Writers' Studies in Literature (403-0-20)

Instructors

Juan M Martinez

Meeting Info

University Hall 418: Mon 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

This seminar will center on narrative and its two most productive engines, plot and character, all while generating material toward your own work. We'll do so by looking at the ways those engines intersect with the literary world at large: the crisis of the publishing industry and the rise and fall of autofiction. We'll read recent novels that place writers and readers as protagonists, and we'll interrogate how authors navigate this fraught relationship during our present (and fraught!) moment of late capitalism. The novels we'll read may include Claire Vaye Watkins's I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, Elizabeth McCracken's The Hero of This Book, Claire Louise Bennett's Checkout 19, Jason Mott's Hell of a Book, and Jean Haff Korelitz's The Plot, as well as excerpts from R.F. Kuang's Yellowface, Olivia Goldsmith's Bestseller and George Gissing's New Grub Street, plus selected essays from the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. We may read supplementary literary theory by Pierre Bourdieu, Mark McGurl, James English, and others. You'll present on one additional novel that navigates these topics, but the principal aim of the course is to help you figure out your own best stance, as a writer, toward narrative: we'll generate material for our own novels and stories.