What I Want You to Forget About Fiction
Syllabus & Calendar

Readings Due Before Class:
--Purchase Texts and materials!

Assignments due before class:
1. Be a committed, postmodern-ish writer!

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Truth and Fiction (John Barth)--mining "the real," but also being open to creating discomfort and magic.
2. Quick intro to Barthes' Texts of Bliss vs. Text of Pleasure.
3. G. Stein's Tender Buttons as Text of Bliss.
4. Writing exercises are risk-free and open-ended...
5. Writerly observations...
6. Being asked to Believe (Winterson's Art and Lies)...
7. Writing from your own margins/Otherness...

Writing from the Margins
Readings Due Before Class:
--Read Syllabus--come with questions
--Best '99: Shange Introduction; Shepard poem; Bottoms essay.
--Passion: through p. 20
--Barthes: pp. 3-14 (culture vs. it's destruction)

Assignments due before class:
1. Reading Reaction #1: do a 1-2 page double-spaced writerly reaction to one of the readings above.
2. Bring Journal--wherein you have written an interesting and writerly observation, description, eavesdropping, character sketch, dialogue fragment etc.
3. Bring something to save your in-class writing in/on.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. The book of you...
3. Freytag's triangle, in media res, and elements.
4. Tension and closure.
5. Making writerly reactions.
6. A few sample reading reactions.
7. Winterson's telling you stories.  Trust her.
9. Passion Reviews...
10. Freytag's Triangle

Postmodernism and Poststructuralism/New Historicism
Readings Due Before Class:
--Best '99: Kijner story, and poems through p. 25 (Campo, Gaspar, Cafagna, Mora)
--Passion: through p. 45
--Handout (hard copy): Gass "Ontology of the Sentence".
--Handout: Prose vocabulary (writerly things to notice).
--Handout: Commenting on fiction.
--Handout: Texts of Bliss

Assignments due before class:
1. Exercise #1: Early draft of The Book of [You] (you will never write): see my ex. 1 prompt for ideas, and if you want you can also look at my longer draft.  As always, these can be just a quick start or a fuller story.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Commenting on stories, and more on writerly observations.
3. More on Texts of Bliss, and Jouissance and Edge
4. Johnson's creative writing boot camp
5. Lee's draft
6. Why we do exercises, and why we read stories...
7. Flash fiction as genre
8. Gass vs Plato: creating (not re-creating, not mirroring) worlds; his juissance love of language; 

Minimalism, Voice, and More Pomo Metafiction
Readings Due Before Class:
--Best '99: Morgan story.
--Barthes: pp. 14-22 (erotics and social language).
--Winterson through p. 65
--Handout: Burnham's "Subtotals"
--Handout (hard copy): Carver "Viewfinder"; Cisneros "Miracles"; Camoin "Sewers"

Assignments due before class:
1. Bring Journal Daily!!
2. Exercise #2: allow yourself to be mentored by one of the stories we've read (not unlike starting with Bottoms' first line, but more so): write minimalism like Carver; write a *found* story in fragments like Cisneros; write about a secret underground place under a "normal" city or town like Camoin; write your own "Subtotals" story; or try some revisionist history.  As always, these can be just a quick start or a fuller story.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
4. W. Gass: words are already worlds; we who are liars; the figurative now becomes literal for me (give me a hand, will you?)...
5. Revisionist History: Winterson on manipulating (creating) history--the facts are not sacred (and they aren't plentiful).

Poststructural Games, and Workshopping
Readings Due Before Class:
--Winterson through p. 87

Assignments due before class:
1.  Students 1-4 will bring Xeroxes for everyone of Workshop Story #1 (Valerie, SAMM, Aaron, Kathy).
2.  Reading Reaction #2 due for these last readings.

Workshop!
Readings Due Before Class:
--Best 99: Mirikitani and Kureishi
--Winterson through p. 107

Assignments due before class:
1. Comments on everyone's stories; pairs be ready to start comments.
2.  Students 5-8 will bring Xeroxes for everyone of Workshop Story #1 (Michael, Jeremy, Leauna, Kai).

