21L.000/21W734J  Writing About Literature

Students, scholars, bloggers, reviewers, fans, and book-group members write about literature, but so do authors themselves. Through the ways they engage with sources, sampling, remixing, and rethinking texts and genres, writers reflect on and inspire questions about the creative process. This course will allow students to observe their own habits as readers and writers; study the ways authors recombine materials to create new works; and develop tools for evaluating their own literary interpretations and arguments in workshops that involve free-writing, team presentations, group discussion, peer review, and extensive revision. We will examine Mary Shelley’s reshaping of Milton, German fairy tales, and her own husband’s poems to make Frankenstein ; Melville’s redesign of a travel narrative into a Gothic novella in Benito Cereno ; and Alison Bechdel’s rewriting of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in her graphic novel Fun Home . Showings of film versions of some of these works will allow us to project forward in the remixing process as well.