English 235 - Winter, 2014

Theory of Fiction

Class Information

Instructor: Corin, Lucy
CRN: 84142
Time: W 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies

Description

I approach the Theory of Fiction with the particular concerns of fiction writers; in fact, while the course is open to and appropriate for graduate students working in a variety of disciplines, each year I teach this course I structure it in a way I hope will speak to the particular writers we have in the MA program. In 2014 the design of the course will incorporate creative interactions with the formal analysis of aesthetically diverse fictions (some stories and two novels) using approaches to thinking about narrative from a variety of thinkers and writers, such as Aristotle, Henry James, Roland Barthes, Wayne Booth, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag. I’m structuring the course around an aesthetic of radical personal honesty and the cultivation of awareness: the fiction writer thinking about what she’s doing—- sort of as a singular isolated creature, but oddly in a group of writers in an academic setting in a larger culture of writing. The backbone is my own history with the project, sharing texts that actually defined/structured my thinking at various moments in my “studies”—sometimes after the fact (ie I’ve had an idea, then run across a text that articulates it, or discovers where it came from, or exposes it as suspect). These texts should create a starting place for students to develop a relationship with theorizing their own writing in order to make it better writing. Part of each class will be spent discussing readings, and part will be “playpen”—you doing things with words in a way that dramatizes or embodies what we’re thinking through. This year it also looks like we’ll be able to do a collaborative project with graduate students in the Art Department.

Texts:
Paula Fox: Desperate Characters (Norton)
Peter Handke: The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Course Reader of short fictions and articles