Parables of Place offers an intensive study of playful, contemporary literature centered on novels, short stories, and hybrid, auto-fictional, and philosophical writings in which contingencies of place, specificities of setting, and mutabilities of atmosphere are central to characterization. Through weekly seminar discussions and writing workshops, the program cultivates a practice of reading and writing that is both intellectually rigorous and creatively expansive. We will ask, by what methods do writers challenge conventional notions of genre and narrative, particularly by intertwining senses of place, history, and character? We'll study dreamlike bureaucracy in Robert Walser's Jacob von Gunten; institutional absurdism in American Genius: A Comedy by Lynne Tillman; queer resistance and place-making in Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter; histories of Paris in Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal; the diasporic, exilic London of Hisham Matar's My Friends; and the formation of literary coteries and styles in Chile and San Francisco, respectively, through Alejandro Zambra's novel Chilean Poet and Robert Glück's Denny Smith.
Students will engage with literature not only as readers but as makers, tuning creative intuition while developing critical analyses of how place functions across our selected texts. Creative writing exercises will support participants in generating writing that is keyed to the themes of the course. Students are expected to read deeply, write consistently, and participate actively in workshop and seminar discussions. Students will be guided on how to co-facilitate seminars collaboratively on selected readings, and will write critical essays, in addition to working on creative writing projects centered on questions of place and character. To that end, the program includes an opportunity for intensive, independent writing residency that we will build up to, during which time students will immerse themselves in revising and deepening place-based, site-specific writing, finalizing their creative writing projects for a culminating literary reading. Open to all levels, the program is particularly well suited to students interested in fiction, genre experimentation, and the philosophical and political stakes of imaginative writing. In order to succeed in this class, students are expected to acquire all of the assigned books. The program entails reading a book a week and secondary readings. The program includes dedicated writing and reading studio time for focused, autonomous reading and writing in a manner that balances solitude and community.
Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:
6 - Literature
6 - Creative Writing
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Academic Details
writing, literature, humanities