Spring 2000 Undergraduate Writing Program Course Descriptions
8W:100 Nonfiction Writing Sections
8W:100 Nonfiction Writing Sec 1-Lieberg
In this class, writings will vary from very short -- one word -- to a little longer and longer yet. Jumping off points will come from two books, both required, and will include writing about personal connections to family, adventures, humor, challenges, and more. As part of the process we'll explore ways to reflect on writing to improve self-editing.
8W:100 Nonfiction Writing Sec 2---Tyx
Through writing and reading personal essays, this course invites you to recognize and reflect on events, people, and places that have been significant in your life. As you practice shaping your experiences into writing that will speak to a broader audience, you will explore the variety of forms used in creative non fiction writing. To that end, this course encourages you to experiment with every level of writing--word, sentence, paragraph, essay. Come expecting to share your writing with other students and to develop the art of responding constructively to their work Course requirements include daily writing, four essays, and a class presentation. Readings will be drawn fi'om student work, as well as Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones' anthology of nonfiction writing, In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal.
8W:100 Nonfiction Writing Sec 3-McConnell
This course is designed to expose students to the some of the infinite variety of forms of literary non-fiction and to guide students in their own writing in areas such as autobiography and biography, history, literary journalism, travel writing, writing about culture, science writing, and nature writing. The goal of the course is to increase students' appreciation of the literature of fact and through this awareness to foster improvement in the students' own non-fiction writing. The reading assign.ments will combine classics in the genres with contemporary essays, in order to expose students both to what are considered great works in the field and to contemporary writing.
8W:100 Nonfiction Writing Secs 4 & 5--Jennings
We often look to creative nonfiction as a source of the narrative of personal discovery. Memoir, day book, journals, and a variety of other forms often speak to the voice of one who is in transition... perhaps even on a journey whose origins are unclear and whose destination is yet to be decided. The liminal condition implies a narrative of transition;
the story of experience which locates the author or his/her subject in a place that is in between the status of departure and arrival. Familiar liminal narratives, especially memoir, blend the experiential and cognitive narratives to describe a period of vulnerability. Travel, Rites of Passage, the arc between the Story of Experience and the Story of Thought, all of these allow the writer of nonfiction to claim and develop a transitional presence in his or her writing.
The emphasis of this course will be to examine four contemporary texts which explore this arc of transition and enrich their presentation through a variety of social, religious, political, ritualistic and historic contexts. Students will write a series of short exercises which explore ways to enrich personal narrative through development of contextual research, character study and metaphor. Students will also be asked to write, revise and refine at least two longer essays. This course will be a blend of critical reading and personal writing conducted in a workshop atmosphere.
8W:100 Sections 6 & 10-Abildskov
We all write to express ourselves. Unfortunately, desire alone is not enough. As Jeanette Winterston has said: The bad writer believes that sincerity of feeling will be enough, and pins her faith on the power of experience.
The true writer knows that feeling must give way to form. It is through the form, not in spite of it, or accidental to it, that the most powerful emotions are let loose over the greatest number of people In this course, we will work to improve our understanding of the way feeling gives way to form, emphasizing, through our discussions of the readings and experimentations on the page, the marriage of content to craft.
8W:100 Nonfiction Writing Sec 7-Nilsson
This writing course focuses on interview techniques and different ways of. writing compelling, artful and informative profiles for a variety of audiences. Class discussions, readings and writing exercises will focus on the interaction interviewer-interviewee, issues of genre, style, voice and other relevant issues. After an initial period of in-class interview and writing exercises and out-of-class interviews and writing assignments, each student will work on a more extensive project which will culminate in a final paper/essay. Class readings includes oral histories, literary journalism, magazine interviews, book-length biographies, essays that focus on portraiture, as well as portraiture in fiction. Students are encouraged to come to class with a specific project idea in mind or already in progress. This course is taught by Nilsson.
8W:100 Sec 8--Lauhon
Enrolling in this course means you'll be expected to take yourself seriously as a writer. A writer writes daily and submits work regularly, not only receiving and assessing
feedback, but talking with other writers about their work and about writing in general. You'll participate in small--and large---group workshops. You'll learn tips from a writing advice book of your own choosing. At the end if the semester, you'll perform your work for videoviewing, and you'll contribute two polished essays to our class collection. Our focus will be on producing nonfiction that is creative, personal, informed, and informative. Although you'll receive some prompts for topics, forms, and approaches, you'll be free to experiment with any kind of writing that meets our course guidelines.
