(This course satisfies MA writing theory and practice requirement)
This course will include conventional peer workshop, i.e., group discussion of student work, along with readings, brief lectures, exercises, handouts and significant individual consultation. The focus of the course will be literary technique: how to recognize it, how to learn it, how to apply it. A primary assumption of the course is that creative writing exists in dialogue with a larger literary world, that reading and writing proceed simultaneously, that literature, among other things, is an encyclopedia of technical data. The techniques addressed include: story and novel form, time control, point of view structure, scene construction, image patterning, dialogue, etc. Authors invoked throughout will include, among others, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Christa Wolf, Milan Kundera, Ralph Lombreglia, Viktor Shklovsky.
Booklist:
LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN by Alice Munro (paperback)
THEORY OF PROSE by Viktor Shklovsky (paperback Dalkey Archive Press)
LECTURES ON LITERATURE by Vladimir Nabokov (paperback)
THE QUEST FOR CHRISTA by Christa Wolf (paperback Farrar Straus & Giroux)
MAKE ME WORK by Ralph Lombreglia (paperback)