Prose Fiction

READING
LIKE A WRITER explores fiction for literary technique and strategies,
looking closely at how sentences are made, what kind of window opens
with point-of-view, the suppression or foreshadowing of information for
suspense, pacing, misdirection, and dialogue vs. summary. From the
meta-fiction of Donald Barthelme, the more traditional stories of Mavis
Gallant, the pidgin and violence of Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s prose, and the
revolutionary allegories of Renaldo Arenas, we will study fiction from
the inside out. Students will be required to read six assigned novels,
and write three self-generated five page stories and three five page
essays.