Winter

Flannery O’Connor writes, “the fiction writer has to realize that he can’t create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought. He has to provide all these things with a body; he has to create a world with weight and extension.”

In this class, we will focus on how prose creates worlds of weight and extension. How do we weave, through the fabric of words, flesh and blood characters whose actions carry heft. We will consider how embodied action amalgamates with voice, setting, dramatic tension, and other story elements. And, through in-class exercises and imitative and generative writing, we will look to hone our control over embodied action. 

Together, we’ll study writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, and Patricia Highsmith, with a focus on how they give words warp and weft. In the second half of the quarter, the emphasis will be on workshopping student’s original work.

This course will examine this genre from its beginnings in ancient and medieval literature (eg in epic, chivalric, and pilgrimage lit), to the modern road novel, travelogue, and buddy film. We will explore why this form is so essential to the storytelling imagination, and the ways we might adapt it to our own needs today.

This beginning workshop takes up the tradition of the modern short story. Always attentive to ancient story values like plot and closure, we will take as our model the specifically twentieth and twenty-first century form that uses scenic-method and open-ended construction to tell a distinctly modern kind of story. Reading authors like James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Mavis Gallant, and Joy Williams for lessons in technique, as well as several short critical texts, students will compose their own stories to be workshopped in class. A spirit of discovery and experiment will be encouraged.

Describing fiction writing as an “art” is perhaps a misnomer. Depending on who’s describing it, the process of creating a narrative is more like driving in the dark, or woodworking, or gardening. The metaphors abound, but the techniques for creating effective fictional prose are often quite consistent. This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of fiction where discussion will aim to distinguish the basic devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as point of view and plot arrangement to more highly focused lessons on scene design, dialog, and word choice. Throughout the term, the writing process will be broken down into stages where written work will focus on discrete story parts such as first pages, character introductions, and dialog-driven scenes before students are asked to compose full-length narratives. Along the way, students will chart their processes of conceptualizing, drafting, and revising their narratives. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students’ full stories.

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, elliptical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we’ll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale.

From 19th century penny dreadfuls to the more recent explosion of podcasts and documentaries, true crime has long endured as a popular narrative genre. Yet, despite the genre’s popularity, there is contention around its potential exploitation of victims, romanticization of violence, and lurid positioning as “entertainment.” This course aims to critically examine the narrative tropes, appeals, and language of the true crime genre by engaging with works of true crime fiction, including both works of fiction based on “true” events (such as Underneath by Lily Hoang, Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and My Men by Victoria Kielland) and entirely fictionalized works that develop themselves as convincing True Crime facsimiles (such as Defiance by Carole Maso, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh). The course will include reading discussions, short weekly written responses, and a project wherein students compare and contrast two alternate “versions” of a true crime story.

In this course, we will study the range of aesthetic possibilities in concept-driven, procedural, aleatory, constrained, and avant-garde poetry. Questions of authorship, emotion, creativity, politics, imitation, and craft will be shifted by readings from Diderot and Mallarmé, the Oulipians, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, ritual-based poetics, and postconceptual/digital poetics, among others.

This course traverses the overlap of works of lyric and narrative poetry with works of autofiction to identify a range of storytelling and formal techniques for the writer curious to write in verse and prose forms as a method of cataloging the self. We will investigate the subjects (the self in the world, war, domesticity, history), forms (the ballad/song/rap, monologue, and short prose (flash fiction, prose poem)), and movements (Black Arts, Confessionalism, Infrarealism, New Narrative, AI) that expand, complicate, and borrow from ideas of narrative modes of self-expression. Sources include: Catullus, Nikki Giovanni, Alex Da Corte, Roberto Bolano, Lydia Davis, Hilton Als, Hito Steyerl, Robyn Schiff, Jenny Zhang , and others.

Perhaps no other narrative genre is more compelling or popular than the mystery. True Crime, Thrillers, and Whodunits consistently top the charts of bestsellers each year. In this Arts Core class, we will explore the mechanics of this fascinating genre. We will take the classic mystery tale written by masters like Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler as an archetype, then examine what can be done with them. Together, we’ll dive into tales of intrigue by Poe and Kleist, psychological thrillers by Patricia Highsmith and Jeffery Eugenides, neo-noir films such as Chinatown, noir-poetry by Deryn Rees-Jones and Sean O’Brien, and postmodern mystery-parodies like those of Jorge Luis Borges. Together, we'll look at the way they hang together, the desire and fear that drives them, and the secrets they tell—or try to keep hidden. Along the way, we will attempt to design and plot our own mysteries, and find ways to improve them in a workshop setting.

This course will be a close examination of the use of spectral imagery as a craft element in narratives across genre and time. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to Emily Carrol’s A Guest in the House, students in this course will be expected to put the fantastical metaphor under a microscope and explore its potential through their own creative and critical work.