Fiction Writing

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This writing seminar examines how historical, political and cultural violence shape language, narrative, and collective and individual identities, and considers art as a form of transformational testimony. The very act of documenting the nuanced affective, symbolic, and structural after-effects of systemic violence can be consciousness shifting for artists and viewers, writers and readers, and thus make available to us new modes of knowledge transmission and resilience, and heighten our individual and collective imaginative capacities. In this class, we will ask: How do writers and artists translate the pain of war, forced migration, and state sanctioned violence into language? What narrative strategies do literatures of exile and resistance engage? How are memory, temporality, and spatiality reimagined in narratives of resistance and testimony? Is literature a form of “archive,” and if so, what is the archival work of the writer in the context of violence and annihilation? How have writers, artists, and filmmakers productively challenged grammars of denial and the politics of erasure? We will study literature, visual art, films and performance pieces that engage with and respond to state-sanctioned violence, document the psychic, spiritual and material consequences of displacement, and generate new visions of identity, community and nationhood in an increasingly global world. Students will generate creative work in response to the assigned readings