ENGL 581 B: The Creative Writer as Critical Reader

Show and Tell

This course offers a non-theoretical, specimen-oriented study of narrative forms and prose styles, ancient to postmodern, with a high ratio of writing to reading. The design of the assignments will be "writing in response" to selected readings, both imitatively and analytically—emphasis on both—but not parodically. The overall ambitions are, first, to provide you with a broader vocabulary of formal choices as fiction writers and so a deeper understanding of fiction and creative nonfiction's expressive possibilities; and also to foster the development of a "bifocal" reading intelligence—intuitively apt and analytically sharp, hands-on and heads up—so that the artist and the critic might cohabit fruitfully in the same mind.

The invitation, in a class that requires the practice of forms through imitation, is to relax a bit. Everyone is trying something new; you are relieved of the obligation of fulfilling "your own voice" for ten weeks or so, with the aim of enriching that voice by the quarter's end. For that reason and others, I would love to have a few poets in the room.