ENGL 301-01, Intermediate Fiction Writing, Spring 2010

Abstract

A premise: point of view is the fundamental riddle of prose narrative. All other aspects of craft must submit to its dominance. Furthermore, one could argue that the deployment of point of view in fiction changed in uncharted ways over the last 150 years, moving from a reliable omniscience down into a more elastic third-person narration and unreliable first-person narration. In this workshop, you will work on your own fiction under the glare of our ongoing discussion of these point of view issues. We will read four books of fiction, both collections of stories and outright novels that each play with point of view in interesting ways. We will see how this POV play affects the telling of these stories and how you might use these techniques in your own work. We will also read some criticism by James Wood, who directly addresses three of these authors, to see how his arguments can inflect our own. This course is designed to be the middle station between your Introduction to Fiction Writing and your eventual, triumphant portfolio in Advanced Fiction, and the discussion and your fiction should reflect this increasing sophistication.