MFA709 The Difficult Imagination Part 3

MFA709 The Difficult Imagination Part 3

This MFA Core course is the second in a 3-part series using the same text. 

Prerequisite: MFA706 and MFA 708

Note: MFA Core Course. You must be enrolled in an MFA Program to access private classroom. MFA Programs are free to WVU Members. Once registered, your access will activate within 24 hours. Register Here. 

Classroom

Facilitated by: Karen

Course Length: 16 Weeks

Course Description: This course theorizes and questions the often unconscious assumptions behind such traditional writing movements as temporality, scene, and characterization. It offers various suggestions for generating writing that resists, rethinks, and/or expands the very notion of narrativity. We will visit a number of important concerns/trends/obsessions in current writing (both on the page and off); discuss marketplace (ir)realities; hone critical reading and manuscript editing capabilities; and strengthen problem-solving muscles from brainstorming to literary activism.

We will take a look at some classic texts and how their authors propelled us into what we know as contemporary literature today.

The exercises and supplemental readings challenge authors to push their work into self-aware and surprising territory.

Study includes: The Balzacian mode vs the Difficult Imagination, Conventional writing and alternative traditions, the McDonaldization of the literary marketplace, Why we write, Automatic writing, Writer’s Block, Narrativity, Setting, Characters: Round and Flat, Engaging with Deep Attention, Scene, Dialogue, Flashback, Tense, Point of View, Word Worlds, Endings, Methods of composition in today’s media, Hypertext, Hypermedia, New-Media Writing, “Re-Visions”, Publishing in a tribal ecology and more.

Many of these topics may sound intimidating, but put simply, this course is about taking chances, trying to compose in alternative surprising, revelatory directions, about trying to move out of your comfort zone to discover what might lie on the other side.

Required Text: Architectures of Possibility – After innovative writing by Lance Olsen (Print Version)

Kindle Version: Architectures of Possibility – After innovative writing by Lance Olsen

Course developed by: Karen