|
|
The Story about the Story
Syllabus
The idea for The Story About the Story sparked in 2004 when Hallman taught a course at the University of Pennsylvania called “Writing About Reading.” The class invited students to read and emulate the writer’s model for executing critical actions about specific authors or texts. Those who are interested in adopting The Story About the Story as a text are welcome to read, borrow, or cannibalize the class’s syllabus:
Writing About Reading
Texts:
Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage
Alain De Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
A variety of essays from Virginia Woolf, Cynthia Ozick, Vladimir Nabokov, Dagoberto Gilb, Fred Setterberg, Robert Hass, James Wood, Sven Birkerts, and many others.
Introduction and Goals:
What draws us to a work of art is invariably a function of fancy. This class explores how personality, context, preference, and whim—all things subjective—influence our perception of literature and become potentially interesting avenues of inquiry in their own right. Creative nonfiction collides with criticism as we explore writers executing their own odd form of critical response—highly personal, yet respectful of the intent of the artist. We will read writers’ responses to the work of J.D. Salinger, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, and others in preparation for producing our own essays about stories or poems which have moved us or proved important at stages of our lives. The essays we write will in turn become the text for a course that allows us to bring creativity to our response to literature.
Students will be required to write one major essay for this class (based on four shorter assignments: see below). A large portion of your grade will be determined by the effort you put into this paper and a subsequent rewrite of it. Students will choose a book that is particularly interesting or fascinating to them, and over the course of the semester each student will conduct an investigation, reading related material, looking for what the author has said about their work, etc. What you will produce will be the story of your relationship with that book or author. It will be as much about the book as about the act of reading, what the place of literature is in the world, and undoubtedly it will be about you, too. Completed essays will run around 5,000 words.
Class will be broken into two distinct sections. In the first, we’ll look at two books and a variety of essays that are in keeping with what I hope you’ll be producing. These readings should give you a good idea of the variety and the creativity that can be brought to bear on the subject of reading. From the readings, you’ll hopefully be able to devise a personal strategy for making narrative sense of all the research you’ve been doing. As we read examples of this kind of work, you’ll complete several short assignments that will prepare you for your own essays.
In the second portion of class we’ll read one another’s essays. We’ll talk about one another’s work, what we found, what we tried, and generally about where literature has taken us, and what our investigations uncovered.
Assignments
Periodically through the semester, you’ll be required to hand in four short papers in preparation of the longer project. These four assignments should run 3-4 pages each, on topics as follows:
- An overview of the life of your author, based on biographical material you uncover about them.
- A synopsis of your book.
- An overview of whatever criticism you can find about the book you’ve chosen.
- A short meditation on the role of literature, executed in the manner of our readings.
Once you have completed these assignments, you’ll use them as inspiration and building blocks of a single coherent narrative which the class will then meet and discuss in a workshop format. Each student paper will be “workshopped” by the rest of the class for a full class session. A revision of each paper based on workshop critique will be due at the end of the semester.
|
|
