Writing Courses
Writing the Human Predicament
K30.1210 4 CR SSI: MW 1:30-4:30 Jones
This course questions the boundaries of traditional discourse and asks what it means to write about life. We will travel vicariously, metaphorically, and physically—seeking grist for our creative mill. Our primary goal is to find fascinating and mind-expanding sources of inspiration for writing prose in everyday life. We will explore dramatic lifestyles and scenes through biographical and autobiographical naratives, as well as critical exposition. Texts may include Micheal Eric Dyson’s Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur; J.T. LeRoy, Sarah; Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors; Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale, and videos such as Bird, Paris is Burning, and Resurrection.
Telling Truths: The Skill of Autobiography
K30.1316 4 CR SSI: MW 10:00-1:00 Weisser
How can one tell the “truth” about one’s life in narrative form? In this course we will explore the pleasures and dangers of telling stories about our lives through writing autobiographical essays, as well as through reading the autobiographies of selected others. Readings may include texts by David Sedaris, Susannah Kaysen, Zora Neal Hurston, Augusten Burroughs, and Alexandra Fuller. We will analyze the way in which self-narrative is constructed from the tangled materials of real life, how we read and understand the life writing of others, and how others’ stories can influence our own. Topics include memory, identity, voice, point of view, the body, and relationships.
The Journal as Genre
K30.1325 4 CR SSII: TR 1:30-4:30 Blythe
The genre of the personal journal balances on the borderline between fact and fiction, life and literature. To read a literary journal is to “read over the shoulder” of the journalist. To write (and read) our own journals is to actualize our interior dialogues, the conversations we have with ourselves. Our inner discourse has received the attention of such theorists as Lacan and Kristeva and has provided material for many literary interior monologues. In this course we use our journals to observe the psyche-as-text, to witness ourselves as subjects-in-progress. We look into the journals of such intriguing others as Woolf, Kafka, Nin, and Plath, reading them with companion pieces from the literary works of these authors in various genres, as well as Sartre’s journal-as-novel Nausea and Rilke’s fictional journal The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (which he subtitled “the journal of my other self”). Theoretical works may include such titles as Kristeva’s Black Sun, Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, and Derrida’s Otobiography. And, of course, we keep our own journals.
Reading and Writing the Short Story
K30.1540 4 CR SSII: MW 1:30-4:30 Foley
Joyce Carol Oates wrote that “every book, every story, every sentence we read is a part of our preparation for our own writing.” Accordingly, this course begins with a close and careful reading of short stories by a variety of writers from early masters like Chekhov to major mid-20th-century writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, and Raymond Carver, to acclaimed recent writers such as Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, and Alice Munro. Students keep journals of their responses to and analyses of these stories, and of their own story ideas. We then shift to workshop mode, devoting the rest of the session to close and careful readings of stories by the members of the class. Each student will complete, and revise, at least one 20-page story. Probable text: The Story and Its Writer (ed. Ann Charters, 6th, compact edition).
