Online Synchronous. (If safety permits, we will mutually schedule in-person gatherings for class, with snacks I provide.)
This course will offer graduate students several approaches as to the histories, methods, debates, and current innovations in the discipline of creative writing, with a special focus on contemporary issues of the past three decades. Students will gain familiarity with a range of contemporary creative writing approaches and ideas, including authorship, ethics, and pedagogies, and will begin to form their own research questions into the future of the discipline.
Tentative Assignments:
- An original final essay responding to, and proposing questions about, at least three texts. (10-15 pages).
- One in-depth presentations on one reading over the course of the semester.
- Participating in a method of workshop over the course of the semester
- An in-class research report on a theoretical creative writing text not on our syllabus
- A 3-minute talk at a departmental colloquium.
- Full attendance and active participation in class.
Possible Readings:
Adsit, Janelle, editor. Critical Creative Writing: Essential Readings on the Writer’s Craft. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
Aki, Kathleen Puahau. “Native Hawaiian Writers and Barriers to Visibility.” Mana: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 10.1 (1993): 128-142. Print.
Burroway, Janet et al. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. 8th edition. Longman, 2010.
Chabon, Michael. “What’s the Point?” Paris Review, September 2019
Chen, Ken, “Ethnicity as Counterculture,” N+1 Magazine
Cruz, Conchitina. THE (MIS)EDUCATION OF THE FILIPINO WRITER: The Tiempo Age and Institutionalized Creative Writing in the Philippines, Kritika Kultura 28 (2017): –034, Ateneo de Manila University
Lorca, Federico Garcia. “Play and Theory of the Duende.” In Search of Duende. Christopher Maurer, ed. New Directions Publishing Group, 1998. 48-62. Print.
Leahy, Anna. Power and Authority in the Creative Writing Classroom. (2005)
Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York : Vintage Books, 1993.
Essays on Laulima by Elaine Castillo, Alexander Chee, Carlos Bulosan, PEN America, Matthew Salessess, and more.