meanings of 'nature' (Williams), we will trace its significance in Australian texts and contexts. How do novelists, poets and others depict Australian landscapes and ecologies? How do different cultural perspectives shape representations of nature? This unit examines Indigenous and non-Indigenous texts, introducing key approaches from ecocriticism and the ecohumanities, and asking how literature shapes an environmental consciousness.
ENGL3705 Writing Country: Indigenous Ecopoetics

Credit points: 6 Session: Semester 2 Classes: 1x2hr seminar/week Prerequisites: 12 credit points at 2000 level in Australian literature or 12 credit points at 2000 level in English or 12 credit points at 2000 level in Indigenous Studies Assessment: 1x1000wd seminar presentation and paper (20%), 1x1000wd online writing task (30%), 1x4000wd essay (50%) Mode of delivery: Normal (lecture/lab/tutorial) day Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
This unit surveys Australian Indigenous representations of Country in poetry, fiction, art and film. We consider Indigenous expressions of Country through comparative ecocritical, transnational and trans-Indigenous frameworks, and examine how Indigenous philosophies of Country can contribute to thinking about issues such as environmental crisis and climate change.