First-Year Studies in Fiction: Writing and the American Racial Imaginary

Catalog description

This fiction workshop will seek to draw inspiration from the way that American writers have grappled with the experience of race and racial inequality. How do race and racism act not only as social forces but also as imaginative ones? How do they become narrative resources for writers? How do writers engage with these historical and imaginative legacies? What lessons might aspiring writers draw from their efforts? In other words, how might we fruitfully think about what Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap have called—in their anthology of the same name—“the racial imaginary”? Over the course of this creative-writing workshop, students will be asked to explore the American racial imaginary by examining writing in a variety of genres and disciplines—from short stories to personal essays and poetry, as well as academic criticism and historical scholarship—in the interest of producing and workshopping their own original fiction. For final conference projects, students will be expected to produce a portfolio of fiction. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. First-Year Studies in Poetry: Poetic Form/Forming Poetry