Two-part question What is poiesis, and how can we understand its relationship to poetic and literary attention? How can thinking about poiesis change our environmental and aesthetic sense of relatedness to other beings?
Description
Your answer should refer to the arguments, ideas and thinkers addressed in topic II. You can select a primary text from a particular week in topic II but you should illustrate your argument with reference to ideas, arguments, images and scenes from other set texts in topic II and additional secondary reading.
Texts options to refer to from topic 2 for this essay:
Hwang Sok-yong, Princess Bari
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences
Timothy Morton, Being Ecological
Please refer to at least 3 of the above texts for the essay.
You’ll be expected to appraise, review and critically engage with some of the complex philosophical and ecological arguments about language, world, environmental relatedness and being studied in topic II. You’ll also be expected to contextualise your argument or creative work with reference to secondary reading.
The second assignment asks you to address learning outcomes LO1 and LO3
LO1 – discuss literary practice and interpretation in relation to critical, metaphysical or theoretical principles
A good English Literature assignment will respond to LO1 by clearly setting out some of the conceptual commitments of the writers and thinkers we discuss in topic II and explaining them with reference to secondary academic texts. You should expect your tutor’s feedback to comment on the clarity of your explanation, your review of these writers’ and thinkers’ ideas and your contextualisation of their arguments with reference to secondary reading.
LO3 – outline and appraise accounts of literary value and creative practice
A good English Literature assignment will respond to LO3 by explaining how the ideas in topic II have changed your understanding of literary creativity and critical practice. Here you should be able to engage critically with parts of different writers’ arguments studied in topic II and argue persuasively how an argument or idea has changed your approach to aesthetic attention, to poetic and literary works of art, and to your sense of environmental relatedness. You should expect feedback on your work to focus on whether you have given a persuasive account of how the ideas studied in topic II have altered your understanding of the meaning and value of aesthetic experience.
Please also consult 3 separate secondary sources for this essay.
