CRWR 22160/42160 Advanced Fiction Workshop: The Middle
What does plot need to sustain itself, to make itself, as Aristotle wrote, “a whole action”? For John Barth, a story’s middle “performs its double and contradictory functions of simultaneously fetching us to the climax and delaying our approach thereto.”
This workshop will explore the successive complications of conflict (its incremental perturbations, in Barth’s words). It will examine how writers arrive at or invent or otherwise architect their ‘middles.’ Our investigative focus will be on how accretion and cumulation are created through sequence. We will read stories and excerpts from writers such as Alice Walker, Roald Dahl, John Le Carré and Jorge Luis Borges.
If you wish to add this course during add/drop please email the instructor to be added to the waitlist.