Courses

273 The Literature of Fact

Students read and discuss a variety of nonfiction works—essays, memoir, speeches, reportage—which employ many of the narrative techniques of literary fiction while presenting factual information. Written assignments often pair readings by subject matter—Henry Thoreau's Walden and Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac or George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed—and ask students to show how writers in different eras approach the same topic.

274 The Short Story

In this course, students read, discuss, and write about short stories. The semester begins by students considering stories they already know—those acquired through the ear rather than the eye—to understand the basic elements of narration. In addition to stories from an anthology, students will also read collections of stories from individual authors to see how recurring themes are dealt with in different fashions. The first half of the semester is devoted to authors who have had a major impact on the evolution of the modern short story: Chekhov, Joyce, Hemingway, and Kafka. The second half of the semester concentrates on contemporary writers, and allows students to choose a particular writer from their anthology to focus upon.

411 Creative Writing Workshop – Fiction

Students begin the course with this question: What is a story? The rest of the semester is a search—by the class as a group and the students as individuals—for the answer to that question. Students are required to write a minimum of four stories over the semester, for a total of not less than 32 pages of prose. In addition, students read a great deal of contemporary fiction and keep a reading journal. In a literature class, a story is taken as a given, a self-contained world, and examined for its implications. In this class, students work backwards to examine how the story was constructed as a series of decisions by the author.

412 Seminar in Nonfiction Writing

The term "non-fiction" is not very helpful because it's a negative definition; it tells the kind of writing the class won't be doing, which is the hypothetical, the invented, the made-up. Non-fiction is bound by actuality; that is both its challenge and essential strength. This course combines the field work of journalism—interviewing, library research, first-hand observation— with the literary techniques of narrative fiction—characterization, scene-by-scene construction, and theme. Students read non-fiction works by writers such as Orwell, Capote, McPhee, and Didion; but most of the emphasis in the course is on writing. Students begin with the essay and then move on to write a profile, historical narrative, and finally two articles of at least ten pages each.