The overall purpose of this class is to teach you to approach, read, and analyze fiction critically, thoughtfully, and intellectually.

Commonly, fiction is understood to be the opposite of fact—where fact is objective, fiction is subjective; where fact is value neutral, fiction is value-laden. Thus, as a class called “Reading Fiction,” this course takes these premises as its starting point in order to challenge their commonsensical status. That is to ask, then, what enables these sharp distinctions between fact and fiction? And to what effect does particular instances of it have? In posing these questions, this course does not seek to reduce one side of the binary to the other, in which fact is nothing but fiction, but rather it will attend to the formal presuppositions and methodological practices that subtend particular historical and disciplinary instances of the fact/fiction dichotomy.

Therefore, the course centers on this problematic of history and fiction through an exploration of forms of reading and reading of forms. Broadly, we will examine how the writing of history and fiction are linked through questions of narrative form and representation. To do so, we will specifically engage with topics like the nation and death, revolution and memory, slavery and the body, war and trauma. And throughout, we focus how such narratives rely upon and make intelligible citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality as the terms by which we come know and feel ourselves. Course texts MAY include: Herman Melville's “Benito Cereno,” Gayle Jones' Corrigedora, E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Alice Walker's Meridian, Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle, Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange

The course workload includes: 10-15 pages of revised writing that satisfies the University "W" requirement, which will come in the form of two 6-7 page academic essays that perform a textual analysis of one or more of the fictional texts and thoroughly engages critical material; group presentations where you begin and facilitate class discussion; weekly pop quizzes on the course readings; daily free-writes; a substantial amount of daily reading; occasional take-home writing assignments; and engaging in daily class discussion and in-class group activities.