ENGL 143(F) On Beyond Criticism: New Ways to Write about Fiction (W)
Pretty much what you do in English classes is read stories or novels or poems, discuss them, and write essays about them. But critical essays are only one form of written response to a text, and in this class we will attempt other forms as well: you could imagine, for example, reading a story, having a thought or two (or three!) about it, and then using those thoughts to write another story entirely, whose implications form a critical interpretation of the first. Or you could imagine a piece of biographical/archival research, or an interview with an author, to expose some mid-way point between his or her intention, his or her actual accomplishment, and what you think. Or you could imagine writing a parody or an imitation, the success of which would depend on a complicated piece of analysis that goes entirely unsaid.
And you can probably see already why we won't be reading Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson for this class. Instead, we will look at a mixture of horror, science fiction, and fantasy writers-that is, authors whose stories exist not just as independent entities, but also as self-conscious members of a larger group of stories, conventions, and traditions. These conventions will be useful not only as a source of analysis, but also as organizing principles for our own fictional or meta-fictional responses. I have prepared a long list of writers, living and dead: Edgar Allen Poe, HP Lovecraft, Theodore Sturgeon, Terry Bisson, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delaney, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Gene Wolfe, Kelly Link, Lucius Shepard, Connie Willis. In the event, I will probably choose four names from this list.
Format: discussion/seminar. This is a writing-intensive seminar, and we will be writing intensively: numerous small sketches, and at least four longer essays, of at least five pages each.
No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 12 (expected: 12). Preference given to first-year students.
Hour: P. PARK