Courses

ARTW B159 Introduction to Creative Writing

Spring 2023

This course is for students who wish to experiment with three genres of creative writing: short fiction, poetry and drama, and techniques specific to each of them. Priority will be given to interested first- and second-year students; additional spaces will be made available to upper-year students with little or no experience in creative writing. Students will write or revise work every week; roughly four weeks each will be devoted to short fiction, poetry, and drama. There will be individual conferences with the instructor to discuss their progress and interests. Half of class time will be spent discussing student work and half will be spent discussing syllabus readings.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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ARTW B165 The Writing Practice

Spring 2023

This course is designed for students who are either working towards or considering proposing an independent major in Creative Writing. Over the course of seven weeks, we will explore the many approaches to maintaining a writing practice and consider various elements of the writing process. We will learn about the back-end of submitting written work so that it may be published and will help match students with published works that might inform and enhance their individual projects. While focusing broadly on the writing life, we intend to build a community of writers on campus that may turn to each other to support and nurture their own practices.

Course does not meet an Approach

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ARTW B233 Writing for Radio and Podcast

Fall 2022

This course will explore the craft of writing for audio sources by focusing on the skills, process and techniques necessary to the generation and production of radio and podcast pieces. Using the information-gathering tools of a journalist, the analytical tools of an essayist and the technical tools of a prose writer, students will study contemporary and historical radio and podcasts in the interest of creating their own pieces. The central focus of the course will be weekly visits from current radio writers, producers and on-air personalities, including local and national NPR producers, commentators and reporters.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Creative Writing

Counts Toward Praxis Program

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ARTW B260 Writing Short Fiction I

Fall 2022, Spring 2023

An introduction to fiction writing, focusing on the short story. Students will consider fundamental elements of fiction and the relationship of narrative structure, style, and content, exploring these elements in their own work and in the assigned readings in order to develop an understanding of the range of possibilities open to the fiction writer. Weekly readings and writing exercises are designed to encourage students to explore the material and styles that most interest them, and to push their fiction to a new level of craft, so that over the semester their writing becomes clearer, more controlled, and more absorbing.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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ARTW B261 Writing Poetry I

Fall 2022

In this course students will learn to "read like a writer," while grappling with the work of accomplished poets, and providing substantive commentary on peers' work. Through diverse readings, students will examine craft strategies at work in both formal and free verse poems, such as diction, metaphor, imagery, lineation, metrical patterns, irony, and syntax. The course will cover shaping forms (such as elegy and pastoral) as well as given forms, such as the sonnet, ghazal, villanelle, etc. Students will discuss strategies for conveying the literal meaning of a poem (e.g., through sensory description and clear, compelling language) and the concealed meaning of a text (e.g., through metaphor, imagery, meter, irony, and shifts in diction and syntax). By the end of the course, students will have generated new material, shaped and revised draft poems, and significantly grown as writers by experimenting with various aspects of craft.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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ARTW B262 Playwriting I

Not offered 2022-23

An introduction to playwriting through a combination of reading assignments, writing exercises, discussions about craft and ultimately the creation of a complete one-act play. Students will work to discover and develop their own unique voices as they learn the technical aspects of the craft of playwriting. Short writing assignments will complement each reading assignment. The final assignment will be to write an original one-act play.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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ARTW B264 Long Form Journalism.

Not offered 2022-23

Students in this class will learn how to develop, report, write, edit and revise a variety of news stories, beginning with the basics of reporting and writing the news and advancing to longer-form stories, including personality profiles, news features and trend stories, and concluding with point-of-view journalism (columns, criticism, reported essays). The course will focus heavily on work published in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times. Several working journalists will participate as guest speakers to explain their craft. Students will write stories that will be posted on the class blog, the English House Gazette.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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ARTW B265 Creative Nonfiction

Fall 2022

This course will explore the literary expressions of nonfiction writing by focusing on the skills, process and craft techniques necessary to the generation and revision of literary nonfiction. Using the information-gathering tools of a journalist, the analytical tools of an essayist and the technical tools of a fiction writer, students will produce pieces that will incorporate both factual information and first person experience. Readings will include a broad group of writers ranging from E.B. White to Anne Carson, George Orwell to David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion to James Baldwin, among many others.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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ARTW B266 Screenwriting

Fall 2022

An introduction to screenwriting. Issues basic to the art of storytelling in film will be addressed and analyzed: character, dramatic structure, theme, setting, image, sound. The course focuses on the film adaptation; readings include novels, screenplays, and short stories. Films adapted from the readings will be screened. In the course of the semester, students will be expected to outline and complete the first act of an adapted screenplay of their own.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Film Studies

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ARTW B267 Sentence Workshop

Fall 2022

In our poetry courses we often spend ample time focusing on line-level writing. But too often we skimp on sentence-level writing in prose courses. This course aims to rectify that in slowing way down and focusing on a small quantity of prose, very closely. Students will gain new skills on the sentence level through reading some of our finest sentence writers, from Grace Paley and Toni Morrison to James Salter, Isaac Babel and Lydia Davis. We will workshop student work focusing solely on the prose itself, and we will read important works on language by Virginia Tufte, Brian Dillon and others.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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ARTW B360 Writing Short Fiction II

Not offered 2022-23

An exploration of approaches to writing short fiction designed to strengthen skills of experienced student writers as practitioners and critics. Requires writing at least five pages each week, workshopping student pieces, and reading texts ranging from realist stories to metafictional experiments and one-page stories to the short novella, to explore how writers can work within tight confines. Suggested Preparation: ARTW B260 or work demonstrating equivalent expertise in writing short fiction. Students without the ARTW B260, must submit a writing sample of 10-15 pages in length (prose fiction) to the Creative Writing Program during the preregistration period to be considered for this course.

