ALL102 - From Horror to Romance: Genre and Its Revisions

Unit details

Year

2025 unit information

Enrolment modes:

Trimester 2: Burwood (Melbourne), Waurn Ponds (Geelong), Online, Community Based Delivery (CBD)*

Trimester 3: Online

Credit point(s):1
EFTSL value:0.125
Unit Chair:Trimester 2: Andrew Dean
Trimester 3: David McCooey
Cohort rule:Nil
Prerequisite:

Nil

Corequisite:Nil
Incompatible with: ALL402
Educator-facilitated (scheduled) learning activities - on-campus unit enrolment:

1 x 1-hour online lecture per week

1 x 2-hour on-campus seminar per week

Educator-facilitated (scheduled) learning activities - online unit enrolment:
1 x 1-hour online lecture per week (recordings provided)

1 x 2-hour online seminar per week

Typical study commitment:

Students will on average spend 150-hours over the teaching period undertaking the teaching, learning and assessment activities for this unit.

This will include educator guided online learning activities within the unit site.

Note:

*Community Based Delivery (CBD): only for students of the National Indigenous Knowledges, Education, Research and Innovation NIKERI Institute (located at the Waurn Ponds campus)

Content

This unit invites students to analyse popular genres such as horror, crime, autobiography, science fiction, and romance. Storytelling is a fundamental means through which humans make sense of the world, and genres provide common templates for story-telling and meaning-making. This unit will investigate the origins of genres and their revision across time, highlighting how genre stories are involved in cultural struggles over meaning. The unit will take a historical and comparative approach, but it will also introduce students to relevant interdisciplinary fields such as gender studies and media studies. Encompassing novels, films, poetry, and comics, set texts include Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Students will write their own piece of genre fiction, as well as undertaking a multimedia presentation and a critical essay exploring genre and its revisions.

Learning Outcomes

ULO These are the Unit Learning Outcomes (ULOs) for this unit. At the completion of this unit, successful students can:

Alignment to Deakin Graduate Learning Outcomes (GLOs)

ULO1

Discuss popular storytelling genres across different textual forms in relation to historical and literary contexts

GLO1: Discipline-specific knowledge and capabilities

ULO2

Use clear, well-structured forms of oral and written communication that reflects language appropriate to genre fiction and the critical writing that attends it

GLO2: Communication

ULO3

Employ a range of digital communication technologies to conduct literary research and to express your knowledge and judgements in a variety of forms

GLO3: Digital literacy

ULO4

Analyse, evaluate and synthesise knowledge and express your judgements and inquiries in a variety of forms and appropriate registers, with a growing understanding of literary studies conventions, to generate new, innovative and creative solutions

GLO5: Problem solving

ULO5

Develop and share knowledge by working in groups, through giving and receiving peer-feedback and applying outcomes from teamwork to improve learning outcomes via assessment

GLO6: Self-management

GLO7: Teamwork

ULO6

Critically analyse how different social and cultural contexts have an impact on literature and language, applying appropriate theories and methodologies

GLO4: Critical thinking

Assessment

Assessment Description Student output Grading and weighting
(% total mark for unit)
Indicative due week
Assessment 1: Presentation 800 words
or equivalent
20% Week 5
Assessment 2: Exercise 1600 words
or equivalent
40% Week 9
Assessment 3: Essay 1600 words
or equivalent
40% Week 11

The assessment due weeks provided may change. The Unit Chair will clarify the exact assessment requirements, including the due date, at the start of the teaching period.

Learning resource

The texts and reading list for ALL102 can be found via the University Library.

Note: Select the relevant trimester reading list. Please note that a future teaching period's reading list may not be available until a month prior to the start of that teaching period so you may wish to use the relevant trimester's prior year reading list as a guide only.

Unit Fee Information

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