The Form and Process of Fiction

Course: ENGL 321
When: MTWRF, 3-6pm
Where: Taylor 206
Instructor: Paula Huston
Phone: 805-756-2294
Email: phuston@calpoly.edu

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Required Texts:

Kaplan, Charles. Criticism: Major Statements. Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics. Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1998.

Plato. The Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Erich Segal. New York: Bantam, 1986.

Plato. Republic. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 1993.

DON'T BUY THESE, BUT BEFORE CLASS BEGINS, TRACK THEM DOWN AND READ:

Aristophanes. The Clouds.

Goethe. The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms.

Homer. The Iliad. (Books 1, 2, 6, 22, 23)

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping.

ADDITIONAL WORTHWHILE READING, IF YOU ARE INTERESTED:

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Burke, Sean. Authorship From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader. Edinburgh University Press, 1995.

Hoffman, Michael and Patrick Murphy, eds. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1988.

Siebers, Tobin. The Ethics of Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

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Course Description:

This course about writers and writing asks two questions: Who are we and what do we do? The first focuses us on the kind of creatures writers are: how we think, how we create, how (or if) we make our artistic choices, how we connect with (or disconnect ourselves from) the wider society that surrounds us. The second has to do with our writing: what it is, exactly, that we produce, how we practice this discipline, what impact (if any) for good or ill our work has on this world, how we (and others) judge this work. Since Plato was the first Western artist/critic to take a serious look at these questions, we begin with him, and with his famous decision to banish the artists from his ideal society. We find out what Aristotle, his friendly but formidable opponent, had to say in response, and then we trace, as best we can within the limits of our three-week class, how this argument was continued during the next 2,400 years, with particular focus on the Romantic artist/critics and their twentieth-century counterparts. To do this, we'll be reading some critical theory, some essays by artists on the subject of art, some stories.

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Course Requirements:

1) Keep up with the reading.
2) Keep a reading journal that tracks the argument we are following.
3) Write several short response papers.
4) Give an oral presentation based on a long paper.
5) Write some fiction in the voice of a "persona."
6) Submit a portfolio of your work at the end of the summer session.

Poetry is capable of saving us.
- I.A. Richards

It is a deadly error to expect poetry to provide the supersubstantial nourishment of men.
- Jacques Maritain

A book [of prose fiction] at the time [it is written] is a good or a bad action.
- Jean-Paul Sartre

[Art] is civilization's single most significant device for learning what must be affirmed and what must denied.
- John Gardner

"What takes place" in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; "what happens" is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.
- Roland Barthes

I recall stories of how it once was at that mountain. The stories told me were like arrows. Elsewhere, hearing that mountain's name, I see it. Its name is like a picture. Stories go to work on you like arrows. Stories make you live right. Stories make you replace yourself.
- Benton Lewis, Apache

I wanted to be loved. That is even the deep-lying reason why I elected to write. When I was eighteen, I read The Mill on the Floss, and I dreamed that one day I would be loved the way I loved George Eliot then.
- Simone de Beauvoir

The act of getting a story or a novel published is an act of communication, an attempt to impose one's personality and beliefs on other people. If a writer accepts this responsibility, he must see himself . . . as an architect of the soul.
- Doris Lessing

Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture.
- Iris Murdoch