Popular Fiction and Digital Culture

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• The roles popular fiction play in shaping understandings of gender, literacy, and taste.
• The ways technology transform the consumption of popular fiction.

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Work independently and collaboratively towards specific project aims.
• Identify, discuss, and use digital methods and tools to study texts.

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Select and use appropriate theories and concepts to analyse literary genres.
• Use themes, theories and critical standpoints to analyse popular literature.

Indicative topics include:

Interdisciplinary approaches to studying literary genres and readers

Digital approaches to audience engagement and reader analytics

Digital methods for writing and reading popular fiction

Serialisation in a digital age: Mass production and technology

More than books: Franchises and adaptations

Curating taste: Platforms, hashtags, likes and reviews

Cultivating readers: Popular fiction and literacy

Social networks and online communities: Fans and Fanfiction

Out of the digital closet: Queering popular fiction

Diversifying popular fiction

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods

• Seminars

Learning activities

• Independent study, including reading and writing
• Group discussion
• Peer appraisal

Resources & Reading list

Textbooks

Jenkins, H. (2012). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture.. Routledge..

Kelley, B. (2021). Loving fanfiction: exploring the role of emotion in online fandoms.. Routledge..

Bode, K. (2008). Damaged men desiring women: Male bodies in contemporary Australian women's fiction..

Radway, J. A. (2009). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature.. Univ of North Carolina Press..

Hayles, N. K., & Pressman, J. (2013). Comparative textual media: Transforming the humanities in the postprint era.. U of Minnesota Press..

Johns, A. . (2019). Piracy: The intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates.. University of Chicago Press..

Assessment strategy

Students will complete two assessments during the course of the semester. These assessments will help them prepare a digital project, which they will analyse and critique in their third (final) assessment.

Multiple assessments will ensure students iteratively receive feedback on their project work, have opportunities to develop digital methods and skills, and receive support to manage group work.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal