ENGL 168S SC - Craft and Process in Contemporary American Prose

This course asks, What is writerly “craft”? and What can we learn – as writers and literary scholars – by paying attention to it? During the first half of the semester students investigate the literary history of “craft” as a term of art. They study how it came to feature so prominently in discourse on North American creative writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They examine how it became associated with particular literary styles, narrative structures, pedagogies, and notions of the creative process. And as they do so they consider what can be apprehended about texts, authors, and the publishing environment by attending to how individual writers have negotiated this term and the material conditions that gave rise to it. During the second half of the semester, this framework becomes the foundation for students’ research projects, and readings related to those projects form the basis for a syllabus tailored to those research interests. This course meets the senior seminar requirement for Scripps English majors (please see “Senior Requirement in the English major” in the catalog). Formerly ENGL197S

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