The course also explores how social context has historically shaped these comic genres and how the technological advances of the twentieth century have caused the multi-media culture to produce such a wide variety of comic expression. The course will also include celebrity guest speakers. Voltaire s Candide, Pirandello s Six Characters in Search of an Author, and films such as Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, and Sullivan s Travels. This course provides students interested in writing fiction an opportunity to explore various forms of fiction short story, novella, and novel in a workshop environment. The main objective of the course is to help students develop their individual styles and voices and to make them aware of the various techniques available to them.
Emphasis is on characterization, structure, and dramatization.
Students present their own fiction, respond to the provide a supportive audience that listens and responds to the work of each member. Storytelling is a craft that can be mastered. In this workshop we will explore the nuances of style, tone, voice, plot, genre and form. From the seed of an idea to a polished manuscript ready for publication, the experiences of both aspiring and successful writers are, by turns, painful, wonderful, exciting, terrifying, mystifying, confusing and, above all, exhilarating. In this workshop poets will focus on the foundations and intricate dynamics of poetry as a writer s process and on poetry as a two-headed tradition, having an oral tradition and a written tradition.