COMP 161
Metafiction Fall 2024
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed ENGL 161

Class Details

This course will examine ways in which literary works reflect on their status as written texts. We’ll look at the formal pleasures and puzzles generated by techniques including frame narratives, recursion, and self-reference, in novels, films, and stories by Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Kelly Link, Paul Park, and others. Ultimately, we will use our study of metafiction to focus inquiry into the socializing force of self-consciousness in human development. Note that students will be required to use, as well as interpret, metafictional techniques in their assigned writing, and will write one or two essays in collaboration with a Chat AI.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 1628
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: Several short exercises; four or five papers of increasingly complexity, totaling 22 pages; consistent attendance and participation; a love of reading, and a willingness to reread.
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: first-year students who have not taken or placed out of a 100-level ENGL course; sophomores
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
COMP 161 Division I ENGL 161 Division I
WS Notes: Students write five essays with considerable feedback from the instructor.

Class Grid

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