Undergraduate

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will work on novel-length projects, completing two polished chapters and an outline of a full novel. We will explore how to structure a book that is both propulsive and character-driven, and how to create a compelling, unique narrative voice. Work by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Ha Jin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Akhil Sharma will help us consider the crucial relationship between characters and their contexts.

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, economical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we'll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale. By pairing readings with generative exercises in stylistics and constrained writing, we will build toward the translation of a short work of contemporary fiction into English. To participate in this workshop, students should be able to comfortably read a literary text in a foreign language.

Every writer of personal nonfiction knows that ultimately the story isn't about them: it's about something larger, perhaps universal, and their personal story is merely a means to that end. The key to this paradox is the synecdoche, or the part that stands for the whole. The universe in a grain of sand, the one story that tells many people's story. Anne Fadiman did it in_The Spirit Catches You and Then You Fall Down, her book about a Hmong immigrant in the United States. So did Joan Didion, in_Where I Was From; by telling the story of her family, she told the story of California, and by telling the story of California she told the story of the West and thus of America. Rian Malan did the same for South Africa in _My Traitor's Heart: by telling the story of his family he told the story of Apartheid, and thus of our segregated world. We'll look at how these and other writers locate the universal in their particulars, and discuss how to apply their example to your own writing._

This course aims to investigate, through a range of readings and writing exercises, various units of composition and the ways that they interact with each other in poems. We will study and imitate traditional formal approaches, such as the poetic foot, meter, caesuras, sprung rhythm, rhymed stanzas, and refrains. We also will study and imitate modernist and contemporary "units," such as the word (approached, for example, etymologically or connotatively), the free verse line, the variable foot, vers libre, serial form, the sentence (the "new" sentence, but also modulations of basic syntax), the paragraph, the page, and forms of call and response. This reading intensive course will draw from a selection of mostly modern and contemporary poetry, poetics, and criticism, most likely include major works by Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Stevens, Frost, Eliot, and Mallarm_, as well as Lyn Hejinian's My Life, Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, and James Tate's The Ghost Soldiers. Students will be expected to submit weekly technical exercises, complete several short critical responses, write a longer essay, and submit a final portfolio of revised material.

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing world-building, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing world-building is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from character dynamics, to setting, to social systems, and even the story or novel's conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of realism, historical fiction, or science fiction, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful world-building, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to not just how to do research, but how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works long and short fiction with an eye to its world-building, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.

This seminar looks primarily at fiction that blurs the line between imagination and experience. We'll look at highly memoiristic "autofiction" by the likes of Rachel Cusk, Renata Adler, and Hitomi Kanehara. Authors who have addressed the same subjects in both works of fiction and nonfiction, including Kathryn Harrison and James Baldwin, will also be of interest to us. As will nonfiction novels and/or highly novelistic journalism by George Orwell, Ryzard Kapuchinski, and Katherine Boo. Finally, we'll look at some radio and film works that deliberately and/or "ecstatically" smudge the truth, by Orson Welles, Banksy, and Werner Herzog. The focus of this course is very much on responding critically to each text and the larger question of genre. But there will also be opportunities for creative exercises. As such this course is particularly meant for Creative Writing majors in fiction but will appeal to any student interested in contemporary literature.

This fundamentals course will look at fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction to explore questions of perspective. We will examine questions of Point of View and Narrative Distance and how these affect a work and a reader's experience of that work. We will tackle the question of (un)reliability in narrators and speakers and how it serves the work. We will also explore the larger question of perspective in a writer. What does it mean to have a point of view as a writer, and why is it important? Readings will include primary texts as well as critical and fundamentals texts in each genre. Students will complete weekly reading responses, as well as creative exercises. A paper focusing on a specific element of perspective will be due at the end of the course.

We'll examine creative nonfiction from all of its sides beginning with the rhetorical precision of Aristotle and moving through the rigorous interior self-mapping of Montaigne, the looping denials of DeQuincey, and then into the modern modes courtesy of Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Arundhati Roy, and others. We'll write our own personal essays, workshop, and revise them.

This course addresses a range of techniques for writing poetry, making use of various compelling models drawn primarily from international modernisms on which to base our own writing. (Our textbook is Poems for the Millennium, edited by Rothenberg & Joris.) In this sense, the course will constitute an apprenticeship to modern poetry. We will consider the breadth of approaches currently available to poets, as well as the value of reading as a means of developing an understanding of how to write poetry. Each week students will bring poems for discussion, developing a portfolio of revised work by the quarter's end. Additionally, students will keep detailed notebooks, as well as developing critical skills for understanding poetry in the form of classroom discussion.

"The novel is exhaustive by nature," Steven Millhauser once wrote. "The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains." Through readings of published stories and workshops of students' own fiction, this course will explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We'll read established masters like Edgar Allen Poe, Raymond Carver, and Alice Munro as well as many newer literary voices, breaking down their stories, not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as roadmaps toward a greater awareness of what makes a short story operate. Over the course of the quarter, students will submit full-length stories for consideration in workshop, as well as other experimental efforts in short-short and micro fiction. Discussion will revolve around basic elements of story craft-point of view, pacing, language, etc.-in an effort to define the ways in which a narrative can be conveyed with economy, precision, and ultimately, power.