Form and Theory of Fiction is a course in fictional technique and critical approaches to reading fiction. It is not a creative writing course. Topics taken up by the class will include varieties and uses of plot structure, “open” and “closed” endings, the role of the narrator and his reliability, the nature of mimesis and “realism,” the necessity (or non-necessity) for coherence in a literary work, the presence or absence of determinate meaning, and the potential of fiction to shape cultural identity.

The reading list is as follows:

• H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
• Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Art of Fiction”
• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
• Jane Austen, Emma
• Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down
• Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
• Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
• Robert Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales
• Woody Allen, Zelig.

These works will alternate with readings in criticism, which will be available for a nominal charge (to cover copying costs) in Lee 316.

There will be a mid-term test and a final test, as well as a critical/research paper due at the end of the term. The paper should focus on some technical, structural, or stylistic aspect of a work rather than on theme alone and should follow the standard MLA form of documentation.

The villages slept as the capable man went down,
Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,
The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,
As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,
Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,
Rode over the picket rocks, rode down the road,
And, capable, created in his mind,
Eventual victor, out of the martyrs’ bones,
The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

--Wallace Stevens, “Mrs. Alfred Uruguay"