WEA courses

This course will explore the following texts: Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad; Short Stories by Kipling; The Siege of Krishnapur - JG Farrell; The Jewel in the Crown - Paul Scott, and The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje. The course will track the decline of Empire and the concomitant social and political uncertainty, the relationship between the colonial and the colonised Other, and develop themes relating to identity and the subjective nature of historical revision. There will be ample scope for discussion of at times difficult and controversial debates, and we will focus on the continuing relationship that exists between contemporary writers and later writers vis-a-vis issues of guilt and responsibility.

Welcome to our Esol Literature course. This Literature course is designed for ESOL Entry 1 students to introduce them to English literature. During the course, students will explore short stories, poems, and simple texts. The course focuses on basic comprehension, vocabulary building, and enjoyment of literature. Activities include reading aloud, group discussions, and creative responses. By the end of the course, students will have developed basic reading skills, expanded their vocabulary, and gained an appreciation for English literary works at an introductory level. This course is free for those who live in Southampton.

This course will help to develop and channel your writing ability, whether as a hobby or for publication. The emphasis is on individual development, with discussion of many aspects of writing. You will be invited to read your work and have feedback in a constructive and friendly setting. All forms are included; short stories, novels, plays, feature articles, poetry, autobiography and memoirs. We will have discussions on many aspects of writing and short exercises in class. All you need is an interest in developing and enjoying creative writing skills. For developers and beginners, who are welcome.

We’ll read a wide-range of short stories, memoir and novel extracts from diverse genres and authors. Each week we’ll be assigned two texts for close reading before the class. In class, the tutor will facilitate discussion around the techniques used and set a short writing exercise to practice a technique.

For the last century, crime fiction has been the most popular and lucrative of literary subgenres. But this commercial success belies a formal inventiveness and experiment, a constant drive to ‘make it new’, which has long been central to the genre. In this course we will read six crime novels (and three short stories) which chart the development of crime fiction. As well as considering each of these novels in isolation from week to week, we will also use the eight week course to ask ourselves: how has crime fiction changed through the years, and how has it remained the same? No previous knowledge of crime fiction is necessary – everybody is most welcome!

For Charles Dickens, writing and worrying went hand in hand. His books were knitted together out of his own anxieties and struggles. And yet, despite the weight of all these worries, his novels are never depressing. To read Dickens is to glimpse the possibilities of new life. We all probably intend to read Dickens ‘one day.’ We all know his characters from various films and TV adaptations, so perhaps the time has finally come to get stuck into a major work. On this eight-week course we will read ‘Little Dorrit.’ We will also study some of Dickens's essays, short stories, and letters. You may already be a Dickens enthusiast, or a complete newcomer to his work. Either way, I hope that you will join us to explore a writer whose books still have the power to move and enlighten us today.

The course presents all twenty-two “fables” of Robert Louis Stevenson, some as short as a few lines, others running to several pages, all of them challenging the reader with unexpected approaches to human life. We will read all the fables in six weeks, coming together on Zoom to share responses and questions, examine the literary merits and explore the ways the fables might enhance our understanding of ourselves and others we come into contact with day by day. There are podcasts for each fable to supplement our discussions, as well as space on the Canvas site to continue the Zoom discussions.

The course presents all twenty-two “fables” of Robert Louis Stevenson, some as short as a few lines, others running to several pages, all of them challenging the reader with unexpected approaches to human life. We will read all the fables in six weeks, coming together on Zoom to share responses and questions, examine the literary merits and explore the ways the fables might enhance our understanding of ourselves and others we come into contact with day by day. There are podcasts for each fable to supplement our discussions, as well as space on the Canvas site to continue the Zoom discussions.

This course will range from the beginning of the twentieth century until its end, and explore the wealth of short stories written during this period by women. We will encounter the usual suspects such as Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Doris Lessing, but the course will also assess the stories of less well-known writers, many of whom are worthy of much deeper study. These writers will emerge from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. As all our texts are by women, we will discover the importance of these voices, often disappeared in a patriarchal society, and recognise how vital these women’s voices were and are.

Chekhov found the nineteenth century novel form too ponderous: he wrote fiction, not novels, and everything he wrote, even in his teenage years, was rushed into publication. Through this single volume selection of his stories we explore the power of this meteoric phenomenon. NB the title of this course is a book title, and access to this book, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published by Penguin and Vintage, is a necessary starting-point. We shall divide the book into roughly equal sections and study them week by week. Mostly the stories will be read in preparation for the classes, and the central activity of the course will be our own appraisal, through close discussion, of the meaning and suggestion of the individual stories, both as this affects us and as it may have affected the original reader. Since the stories are chronologically arranged, this will allow us a broad focus on Chekhov's development as a writer of prose narrative.