Spring 2023 Writing UN3225 section 001

LIFE STORIES

NF SEM - LIFE STORIES

Call Number 16921
Day & Time
Location
M 6:10pm-8:00pm
511 Kent Hall
Points 3
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Mark Rozzo
Type SEMINAR
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

In this seminar, we will target nonfiction that tells stories about lives: profiles, memoirs, and biographies. We will examine how the practice of this kind of nonfiction, and ideas about it, have evolved over the past 150 years. Along the way, we will ask questions about these nonfiction forms: How do reporters, memoirists, biographers, and critics make sense of their subjects? How do they create work as rich as the best novels and short stories? Can criticism explicate the inner life of a human subject? What roles do voice, point-of-view, character, dialogue, and plot—the traditional elements of fiction—play? Along the way, we’ll engage in issues of identity and race, memory and self, real persons and invented characters and we’ll get glimpses of such key publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. Some writers we will consider: Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, James Agee, John Hersey, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Gay Talese, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Malcolm, Robert Caro, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. The course regularly welcomes guest speakers.

Web Site Vergil
Department Writing
Enrollment 14 students (15 max) as of 9:07PM Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Subject Writing
Number UN3225
Section 001
Division Interfaculty
Campus Morningside
Fee $15 Creative Writing C
Section key 20231WRIT3225W001