[Cwgrad-announcements] Course Description for The Art of the Novel

[Andrew Winer]

Dear MFAs,

Below is a description of my spring seminar.  Please feel free to email me with any questions.  I am looking forward to an engaging, enjoyable, and productive class with you.

Warmly,
Andrew


CRWT 252G - The Art of the Novel - Spring 2007

Andrew Winer



Description:

This course is alternately a reading seminar—in which vital and challenging examples of the novel as an art form are examined—and a generative "laboratory" for students who are currently writing, or intend to one day write, a novel. Over the course of ten weeks, we will model and practice a process useful to novel composition: reading, analyzing, and mining novels and other texts (including nonfiction, diary-journals, philosophy, theology, poetry, and music) and accreting our own ideas from which to draw as (or when) we write our own novels. By the end of the quarter, each student will come away with their own compendium (in the form a large word document) of ideas, notes, quotes, inspirations, and original passages to be used for their novel-yet-to-be-written or novel-in-progress. 

Each week, students will engage the assigned texts—firstly, by taking written note of structures, forms, passages, words, and ideas; secondly, by applying those notes to their own written projects (existent or in idea form); and thirdly, by exchanging with each other (both in direct classroom discussion and electronically on iLearn) the results of the first two undertakings—with the desired effect of increased articulation and quantity of ideas.

An important note about the texts: It is crucial that we all have the same translations. I have specified the translators, where appropriate. All of the texts, with the exception of Madame Bovary (the particular translation of which is out of print and must be purchased used on Amazon) and the essays and CDs that I will provide, have been ordered at the UCR Bookstore. 

Novels:

Jacques the Fatalist, Denis Diderot

Embers, Sándor Márai

The Sleepwalkers, Hermann Broch

Elizabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee 

The Castle: A new translation based on the restored text, Franz Kafka, Mark Harman (translator) (Schocken Books)

Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (translators)

Madame Bovary: Life in a Country Town, Gustave Flaubert, Gerard Hopkins (translator) (Oxford)

The Counterlife, Philip Roth

The Ambassadors, Henry James

Journals, Notes, Poems, Aphorisms:

The Secret Heart of the Clock, Elias Canetti

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil 

Voices, Antonio Porchia 

Anathemas and Admirations, E. M. Cioran 

Nonfiction:

The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera

The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, Milan Kundera 

Essays by Auden, Mann, Shestov, etc., provided by Andrew Winer

Music:

CD of assorted works, provided by Andrew Winer
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