Creativity and the Mind Course Descriptor

Course Overview

This course explores relations between creativity and the mind, with a focus on creative practice and the experience of engaging with creative works, and on the links between these and cognition, affect, and actions.

Drawing on perspectives from disciplines such as Creative Writing, Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence, the course considers: how we can understand a mind that produces creative works, the representation of the mind (and minds) in creative works, and the effects of creativity on the mind.

Across the course, students engage with multiple theories and practices of creative expression and innovation, approaching them both as ways of discovering the world (including the self), and as ways of expressing and communicating with others.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and Understanding

Subject Specific Skills

Transferable and Employability Skills

Teaching and Learning

This course has a syllabus and online learning resources, including structured assignments to facilitate progress.

The teaching and learning activities for this course are:

• 40 scheduled hours (lectures, seminars, workshops, and scheduled assessment activities)
• 110 private study hours (with structured assignments)

Faculty hold regular ‘office hours’, which are opportunities for students to drop in or sign up to explore ideas, raise questions, or seek targeted guidance or feedback, individually or in small groups.

Students are to attend and participate in all the teaching and learning activities for this course and to manage their directed learning and private study.

Indicative total learning hours for this course: 150

Assessment

Both formative and summative assessment are used as part of this course, with purely formative opportunities typically embedded within interactive teaching sessions or office hours.

Summative Assessments

The Set Exercises will prompt students to apply canonical theories and techniques to explore relations between creativity and the mind and to reflect critically on the process of developing a creative artefact (e.g. application, poem, visualisation, prototype). Further information about the assessments can be found in the Course Syllabus.

Feedback

Students will receive formative and summative feedback in a variety of ways, written (e.g. marked up on drafts or through email) or oral (e.g. as part of interactive teaching sessions or in office hours).

Indicative Reading

Note: Comprehensive and current reading lists are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative reading list provided below is for a general guide and part of the approval/modification process only.

• Boden, Margaret (1990: 2004) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. Routledge.
• Collingwood, R. G. (1938) The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Gemes, Ken (2009) ‘Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation’. Journal of Nietzsche Studies.
• Goldsmith, Kenneth (2011) Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Kaufman, James C. and R. J. Sternberg eds. (2012) The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press.
• Freud, S. (2009) On Creativity and the Unconscious [collection of essays]. Harper Perenniel.

Indicative Topics

Note: Comprehensive and current topics for courses are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative topics provided below is used as a general guide and part of the approval/modification process only.

• Plato, Freud, and divisions in the mind
• Creation and expression
• Repression and discovery
• Writing as therapy and literature as mindful
• Artificial minds, embodied minds