8W: 100 Nonfiction Writing See 9-Coyne
In 08W: 100, we will focus on the craft of creative nonfiction by reading and discussing individual essays and at least one book length work. As we discuss these texts, we will study (and use in our writing) the strategic use of writing techniques and methods including dialogue, humor, description, irony, symbolism, metaphor, tone, etc... the main objective, of course, is to write. And write. And re-write. The readings, discussions, and writing assignments will be roughly divided into three general categories: place, people and personal experience.
Advanced Nonfiction Writing Courses
8W:120 Advanced Nonfiction Writing-Hussmann Prerequisite: 8W:100
This class is for advanced undergraduates who've taken basic nonfiction writing
(8W: 100) and want to take their work to a higher level but aren't quite ready for the undergrad nonfiction workshop. We'll operate largely as a workshop and each student will hand in two finished (that's fairly polished, not first draft) pieces of nonfiction over the course of the term plus one revision of either essay. The first week or two we'll read essays from the latest edition of Best American Essays to explore the forms and varieties of contemporary nonfiction. We'll read with an eye toward form and structure more than for thematic content. After that we'll move into the workshop format with two student essays discussed each class. Each student will respond in writing to each essay workshopped--this is an integral part of the workshop in which everyone gets involved with the process, not merely judges the product. And most importantly we'll learn to function as a small community of writers and readers who are willing to invest time in our own and others' work, who arewilling to respond thoughtfully and honestly, and who encourage rather than condemn risk-taking in writing and thinking.
8W:125 Freelance Reporting and Writing Sec 1,2,&3 (same as 019:125) Prerequisite: 019:115 or consent of instructor
The course acquaints students with the process of writing and marketing fleelance articles to magazines, newspapers and other publications, and provides an opportunity for students to develop articles and have them critiqued. Students develop story ideas, research periodical markets, write query letters, and write and revise several articles. A
fair amount of reading also is required-mainly examples of feature writing. Final grades are based on written work and class participation.
8W:130 Forms of Nonfiction Sec 1 -Levine
This course focuses on the literary essay and how it differs from other short prose forms, such as academic prose and the short story. We will consider the essay's obsession with style; its skepticism about knowledge; and its happy tendency to wander off the point it's making. Students will write 3-5 essays with different formal constraints and be expected to read widely within a self-chosen subgenre.
8W:130 Forms of Nonfiction Sec 2: Prose Style Imltation-Kupersmith
Students explore English prose style historically from the early modern period at the beginning of the 1500s to the present. Each week students are expected to write a short' paper in the style of the samples that are analyzed from the period and the writers assigned. The course is intended for advanced writers with a keen interest in prose style as a literary and cultural artifact. All reading materials are furnished by the instructor.
8W:130 Forms of Nonfiction Sec 3: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Writing but Were Afraid to Ask: From Op-Ed to the One-Act Play-Simmons
Several centuries ago, when I was a teaching assistant for the Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn at UC Berkeley, we taught a class called English 141, "Modes of Writing." It could have been called "Modes of a Free-for-All Designed to See What You're Best At," but that was too clunky. In this course, which had around 60 students, we taught playwriting, poetry, and the short story. Though a little chaotic at times, it was a huge success: people who'd never written plays before began to study playwriting seriously, while people who'd thought of themselves as poets turned out to be fiction writers. The only genre not represented in the course was the essay.
In this course, I'd like to take a similar approach to the Berkeley class, but with the essay at the center. The idea here is that many techniques of other genres--plays, poetry, fiction--are applicable to good essay writing; you need to know how to write a functional dialogue, for example, or how to set a scene or to move from narration to meditation, in order to be a good essayist. My hope is that, as you study and practice other forms of writing, you'll find yourselves improving as nonfiction writers.
