Contemporary Literature - Eng 226

Tuesday/Thursday, 4:15-5:35 p.m., Lecture Center 22

Donald W. Faulkner

In conjunction with the New York State Writers Institute Visiting Writers Series, this new survey course will introduce students to the diverse range of writers currently at the white hot center of both American and international literature. While reading selections from the works of award-winning authors in genres ranging from fiction to nonfiction, poetry, and film, students will also have the opportunity to meet the authors themselves. The authors discussed will read from their work at the University during the course of the term.

Among the issues discussed in the course will be postmodernism in fiction, trends in poetry, and the traditions of memoir and of scientific writing for a general-audience. Among the authors presented will be the hypertext novelist Robert Coover, the world-explorer Peter Matthiessen, who is also the State Author of New York, avant-garde poets Ann Waldman and Nicole Brossard, and the Pulitzer-prize winning poet Philip Levine, as well as the major Irish novelist John McGahern, and Robert Stone, winner of the National Book Award. Other writers will include the African-American feminist critic bell hooks, memiorist Clifton Taulbert, and the brilliant science writer Stephen Jay Gould.

There will be a bluebook midterm, a take-home final, and the option of a brief research paper.