Spring 2007 Courses

English 405-01: Advanced Writing Workshop (Burt)

T/TH 2:45-4:15pm, Old Main 011

This course should help students with extended projects in almost any genre, or in several genres at once, amplify, refine, extend, revise, re-imagine or complete those works. Part of the class, of course, will be a workshop, with students responding to one another's writings in progress. Another part will involve reading and analyzing book-length works—poetry, prose fiction, nonfiction, and unclassifiable hybrids of all three—in ways that might help us write our own. This class is for relatively experienced Mac writers who take reading as seriously as they take writing, and who enjoy it just as much. We'll likely be reading works by (among others) Ben Marcus; Lorrie Moore; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Jeff VanderMeer; and John Edgar Wideman.

I want to encourage writing in many forms and modes (with one exception): though you're welcome to work on realistic narrative fiction, or on memoir, I hope we'll also see, in our workshop, "experimental" or elliptical fiction, poetic sequences in verse or prose, science fiction and other non-realist modes, comics and other verbal-visual hybrids, and argumentative or expository writings for nonacademic audiences. (The exception is film: I will not be able to help you complete a screenplay, and you should look elsewhere if that's all you want to do.)

Spring 2007 Course Listings