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. More on Gass
3. Onesy twosy writing...

Workshop!
Readings Due Before Class:
--Winterson through p. 129

Assignments due before class:
1. Comments on everyone's stories; pairs be ready to start comments.
2.  Students 9-12 will bring Xeroxes for everyone of Workshop Story #1 (Heather, Jacob L., Brett, Thomas).

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. 

Workshop, and Noveling
Readings Due Before Class:
--Read Peer Works... 

Assignments due before class:
1. Exercise #3--a novel outline and early draft of ch. 1 (or the chapter you feel you can most write right now; this chapter might be something you have written that you want to see about turning into a novel).  Click here to see Lee's polished sample outline.
2.  Reading Reaction #3 due for previous Winterson readings.
3. Reading Reaction #4 due for Touchstones (two pages, double-spaced).
4. Outside Reading Reaction #1 due for Moure.
5. Bring comments on last set of workshop stories; pairs be ready to start comments.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Lying bastards, James Frey, and Oprah's book list
3. Winterson's novel outline...Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays (a book of 

Thinking about Publishing
Readings Due Before Class:
--

Assignments due before class:
1. Possible Ch. 1 of your possible novel
2. Bring things to work on for Touchstones...

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.

Working on Touchstones
Readings Due Before Class:
--

Assignments due before class:
1. Bring things to work on for Touchstones...

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.

Fiction In Your Face, and Taking Things Apart with Theory and Poems
Readings Due Before Class:
--Best '99: Faulkner and Jen
--Handout: Tyson on Affective Stylistics and various Structuralisms/Narratologies

Assignments due before class:
1.  Reading Reaction #5 due for something from Tyson: what ideas stick to you in a writerly way?  What questions emerge from the theories?
2. Bring journal daily!

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Subjective Reader Response, Affective stylistics, and ideal readers...those who know the codes of the genre
3. Stanley Fish--Readerly expectations and their violations (or as Gass says, the norm vs. it's thwarting)
4. Looking at Winterson's ending with Affective Stylistics; looking at 
4. Email: Workshopping feedback...who was your best ideal (or better) reader?  Who was your least idea reader?  Why?  Did you feel like you got grilled enough?  Too much?

Signifiers as God, and Mythoi (traditional reading codes)
Readings Due Before Class:
--Barthes pp. 22-27
--Best 99: Jin, Phipps, and Wideman

Assignments due before class:
1. Exercise #4: an affective stylistic reading of the first page or so of one of the stories we've read thus far...two pages, typed, double-spaced: what are your expectations as you read slowly through a text and how are those expectations fulfilled or violated?  Are these fulfillments and violations interested/seductive to you?  What kind of a reader are you for the text you've chosen to analyze?

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Structuralism and the dream for a universal, underlying structure of all narrative.
4. Joseph Campbell's Monomyth structure; a summary of the monomyth
5. Northrop Frye's 4 Mythoi structures (are they still valid for texts of bliss or more contemporary literatures?)
6. What are you learning about commenting from Affective Stylistics?
7. Thinking about Kureishi with Mythoi and Affective Stylistics...
8. How many plots are there then?

Narratology and Your Deaths, and boring texts
Readings Due Before Class:
--Barthes pp. 22-27
--Best 99: Addonizio, Miller, Diaz
--Handout (hard copy): Barthes' "Death of the Author"

Assignments due before class:
1. Reading Reaction #6 to "Death of the Author"

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Affective stylistics and ideal readers...
4. Todorov and the strange way language disappears...
5. The intentional/biographical fallacy
6. Re-presentation vs. creating worlds
7. Your novel ideas...
8. What are you learning about commenting from Affective Stylistics?
9. Barthes' Juissance and Death
2. A quick lecture on linguistics and why you are dead (Re-presentation vs. creation)
11. More arguments against Subjective Reader Response--when you use your identity laundry list to judge a text or make meaning with a text, you run into the problem of dismissing it, or liking it, because you can, or can't relate...

