Instructor: Valeria Luiselli
Wednesday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students
Course Site
How do fiction writers interact with official narratives and the archives that support them? This is a course both about fictions created by historical archives, and a course about using fiction to intervene historical archives. If the archive is often historically bound to power, perhaps fiction can act as a destabilizing force, throwing official narratives off balance and offering alternatives to how we can imagine possible futures. In this course we will be examining a series of works –literary, acoustic, photographic, hybrid, and others– that have worked with archives and offer insight into the relationship between document and fiction. Among others, we will be looking at work by Svetlana Alexievich, Michael Ondaatje, Layli Long Soldier, Zoe Leonard, Arlette Farge, Alice Oswald, Humane Borders, and Ecologies of Migrant Care. We will also be working directly with a selection of archives, thinking (and practicing!) ways to intervene and question them.
Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a letter telling me about yourself, and your interests as a reader and writer. Tell me about the reasons why you are interested in this course, including what you expect from both the course and from yourself as a writer working with archives.
Apply via Submittable (deadline: 11:59pm ET on Saturday, November 4)