Literary Arts Foundations

This program will provide a supportive and challenging environment for you to grow as a writer and thinker in a learning community that combines rigor, creative play, and collaboration. Fall quarter will off a broad historical backdrop for the study of literature and writing, including writers, critics, and theorists from different traditions. In the winter, our studies will turn toward more contemporary fiction and poetry, and program work will emphasize writing craft and manuscript development in poetry, prose, or hybrid experiments.

By the end of the program, you will have learned close reading practices and how to build arguable claims about literary texts. You will develop “beyond beginning” skills in library research, research question development, and appropriate use of sources, which will complement the development of  formal writing skills that meet a variety of purposes. Creative writing assignments, peer critique, and workshops will push you to heighten your awareness of the craft and of your own creative process and will also enable you to better understand the work of others.

Literary Arts Foundations is an annually repeating program for students interested in building an emphasis in Literary Arts and includes creative writing practice, skill-building in close reading and literary analysis, and discussion of major concepts in literary thought and history that have special relevance to writers. This program is preparatory for Intermediate, Advanced, Capstone, and other upper division programs in creative writing and literary study.