Summer 2013

This creative writing course will be organized around using “research” to inform your creative writing.  In a workshop setting (where the writing community will read and comment upon written work), students will draft and polish a major creative project in any genre (or in a variety of genres).  A creative group project will also be required.  Students can expect class “field trips” (for research purposes), and to write smaller weekly assignments.  Readings will include Kyoko Mori’s “Yarn” and Eula Biss’ No Man’s Land, as well as readings of the students’ choosing.  Sending out work for publication will also be addressed (and encouraged!).

Hungarian-born scholar and Marxist critic Georg Lukacs argued for a fiction of “realism” that could inspire social transformation.  According to Astradur Eysteinsson, when Lukacs called for this “realism” in his studies of European literature of the early twentieth century, Lukacs was already anticipating some of the distinctions later critics have made between “aesthetic” modernism and the “political” avant-garde.

Throughout this term, we’ll consider the ways that what is “aesthetic” and what is “political” converge in the modern novel.  Modern writers sought to alter the appearance of commonplace “reality” as well as to alter the appearance of “realistic” literature.  The novels they wrote attempted to be new — new both in the worlds they portrayed and in the techniques the authors used to portray such worlds.  Given its refusal to conserve what was, and its commitment to radical newness, the modern novel delivered new visions and new experiences.

One goal of this course is to continue practicing facets of critical reading.  In exploring the ways texts are both aesthetically and politically challenging, we’ll become more aware of word function, of narrative style, and of technical device.  Course requirements seek to appeal to diverse learning styles, and graded assignments will include: a group presentation, a multimedia project, an analytic paper, several quizzes on character and passage identifications, and daily participation in class discussions.

Our readings may include novels by James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Andre Gide, Robert Musil, and Nella Larsen.