ENGCW 480

Honors Seminar: Creative Writing and Culture

This course is an honors seminar for students who wish to write fiction and to do so with an awareness of fiction's role in culture. Students will study the relationship between cultural events and literary conventions: connections, for example, between World War II and Hemingway's concise sentences, the birth of jazz and the language of the beatniks, Existentialism and Ralph Ellison's view of character, or the systematic repression of Native American languages and Joy Harjo's fluid syntax. While students become familiar with the history and cultural place of fiction, they will be writing and analyzing fiction of their own. Students will be encouraged both to "write from instinct"and to begin deliberately cultivating a style, identifying personal influences, and situating their writing in relation to major cultural events. This course may be taken only once for credit. Enrollment is limited to Honors Program students. Details about the Honors Program can be found in the front of the Catalog and on the CRC website.

Units: 3.0

Hours: 54 hours LEC