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Study online with Macquarie University through Open Universities Australia. Explore all degrees, subjects and short courses now.

The Bachelor of Arts (OUA) at Macquarie University is a distinctive course that equips its graduates with knowledge and skills that can be applied in any career or in further study. No other course offers as much flexibility and a wide range of study options as the Bachelor of Arts. You will be given the opportunity to turn your passion into a career while developing a strong set of core transferable skills valued by industry and the society. In consultation with industry, the Bachelor of Arts (OUA) places a strong emphasis on skills for success in the 21st century workplace. You will be taught by active researchers, leading academics and award winning teachers.

Make your degree unique and study what interests you. Analyse critically, think creatively and problem-solve at work or in everyday life. Complete foundational studies then tailor your degree with a major. Create a portfolio and build your connections.

Bachelor of Arts

Literature: Modern and Contemporary

Literature: Medieval to Modern

Building on the range of concepts and tools introduced to students in ENGL1001 Literature: From Medieval to Modern, this subject focuses on how literature developed throughout the twentieth century to the present day. It analyses how English, Australian and American writers – poets, playwrights, novelists, graphic novelists and screenwriters – responded in profoundly intellectual and visceral ways to the wars, calamities, technological change and digital disruptions of what Eric Hobsbawm calls the ‘Age of Extremes’. We trace patterns of alienation and anomie, but also the growing urgency of hope and human rights in literary responses to the modern world. Continuing to develop university level skills in critical reading, textual analysis and writing about literary texts, this subject also introduces students to theories of visual literacy and critical studies, equipping students with the tools to interpret different kinds of narratives.

Seek to understand how poets, playwrights, novelists, graphic novelists and screenwriters responded to the world around them – including wars and technological change – reflecting this in their texts. Build on your skills in critiquing narratives.

This unit looks at a range of texts across the 20th century, from modernism to postmodernism and late modernism. The governing theme for the unit is what it means to be human, raising questions about memory, identity, agency, empathy, care and ethical responsibility. Topics to be discussed within these lines of enquiry include the death of God, the crisis of history, war and its aftermath, and changing gender dynamics. The range of Australian and international authors to be studied includes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, Gerald Murnane, J. M. Coetzee and Sarah Kane.

20th-Century Literature: Inventing the Future

English literature is foundational to modern life, providing everyday cultural references and a storehouse of stories that entertain us and enrich our communication and interaction with each other. This entry unit is informed by the questions: What is literature for? Why is it necessary? Why is it useful? Running through our program is the idea that literature helps us conceive of what it means to be human, and to apprehend the lived experience of other humans.  This unit surveys English literature from its medieval beginnings, through the Shakespearean Renaissance, to the late nineteenth century, when the Modernist movement began to supplant the Decadence of the late Victorian era, and children’s literature began to proliferate, contributing to our modern idea of what it means to be a child. Students will read a wide variety of literature and will be introduced to a range of concepts and tools for studying these texts. Along with a chronological knowledge of literary movements, this unit develops skills at university level in critical reading, textual analysis and writing about literary texts. Short literary works and weekly critical studies provide focal points for developing detailed and informed ways of interpreting different kinds of narratives. This unit will also provide students with an introduction to further studies in English and creative writing at Macquarie.

An introduction to the study of literary texts. You’ll learn how to think carefully about novels, poems and plays. Explore society reflected on paper and learn about what it means to be human. Build a base for further English studies and the arts.

Apart from being hugely entertaining, what does being popular mean? Cultural perceptions of what makes literature fiction popular, rather than elite, serious or academic, constantly shift in response to changing historical circumstances. This unit looks at a wide variety of popular novels and short stories from different genres and different historical periods: Gothic novels, crime and detective fiction, romance,romance and fantasy.popular women&#39;s fiction, and fantasy and science fiction. This unit will explore how such texts differ from and challenge their &quot;respectable&quot;“respectable” counterparts, and consider issues of production, reception, audience engagement,engagement and fandom.

Popular Fiction

This unit introduces students to a selection of texts produced during the &quot;long&quot; nineteenth century in Britain, covering a period from the French Revolution of 1789 to the first decade of the twentieth century. The novels and poems you will study helped to create new visions of the human, creating and responding to changing worldviews about many facets of social life: political, scientific and artistic. Major figures such as Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti and George Eliot will be studied alongside lesser-known innovators such as Charlotte Smith, John Clare and Augusta Webster. The unit will explore how these writers used literature to respond to the most challenging and divisive issues of their time in a way that still speaks to modern readers and created the foundation of the world we live in today.

