M.F.A.
Program
Degree Requirements
How to Apply
Teaching Fellowships
F.A.Q.s
Courses
Faculty
Reading Series
Kidd Tutorial
Newsletter/Press
Alumni
Supporting
the Program
Home
Creative Writing Program
2007-08 Course Descriptions
The University of Oregon Catalog and the current schedule of courses are both available online.
Fall 2007 | Winter 2008 | Spring 2008
Summer 2008 - Pending
CRWR 230: Introduction to Poetry Writing Introduction to forms and techniques of writing poetry. Prerequisite: WR 121 or equivalent. CRWR 240: Introduction to Fiction Writing Introduction to forms and techniques of writing fiction. Prerequisite: WR 121 or equivalent. CRWR 330: Intermediate Poetry Writing Intermediate-level study of poetry writing. Prerequisite: CRWR 230 or equivalent with a grade of mid-B or better. CRWR 340: Intermediate Fiction Writing Intermediate-level study of fiction writing. Prerequisite: CRWR 240 or equivalent with a grade of mid-B or better. CRWR 340: Intermediate Fiction Writing This course will introduce undergraduate students with experience in fiction, poetry, or journalism and/or strong composition skills and significant knowledge of a specific subject to the techniques of the emerging "fourth genre," Creative Nonfiction (CNF), and help them develop skills that would enable them to effectively present technical or academic subjects to a general audience. Readings will be short texts which introduce basic concepts (e. g. What is CNF, anyway?) or provide exemplars. Writing assignments will be a series of "studies" in which students will apply CNF concepts to subjects drawn from their own knowledge base. There will be three such assignments, each of which will
receive instructor comment and be revised at least once. The cataloged prerequisite is CRWR 244; however, students who have earned a B+ or better in any of the following may enroll by permission of instructor: CRWR 230; CRWR 240; CRWR 330; CRWR 340; J 361; J 371. Students who have passed WR 121 with a B+ or better and have a specific area of expertise may enroll with permission of instructor.CRWR 417: Kidd Tutorial I This is Section 1 of a three part intensive, yearlong study of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. This includes development, completion, and presentation of an individual line-of-inquiry project. Admission is by application only. Prerequisite: CRWR 330 or 336 or 340 with a grade of mid-B or better. CRWR 607: Fiction Seminar – Excursion in the Fourth Genre
This course invites MFA students and non-MFA graduate students to consider craft and ethical issues in the emerging "fourth genre" of Creative Nonfiction. Initially, we will read and discuss several theoretical texts which can be viewed as attempts to define the genre, and move on to a close reading of a number of exemplar texts composed by writers whose oeuvre includes successful works in both creative nonfiction and a traditional genre. During the term students will gradually create a lengthy composite essay using responses to theoretical and exemplar texts and materials of the student’s choosing (which may include original creative work) to develop or refine a definition of creative nonfiction and differentiating that genre from the student's primary genre of interest. CRWR 635: MFA Poetry Workshop Concentration on student writing in a workshop setting. Open only to MFA students admitted to the Creative Writing Program in Poetry. CRWR 645: MFA Fiction Workshop Concentration on student writing in a workshop setting. Open only to MFA students admitted to the Creative Writing Program in Fiction. CRWR 230: Introduction to Poetry Writing Introduction to forms and techniques of writing poetry. Prerequisite: WR 121 or equivalent. CRWR 240: Introduction to Fiction Writing Introduction to forms and techniques of writing fiction. Prerequisite: WR 121 or equivalent. CRWR 336: Intermediate Creative Writing – Literary Nonfiction This course will introduce undergraduate students with a background in writing fiction, poetry or journalism to the techniques of the emerging "fourth genre," Creative Nonfiction (CNF). Students will read and discuss short texts which introduce basic concepts (e. g. What is CNF, anyway?) or provide exemplars of the genre. Students will write and revise a series of "studies" in which they will attempt to apply these concepts. Selected assignments will be discussed in workshop format. The prerequisite is CRWR 244; however students who have earned a B+ or better in any of the following may enroll by permission of instructor: CRWR 230; CRWR 240; CRWR 330; CRWR 340; J 361; J 371. CRWR 340: Intermediate Fiction Writing Intermediate-level study of fiction writing. Prerequisite: CRWR 240 or equivalent with a grade of mid-B or better. CRWR 414: Literature for Fiction Writers – Models in Problem-Solving Creative writers tend to view literary texts not as objects of art to be admired and analyzed, but as exemplars of solutions to classic narrative problems. Writers want to take a text apart to see how it works. This course provides undergraduate with that opportunity. Students will learn and apply reading styles and analytical modes appropriate to literary production, as opposed to literary theory or cultural studies. The course is reading, not writing, intensive; this is not a workshop. Students will read three novels and several shorter texts and written assignments will include close-reading analyses, emulations of exemplar texts, and a final essay analyzing various approaches to a single fictional problem. Prerequisite is CRWR 340. Additional students may enroll by permission of instructor. CRWR 418: Kidd Tutorial II This is Section 2 of a three part intensive, yearlong study of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. This includes development, completion, and presentation of an individual line-of-inquiry project. Admission is by application only. Prerequisite: CRWR 417. CRWR 607: Poetry Seminar – Poetic Genres This is a craft seminar in which we’ll study various poetic genres as they have been practiced traditionally up to contemporary times. Genres to be considered may include the pastoral, eclogue, epistle, plain ode, prospect ode, dramatic monologue, elegy, ballad, collage, instructional, and itinerary. Poets we’ll read may include Milton, Pope, Neruda, Theocritus, Virgil, Coleridge, Keats, Bryant, Yeats, Robinson, Browning, Williams, Bishop, Hecht, James Wright, Hugo, Walcott, Charles Wright, Hass, Pinsky, Levis, Ai, Hirsch, Schnackenberg, and Digges. Readings, lecture, some discussion, and weekly writing assignments. CRWR 635: MFA Poetry Workshop Concentration on student writing in a workshop setting. Late in his life, W. B. Yeats wrote, “I only revise now in the interest of a more passionate syntax.” It is the most beautiful and useful term I know in poetry. In the compressed lyricism of poetry, syntax is a rich and crucial topic. Attentiveness to the syntax of our poems can make them more muscular, vibrant, and compelling for both eye and ear. Writing prompts and readings in the workshop will be various, but the discussion, even if sotto voce, will often figure on unearthing a keener and more nuanced handling of syntax. Open only to MFA students admitted to the Creative Writing Program in Poetry.
