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2021 unit information
Unit delivery will continue to be provided in line with the most current COVIDSafe health guidelines. This may include a mix of on-campus and online activities. To find out how you are impacted, please check your unit sites for announcements and updates. Unit sites open one week prior to the start of each Trimester/Semester.
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Last updated: 4 June 2021
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Students will on average spend 150 hours over the teaching period undertaking the teaching, learning and assessment activities for this unit.
Online independent and collaborative learning activities including one scheduled online seminar per week (recordings provided)
‘Life Writing’ designates a vast literary movement that has gathered momentum and popularity in the 21st century. While creative nonfiction and personal essay proliferate across digital publishing, contemporary experiments with hybridity in auto/biography, lyric essay, autofiction, graphic memoir, and multimedia destabilise traditional ideas of authorship, allowing exploration of fluid and diverse identities and contexts.
This unit situates life writing as a central mode of contemporary discourse. By studying texts from writers such as Maggie Nelson, Alison Bechdel, Rachel Cusk and others, students will explore formal innovation, and engage in current debates about the possibilities and provocations offered by contemporary Life Writing. Exercises and assessments undertaken throughout the unit will develop skills in combining creative and critical modes of reading and writing practice.
Articulate the cultural importance of life writing as a transnational creative practice, with particular attention to its hybrid and transmedia affordances
GLO2: Communication
GLO8: Global citizenship
ULO2
Identify ways in which formal innovations in life writing respond to contemporary developments in both publishing and sociocultural contexts
GLO1: Discipline specific
ULO3
Communicate knowledge about contemporary life writing using various critical and creative forms of writing, including forms appropriate to publication
GLO4: Critical thinking
ULO4
Interact in a constructive and professional manner to others by engaging in process meetings (including a peer-led process meeting), and by communicating appropriately
GLO7: Teamwork
These Unit Learning Outcomes are applicable for all teaching periods throughout the year
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.
The texts and reading list for the unit can be found on the University Library via the link below: ALL784 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.
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