F ic t io n L ab o r a t or y

 S pring Quarter

Faculty: Steven Hendricks

Enrollment: 25

Class Standing: Sophomore and above

Prerequisites: Strong writing and reading skills

Faculty Signature: No

Special Expenses: Approximately $20 for photocopies

The vague label "experimental fiction" conceals a world of creative work and study that fiction writers are often taught to ignore and reject--"leave it to the English majors." This will to ignorance leaves student writers out of step with literary history and subject to writing by committee through workshops; it aligns them with an educational and creative process geared not toward knowledge and innovation but toward conformity and commodification.

In this program, we will treat literary works--our own included--as creative experiments and research into the possibilities of language and narrative. The alphabet, the language, the myriad tropes and formulae for literary expression, and the archetypal patterns of narrative we will view as a vast table of elements that can be combined and synthesized into new substances: new genres, new prose forms, new syntax, new strategies for reading and making meaning, new reasons to write.

Program seminars will emphasize a lineage of exceptional exceptions: novels and short fiction of the last half century by writers who have taken careful stock of shifts in literary and cultural theory, who have learned their art in the ruptures between modernist, high modernist, and postmodernist criticism. We'll begin our story with "The End," digging ourselves out of Samuel Beckett's exhaustive void to locate those new voices, forms, and innovative projects that replenish literature and invest the writer's work with the possibility of creating meaning, not merely reproducing or consecrating received forms of thought and expression.

We'll surround our study of innovative literature with introductions to the thinking that motivated and buttressed movements like the nouveau roman , the Oulipo , and post-structuralism; we'll examine how this same thinking has led many writers and scholars once dedicated to understanding authorship to Italo Calvino's conclusion that "the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading." Working in the shadow of such theories, we'll seek to construct new hypotheses about the act of writing, the art of reading, and the function of literary form.

Our own creative work will provide a rigorous testing ground for ideas. Student work will be examined by faculty and peers on a regular basis with half a mind toward developing a manuscript, the other half toward investigating the creative process and continually redefining the complex relationship between reader, text, and writer.

Students enrolled in the program should be prepared to read a range of challenging texts, to write consistently in the spirit of experimentation and play, to conduct independent research into complex questions relevant to program texts and themes, and to participate actively in program seminars, workshops, and critiques.

Total: 16 credits

Program is preparatory for further study in fiction writing, literature, and literary theory. Credit is awarded in fiction writing, literature, and literary theory.