ifp ii syllabus

W INTRODUCTION TO FICTION AND POETRY II: Spring 2015The Writing Seminars

The Johns Hopkins University

Instructor Bobby Mitchell Office Hours TBD in Gilman 61B Email [email protected]

Purpose

IFP I and IFP II are required for admission to a major in The Writing Seminars. This course introduces the student to basic strategies in the writing of poetry and fiction, and in the critical analysis of literature.

The course is open to all Krieger and Whiting School undergraduates, regardless of major. Enrollment in IFP II is based on successful completion of the IFP I.

Texts

The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Daniel Halpern.The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th Ed., edited by Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy.

Procedure

1) Students read and discuss assigned texts in classroom discussions. 2) Students write assigned fiction and poetry sketches and exercises, sharing these with the instructor and fellow students according to a fixed schedule. Students write every week. 3) Instructor and class comment on student work in a workshop setting. 4) As appropriate and desirable, students have one-to-one conferences with the instructor.

Grades

Grades will be based on careful reading of the assigned literature, class participation, the quality of the writing in daily or weekly assignments, and revisions. Ultimately, students will hand in a final portfolio containing the best of the written work, revised to the best of the student’s ability.

Writing Assignments, Final Projects, and Final Portfolios (60%)

Participation and Written Responses to Classmates’ Work (35%)

Response to Literary Readings (5%)During the semester, you are required to attend at least one literary reading and to turn in a typed response (1-2 pages, double-spaced) for one of them. Respond to an element of craft that especially interested you in the writer’s work (e.g., her use of metaphor, point-of-view, poetic meter), or to several such elements.

Attendance

The Writing Seminars policy is to fail a student who misses more than two weeks of a course due to unexcused absences. One week’s unexcused absence will result in a deduction from the final grade. Two unexcused tardy arrivals to class will result in the recording of an absence.

Plagiarism Policy

A student who is found to have plagiarized an assignment in IFP will receive an F for the course, and a notation will be made in departmental records. Students enrolled in IFP I and II are required to sign an honor code statement acknowledging that they understand this policy.

Part 1: POETRY

Week One: Where Do We Come From?

Readings:

Jan 26: Countee Cullen: “Incident” (1,446)

Jan 28: Louise Erdrich: “Birth” (2,006) Jane Shore: “High Holy Days” (1,952)

Jan 30: John Berryman: “A Sympathy, a Welcome” (1,547) Cynthia Zarin: “Song” (2,014)Hart Crane: “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” (1,410) Assignment 1 due.

Assignment 1:

Write a poem of welcome or prayer for a new child in a family, or write about an incident in a young child’s life that is somehow life-defining or life-changing. Surprise and paradox often work well in this kind of poem. While using figurative language and any and all poetic devices, be concrete and specific. Note how Shore places her poem in a synagogue, and Cullen places his poem on a train.

Week Two: What Are We?

Readings:

Feb 2: Andrew Marvell: “To His Coy Mistress” (478) Robert Herrick: “Delight in Disorder” (355)

Feb 4: Henry Reed: “The Naming of Parts” (1,564) Edna St. Vincent Millay: “The Buck in the Snow” (1,384)

Feb 6: Philip Larkin: “Talking in Bed” (1,654) Robert Graves: “Love without Hope” (1,400)E. E. Cummings: “who are you, little I” (1,397) Assignment 2 due.

Assignment 2:

Write a poem set in one moment, the present—one that may suggest a remembered or imagined past, and an imagined future. Nonetheless, the key quality of this poem is that it locates itself in the “now.” Marvell’s poem, above, sees the “now” as a moment of seduction; Larkin’s poem sees it as a silence in which there is nothing entirely right to say. Even the inability to speak can be a “now” in a poem.

Week Three: Where Are We Going?

Readings:

Feb 9: John Milton: “When I Consider How My Light is Spent” (418) Thomas Hardy: “The Darkling Thrush” (1,155) Robert Frost: “Home Burial” (1,228) Robert Lowell: “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” (1,597) Group 1 sends out pieces for workshop.

Feb 11: Anthony Hecht: “The Book of Yolek” (1,672) Seamus Heaney: from “Station Island” (1,903) May Swenson: “Goodbye, Goldeneye” (1,543)

Feb 13: Workshop Group 1, Assignment 3 due.

Assignment 3:

Write an elegy for a person whom you, or the speaker, have lost. If you prefer, you can elegize a thing or quality—such as good manners, manual typewriters, a demolished house.

Week Four: Riddles, Secrets, Mysteries

Readings:

Feb 16: E.A. Robinson: “Richard Cory” (1,212) Elizabeth Bishop: “The Moose” (1,523) Richard Wright: from “Haiku: This Other World” (1,502) Group 2 sends out pieces for workshop.

Feb 18: A.E. Housman: “Is My Team Ploughing?” (1,175) W. H. Auden: Musee des Beaux Arts (1471) Walt Whitman: from “Song of Myself,” part 6: A child said What is the grass? (1,061-2)Amy Clampitt: “Beach Glass” (1,609)


Assignment 4:

Write three haiku; each of these should express, by what it doesn’t have room to say explicitly, some secret or mystery. In addition, write one other short poem that is a riddle, or which expresses what, for you, is a true mystery.

