Undergraduate Course: Looking at Literary Prizes (LLLG07096)
Course Outline
| School | Centre for Open Learning |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 7 (Year 1 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 10 |
ECTS Credits | 5 |
| Summary | This course explores the winning novels of five different literary prizes in one year, 2006. The criteria for each prize will be explored and we shall evaluate how successfully the winning novels fulfil those criteria, the judging processes and how critics and contemporary readers responded to the winning novels. We shall consider winners of the Man Booker, Costa, Orange, James Tait Black and Commonwealth Writers prizes and evaluate how literary value is ascribed and how much influence ordinary readers might have on the awarding of literary prizes and the influence of commercial value. In the final session, we shall compare all the novels we have read from this year and decide which is our book of 2006.
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| Course description |
Students on this course will read five novels which were awarded literary prizes in 2006. Through mini-lectures and seminar discussion, students will explore the key themes and stylistic characteristics of each novel and develop skills in close reading, critical analysis, using and interpreting secondary reading and writing an academic piece of work. Students will engage with the texts through excerpts for close reading, chosen by the tutor, in a supportive tutorial atmosphere.
Through our reading of Zadie Smith's On Beauty will shall interrogate the reasoning behind the women-only Orange Prize. The Costa Prize will draw our focus to the historical novel Restless through which we shall explore themes of nationality and espionage. In our discussion of the Man Booker prize we shall confront the notion that the prize is one of compromise as well as great prestige. Students will consider the membership of the judging body for the James Tait Black Prize and the wide-ranging reviews of MacCarthy's dystopian novel The Road, exposing how disparate the response can be to a celebrated text. We shall ask ourselves how well The Commonwealth Prize meets its aim to contribute to the growth of arts and culture as well as the promotion of equal rights and the awareness of the importance of social welfare.
Throughout the course we shall be discussing issues such as literary value, commercial value, readability and above all, how useful literary prizes are in the way in which we determine literary merit. In our final session of the course we will compare all the texts on the course and try to establish some criteria to decide which is our best book of 2006.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Articulate knowledge and understanding of the issues that influence the awarding of literary prizes such as readability, literary value, commercialism and marketing;
- Construct original, clear and coherent arguments, using recognised critical terminology and methodologies;
- Evaluate, compare and contrast prize-winning fiction of 2006, demonstrating knowledge of linguistic, literary, cultural and political contexts;
- Extrapolate, evaluate and assess ideas from non-literary texts such as criticism or journalism in order to bring them to bear on their analyses of prize-winning literary texts;
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Reading List
Smith, Zadie., 2006. On Beauty. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Boyd, William., 2007. Restless. London: Bloomsbury.
Desai, Kiran., 2008. The Inheritance of Loss. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
MacCarthy, Cormac., 2009. The Road. London: Picador.
Grenville, Kate., 2011. The Secret River. Edinburgh: Canongate
Recommended:
Mullan, John, 2008. How Novels Work. Oxford: OUP.
Taylor, Jonathan, 2003. The Man Booker Prize: 35 years of the best in contemporary fiction. London: The Booker Prize Foundation.
Todd, Richard, 1996. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury.
Roberts, Gillian, 2011. Prizing Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
http://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/
http://www.costa.co.uk/costa-book-awards/welcome/
http://themanbookerprize.com/
http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/events/tait-black/about/book
http://www.commonwealthwriters.org/commonwealth-book-prize
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Confidence in discussing texts
Ability to articulate knowledge and arguments coherently
Ability to assess secondary material |
| Keywords | Literary,Prizes,Fiction |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Ms Rachael King
Tel:
Email: Rachael.King@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr Benjamin Mcnab
Tel: (0131 6)51 4832
Email: Benjamin.Mcnab@ed.ac.uk |
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