This is the course home page for Jonah Willihnganz. I am a writer and a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. I am also a former Fellow of the Stanford Humanties Center and currently the director of The Stanford Storytelling Project, an initiative that explores the craft of modern oral narrative. My writing has appeared in places like American Literary Review and The National Interest (weird, I know) and I sometimes tell stories live for the San Francisco Porchlight Storytelling Series. My latest piece, on Richard Wright's first novel, Lawd Today!, appears in the collection Broadcasting Modernism. From this page you can navigate to some of the courses I teach. If a link is not active, the course is under construction or off-line at the moment. For a little more about me you can look at my department bio page |
| Conspiracy Theory |
Reading as a Writer |
The Art of Fiction |
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The Rhetoric of Modernism |
The Art of the Essay |
The Rhetoric of Oral Narrative |
Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
—Franz Kafka