Week Five: Art in the Mirror

Readings:

Feb 23: John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (938) Wallace Stevens: “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (1,256) W. H. Auden: “Musee des Beaux Arts” (1,471) Workshop Group 3 sends out pieces.

Feb 25: W. C. Williams: “Portrait of a Lady” (1,273) Frank O’ Hara: “Why I Am Not a Painter” (1,730) Emily Dickinson: “I would not paint—a picture—“ (348) Marianne Moore: “Poetry” (1,329)


Assignment 5:

Write a poem about an actual work of art you observe, in person, in Baltimore. You could visit the archeological museum in Gilman, or Homewood House, or the Baltimore Museum of Art, or the Visionary Art Museum, or the Walters Art Museum—you choose. As you write about this object (painting/sculpture/print…), keep in mind that your own work of art, the poem, must have some separate reason for existence beyond simply reporting on the existence of the object. What does this object make you think about art itself—or, possibly, about poetry itself?

Week Six: Wings Without Birds

Mar 2: Selected Poems from Wings Without Birds, Handout. Workshop Group 4 sends out pieces.

Mar 4: Selected Poems from Wings Without Birds, Handout.

Mar 6: Workshop Group 4.

Part 2: Fiction

Week Seven: First-Person Narration

Readings:

Mar 9: “Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality,” Vassily Aksenov;

Mar 11: “Sister Imelda,” Edna O’Brien;

Mar 13: “Greasy Lake,” T. Coraghessan Boyle, Assignment 6 due.

Assignment 6:

Write three strong paragraphs (half-page or longer) using three different voices. You can borrow a voice from one of these stories, and try it out on your own material. Think about each word in the “voice,” and be prepared to justify its presence.

Spring Break

Week Eight: Child’s Point-of-View

Readings:

Mar 23: “The Mother,” Natalia Ginzburg;

Mar 25: “The Conjurer Made off With the Dish,” Naguib Mahfouz;

Mar 27: “Bestiary,” Julio Cortazar, Assignment 7 due.

Assignment 7:

Using “The Mother” as a model, write two pages describing a person from your childhood (not necessarily a parent) from a child’s point-of-view. Use as hard and critical an eye as you wish, but make sure you’re making the observer and observed sound like real people. Use descriptive language rather than emotional, reactive language. Decide in advance how old your child observer is, and stick with that age.

Week Nine: Love and Complications

Readings:

Mar 30: “Spring in Fialta,” Vladimir Nabokov; “Two Gentle People,” Graham Greene; Group 1 sends out pieces.

Apr 1: “The Habit of Loving,” Doris Lessing;

Apr 3: Workshop Group 1, Assignment 8 due.

Assignment 8:

Using the dry, assessing tone (and third person POV) that Graham Greene uses in “Two Gentle People,” narrate an episode from your own encounter with a new and attractive other. Write three pages: first page recounting the meeting; second page, the middle stage; last page, the ending stage. Use a real incident, but feel free to depart from reality when necessary.

Week Ten: A Stranger Intrudes

Readings:

Apr 6: “The Last Mohican,” Bernard Malamud; “Fat,” Raymond Carver; Group 2 sends out pieces.

Apr 8: “A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme,” Frank O’Connor


Assignment 9:

Use first person (as “Fat” does) and present tense to recount to someone else a strange experience at a party, at a restaurant, or some other such place. Develop the scene so that the attitude of the narrator at the beginning changes as the story proceeds. Make sure the changes are connected to what’s happening, and are subtle, but perceptible. 3-4 pages.

Or: Using “The Last Mohican” as your model, write a third-person account of an experience where an undesired companion decides to attach him/herself to you, and tag along. Start the account with the last name of the main character. Start another version with the first name, or with a personal pronoun. Use the strongest approach of the three and write 3 pages.

Week Eleven: Extremes and Transformation

Readings:

Apr 13: “The Country Husband,” John Cheever; “Why I Transformed Myself into a Nightingale,” Wolfgang Hildesheimer; Group 3 sends out pieces.

Apr 15: “Action Will Be Taken,” Heinrich Boll


Assignment 10:

Write a tale of fancy like Hildesheimer’s story. Start with the conclusion; then, proceed to tell us how one thing led to another. Do not write science fiction. Take your created world and character very seriously.

Or: Write a short story starting out (as Heinrich Boll does) with the phrase: “One of the strangest interludes in my life was the time…” Using the word “interlude,” you’re pitching your story at a relatively high intellectual level, with a serious and exploratory tone. Make use of that tone and pitch. 4-5 pages.

Week Twelve:

Apr 20: Individual Conferences and Selected Readings from The Best American Short Stories 2014, (Handouts).

Apr 22: Individual Conferences and Selected Readings from The Best American Short Stories 2014, (Handouts).

Apr 24: Workshop Group 1, final fiction project.

Week Thirteen:



May 1: Workshop Group 4, final fiction project.

FINAL PORTFOLIO:

Three revised poems; a revised 7-9 page story expansion; revision of one of the two-page sketches; critical, reflective essay, 2-4 pages; due May 12th .

ifp ii syllabus

Documents