More Narratology and more Traditional Codes
Readings Due Before Class:
--Best 99: Jhabvala, Komunyakaa, Sandor
--Virgin Suicides through p. 20 or so
--Barthes pp. 27-36 (more death of the author and other fetishes)

Assignments due before class:
1. Always be collecting interesting writerly signifiers in your journals.
2. Always be working on stories you want to have workshopped.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Deconstruction theory--a political/ethical way of reading a text which in term of writerly readings and workshops I try to discourage (like Subjective Reader Response)...
3. Linguistics, Authorial Intention's fallacy, and the problems with biographical criticism...
4. More about your novels...
6. Your next writing exercise...
9. Todorov and the disappearance of language...

Dangerous Fiction and Regional Writing
Readings Due Before Class:
--Handout (hard copy): Brian Evenson 
--Virgin Suicides through p. 40

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. the AML conference
3. More Narratology...Genette's narratology structure, and a sample micronarrative and Hundred Years of Solitude.
7. Greimas and binary oppositions like plot formulas: conflict/resolution; struggle/reconciliation; separation/union; and the grammatical structure of plot (subject-verb-object)
8. Todorov--structural units of narrative and of language; characters are nouns, their actions verbs, their attributes adjectives...reducing the action of a plot to 3 basic verbs.
4. Mormon Fiction...Evenson and Genette (tense isn't complex, but voice sort of is)
5. More about your novels...

Regional Writing, and Thinking about Prose and Poetry...
Readings Due Before Class:
--Virgin Suicides through p. 80
--Handout: Jean Howard, slam/performance poet
--Best 99: Rosalsky, Wexler, Svoboda

Assignments due before class:
1. In class Email: what possible writerly things are you learning about reading stories and drafts from the theories?  What questions do you have?
2. Always be collecting interesting writerly signifiers in your journals...
3. Always be working on stories you want to have workshopped.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Slam and performance poetry
3. More about your novels...
4. Ex. 5--things you played with
5. Poetry and fiction
6. More about Evenson--first book with Knopft very dense linguistically
7. Back to Barthes...the text as fetish desires me p. 27

The Reading, and Revising your Pieces...
Readings Due Before Class:
--Virgin Suicides: through p. 120
--Pleasure of Text: 28-35

Assignments due before class:
1. Exercise #6: a story beginning about an accident you never mention (Rosalsky--does she get away with it, though?); a story that incorporates a famous person (Passion; Wexler; revisionist history?); story told from an older point of view about a younger self (Eugenides); or a story where you specifically and technically play with elements from Frye or Genette (an anti-hero story? a reiterative piece--this is how it always goes?  a "crazy" complex chonology piece?  you could play with the Telling Time ex. too).
2. Outside Reading Reaction#2 to Jean Howard.
3. In case you haven't done this already, Email: what possible writerly things are you learning about reading stories and drafts from the theories?  What questions do you have?

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Slam and performance poetry: Howard and passion, Open Mic's, narrative that sustains length
3. Tweaking Genette's elements
4. Carol Maso's fragmented "novel" Ava...
5. Back to Barthes--the text that has a shadow/ideology, and a bit of representation p. 32; Barthes as poet and pervert (or are those the same?)
6. Ex. 5 and 6 things you played with
9. Your novel ideas...
10. Your midterm workshop groups

Revising your Pieces...Think of Genette
Readings Due Before Class:
--Virgin Suicides: through p. 140
--Barthes: bring it

Assignments due before class:
1. Bring Lee and your workshop group a new fleshed writing experiment or a new novel chapter you want comments on (yes, Virginia, you may bring me something different than you show your workshop partners).
2. Reading Reaction #7 to Virgin Suicides thus far--think in terms of one of the theories we've been discussing
3. Sign up for a consultation with Lee.
4. Arrange to meet with partners for workshop (LA 029 is available at noon the next 3 class periods)--see your midterm workshop groups and assignment.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Commenting with theory...
3. Being mature and hyper-detailed in your workshop partner workshops
4. Your workshop groups
7. Something from Barthes: hitting a nail into wood as a metaphor for reading p. 36; the text that resists us; blissful texts don't have to be muscular p. 18;
8. Something from Virgin Suicides: the Barthesian striptease in reverse p. 10! (thanks thomas)

Consultations with Lee in LA114B

Assignments due before:
1. Self-Evaluation Midterm Grade due.
2. Bring your stories that have comments so we can discuss questions and ideas for revision!
3. Xerox 4 pages from your writerly journal.

