Reading & Composition

A good king who’s promised to find the cause of a plague killing his city winds up with himself as a prime suspect. A man working his way up the corporate ladder lets his bosses use him in exchange for promotions, but falls in love with the wrong woman. A teenage vampire slayer falls for an older man only to find out that the perfect happiness she gives him has transformed him into the creature she is sworn to kill. How do these simple plots grow into fully formed stories that capture audiences through the ages?

In this course we pull out the guts of stories to try and understand how storytellers craft works that grip us. In the process we examine classic attempts to say what makes a good story and put to the test the idea that a given genre—crime drama, romantic comedy, gothic fantasy—has certain “rules” that make it successful.

Required Books:

Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays

Colette, The Vagabond (La Vagabonde)

Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Required Film and TV:

Some Like it Hot (Wilder, 1959)

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Heckerling, 1982)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon, 1997-2003)