We'll start this class with readings of newspaper-style opinion pieces and some other forms of literary journalism; we'll then move to short stories, poems, some one-act or two-act plays, and one or two novels. Assignments include one opinion piece or editorial, one brief portrait of a friend or a stranger in a journalistic format, one poem or short story, one one-act play, and two essays one 3-4 pages, the other 8-10 pages--in which you try clearly to incorporate some literary techniques from other genres into your nonfiction writing.
8W:130 Forms of Nonfiction Sec 4: Writing for the Arts--Bunke
This course provides practical experience in writing about arts performance. In addition to instruction in writing reviews of performance events, writing to promote the arts and writing of feature articles based on interviews with performers, directors, and creators is emphasized. Class sessions are held during six weeks of the semester on a concentrated schedule. Students are required to attend a modest number of local performance events. The course is taught by visiting instructor, Joan Bunke, who was for several decades the primary writer for the Des Moines Register on music, theater, dance, film, and books.
8W:135 Forms of the Essay: Writing About Education-DiPardo
This is a course for anyone who is interested in educational issues, who wants to write, and who is willing to engage in thoughtful conversation about bow schools, teachers, and learners are represented on the page.
Over the semester we'll write four essays-about our experiences as students, about our observations in schools, about educational issues, and about our dreams for the future. We'll respond to one another's drafts, attending both to our work as writers and to our thinking about educational concerns. We'll also read some provocative books about teaching and learning in diverse settings, both in and out of sehoolso
8W:141 Approaches to Teaching Writing--Sunstein (same as 07S: 155)
8W:145 Multimedia Writing Sec 1: Radio Essays-Porter
Radio Essays is a multimedia writing class in which students work closely with electronic media and audio production tools in composing original texts intended for local broadcast on the web and/or on campus radio stations. In producing an essay in electronic form, students will learn how to record interviews, produce their own voiceovers, capture non-
. verbal sounds and music and integrate these various audio-based media with spoken texts. In the course of the semester, students will compose radio essays in five different genres: memoir, oral history, travelogue, documentary, and audio diary. In addition to studying traditional nonfiction writing practices, students will also complete smaller projects on voiceover techniques, interviewing methods, conducting oral history, and editing audio on a computer.
8W:145 Multimedia Writing Sec 2: Honors Seminar in Literary and Electronic Magazine Publishing--Httssmann (special permission number required from director of undergraduate honors program)
This course will explore both the literary and electronic magazine cultures, drawing comparisons, noting differences, examining audiences, and arguing the apparent philosophies, strengths and weaknesses of each form of literary communication. We'll also be learning how to edit the English Honors electronic magazine Smack.
Students will have hands-on experience in all phases of production: soliciting and selecting manuscripts, copy-editing and proofreading, and using software programs to put photos and text on the web. The only texts required are for each student to subscribe to a literary magazine of his or her choice and be prepared to write a profile at the end of the semester.
8W: 155 Undergraduate Nonfiction Workshop--Levine
An intensive writing workshop for those who wish to immerse themselves in a semester of writing and revision. Students take a piece of writing as far as possible on their own-to achieve what feels like a stable, fully amplified, stylistically polished text-and then submit it to the class for discussion. You'll produce a type-written letter of assessment for each essay you read (which means, you'll get 10 type-written letters of assessment for each essay you write). There is also a take-home exam with short-answer questions. There are no letter grades until the end of the semester. Final assessment will be based on a portfolio. This class is small and intense; registration by permission only. Interested students should submit 5-10 pages of prose to Sara Levine by November 22, and include their name, address, telephone, and email. If you're selected for the class, you'll be notified by November 29 and given a special registration number.
8W:196 Nonfiction Writing Internship
8W:199 Undergraduate Project in Nonfiction Writing
010:014 Rhetorical Praxis: Rhetoric of the Personal Essay
Rhetorical Praxis will provide students an opportunity to build on their understanding of rhetoric, as we focus on the personal essay and the work of essayists such as Joan Didion, James Baldwin, and George Orwell. As we study the personal essay, examining ways in which context and motivation influence the writers' rhetorical strategies, we will try to raise and address such questions as: what place does the personal voice have in the public domain? What are the boundaries between the personal and the public? How are they established, and by whom? What limits and possibilities does the personal essay have for public advocacy? The course will call for weekly writing and workshopping, critical reading discussions, and other analytical exercises. This course is taught by Knight.