We often tell stories with urgency – to reflect, share, inform, and influence – because the world and our lives needs to be expressed and understood in complex ways. In this course, we will analyze, take apart, and learn from the elements and narrative forms of fiction. With that, there is no experience quite like reading. As an intimate and private interaction, reading connects us to the world as we invite its stories to dwell in us and as we listen to and embrace multiple voices, communities, and perspectives. In this way, stories become maps that help us confront history, representation, silence, and injustice, as well as envision ourselves: how we struggle, survive, communicate, and love.
We will encounter a wide range of content and themes addressing place, community, relationships, innocence, identity/inheritance, gender/sexuality, history/trauma, and migration/country. As we learn how to become better readers of texts by discussing form, we will also shift our attention to considering the ethics and stakes of our own writing by questioning choices in craft and the purpose of storytelling.
Throughout the semester, students will produce thoughtful and imaginative responses to texts, a critical paper, and several short fiction pieces.
“We’ve got a long history of screwing everything up and of victimizing each other, but we also have a long history of continuity – of resistance and of creative survival and that’s always been helped tremendously by our arts, by our songs, by the cultural stuff that we pass on from the past to the future – and that’s not bad thing to be a part of.”
-Junot Diaz
Required Texts:
-Course reader, available the first week at Professional Image (2633 S. King St., 808-973-6599)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Krys Lee, Alexander Chee, Junot Diaz, Raymond Carver, Andrew Lam, Tim O’Brien, Charles D’Ambrosio, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Nami Mun, T.C. Boyle, Paul Yoon, NoViolet Bulawayo, Sherman Alexie, Richard Ford, Ken Quilantang, Louise Erdrich, Rodney Morales, Kaui Hart Hemmings, Annie Proulx, and excerpts from Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories.
-Ryan, Shawna Yang. Water Ghosts. New York: Penguin Books, 2009. ISBN-10: 0143117270, available at Revolution Books.
-Adaptation (2002), dir. Spike Jonze (available online)