ENGL10001: Modern and Contemporary Literature

[same as ENGL1002 - Lit. and Performance] 1x800 word close analysis (20%) 1x1200 word essay (30%) and 1x2000 word research essay (50%)

Although Lit. and Performance wasn't technically a prereq, this subject is essentially an extension of that course, picking up from the late 19th century and continuing till the early 2000's. The assessment was structured in the exact same way, and judging by the atmosphere in my tute, people who'd done Lit&Performance were a lot better off than those relying on the ModCon marking rubrics or explanations of assessment.
I found the first semester subject to be much better co-ordinated, even though I enjoyed more of the texts in ModCon.

Lectures: This was a mixed bag; some lectures (most notably Paul's Godot week) were incredibly engaging whereas others consisted of monotonous repetition of other people's readings of the text - as well as the bane of the English subjects: reading straight from powerpoint slides! I know this is a thing in other subjects too, but my god is it tedious to sit there listening to someone read someone else's opinion for 20 minutes when you could have just read it yourself. Because this latter style or presenting was more often the case, lecture attendance dwindled considerably to the point where we were sent slightly desperate sounding emails asking us all to come back
It was a shame because some of the lectures were really awesome

Yes, with screen capture but we got stuck in a dodgy lecture theatre and the recording quality was pretty awful most weeks. Lectures can definitely afford to be skipped, esp. for texts you're not writing on for assessment, but don't rely on the echo to pick up the slack. They also took ages to upload (sometimes a whole week after the actual lecture :/)

Various, and I've been told this changes from year to year. Each text is presented by a different person with Joe Hughes and Paul Rae (subject co-ordinators) being the only repeat performers.
Others included: Grace Moore, David McInnis, Stephanie Trigg, Tyne Sumner, Ken Gelder, and Denise Varney.
For the record, I've noticed the Theatre Studies Department and the lecturers teaching the plays were usually a lot better, but this is just my opinion.

No exam for this subject.

2.7 Out of 5

Course reader has all the necessary articles, but is MASSIVE! Like, I do a lot of reading-based subjects, but this one was bigger than all my other subjects combined. It's not like there was an abundance of material either, it was just poorly organised photocopying (ie. one article was about 30 pages of little A6 scans on a whole A4 sheet each, and wasn't double sided -.-) Hopefully they'll edit this down next year.
Most texts studied are available from Fishpond/Book Depository for less than $10. Don't buy from the Co-Op.

2x1 hour lectures and 1x1 hour tute per week

2014, Semester 2

H1