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ENGLISH 3860                                                            S. Davis

Course limited to 15 students. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor on the basis of a writing sample (critical/interpretive prose), which should reach the instructor before the first day of class.*

"Fictions" -- of voice, audience, plot, point of view, figurative language, and thought -- abound in good expository writing. They stand out in works that deliberately test and play with ideas: dialogues, satires, parodies, parables, philosophic tales, and thought-experiments. Students will write critically about such works and the issues they raise and will experiment with writing in similar forms. The fictions read and written in this course are the vehicles and animating resources of writers who want to argue flexibly, provoke thought, ridicule vice or folly, reimagine the existing political order, or involve readers in pleasingly or disturbingly insoluble problems. Readings may include Plato's Phaedrus or Gorgias, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, parables by Jesus and Kafka, dystopias by Caryl Churchill and George Saunders, science fiction by Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler, short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Flannery O'Connor, and essays by Richard Rorty and Jean Baudrillard.

* You don't need the instructor's permission to pre-enroll in this course. Go right ahead, sending along a writing sample by the first day of class.