READING FOR WRITERS FICTION: CRIME STORIES: This course examines crime stories, true and fictional. Storytelling has long focused on criminals and criminal acts. In this seminar students will read and respond critically as well as creatively to narratives featuring criminal protagonists. The psychological, social, and material characterization of criminals and, more broadly, of transgressive behavior will raise several questions: What is the criminal type? What draws writers to such figures? How do we come to understand social and moral norms? What is a crime?

READING FOR WRITERS FICTION: THE GLOBAL NOVEL: This course looks at contemporary novels that respond to a sense of interconnectedness between different places and time periods. All are global in taking place in more than one geographical location; all play with form, genre, and style; most have close relationships with other cultural forms such as cinema, visual arts, and poetry; and many raise questions about authorship, history, and politics. The authors studied in the course will include David Mitchell, Rachel Kushner, and Roberto Bolaño, and will include critical work by theorists and critics as well as reviews, interviews, essays, and profiles that provide a context for the works being read. Students will be required to lead discussions, write response papers, take short tests, and produce, as a final requirement, a 10-12 page literary essay, scholarly paper, or creative project.

RFW FICTION: DYSTOPIAN FICTION. This course explores diverse works of literature broadly construed as “dystopian.” Focusing mainly on novels, short stories, and movies, students will become acquainted with some of the early classics of the genre as well as a variety of contemporary texts across a broad spectrum of sub-genres, such as cyber-punk, historical, and/or existential dystopias, to name a few. In so doing, students will analyze the aesthetic, rhetorical, and ideological tropes at work in dystopian narratives, identify common plot structures, metaphors, symbols, and themes, and investigate what, if anything, constitutes such disparate works of fiction as a genre. Students will be required to write response papers, make oral presentations, and produce either a 10-page critical essay or a creative work, subject to the instructor’s approval.

Reading for Writers classes focus on a given literary style, genre, or aspect of craft through the consideration a representative selection of readings. Writing and discussion in these classes discovers the subtle techniques used by authors to achieve aesthetic and expressive goals. Rather than engaging primarily in interpretation, these courses illuminate the formal properties of a genre as defined by its practitioners: the bricks, mortar, and architecture of writing. The goal of this inquiry is to enrich our writing, therefore these insights are put into practice through short creative assignments. Since aesthetic and social philosophies often play a role in the development of literary styles, students will master the ideas that informed the works under consideration. The goal, as the name suggests, is for writers to obtain usable knowledge through careful reading and bring this knowledge to their own work. This course fulfills the Reading for Writers requirement.

RFW FICTION: LITERARY CRIME. In this course we will read a variety of texts that venture unconventional methods and forms of literary expression. Fiction writers such as Louise Erdrich, Patricia Highsmith, Denis Johnson, George Cain and others—will also be included. Students will respond critically and creatively to these readings as they investigate the relationship between form, style, and meaning. We will expand what is commonly considered a crime novel. There may be required textbooks or materials associated with this course. This course fulfills the Reading for Writers requirement.