Form and Content and Author

To help you meditate on the texts we have read and explored together for your final essay, I thought it would be helpful to provide you with a few articles in which the idea of "form and content" becomes a larger part of the discussion of the writer.

As we discussed in class superficially in class, form and content often meet with the author's thematic intent, or their thematic/cultural statement.

Check out what American writer Tobias Wolff has to say about the short story as an American form -- on page 2 of this interview...

Here is an article from Poets & Writers on how one writer "accidentally" became a memoirist!

And here is a provoking opinion piece from The New York Times which discusses John Updike, the novelist, and the scope or scale of what he set out to do as a writer...

Also, here's a fantastic poem from Sherman Alexie in the current issue of The New Yorker, which has the same kind of attitude the exemplifies his writing...