Student fiction writing in the literature classroom.

This dissertation is a qualitative study of a college introductory literature-based writing course. Instead of writing analytic essays, students were asked to write fiction in response to the literature they read. I, their teacher, collected and analyzed student writing and tape recorded class discussions as well as student/teacher conferences. After the course was over, I continued interviewing students during the next three years of their college careers. In this research, I found that writing fiction instilled in students an understanding of craftsmanship that led students beyond the reductive perception of literature as an intellectual exercise of made up writings, toward a deeper grasp of literature as emerging from the human desire to convey ideas. When their struggles to generate fiction forced students to confront their own desires to communicate and to understand, the literature assigned became more personal and more worthy of discussion. For me the most exciting finding of this study was that students grew in understanding themselves through writing fiction. Three students were chosen for close analysis. Damian's experience demonstrated how creative writing led him to consider what makes a plot interesting, how the fantastical and the personal are related in literature, and how to begin to craft a text which immerses an audience into its world. Evy, was one of ten students who chose to write fiction about fiction at the end of the course. Evy found that writing fiction helped to personalize and illuminate her reading of literature. Amy disliked writing fiction and struggled all term with her limiting assumptions about fiction and nonfiction. Using Amy's experience, I explored the problems posed for this approach by the prior traditional literary training of both the student and me, the teacher.PhDEducationHigher educationLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsRhetoricUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125700/2/3016885.pd