Revolution, Evolution, Humanity: Literature and Change in the Long Nineteenth Century

This unit offers students the opportunity to develop a research project based on specific genres of creative writing and to reflect on how this affects their own creative practice. Students will have the opportunity to read and analyse different genres and to research current scholarship and publishing trends in these genres. Working independently, students will hone their critical research, writing, and presentation skills. By the end of this unit, students will gain a critical understanding of the contemporary academic and professional contexts of their own writing.

Research for Creative Writing

This subject examines different critical approaches to analysing literature, including narratological, postcolonial, feminist, and cognitive. This range of perspectives will open up ways of considering what literature is, what kinds of knowledge it provides, and what is at stake — culturally, politically, aesthetically, and emotionally — in the way texts are understood and consumed. This subject will prepare students for research in literary studies by addressing questions concerning how we as scholars approach literary texts and the critical responses they have attracted; how we recognise and assess a literary approach; and what questions and access points we use to understand and critique literary texts. Practically, students will learn to identify, understand, and apply different questions and concepts to the interpretation of texts and to the creation of meaning.

Explore the pathways you can take when analysing English literature. Consider characterisation, genre and suspense. Think about a writing's context and authorial intent. Devour short stories, plays and critical texts as you broaden your studies.

Critical Approaches to Literature

The limitations of Western conceptions of &quot;the human&quot; are highlighted in this unit as we consider how twenty-first century Australian, Indigenous, American, postcolonial and other forms of literature which challenge and expand Western conceptions of humanity, subjectivity and belonging. This unit looks at how literature is alive in the world today, and how it responds to the new opportunities afforded to it by the twenty-first century such as streaming, open-access and web publishing, social media and AI-written texts. All texts studied (essays, translated poetry and novels, speculative short fiction, Indigenous sci-fi and vampire TV series, multilingual historical film) have been produced since 2010. Current controversies are simultaneously examined in real time to show present-day faultlines in local and global publishing and writers’ festivals. The premise of this unit is that writers living today are developing exciting and innovative ways of responding to contemporary debates on authorship, race, gender, climate change, refugee rights and social justice, neo-colonialism, multiculturalism, literary celebrity and activism. We will reflect on how we engage with global contemporary literature now, and how we can best critique evolving forms of literature which offer us radical visions of both the future and the past in Australia and beyond.

Global Contemporary Literature: Australians and the World

This unit focuses on intersections between literary and visual narratives across a variety of mediums. Students will analyse traditional literary texts (novels, poetry, short story) alongside graphic novels, television series, films, and video games, to consider the multitude of ways in which visual forms borrow from the literary imagination. The unit will engage with research and scholarship focused on sequential art, serialised television, film studies, and new media theory, while exploring methods of adaptation and transmedia production. Key theoretical and conceptual issues such as narrative methods in poetry, drama, prose, and visual communication and literacy will be examined, along with the role literary and visual narratives play in the public discourse surrounding politics, gender, ethnicity, and the environment.

Literature and the Visual

This unit explores the rich and ever-changing category of &#39;the human&#39; as it features in some of the most influential writings in English up to and including those by Shakespeare. It considers how these writings responded to and shaped ideas of &#39;the human&#39; in their own times, while also examining how earlier literary representations of humanness relate to our modern assumptions about what it is to be human. Students will be exposed to a range of texts that offer insights into how the mind, the emotions, and the body were understood in medieval and early modern literature, and also study later texts that adapt these early ideas for modern use. The unit offers students an approach to early literature that will acquaint them with distant times and world views while also anchoring their studies of later literatures and shedding light on their understanding of the world today. This unit increases their literary-historical knowledge as well as their conceptual and technical vocabulary, to analyse and discuss literature from different periods and contexts with confidence. It also enables them to develop a sophisticated understanding of how cultures across time intersect with one another, and appreciate the vital function played by literature throughout the human story.

The Human Story: Heart, Mind and Body in Early Literature

Macquarie University Literature Short courses | Open Universities Australia

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