ENGL 156
New American Fiction Fall 2024
Division I Writing Skills

The goal of this course is to teach you how to write a clear, well-argued, and interesting analytical paper. We will spend most of our class time actively engaged in a variety of techniques to improve your critical reasoning and analytical skills, both written and oral. Though the skills you learn will be applicable to other disciplines, and a central purpose of the course is to improve all aspects of your writing, this is a literature class, designed partly to prepare you for upper level courses in the English Department, so we will, therefore, spend equal time on the interpretation of literature, in this case, contemporary American fiction, examining the very, very recent (last thirty years) developments in American fiction. We will read short stories and novels by writers such as Danielle Evans, George Saunders, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Mary Robison, Karen Russell, ZZ Packer, Ocean Vuong, Yiyun Li, among others.