Course Descriptions
Course Descriptions for MFA in Creative Writing - Nonfiction
Nonfiction Workshops:
These are studio-like courses, devoted to the production of student work. Taught by the core faculty in nonfiction, these repeatable workshops may have different foci, depending upon the instructors. Students will be expected to complement the writing and critiquing of their work with readings from classic and contemporary examples of the form.
Thesis Development Workshop:
This course will serve to encourage students to develop, focus and move on to completing work on their theses, depending upon what stage of their work they are in at the time they take the class.
Form and Theory of Nonfiction:
Examples: Short Forms: The Short Essay and The Prose Poem; Writing Hybrid Nonfiction; The Poetic Memoir; Aphorism and The Declarative Impulse in Nonfiction Writing; Forms of the Essay. This class is to a large extent a craft class in which students focus more intensely on specific issues and practices of their genre; but it also has the difference of incorporating a theoretical component as well, asking students to not only engage and think about craft and form, but to read and theorize it.
History of the Essay:
Seneca to Montaigne to Alice Meynell to Simone Weil etc ... a linear, disjunctive, or creative tour into the heart of the essay. The essay is, in many ways, the genre central to the study of literary nonfiction in the United States today. It is the form most taught in nonfiction workshops. This class will introduce students to some of the crucial voices in the history of the form.
Topics in Nonfiction:
In these classes, Nonfiction faculty will have the opportunity to expose students to a broad array of canonical and contemporary writers in a variety of nonfiction genres. This may be single, paired, or movement author classes (OULIPO’s work, or The Surrealist Essay), or classes that focus on a specific theme in nonfiction studies, or are devoted exclusively to exploring the critical necessity of aspects of nonfiction such as The Devotional Memoir (Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, etc) or The Journal and Letter as Cognate Forms of the Essay, as well as Autobiography and Memoir, Travel Literature, Traditional Biography and the “New” Biography, etc.
Electives:
Current Listings in Graduate Literature, which are mostly in poetry and new classes generated by the English faculty, which will be open in subject matter, giving graduate students a chance to sample more broadly based graduate curriculum in English studies.
Thesis Hours:
Thesis credits, under individual direction by faculty, towards completion of the thesis.
Nonfiction Workshops:
These are studio-like courses, devoted to the production of student work. Taught by the core faculty in nonfiction, these repeatable workshops may have different foci, depending upon the instructors. Students will be expected to complement the writing and critiquing of their work with readings from classic and contemporary examples of the form.
Thesis Development Workshop:
This course will serve to encourage students to develop, focus and move on to completing work on their theses, depending upon what stage of their work they are in at the time they take the class.
Form and Theory of Nonfiction:
Examples: Short Forms: The Short Essay and The Prose Poem; Writing Hybrid Nonfiction; The Poetic Memoir; Aphorism and The Declarative Impulse in Nonfiction Writing; Forms of the Essay. This class is to a large extent a craft class in which students focus more intensely on specific issues and practices of their genre; but it also has the difference of incorporating a theoretical component as well, asking students to not only engage and think about craft and form, but to read and theorize it.
History of the Essay:
Seneca to Montaigne to Alice Meynell to Simone Weil etc ... a linear, disjunctive, or creative tour into the heart of the essay. The essay is, in many ways, the genre central to the study of literary nonfiction in the United States today. It is the form most taught in nonfiction workshops. This class will introduce students to some of the crucial voices in the history of the form.
Topics in Nonfiction:
In these classes, Nonfiction faculty will have the opportunity to expose students to a broad array of canonical and contemporary writers in a variety of nonfiction genres. This may be single, paired, or movement author classes (OULIPO’s work, or The Surrealist Essay), or classes that focus on a specific theme in nonfiction studies, or are devoted exclusively to exploring the critical necessity of aspects of nonfiction such as The Devotional Memoir (Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, etc) or The Journal and Letter as Cognate Forms of the Essay, as well as Autobiography and Memoir, Travel Literature, Traditional Biography and the “New” Biography, etc.
Electives:
Current Listings in Graduate Literature, which are mostly in poetry and new classes generated by the English faculty, which will be open in subject matter, giving graduate students a chance to sample more broadly based graduate curriculum in English studies.
Thesis Hours:
Thesis credits, under individual direction by faculty, towards completion of the thesis.