--Always be collecting interesting writerly signifiers in your journals...
--Always be working on stories you want to have workshopped in the future.
--Meet with your workshop groups

Consultations with Lee in LA114B

Assignments due before:
1.  Self-Evaluation Midterm Grade due.
2. Bring your stories that have comments so we can discuss questions and ideas for revision!
3. Xerox 4 pages from your writerly journal.

--Meet with your workshop groups

Consultations with Lee in LA114B

Assignments due before:
1.  Self-Evaluation Midterm Grade due.
2. Bring your stories that have comments so we can discuss questions and ideas for revision!
3. Xerox 4 pages from your writerly journal.

--Meet with your workshop groups

Revising our Work--Character, Dialogue, and Length
Readings Due Before Class:
--Best '99: Kamata; Davidson; de Bravo; Hocevar
--Virgin Suicides: through 200
--Barthes: 36-47

Assignments due before class:
1. Return detailed comments to your partners if your haven't already.
2. Reading Reaction #8 due on Roland Barthes' Pleasure of the Text.
3. (In Class) Ex. 7: dialogue and character parody--choose/create/give birth to two characters--write a character sketch for each (try 10 questions from Metro)--then have them begin to speak to each other in media res, except that you will be doing a parody (excess, humor)--what would they say?  What would they not say?  What will their central conflict be?  How will you make them violate "realistic" rules of dialogue at an extreme level?  

--who wants to perform for earth day april 3??

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Midterm Workshop feedback and grading
5. More about Mormon Fiction--writing for a larger audience
6. Slam CD--examples of narrative
7. The personal is political (Carol Hanisch, 1969)
8. Barthes: the third term and the idea of a continuum of bliss...p. 55--laughter and subtle subversion (a little bit of representation)
5. More dialogue mimesis--avoiding plot progression, setting details, motivation explanations, backstory, total focus on the drama at hand ("But Henri, I've loved you since we were black children selling our bodies on the streets of Paris in 1983!"); soap opera as postmodern excess (vs. realism)
6. Dialogue parody
7. New York Eavesdroppings

Revising--Fiction, Non-Fiction, and One Thing More
Readings Due Before Class:
--Best '99: Szporluk, Brox, Levertov, Kincaid
--Barthes pp. 48-55 (recuperation)
--Web Handout: Lee's Non-Fiction Lecture

Assignments due before class:
1. Exercise 7--dialogue parody
2. Always be collecting interesting writerly signifiers in your journals...
3. Always be working on stories you want to have workshopped.
4. If you have not been getting regular emails from me, email me now!

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Let's look at your dialogues--they aren't bad enough!
7. John Gardner: "But though some great writers may at times write awkwardly, it is nevertheless the case that one sign of the born writer is his gift for finding or (sometimes) inventing authentically interesting language."  From his On Becoming a Novelist p. 4.
8. Simile du jour from Charles Labare: "Daybreak came like a sloth crawling along a branch in the rainforest."
7. New York Eavesdroppings
8. lee's play...
9. Talking about risk, and revision--what's at stake; writing off the page (time); the end foretold; laughter (Painter and Bernays from What If)
10. Character and dialogue from Virgin Suicides...Trip Fontaine the "dreamboat"

Holiday

Revising and Voice and Language
Readings Due Before Class:
--Best '99: Allison, Erdrich, Vazirani, Sylvain
--Barthes: pp. 56-60 (recuperation; dream)
--Handout (hard copy outside my office):  writing outside the story etc.
--Virgin Suicides: finish

