ENGL 305 - Senior Creative Writing Seminar

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Senior Composition is a year-long creative writing course aimed at refining craft repertoire, developing a practice of rigorous revision, and producing a written project of style and substance, which may range from a collection of poetry, a sequence of stories, to a short novel. This class begins with the notion that revision and the revising mind are fundamental engines of literary composition. We read a number of texts, considering the question of how a writer “revises” a notion and/or tradition to create a centripetal force holding together a lengthier work or sequence. How might a constraint both generate diffuse work and adhere as a collection? How might a voice cinch together stories or a collection of verse? How can the fragment insinuate a coherent narrator, sensibility, or concept? Our class operates both as a workshop and a laboratory for critical-creative practice. We aim to articulate the raison d’etre of our work, and our intentions for how it will converse with the larger world of literary texts. David Means.

Permission of the instructor. Open to seniors in all departments. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.

Yearlong course 305-ENGL 306.

One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.

Course Format: CLS