March 28, 2024 Syllabi Syllabus: Diaries By Jhumpa Lahiri Lahiri at Boston University, where she attended graduate school, in 1997. “I’ve kept [a journal] for decades—it’s the font of all my writing,” Jhumpa Lahiri told Francesco Pacifico in her Art of Fiction interview, which appears in the new Spring issue of The Paris Review. “That mode, which involves carving out a space in which no one is watching or listening, is how I’ve always operated.” She described a class she recently taught at Barnard on the diary, and we asked her for her syllabus for our ongoing series; hers includes a wide range of texts which all carve out that particular, intimate space. Course description What inspires a writer to keep a diary, and how does reading a diary enhance our appreciation of the writer’s creative journey? How do we approach reading texts that were perhaps never intended to be published or read by others? What does keeping a diary teach us about dialogue and description, or about creating character and plot, about narrating the passage of time? How is a diary distinct from autofiction? In this workshop we will evaluate literary diaries—an intrinsically fluid genre—not only as autobiographical commentaries but as incubators of self-knowledge, experimentation, and intimate engagement with other texts. We will also read works in which the diary serves as a narrative device, blurring distinctions between confession and invention, and complicating the relationship between fact and fiction. Readings will serve as inspiration for establishing, appreciating, and cultivating this writerly practice. Read More
January 29, 2024 Syllabi Recommended Readings for Students By Yu Hua Yu Hua in Paris, 2004. Courtesy of Yu Hua. The new Winter issue of The Paris Review, no. 246, includes an Art of Fiction interview with the Chinese writer Yu Hua, the author of novels such as To Live, Brothers, and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. We asked Yu to contribute a syllabus to our ongoing series, and he obliged with a list of recommendations that he’s provided to his students—but, as he says in his interview, remember not to be narrowly focused on reading lists: “Literature is not the only thing in my life. I encourage my students to think this way, too. Recently, I told one of them, ‘Let’s meet this afternoon to talk about the story you wrote,’ and he said, ‘Professor, I’m going clubbing tonight.’ I said, ‘All right, have fun.’ ” I am a professor of creative writing at Beijing Normal University, and with few exceptions, most of my students have no experience writing before enrolling in my course. We begin with short stories before transitioning to novellas, a literary form uniquely popular in China—works of fiction between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand Chinese characters. Julio Cortázar’s “The Southern Thruway” and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach are both excellent examples. When recommending literary works to my students, I base my suggestions on two principles. The first is to avoid works that are already extremely well-known in China, which most of my students will have read during senior middle school or high school. (The Old Man and the Sea, which I ask them to reread, is an exception to that rule.) The second principle is to tailor my lists to students’ individual writing goals. I have one student whose mind is filled with strange and unusual thoughts; I advised her to read “The Southern Thruway” three times and then search for a scene from everyday life to use as a starting point from which her own narrative could gradually expand, so that the magnification of the narrative would be dependent upon real-life details, which can allow the writer to reveal the vastness and complexity of human nature. I also asked her to read Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” three times, as an example of how the literature of the absurd can actually arrive at the real more quickly. In other words, our starting point is “the real” and that is where we ultimately return—even if “the real” to which we return has become completely unrecognizable. Read More
December 1, 2023 Syllabi Syllabus: Unexpected Dramaturgy By Lynn Nottage LYNN NOTTAGE IN REHEARSAL FOR THIS IS READING (2017) AT THE FRANKLIN STREET RAILROAD STATION IN READING, PENNSYLVANIA, 2017. In an interview in the Review‘s new Fall issue, the playwright Lynn Nottage describes the way one of her classes at Yale would open: with a trip to the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. “Most academics and practitioners weren’t acknowledging the different forms of theater happening all over New York City, and how those forms were in conversation with the way we as playwrights make our work,” she tells Christina Anderson. Her class also visited vogue balls, megachurches, trials, and wrestling matches. “What I’ve witnessed is that, by the end of the course, all the students, even if they began as very naturalistic, structurally conservative writers, are making work that is more playful, inventive, and open,” she says. We asked Nottage to provide us with a syllabus of sorts—and she sent a reading list of plays that can also teach us to look at drama and narrative structure from a similarly wide range of vantage points. As a playwright, I’m interested in what happens when I enter my craft from differing perspectives, as an anthropologist, an athlete, an activist, a con artist, a criminal, a prosecutor, an exhibitionist, an archivist, a visual artist, a musician, a mystic, or a healer. What can we learn about dramatic structure and storytelling from observing the way theater, and performance, occur outside of a traditional theatrical setting? I’ve gravitated toward the following plays for their ability to raise this question, to engage unexpected dramaturgy, and to bend and twist the architecture of narratives to arrive at a piercing truth. Read More
October 30, 2023 Syllabi The Displaced Person: A Syllabus By Robert Glück In an interview in our Fall issue, Robert Glück told Lucy Ives, “I think about the workshops I ran at Small Press Traffic in the seventies and eighties, how reading became a part of writing. We were reading our lives and living our fictions.” We asked Glück—whose free community workshops spearheaded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco—for a syllabus from one of his former classes. This one is from a course called The Displaced Person. Here is my catalogue description: This M.F.A.-level course in fiction explores—through readings, writing assignments, and critical essays—the many ways in which alienation defines the self, from Lacan’s mirror stage, where the self comes to be organized around an image outside of the body, to the various kinds of exile we experience by virtue of class, age, race, and sexuality, as well as the hatred of the other, the discontents of language, and the economies of pleasure that society seems to be founded on. Read More
February 6, 2023 Syllabi Quiet: A Syllabus By Victoria Adukwei Bulley For most of my life, I took quiet to mean a kind of shortcoming. I had heard it used too many times as a description of how others saw me. But then I realized that in the work of writers I love deeply are many kinds of quiets—those of catharsis, of subversiveness, of gaping loss or simple, sensual joy. I came to think of quiet not as an adjective or verb or noun, but as a kind of technique. The books I chose for the syllabus below expand how we think about black expression, intimacy, interiority, and agency; about black quietude. I began with the work of Kevin Quashie, whose voice, like a tuning fork, set a tone for my reading of other books. For the nonfiction books on this list, I looked for thinkers who are deeply attentive to the everyday. For fiction and poetry, I selected writers who allow us to glimpse more clearly our own selfhoods via the unknowability of others. In all cases, these are books that are richer for asking us to listen more deeply. We might return from each one dazzled, dazed even, but always with renewed, sharpened perception. Read More
January 11, 2023 Syllabi Relentlessness: A Syllabus By Colm Tóibín Photograph by Sophie Haigney. In our new Winter issue, Belinda McKeon interviewed Colm Tóibín, the author of ten novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of essays and journalism. “In the autumn of 2000,” he told her, “I taught a course at the New School called Relentlessness, and I chose to teach translations of some ancient Greek texts, and Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Sylvia Plath. The class was very useful because it gave me a bedrock of theory about what this sort of work was doing. … Once you have that certain authority, you can actually write a plainer prose.” We asked Tóibín for his syllabus from that class, along with a short introduction, as the first in a new series we are launching called Syllabi. I am interested in texts that are pure voice or deal with difficult experience using a tone that does not offer relief or stop for comfort. Sometimes, the power in the text comes from powerlessness, whether personal or political. Sometimes, death is close or danger beckons or violence is threatened or enacted. Sometimes, there is a sense of real personal risk in the text’s revelations. Sometimes, there is little left to lose. All the time, the tone is incantatory or staccato or filled with melancholy recognitions. Read More