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ARTW B361 Writing Poetry II

Spring 2023

This course assumes that reading and writing are inextricably linked, and that the only way to write intelligent and interesting poetry is to read as much of it as possible. Writing assignments will be closely connected to syllabus reading, including an anthology prepared by the instructor, and may include working in forms such as ekphrastic poems (i.e. poems about works of visual art or sculpture), dramatic monologues, prose poems, translations, imitations and parodies. Suggested Preparation: ARTW B261 or work demonstrating equivalent familiarity with the basic forms of poetry in English. For students without ARTW B261, a writing sample of 5-7 poems must be submitted to the instructor to be considered for this course.

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ARTW B362 Playwriting II

Not offered 2022-23

This course challenges students of playwriting to further develop their unique voices and improve their technical skills in writing for the stage. We will examine how great playwrights captivate a live audience through their mastery of character, story and structure. Through a combination of weekly reading assignments, playwriting exercises, theater explorations, artist-driven feedback, and discussions of craft, this class will facilitate each student's completion of an original, full-length play. Prerequisite: ARTW 262; or suitable experience in directing, acting or playwriting; or submission of a work sample of 10 pages of dialogue. All students must complete the Creative Writing preregistration questionnaire during preregistration to be considered for the course.

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ARTW B364 Longer Fictional Forms

Spring 2023

An advanced workshop for students with a strong background in fiction writing who want to write longer works: the long short story, novella and novel. Students will write intensively, and complete a long story, novel or novella (or combination thereof) totaling up to 20,000 words. Students will examine the craft of their work and of published prose. Suggested Preparation: ARTW B260 or proof of interest and ability. For students without ARTW B260, students must submit a writing sample of 10-15 pages in length (prose fiction) to the Creative Writing Program during the preregistration period to be considered for this course.

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ARTW B367 Visual Poetics

Spring 2023

Visual Poetics is an advanced poetry workshop in which we will discuss and write poetry that privileges the visual field as an essential element. The class will examine the development of experimental literary forms from visual to multimedia poetics. We will utilize avant-garde techniques and consider the different representations of the visual poetic from Russian futurism to cinéma verité to digital poetry practices. Observation and practice of the various visual mediums will allow critical thinking around topics of hybridity, collaboration, form and innovation in poetic craft.

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ARTW B403 Supervised Work

The Department may offer special topics based on faculty and student interests. Special Topic for Spring 2018: Students with approved portfolios, who have taken Poetry 1 and 2, will work with a member of the Creative Writing Program faculty on a semester-long chapbook project. As needed in the Spring semester students who have had a Creative Writing Major approved through the Independent Major Program will work with a member of the Creative Writing Program faculty on a semester-long 403 (Independent Study) as a final project their senior year. Highly qualified Creative Writing minors and concentrators may petition the program to complete an independent study, subject to the availability of faculty to supervise such projects.

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ARTW B425 Praxis III: Independent Study

Praxis III courses are Independent Study courses and are developed by individual students, in collaboration with faculty and field supervisors. A Praxis courses is distinguished by genuine collaboration with fieldsite organizations and by a dynamic process of reflection that incorporates lessons learned in the field into the classroom setting and applies theoretical understanding gained through classroom study to work done in the broader community.

Counts Toward Praxis Program

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ARTT B262 Playwriting I

Fall 2022

An introduction to playwriting through a combination of reading assignments, writing exercises, discussions about craft and ultimately the creation of a complete one-act play. Students will work to discover and develop their own unique voices as they learn the technical aspects of the craft of playwriting. Short writing assignments will complement each reading assignment. The final assignment will be to write an original one-act play.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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ARTT B362 Playwriting Adapting Mythic Cycles to the Stage

Spring 2023

In this course we are learning to write performance texts that transcend the mere personal/psychological, move through the cultural/aesthetic realms, and reach into the epic - to the mythic order. We begin by examining the origins of theater within the functional technology of ritual practice, and look at universal myth and ritual structures across cultures. At the same time, we are locating the vectors of our own creative impulses, and allowing them to hold sway over the process of writing for the stage, and we write ourselves into unknown territory. Students are encouraged to set aside received and preconceived notions of what it means to write plays, or be a writer, along with ideas of what a play is "supposed to" or "should" look like, in order to locate their own authentic ways of seeing and making. Students will be encouraged to connect more deeply their own subconscious and, in so doing, to tap into the collective unconscious as a source material. In other words, disarming the rational, the judgmental thinking that is rooted in a concept of a final product and empowering the chaotic, spatial, associative processes that put us in immediate formal contact with our direct experience, impressions and perceptions of reality. Emphasis on detail, texture and contiguity will be favored over the more widely accepted, reliable, yet sometimes limiting Aristotelian virtues of structure and continuity in the making of meaningful live performance. Readings will be tailored to fit the thinking and inquiry of the class. We will likely look at theoretical and creative writings of Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Toni Morrison, Marlon James, Leslie Marmon Silko, George Steiner, Mac Wellman, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, Graham Harvey, Mircea Eliade, Roland Barthes, as well as work that crosses into visual art realms and radical scientific thought from physicists David Bohm and F. David Peat. The course will be conducted in workshop fashion with strong emphasis on the tracking and documenting of process.

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CHEM B125 Writing Science

Not offered 2022-23

How does scientific research make its way out of the lab? Science translates from the laboratory and the field to journals written for the expert and is often translated again for more general audiences--appearing in venues such as Twitter, newspapers, essays, and memoirs. This course will explore the many ways in which science is translated. Students will experiment with different structures and genres, with weekly readings and writing exercises designed to help them be clearer, livelier writers of science. This is a half-semester, half-credit course.

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