CRWR 645: MFA Fiction Workshop Concentration on student writing in a workshop setting. Open only to MFA students admitted to the Creative Writing Program in Fiction. CRWR 230: Introduction to Poetry Writing Introduction to forms and techniques of writing poetry. Prerequisite: WR 121 or equivalent. CRWR 240: Introduction to Fiction Writing Introduction to forms and techniques of writing fiction. Prerequisite: WR 121 or equivalent. CRWR 330: Intermediate Poetry Writing Intermediate-level study of poetry writing. Prerequisite: CRWR 230 or equivalent with a grade of mid-B or better. CRWR 419: Kidd Tutorial III This is the final section of a three part intensive, yearlong study of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. This includes development, completion, and presentation of an individual line-of-inquiry project. Admission is by application only. Prerequisite: CRWR 418. CRWR 435/535: Advanced Poetry Writing Although not strictly segmented, this course is part craft seminar, part workshop, and part directed projects. We’re going to be looking at poetry in extended forms--the long poem, the poetic sequence, and the collage—in order to acquaint ourselves with models for sustaining narrative, lyric, and discursive vision. Of particular interest will be poems written out of a sustained dramatic situation—imprisonment, suburban loneliness, a pilgrimage to homelands, grief, and soldiering during a time of war. Poets considered may include Barrett-Browning, Yeats, Frost, Pound, Williams, Roethke, Berryman, Bishop, Jarrell, Walcott, Momaday, Pinsky, Hass, Jarman, Schnackenberg, and Tretheway. Students will be asked to design a project, submit a brief “treatment” with sample sections for discussion, then later make a presentation of the project to the class. Readings, discussion, treatment, term project, and presentation. Prerequisite: CRWR 330 or equivalent with a grade of mid-B or better. CRWR 445/545: Advanced Fiction Writing Advanced workshop in the writing of fiction. Open to graduate students not admitted to the Creative Writing Program. Prerequisite: CRWR 330 or equivalent with a grade of mid-B or better. CRWR 607: Poetry Seminar - Stepping Into Character Since at least the 1950s, ostensibly self-revealing poems have dominated the poetry landscape. While the “I speaker” of the poem—that hapless persona of past poetics discourse—continues to zoom in and out of autobiography, countless characters are also entering the scene. This seminar takes up the question of who’s talking, particularly in books creating a fictionalized character or re-imagining a life. The reading list will include Tyehimba Jess’s Leadbelly, William Meredith’s Hazard the Painter, Berryman’s Dream Songs, the great dramatic monologues of Lowell and Bishop—as well as acknowledged first-person memoir poems, poets with variable “I’s” (such as, perhaps, Larry Levis). We’ll also consider the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, with his dozens of heteronyms and willful insistence on multiplicity. Conversation and writing assignments will be exploratory, attempting to take stock of persona, asking what “confessional” really means, whether a person in a poem is always hybrid, and how autobiography and invention share the stage. The underlying goal
will be to create greater space for (and deeper sensitivity to) the I and other subjects in our own poems.CRWR 607: Fiction Seminar – Narrative Design The “working thesis” of this seminar is that form or structure is of first and final importance to any work of fiction. Structure doesn’t necessarily mean plot structure (although form is often most obviously expressed by its arrangement of events); it may be something else that defines the form of a narrative: an arrangement of images or motifs. If you’ve ever diagramed a sentence, then you have a very basic understanding of this seminar’s primary goal: diagramming stories and novels so that you move beyond an intuitive grasp of form to the deliberate construction of form in your own work. (This will be, I assure you, much more fun than diagramming sentences.) We will study (and diagram) a number of short stories (using Madison Smart Bell’s text, Narrative Design, as a starting point) as well as at least two novels: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Haruf’s Plainsong. You will also “diagram” a classmate’s work of fiction and analyze then revise, in light of our term-long discussions, one of your own works of fiction. CRWR 635: MFA Poetry Workshop Concentration on student writing in a workshop setting. Open only to MFA students admitted to the Creative Writing
Program in Poetry.CRWR 645: MFA Fiction Workshop Concentration on student writing in a workshop setting. Open only to MFA students admitted to the Creative Writing Program in Fiction.
Creative
Writing Program
5243 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-5243
Phone: (541) 346-3944
Fax: (541) 346-0537
crwrweb@uoregon.edu