Assignments due before class:
1. Reading Reaction #9 due on previous week's readings--think in terms of one of the theoretical ideas we've discussed.
2. Students 1-3 (Michael, Kathy, Spencer) bring 24 copies of a draft--if give us a revision, it must be a deep revision of a previously rough piece.  If you need another writing ex. to help you generate something for workshop, you can do a serious/mimetic Character and Dialogue exercise (as opposed to the parody we did); you can write a 3000+ word story which is about 10 pages doubled-spaced which is simply no big deal!  You can try a new piece, an old piece, apprentice from a new story, expand ex. 7, and keep in mind the novel techniques for length we have been encountering; you can write another chapter in your novel; you can do one of the revision ex. from the What If handout and incorporate some of your what's at stake or writing off the page insights into a deep revision.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. What's at stake?  What is the risk of your story (vs. a story that merely tells a yarn)?  What is it in Virgin Suicides?  What's the central pivot?  Do characters have to die (also see the drowning story)?  Can the risk be linguistic, putting the reader at crisis with culture?
3. More Novel Techniques--multiple and strange coincidences (like the cemetery strike or the elm tree decimation in Suicides); a cast of thousands (some of whom may or may not be the We).
5. Something from Barthes: a dream as metaphor for texts--some dreams/texts are uncivil utterances of civility, and some the opposite p. 59

Workshopping
Readings Due Before Class:
--Read workshop drafts
--Barthes: finish (the subject)

Assignments due before class:
1. Bring detailed comments on drafts.
2. Students 4-6 (Kai, Jacob L., Aaron G.) bring 24 copies of a draft.
3. Evaluate your workshop group--email.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Motorcycles and the Mormon Trail
3. Something from Barthes: p. 65 pleasure suspends the signified--the extravagance of the signifier
2. Hard Core story tellers Allison and Erdrich
4. On poetry and fiction
5. Must characters die to have risk?

Work Day--Lee at NULC

Workshopping
Readings Due Before Class:
--Read workshop drafts

Assignments due before class:
1. Bring detailed comments on drafts.
3. Students 7-10 (Brett, Jacob C., Leauna, and Valerie) bring 24 copies of a draft.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Alison's non-fiction speculations...
3. How do you tell non-fiction from fiction?

Workshopping
Readings Due Before Class:
--Read workshop drafts
--Handout: Richman

Assignments due before class:
1. Bring detailed comments on drafts.
3. Students 11-14 (Jessica, Diana, Renato, Lisa) bring 24 copies of a draft.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Something from Barthes:
3. Is a short story something that must focus on plot??
4. Motorcycles and Mormons and publishing

Guest Author Jana Richman in LA 101
Readings Due Before Class:
--

Assignments due before class:
1. Bring questions for Richman

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Writing locally...Riding in the Shadows of Saints : A Woman's Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail

Workshopping
Readings Due Before Class:
--Read workshop drafts
--Handout: Roripaugh

Assignments due before class:
1. Bring detailed comments on drafts.
2. Students 15-18 (Tiffany, Jeremy, Kumen) bring 24 copies of a draft.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. And now for something completely different...

Guest Author Lee Ann Roripaugh in LA 101

Assignments due before class:
1. Have Questions for Roripaugh!!

Workshopping
Readings Due Before Class:
--Read workshop drafts

Assignments due before class:
1. Bring detailed comments on drafts.
2. Students 19-23 bring 24 copies of a draft.
3. Do course evaluation on UVLINK

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. Roripaugh's reading
3. Escriture Feminine...
4. Short stories are for...plots?

What I Want You to Forget About Fiction, and Your Final Project
Readings Due Before Class:
--Read workshop drafts

Assignments due before class:
1. Bring detailed comments on any remaining drafts.
2. Outside Reading Reaction #3 Due!
3. Do course evaluation on UVLINK
4. Sign up for a final consultation if you need one...

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Prose/fiction vocabulary to know.
2. A final in class exercise...
3. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
—MURIEL RUKEYSER

Final (REQUIRED) 11-1 in lab...

Assignments due before class:
1. A reading of your work 3-5 minutes max!
2. Be sure Lee has received your grade justification letter!!