“Good prose is like a window-pane.”

--George Orwell

“They shut me up in prose— / As when a little girl / They put me in the closet— / Because they liked me ‘still.’”

--Emily Dickinson

“. . .the form of written language that is not organized according to the formal patterns of verse. Prose has as its minimum requirement some degree of continuous coherence beyond that of a mere list. The adjectives prosaic and prosy have a derogatory meaning of dullness and ordinariness; the neutral adjective is simply ‘prose.’
--Christopher Baldick
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

Prose as a genre has been controversial, conventionally downgraded as “factual,” “straightforward,” “less than poetic,” and “intellectually unimaginative.” Although any number of poets and playwrights practice the “art” of prose and laud it, not many are consistently commended for that effort because traditional cultural hierarchies of literary genres.
We’ll question that reservation, analyze some of the reasons why other readers resist challenging genre assumptions, and we’ll do both by reading and analyzing a variety of prose subgenres, some written in traditional print, and others fusing print and graphics media to stretch innovatively the formerly paned boundaries of traditional prose narratives.
Goals

acquainting or reacquainting you with a variety of prose genres, traditional and experimental, possibly including multimedia formats
increasing your reading pleasure and understanding of the composition of prose texts
exposing you to a variety of authors, styles and literary movements
enhancing your critical abilities, both in speech and in writing, to analyze, interpret and evaluate prose, which includes searching reliable critical databases

Requirements

Engaged, prepared, in-person participation of in-class prose analyses, individually and in small groups; short analytical writings; a midterm and a final examination

Course Texts

Modern and/or contemporary prose fiction and nonfiction, shorter and longer, including essays, articles, travel narratives