NONFICTION-ISH

This craft seminar aims to uncover daring and unusual approaches to literature informed by nonfiction (and nonfiction-adjacent) practices. In this course we will closely read and analyze a diverse set of works, including Samuel R. Delany’s memoir-polemic of New York street life, Lydia Davis’s very short stories drawn from life, Svetlana Alexievich’s “novel of voices,” Sheila Heti’s alphabetical diaries, Adania Shibli’s double-telling of a crime story, Eliot Weinberger’s ways of looking at translation and Chinese poetry, Sei Shōnagon’s observations from eleventh-century Japan, Christopher Isherwood’s autofiction, Emmanuel Carrère’s “nonfiction novels,” Sigrid Nunez’s memoir “of” Susan Sontag, Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulations, W. G. Sebald’s essay-fiction, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s semiautobiographical novel in journal entries, alongside shorter pieces and extracts by writers like Eileen Myles, Alejandro Zambra, Maria Stepanova, Ben Mauk, and more. What we learn in this course we will apply to our own work, which will consist of regular ungraded generative writing prompts and two graded creative writing responses. Students will also learn to keep a daily writing journal, from which selections will serve as the midterm and final.