ENGLISH 386Philosophic FictionsSpring 2007. 4 credits. 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 will include such works as Plato's Republic, parables by Jesus and Kafka, Swift's "Modest Proposal" and Gulliver's Travels, philosophic tales by Voltaire and Diderot, dystopias by Jorge Luis Borges and Caryl Churchill, science fiction by Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, and essays by Richard Rorty and Terry Eagleton. * Note: you don't need the instructor's permission to pre-enroll, so if you're interested, go ahead and do that and send him a writing sample at some point before classes begin. |