English Literature Major: Creative Writing
As an English major with a specialization in creative writing, you’ll develop a broad range of skills, including: creativity, nuanced judgment, advanced reading, writing, and research skills, and critical self-reflection. You will have the opportunity to focus on a single medium, whether it be poetry, fiction, non-fiction, playwriting, or screenwriting.
sample courses:
This course's premise is that critical writing--about fiction, poetry, visual art, and culture generally--is a genre capable of as full a range of expression as any, as potentially artful as any; that at its best, criticism is art. The course will be part survey, part workshop. The workshop aspect will entail writing two different works within the genre, chosen from among the various types of critical writing we survey. For the survey aspect, we'll read book reviews to manifestos to book-length poetic-critical hybrids. The goal is not really compare-and-contrasting but rather considering each form within its rhetorical context and seeing what we can learn. We might look at how a single writer handles various subjects, and at how various writers handle a single subject. Writers likely to be read include Susan Howe, James Baldwin, Dave Hickey, Anne Carson, William Carlos Williams, Susan Sontag, James Wood, E. A. Poe, and Viktor Shklovsky. We will definitely read Roland Barthes.
This is an intermediate course in writing creative nonfiction, with a concentration on personal essay and memoir. It will build on elements of craft that were introduced in Creative Nonfiction Writing 1. Through directed reading and writing, we will examine fundamental questions and challenges of writing personal narrative.
our students have gone on to become:
Attorneys
Broadcasters
Copy Editors
Journalists
Literary Critics
Public Relations Specialists
Writers
Teachers/Professors
TV Producers
