ENGL 365 - Selected Author

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Study of the work of a single author. The work may be read in relation to literary predecessors and descendants as well as in relation to the history of the writer’s critical and popular reception. This course alternates from year to year with ENGL 265.

Topic for 2015/16a: Fanny Howe. “I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction./The paper slept but the night in me woke up,” begins Fanny Howe’s poem, A Hymn. In this seminar we travel through the work of this American poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and activist, the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose, not only in hopes of waking the night in us, but also exploring what she calls “bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work. Bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics.” Mr. Joyce.

Topic for 2015/16a: J.D. Salinger and the Craft of Writing: This seminar focuses on Salinger’s development of the craft of writing, from his earliest, never re-published stories (available on course website), to his novel Catcher in the Rye and his later collections Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters, and Hapworth 16, 1924. A goal of the seminar is to blend students’ critical experience of reading with their own creative work, exploring use of dialogue, focus on detail, narrative voice and structure in both Salinger and in their own creative writing practice. Among topics the seminar explores are Salinger’s experience in the infantry in World War II as it shaped his writing and his creation of a postwar American family of prodigies, the Glass family. The final segment of the seminar explores Salinger’s influences on a generation of younger writers, such as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, Amy Bender, and the film maker Wes Anderson. Of special interest to creative writing students. Ms. Wallace.

One 2-hour period.