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2015/16 Undergraduate Module Catalogue

ENGL3259 Literature, Reading, Mental Health

20 creditsClass Size: 40

School of English

Module manager: Professor Francis O'Gorman
Email: f.j.o'gorman@leeds.ac.uk

Taught: Semester 1 (Sep to Jan) View Timetable

Year running 2015/16

This module is not approved as a discovery module

Objectives

On completion of this module, students should be able to discuss with sensitivity, textual knowledge, and historical awareness some of the major questions about art and ethics pertaining to the relationship between literary writing and what we would now call ‘mental health’. They will be able to discuss in an informed and ethically responsible manner major concepts that relate both to ‘health’ and literature, including madness, healing, expression, self-narration, and the much-analysed concept of the relationship between art and ‘neurosis’. They will have an in-depth understanding of major questions about the relationship between reading and ‘mental health’, and a significant and advanced conception of how, through literary texts, we might come to a richer understanding of the issues involved in describing mental ill-health, and how reading itself might be understood as a mental activity in some form of relationship with pleasure.

Learning outcomes
Students will have developed:
- the ability to use written and oral communication effectively;
- the capacity to analyse and critically examine diverse forms of discourse;
- the ability to manage quantities of complex information in a structured and systematic way;
- the capacity for independent thought and judgement;
- critical reasoning;
- research skills, including the retrieval of information, the organisation of material and the evaluation of its importance;
- IT skills;
- efficient time management and organisation skills;
- the ability to learn independently.

Skills outcomes
- Skills for effective communication, oral and written.
- Capacity to analyse and critically examine diverse forms of discourse.
- Ability to acquire quantities of complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way.
- Capacity for independent thought and judgement.
- Critical reasoning.
- Research skills, including information retrieval skills, the organisation of material, and the evaluation of its importance.
- IT skills.
- Time management and organisational skills.
- Independent learning.

Syllabus

The association between creativity and madness is ancient. But the entanglements of literature, the experience of reading, and states of ‘mental health’ are far more diverse. What is mental health, exactly? How is it separate from the ‘normal’ patterns of the human mind through life? This module looks at a range of literary writing, and one autobiography, to explore a variety of mental conditions and topics of mental health as they have appeared in writing from Shakespeare to the present: from murderous insanity to depression; from shell-shock to bipolarity.
The module is particularly interested in the languages of interiority; in narratives of ‘redemption’ and how these draw on established literary and cultural tropes; in the nature of literary forms as they are driven by particular conceptions of mental health/life; and in the question of what it means when we say that we found a book ‘depressing’. Paying particular attention to the sustained tragic-comedy of writing about mental health, we will think carefully about the ethics of representation, the moral problems of talking about the figuring of mental health, as we will consider the idea of reading and mental activity itself. The textual construction of mental health – how a reader might understand the dividing line between healthy and unhealthy – will be explored in a module that examines the peculiarly intimate relationship between narrative, metaphor, and the mind; between mental health and what can be said in words about it; between mental health, the strange intimacies of reading, and the exceptional territory of literature.

Teaching methods

Delivery type	Number	Length hours	Student hours
Meetings	5	1.00	5.00
Seminar	10	1.00	10.00
Private study hours			185.00
Total Contact hours			15.00
Total hours (100hr per 10 credits)			200.00

Private study

Teaching will be through weekly seminars (10x 1 hour) plus up to 5 additional hours which can take the form of one-to-one discussions and consultations, the return of unassessed/assessed essays and feedback. Participants will be encouraged to watch Nicholas Hytner's 1995 film version of Alan Bennett's play (The Madness of King George).

Private Study: Reading, preparation for seminars, essay writing.

Opportunities for Formative Feedback

- Contribution to seminars.
- Unassessed essay.

Methods of assessment

Coursework

Assessment type	Notes	% of formal assessment
Essay	4,000 words	100.00
Total percentage (Assessment Coursework)		100.00

This module will be assessed by one essay of 4000 words (including quotations and footnotes). One unassessed essay of 1700 words is required (submitted during Week 7). This does not form part of the assessment for this module, but is a requirement and MUST be submitted. Students who fail to submit the unassessed essay will be awarded the maximum mark of 40 for the module (a bare Pass).

Reading list

The reading list is available from the Library website

Last updated: 22/04/2015

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