First-Year Studies: Fiction: A User’s Guide

Catalog description

Many students enter college as avid readers and writers, but their understanding of what fiction is—its range and possibilities—will greatly expand during their undergraduate years. This writing workshop is designed to invite and fast-track that experience by exposing students to fiction’s aesthetic diversity and the myriad ways it can enchant, enlighten, and unsettle us—without privileging any single approach. To that end, we will read everything from the psychological realism of A. M. Homes and Jhumpa Lahiri, to the eerie expressionism of Franz Kafka and Haruki Murakami, to the funhouse narratives of Donald Barthelme and Angela Carter, to the genre-bending work of Brian Evenson and Kelly Link. We will not only explore the logic behind stories but also analyze their construction: the way point-of-view decisions steer us through a work of fiction, the way meaningful patterns drive us deeper, and the way sentence-level choices engineer a story’s lasting effect. But the course—a “user’s guide,” after all—is as much about writing as it is about reading. Students will bring what they are learning to their own work, initially by responding to weekly writing prompts and later by sharing several longer pieces with their classmates during focused peer-critique sessions. Students will be encouraged to play on the page, as we build a community determined to seek out the borders of fiction. The class will culminate in a final portfolio, giving students the opportunity to collect, arrange, and reflect upon the diverse work that they have created over the course of the year. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences may be weekly or biweekly. First-Year Studies in Fiction: The Craft of Fiction