English 90015

Graduate Fiction Workshop

Steve Tomasula

Office Phone: 631-7647

Home Phone: 232-0933

E-mail: Tomasula.4@nd.edu

Office Hours: By appointment, 162 Decio

Course Description

This course is a chance for students in the graduate creative writing program to come together as writers/readers with the goal of helping each other develop as authors.  Emphasis will be on writing as a contemporary art form rather than on polishing prose for particular genres or markets: in this class we will be more attentive to those aspects of writing that cannot be learned from cookbook approaches to writing.  That is, emphasis will be placed on articulating an aesthetic and personal vision through the writing of fiction rather than on the craft of fiction and the well-crafted cuckoo clock the word implies even as we acknowledge that no art takes place in a vacuum, that the personal operates within the constraints of audience and economy, be it the economy of the multinational publishing conglomerate, the not-for-profit poetry press, or the personal journal.  It is hoped that students will articulate through their critiques of their classmate’s work, through the application of literature and theory read in other classes, but especially through the fiction they write in this class, an awareness of the contemporary moment in literary practice, a reason for doing whatever they are doing in their own fiction, and a practical way to bring the two together.

Texts
American Fiction: States of the Art. Special issue of Conjunctions No. 34 (2000): 1-448. 
PP/FF: An Anthology.  Peter Conners, ed. Starcherone Books, 2006.

Requirements

Three short fictions; presentation of two authors/stories from the anthologies; regular attendance and participation. 

 
 

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