ENGL-499: NARS Capstone Seminar
Application for Spring 2016 / Name: ______
USC ID#: ______
Email: ______

PART ONE: List your courses completed or in progress (IP) in the Narrative Studies major and attach your current STARS report:

Major requirement categories:

  1. Introduction to Narrative Media
  2. Writing and Narrative Forms
  3. Popular Culture and Ethnicity
  4. Narrative in Cross-Cultural Perspective
  5. Western Narrative in Historical Perspective
  6. Contemporary Fiction and Drama
  7. Electives

Cat. / Course / Title / Professor / Grade
1
2
3
4
5
6
7a
7b

PART TWO: Submit with this application your typed proposal. A capstone project in Narrative Studies—whether an independent project or a seminar portfolio—requires that you think long in advance about your topic and formulate an acceptable proposal. The four authors whose work is described below present challenges and opportunities for your study of narrative.

Choose two of these authors, and for explain what kind of seminar project you would undertake in response to their materials—research, creative, or hybrid.You are not bound by your proposal here (we do live and learn, especially with intense seminar interactions) but we need to see what kind of thinking you can bring to the seminar, based on your experience in Narrative Studies.

This proposal is your application. The seminar professor will make admission decisions based on the quality of your responses. 500words maximum for each response.

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Required Readings and Supplementary Materials

The material for this course is flexible. The intention is to provide three or four clusters/case studies to allow deep, comparative study of form/content/style/genre/adaptation, etc. An important component of the content is also theoretical material on narrative and on writing/creativity.

Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (memoir, 2005); The Reenactments (memoir, 2013); Some Ether (poetry, 2000); Being Flynn (film, 2012).

Nick Flynn is an important contemporary writer who works in various forms and whose work peers mercilessly into the relationship between life and writing. This particular cluster allows us to pay close attention to reworkings of similar material—a memoir and poetry base on Flynn and his father; a film adaptation of that memoir; and then a memoir about the making of the film, which provides a fascinating re-evaluation of the preceding texts and stories. Flynn’s work is accessible and elusive, poetic and powerful.

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (poetry, 2014.)

Claudia Rankine, a new member of the USC Department of English, is one of the most important voices in Contemporary American culture, and won the National Book Award for Citizen, a wide-ranging, formally experimental intervention into current discussions about race, class, gender, and pop culture.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (memoir, 2015)

Coates is a journalist whose work is best known through his writing for The Atlantic. In this new memoir, which takes the form of letters to his son, Coates addresses the racial climate in the United States, his own history, and his hopes and fears for current and future generations. This book is being touted as the inheritor of the voice of James Baldwin on the complexities of race in the contemporary milieu.

Art Spiegelman, Maus I & II (graphic novel/memoir, 1992); MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic (Book and DVD, 2011).

The Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novels by Spiegelman were instant classics. Groundbreaking, form-breaking, and heartbreaking, Maus tells the tale of the Holocaust through testimony from Spiegelman’s father Vladek. But Art is also very present in the narrative. MetaMaus is a comprehensive look at all the makings of Maus, from original interviews with Vladek, to the creation of the comic frames, to research trips to Auschwitz. This cluster brings together history, memoir, comics, and digital media.

Richard Linklater, Waking Life (film, 2001); Before Sunrise (film, 1995), Before Sunset (film, 2004), Before Midnight (film, 2013); Rob Stone, The Cinema of Richard Linklater—Walk, Don’t Run (2013).

Linklater is one of the best storytellers in contemporary cinema. His Before series follows the same two characters across decades and continents; Boyhood follows the same family and the same actors over a fifteen-year period, filmed in real time and with a collaboratively produced storyline (which is also true of the Before films). Waking Life is an exploration of consciousness, language, philosophy, and Being, filmed and then animated. Stone’s recent book sheds important light on the work and the impact of Linklater’s career. This cluster is all about art, experimentation, storytelling, hybridity and plasticity of form.
Again, this is your application. You have wide choice, many options, and plenty of time to think and talk about your ideas.The seminar professor will make admission decisions based on the quality of your responses. 500words maximum for each response.