This is an intensive prose workshop: fiction, of course, but writers in other forms, like the essay, or “life writing”, or narrative non-fiction, are equally welcome to sign up. The primary point of focus will be on student writing, but there is one touchstone book, which everyone will be expected to have read by our first meeting: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, in whatever translation you find most congenial.

During the course, we’ll discuss aspects of the novel in great detail, and from a point of view more “writerly” than that of conventional academic criticism. We’ll follow Flaubert from his first conception of the book, through the difficulties he faced while writing it, to his realization of one of the great acknowledged masterpieces of modern fiction. To this end, it’s expected of students that they will also have read Flaubert’s letters to Louise Colet during his composition of Madame Bovary. These are collected in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857, edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller, and published by the Belknap Press of Harvard U.P., 1979. (Both this book, and translations of the novel, are readily and cheaply available via the internet on sites like AddAll, http://used.addall.co.)

I should add that Madame Bovary is notoriously hard to translate well, and I can’t recommend any particular translation wholeheartedly, but those by Margaret Mauldon (for the Oxford World’s Classics series), Gerard Hopkins (for an earlier edition of the Oxford World’s Classics), and Francis Steegmuller (Vintage Books) are generally well thought of. Try to avoid the earliest, and still most widely available translation, by Eleanor Marx Aveling (Karl Marx’s daughter). For our first class meeting, you are invited to ponder the question of why the first word in the novel is what it is—to which any intelligent answer will require a familiarity with the entirety of the book.

During the quarter, students will be expected to produce around 30-50 pages of writing, and to discuss each other’s work with the same attention to detail that we shall be devoting to Flaubert.