Craft of Fiction

3 units

In her introduction to Halldor Laxness's novel Under the Glacier, Susan Sontag says, Narratives that deviate from [the] artificial norm of realist fiction and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all...still, to this day, seem innovative or ultraliterary or bizarre, suggesting they occupy the outlying preceints of the novel's main tradition, and it is with some of these Martian fictions that this class will be concerned. Deviants we'll be reading: Djuna Barnes, RikkiDucornet, Kate Bernheimer, Jaimy Gordon, Kathryn Davis, and other such lady heteroclites. You'll be asked to produce aberrant fictions of your own. Cross-dressers welcome. Craft class for Graduate Students only.