Open University E301 EMA
In the light of your study of both parts of E301, analyse and compare evidence for both literariness and creativity in a short ‘everyday’ English language text, and a short ‘literary’ English language text, both of which you have selected yourself. Your assignment should be 3000 words in length (+/–10%). Your reference list is not included in the word count. In addition, you should include an appendix containing your texts, which in total should be no longer than 500 words.
8 Guidance notes E301 illustrates a variety of ways of approaching creativity and literariness in English language texts, from those that focus on textual analysis to those that locate these within the broader sociocultural context and those that draw on cognitive theory. It also shows how creativity and literariness are related and are features not only of works of literature but of everyday spoken and written texts. The EMA will require you to demonstrate your awareness of the range of analytical possibilities that you have encountered in E301, and to select and apply those that you consider most appropriate to your chosen texts and/or the practices they represent. You should use at least two analytical techniques from E301 in your answer. You must use material from both parts of the module and you may include material from the set books. Rather than focusing narrowly on one particular type of analysis, you will need to apply and draw inferences from different concepts and techniques that you have studied in the module. For example, it will not be sufficient to look at your texts in terms only of metaphor or to analyse them only from a sociocultural point of view. In E301, it is expected that you engage in critical thinking and evaluation of the materials you have studied, so you will also be assessed in part on your ability to think through the strengths and limitations of the techniques that you use and to express this clearly in your writing.
8.1 Text selection the selection of appropriate texts for the EMA is a crucial part of the assignment and is your responsibility. You should bear in mind that your tutor is not required to read through your texts to assess their suitability. Your tutor cannot give or withhold permission for you to use a particular text, but you can ask for advice. Do remember, therefore, to make contact with your tutor at the planning and research stage, with a clear plan of the texts you intend to use and how you propose to approach the task.
Your EMA must reflect learning from E301 and must answer the assignment brief set. Reusing texts and/or other material from other modules, therefore, will not be to your advantage and you run a real risk of dealing with your texts through the lens of another module, whose subject-matter and theoretical techniques will differ considerably from E301’s.
5 Your selected texts for the EMA must reflect both parts of the module, i.e. one must be an ‘everyday’ text such as a conversation, newspaper article or advertisement, and the other a more conventionally ‘literary’ text. Importantly, the selected texts should be ones that you will be able to exploit analytically. We have left the choice of texts for the EMA deliberately broad, to allow you to follow up issues which are of particular interest to you or which you find striking in some way. You should, however, select texts that are brief enough for you to analyse within the scope of the EMA. A poem or advertisement, for example, might be just a few lines long, but would provide sufficient material for you to work with. If you want to discuss longer texts, such as a story or an extended dialogue, you may do so by selecting extracts for detailed analysis. You could, for example, talk about the narrative structure of a whole short story, and then examine in closer detail how plot is developed in a key paragraph. Similarly, you could discuss literacy practices by using a short text as an example to illustrate your general points. You might find it helpful to look at examples from the E301 book readings where writers build up an argument based on relatively brief extracts. Suitable texts could include, for example, a short section of a novel, a magazine article, an email, an anecdote recorded from a radio phone-in programme, a child’s bedtime story, a section of a hypertext narrative, or a recording of a brief conversation. The two texts should relate to one another (e.g. by topic) so as to enable a valid comparison. Your EMA is unlikely to be successful if the two texts are only tenuously related. Please note, however, that you must not reuse texts that you have previously analysed in your TMAs. The two texts that you select for analysis should together be no longer than 500 words (though they may be as short as you like). If you attempt longer texts, you will probably fail to do justice to both your analysis and your discussion.
The texts should be provided in an appendix within your EMA, which will not count towards the EMA word count (that is, you should write 3000 words for the EMA, plus up to 500 words more in the appendix). Please use a page break to separate your appendix texts from your main EMA (i.e. do not submit your work as separate documents).
8.2 Structure and content of the EMA There are no specific requirements for the structure of this assignment, which you can organise in any way that you think is appropriate. Keep in mind, though, that you will need to ensure a balance between analysis and theoretical discussion. Your assignment should include: some background information about the texts, and your reasons for choosing them a discussion of the theoretical background to your analysis, indicating what you understand by creativity and literariness, based on your study of E301 an analysis of your two texts (and/or the practices that they represent), focusing on aspects that you feel are most relevant to an understanding of their creative and literary qualities, based on your study of E301 an evaluation of the strengths and limitations of the approaches you have applied to your chosen texts (and/or practices) a reference list (not included in the word count) an appendix containing your texts (see Section 8.3).
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