URBS 207 - Intermediate Creative Writing: Literary Non-Fiction

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as ENGL 207) Continued study and practice of various forms of prose and/or poetry.

Topic for 2015/16b: Writing About the City. The city as a liberated zone, open for the play of difference. The city as a mood. The city as style. The city as designed space, as a site of anonymity, or a meeting place for the masses. The city as a no-name development zone in the desert. The city as history. The city as Ground Zero. The city as the place whose whole point is to leave behind the dull death through boredom that is suburbia. The idea of the city as it is imagined in the half-light of the remote town or village. The city as a disaster. The city as civilization. These and other meanings are present in what we will read in class. This is a writing course. I am interested in your writing about cities, both familiar and unfamiliar, in a way that is original and revealing.

Reading packet will have excerpts from Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, Rem Koolhaas, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Vivian Gornick, Teju Cole, Edwidge Danticat, Don DeLillo, Amit Chaudhuri, David Foster Wallace, Suketu Mehta, Sukhdev Sandhu, Sean Wilsey, Andrew O’Hagan, Luc Sante, Lillian Ross, Svetlana Alexiyevich, and others. Mr. Kumar.

Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 or ENGL 206 .

Special permission is not required.