Writing From Journals: Fiction and Memoir

Catalog description

English B1993 Writing from Journals, Fiction and Memoir, examines the work of major American, European and Hispanic authors whose writing, letters, and journals embody the dilemmas that they struggle with in their lives. I hope to explore the tension between the journals and the short fiction of Franz Kafka in the early 20th century and Henry David Thoreau in the mid 19th. The latter dramatizes in books that on the surface are about travel, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers or The Maine Wood, but reflect deeper traumas that his journals expose. Similarly, the journals of Robert Musil through the mid 20th century illuminate his difficult fiction as Joyce Carol Oates’ novels and stories construct with an elusive discretion like Kafka and Musil the violence or the cruel paradoxes of love. How do Cynthia Ozick, and Donald Barthelme’s fairy tales, tease their authors, their lives? The professor believes that the language of a writer’s work speaks to his or her secrets. Among the writers we will read will be Bruno Schulz , Witold Gombrowicz, Frederick Douglas, Norman Mailer, Miguel de Unamuno, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino. The class will be asked not just to read but to write fiction, journal and memoir in the course of the semester.