Designed primarily for undergraduates interested in creative writing, this course examines seminal examples of short fiction by James Baldwin, Lucia Berlin, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, and other writers. Together we will explore the works in question from a craft perspective as a means to help students improve their own writing, whether analytical or creative.
Alongside the other texts, students will use Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer to help develop their skills as readers of literary fiction with an eye to emulating the skills of accomplished writers. This course is based on the assumption that writers, out of necessity, read literature differently from critics. While critics, scholars, and students of literature typically read to understand or interpret a text, writers read with an eye to emulation of craft. Writers, to learn from their successful predecessors, read meticulously--letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, line of dialogue by line of dialogue, page by page.