READING FOR WRITERS: FICTION: DYSTOPIAN FICTION. This course explores diverse works of literature broadly construed as “dystopian.” Focusing mainly on novels, short stories, and movies, students will become acquainted with some of the early classics of the genre as well as a variety of contemporary texts across a broad spectrum of sub-genres, such as cyber-punk, historical, and/or existential dystopias, to name a few. In so doing, students will analyze the aesthetic, rhetorical, and ideological tropes at work in dystopian narratives, identify common plot structures, metaphors, symbols, and themes, and investigate what, if anything, constitutes such disparate works of fiction as a genre. Students will be required to write response papers, make oral presentations, and produce either a 10-page critical essay or a creative work, subject to the instructor’s approval.

READING FOR WRITERS FICTION: CRIME STORIES: This course examines crime stories, true and fictional. Storytelling has long focused on criminals and criminal acts. In this seminar students will read and respond critically as well as creatively to narratives featuring criminal protagonists. The psychological, social, and material characterization of criminals and, more broadly, of transgressive behavior will raise several questions: What is the criminal type? What draws writers to such figures? How do we come to understand social and moral norms? What is a crime?

RFW FICTION: DJINNS, GODDESSES, AND GHOSTS: THE SPECTRAL AND THE REAL IN INDIAN FICTION. This course explores how the novel in the Indian subcontinent – India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka -- grapples with inequality, climate change, and authoritarianism through fictional techniques ranging from realism and magic to more recent turns toward the weird, the occult, and the speculative. The writers studied in this course will include Rohinton Mistry, Fatima Bhutto, Amitav Ghosh, Mohammad Hanif, and Shehan Karunatilaka.

RFW: FICTION: ON BEAUTY. In this Reading for Writers, we will search for beauty and all its permutations. We will search for the beauty in short stories, the beauty of plot, the beauty of perspective, of a novel and sadness and a poem and fine art, all to learn the ways that these appearances utilize the tools of fiction. Writers will leave with an understanding of how to use these craft elements to create beautiful works of fiction while being able to speak about and consciously decide how to implement such measures.