Temporal Entanglements: Writing Historical Fiction

Catalog description

“The past is never dead, it’s not even past.” – William Faulkner How do fiction writers go about creating historical narratives? If we use Saidiya Hartman’s words as our starting point, that we live in a kind of “temporal entanglement,” where the past, present and future, “are not discrete and cut off from one another,” how might we write fiction that straddles this simultaneity? In this class, students will research and write a short work of historical fiction. We’ll discuss research methods and sources, while developing supplementary materials, such as timelines, scrapbooks, and working bibliographies, that will serve to anchor our fictional texts. Students will also workshop their research-based stories with the class. In addition, we’ll read a cross-section of historical fictions and study their various approaches. Students can expect a substantial weekly reading load on top of their individual