English 141

Book List

Basho: Back Roads to Far Towns; Brunvand, Jan: The Choking Doberman; Coultas, Brenda: The Marvelous Bones of Time; Lorde, Andre: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - A Biomythography; Ondaatje, Michael: Running in the Family

Other Readings and Media

Fiction packet including stories by William Kennedy, Jamaica Kincaid, Louise Erdrich, Eudora Welty, etc.

Description

We’ll study some of the ways that fiction writers, essayists, story-tellers, and poets have responded to the worlds that their cultures have built.  We’ll look at “high” forms and “low” forms and write in both and consider the distinctions.  We’ll read and think about and write urban legends and short fictions, family histories and haibuns, hybrid texts and ghost stories and ballads.  Students will work on individual projects and will also be asked to collaborate on group performances of creative work.  Projects incorporating material from non-written sources (graphic art, for example) will be encouraged; projects incorporating material from unpublished sources (folklore, family stories, etc.) will also be encouraged. 

This course is open to English majors only.