Course schedule for the Creative Writing Graduate Certificate Program, Northwestern University School of Professional Studies - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

Course Schedule

LIT 492-0 : Special Topics: Inventing the American Novel

Description

With attention to some of the most important American writers, this course focuses on different forms of aesthetic experimentation that authors use to invent and reinvent the novel. In addition to analyzing the ways writers blur and reframe the boundaries of the novel by engaging other sub-genres of literature (including, for example, visual art, drama, and non-fiction prose), the course will investigate how themes of desire, history, and science are not only represented within narrative fiction but how they transform and render metamorphic the novel’s very form. Writers may include Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Samuel R. Delany, Toni Morrison, Don Delillo, Philip Roth, Mark Danielewski, and Alison Bechdel. (This course may count towards the American Literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)