ENGL 154
New American Fiction Fall 2015
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

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 ten to twenty years) developments in American fiction. We will read short stories and novels by writers such as Mary Robison, Karen Russell, Nam Le, ZZ Packer, among others. This course and English 150 will focus more directly on basic expository writing skills than the other 100-level classes.