Creative Writing: Sample Courses

WP 600: Teaching Freshman Writing

4 Credits
This course is a survey and analysis of current composition theories and the study of teaching methods and assignment and syllabus preparation. Students regularly facilitate discussion in class on texts they read. They also observe and participate in ongoing freshman writing classes. At the end of the semester they produce a detailed critical appraisal of what they have read and discussed, along with a full prospectus, including a syllabus and assignment sequences, describing the course they may go on to teach. (Fall/Spring)

WP 605: Poetry Workshop

4 Credits
Course consists of in-class discussion of original poems with the aim of helping students learn strategies for generating and revising work. The workshop asks you to consider your work in light of the essential issues of the poet's craft, and to articulate your individual sensibilities as poets. Students in the course also read and discuss essays written by poets about poetry. These essays often generate discussion on issues in the student's own work. (Fall, Spring)

WP 606: Fiction Workshop

4 Credits
This course consists of in-class discussion of short stories written by students. The discussion aims in focusing on important factors in works of fiction, such as plot, characters, scene, structure, and dialogue. Workshops can have various focuses, such as writing a series of linked short stories. (Fall, Spring)

WP 613: Nonfiction Workshop: Forms of Nonfiction

4 Credits
In this workshop the student can submit and explore any sort of writing that falls in the nonfiction category. We will read and discuss the more common forms such as memoir and travel, or literary journalism, and perhaps historical narrative, but possibly also experiments with multiple points of view and dream narrative. (Fall, Spring)

LI 629: Novel into Film

4 Credits
A study of the process of adapting novels into films, with the aim of understanding the narrative conventions that govern each medium, and how words on the page translate into images on the screen. After spending the semester comparing novels with their film adaptations, students produce a final project of adapting a short story into a screenplay. (Spring)

LI 687: Topics in American Nonfiction: Travel Literature

4 Credits
Home and away, placement and displacement, location and dislocation are all themes that abound not only in contemporary literature in all its forms (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) but also in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. This class explores the theme of travel in literature across its historical terrain in order to understand not only the evolution of its forms but also its role in the construction of identities, familiar and foreign. (Semester varies)

Complete Course List...