FALL 2007 HONORS COURSES

HONR238Y Creative Writing: Concepts of Authorship in Literary History and Creative Writing
Tuesday/Thursday 2-3:15 p.m.
Dr. Sibbie O’Sullivan, Senior Lecturer in University Honors

In this course students will examine certain authors and their works while developing their own creative writing talents. By examining specific literary modes, we will see how concepts of authorship evolve in conjunction with the rise of the individual and certain developments in literary history, such as the birth of the novel and Modernism. Students will then write in response to these modes, exploring their own sense of authorship and individuality, discovering both the restrictions and possibilities of a given literary form.

The modes are the meditative mode; the epic mode; the novelist as Artist; the Romantic mode, or the writer as one who walks and sees; the nonfictional and autobiographical mode; the Modernist mode; and the critical mode, or is the author really dead?

The format of the course will be split between discussion of the readings and critique of student writing. For each discussion unit, students will turn in questions pertaining to the style and content of the assigned reading. In response to each specific mode, students will turn in a creative example to be critiqued in a workshop setting. These responses are not imitations so much as demonstrations of specific forms. For example, students will not write an epic, but they can write in the epic voice. Or, in response to the modern mode, students can discover the playful or absurd qualities of language. The assignment for the critical mode will be to write a literary manifesto expressing both a theory of art and authorship; this can be either a solo or a group project. The final creative project will be a portfolio of the student’s best and revised writing done throughout this course.

The reading list includes, but is not limited to the following authors and texts: John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions; Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals; selections from John Milton, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Charles Wright and Jorie Graham; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; stories by Ernest Hemingway; Wordworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads; Lia Purpura’s On Looking; Donald Hall’s “Poetry and Ambition”; Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; selections from The Education of Henry Adams; Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club; Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah; Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons; Samuel Becket’s Not I; selected essays by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, David Lodge and Stanley Plumly.

CORE: Literature (HL)