Sketchy, plotless, incomplete—these are not the qualities we normally associate with good story-telling. In fact, we usually look for the opposite: wholeness, action, closure. Our course is a tribute to narrative disruption and writerly experimentation. We will take, as our case study, a strange, fragmented genre that has been alternately at the center and margins of American literature: the sketch. We will look closely at the sketch in all its guises—from the nineteenth-century village sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving to contemporary sketches of post-millennial neurosis by Lydia Davis and Glen Pourciau. These peculiar, kooky narratives will provide us with beguiling material to talk and write about, leaving us asking provocative questions about the meaning and value of literary expression.

Our focus will be on creating complex, analytic, well-supported arguments that matter in academic contexts, and you will work closely with both your peers and me in developing your writing. In responding to these off-beat sketches, your challenge is to do precisely what these narrators don't do: craft your own tight argumentative plots about these plotless stories.