Graduate Courses - ENG 507: Graduate Workshop in Fiction
Prerequisites: English master’s degree candidates concentrating in Creative Writing. All others must submit a writing sample to obtain instructor permission
Recent offerings:
Spring 2011, Kress
Blanchot reminds us that writing is defiance. Very good, but what exactly does that mean? Is all writing defiance or only writing that earns the name writing? Is writing in and of itself defiance, or is it in defiance? And if it is in defiance, what is it in defiance of? Society? Art? Itself?
In an attempt to approach these—and other, similar—questions, this course will examine forms and theories of fiction writing through two tactics: your own writing and copious amounts of outside readings. That is to say, in addition to workshopping your own writing and performing numerous experiments in a variety of forms, voices, styles, and modes, you will be doing extensive reading of fiction and fiction writers writing about fiction as well as essays on narrative theory and the theory of fiction.
The basic question for the course: not so much what is a sentence? (although that is an essential question, necessarily part of our tactics) but rather what can a sentence do? In our approach to this question, we may start to glimpse what writing as defiance may itself do.
Note: those graduate students who wish to try their hands at writing are neither encouraged nor discouraged from taking 507. However, those graduate students who want to think about writing by trying their hands at writing are strongly encouraged to take 507 this spring.
Spring 2010, A. Irvine
Spring 2009, Kress