Narrative Writing

Course: ENGL 608
When: Monday-Friday, July 17-August 4, 3-6pm
Where: Jerome Ritchfield Hall, room 203
Instructor: Katharine Haake
Phone: 818-677-3427
E-mail: kate.haake@csun.edu
Office: ST 827

Required Texts
Course Description
Course  Requirements

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Required Texts:

Blow-up and Other Stories     
Julio Cortazar

Accident: A Day's New  
Christa Wolf

Underworld    
Don Delillo

The Collected Works of Jane Bowles   
Jane Bowles

Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction   
Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shires.   
New York: Routledge, 1988.

                       
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Course Description

English 608 is a graduate seminar in narrative writing. This class will proceed as a workshop, with a twist. While most workshop classes are text-specific, aiming to "fix" each particular story under discussion, this one rejects the basic notion of repair. Not that the stories we write here can't or won't get "better," but that our business will more generally be to use the stories we have to explore and further understand the fundamental principles of fiction. In addition, we begin by acknowledging that the way we talk about stories is largely determined by the tacit assumptions we make about the nature and aim of fiction. This, of course, is inevitable, and often coercive. That is, what you think about what fiction is supposed to do and be like will form a grid you will impose upon the work of others. And while this is "natural," we will ask: is it fair? So, our goal in this workshop will be to step back first and look at how we are reading a particular story, why and to what ends. It will be to become more self-conscious about our critical apparatus so that we may better use it to understand our writing practice and our purpose. And it will be to create an informed community of writers that will encourage and support the individual writer writing. Finally, as we become more aware of our own reading strategies, we will begin to form the guiding questions that will sustain writing for us in the future.

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Course Requirements

20-30 pages prose narrative submitted for workshop

workshop response/reflection (this is writing about the class discussion of your own work)

seminar presentation and five page paper on peer writing

exercises:

week 1: "self-reflections and the scene of writing"

week 2: "burrowing"

week 3: "des rives" (to be done at csun)

Manifesto

Annotated bibliography: brief annotations, from a "writerly" perspective of your top ten books and assigned reading