This rigorous upper-division seminar and creative writing workshop explores contemporary prose that crosses and unsettles boundaries between fiction, autobiography, history, essay, poetry, narrative, documentary, theory, and criticism. Focusing on hybrid and multimodal forms, we will consider how writers use experimental structures, shifting perspectives, fragments, juxtaposition, association, and other formal strategies to explore the relationships among person and place, body and culture, memory and history, language and psyche, individual experience and collective life, and the human and more-than-human. We will ask how questions of perception, embodiment, sensory experience, displacement, tone, argument, reflection, and uncertainty shape both literary form and the reader’s experience.

At the center of the seminar are eight books, alongside selected secondary readings, which we will read closely and comparatively: Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child; Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; Rachel Cusk’s Outline; Pamela Lu’s Pamela; Thalia Field’s Personhood; Renee Gladman’s Theory for Moving Houses; Imogen Smith’s raw & zero; and Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You. We will also engage writings by Hélène Cixous and Édouard Glissant, whose contributions to feminist and postcolonial literary thought illuminate the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of experimental writing.

Reading will be at the center of our work, with one book discussed each week through sustained close reading; analytical, interpretive critical writing; comparative analysis; and student-facilitated seminars. We will attend closely to the formal choices each writer makes and consider how those choices shape meaning, perception, and interpretation. 

Alongside the seminar, students will participate in a writing workshop and experiment with hybrid prose of their own. Writing projects will emerge from encounters with the course readings, inviting students to test unfamiliar forms, structures, and modes of inquiry while developing their own approaches to experimental literary practice.

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies: 

8 - Literature

8 - Creative Writing