Course Description

[Jean Cocteau]

Gestaltenlehre ist Verwandlungslehre
[The study of forms is the study of transformations]
- Goethe

What is genre, exactly? Why are such distinctions as "poetry" and "prose", "fiction" and "non-fiction" so crucial in determining the nature and content as well as the style of any piece of writing you undertake?

Is there such a thing as "true expression" - a kind of communication which somehow transcends these laws of form? The quotation, above, from the German poet, novelist, critic (and pioneering natural scientist) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, implies that the best way to decide such questions is to look at genre in its moments of change.

The intention behind this course, accordingly, is to examine sub-genres such as the non-fiction novel or wisdom literature, which combine contradictory practices and techniques (fiction and non-fiction in the case of the first; poetry and prose in the second) into texts which transcend easy categorisation.

There can be many motivations - ideological and aesthetic - for writing in such a way. Nor are the results necessarily more difficult for readers to assimilate than more traditional forms.

Whether you define yourself as poet, fiction-writer, or essayist, it always pays to try to enlarge the technical resources available to you as a writer. This course will assist you in that, but will also provide you with a historical and analytical frame to understand the intention behind such innovative approaches to the craft of writing.

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“Mixed-genre” or “Cross-genre” writing is often defined in terms of fictional subgenres: mixing the conventions of a Jane Austen novel with those of zombie fiction, for instance; or combining SF ("Science" or "Speculative Fiction") with the Western.

In this course, you will be encouraged to extend the word "genre" to include larger considerations of form: calculated mixtures of poetry and prose, for example (as in the Haiku Diaries of medieval Japan), or the admission of fictional techniques to non-fictional genres (as in the New Journalism of the 1960s and 70s – now subsumed under the general heading of “Creative Non-fiction”).

We will start off by reading a number of texts (both contemporary and classic) which challenge conventional genre classifications. You will need to have a good understanding of the major creative strategies involved, as well as the larger cultural and artistic contexts lying behind such experiments, before you attempt to emulate them in your own writing.

A comprehensive Book of Readings has been provided for you, but you will also be expected to read at least one full-length book in order to complete the critical portion of the course. A Bibliography of other relevant materials has also been made available on this site.