ENGLISH CFE: Advanced Fiction

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In the area below, provide basic, standard course information ahead of registration period to help students make informed course choices. Click the EDIT button and input your responses by over-writing the field description below each bolded heading. Consult the IT Help knowledge base or reach out to FAS Academic Technology at atg@fas.harvard.edu for assistance.

Course goals:

To learn how to close-read literary texts so that you can better understand techniques and strategies for your own writing. The aim is to have up to 10,000 words of your own work workshopped over the course of the semester.

Course format:

See above (course description) or below (under 'CFE: Advanced Fiction Workshop') or the 'CFE Fall 2024' document under 'Files'. PLEASE READ THE SECTION/DOCUMENT CAREFULLY. 

Typical enrollees:

Students who have taken Creative Writing workshops before. Not for students writing YA or YA fantasy. Priority given to students who are trying their hand at putting together a debut short story collection or a first novel, 

When is course typically offered?

Only in the fall. 

What can students expect from you as an instructor?

Intense engagement on all aspects of your writing; wide-ranging and participatory discussions of assigned texts; engagement during office hours.

Assignments and grading:

See 'CFE: Advanced Fiction Workshop' below.

Sample reading list:

See below. Texts of all assigned reading will be made available as PDFs under 'Files'.

Enrollment cap, selection process, notification:

The class is capped at 12 students. See 'supplemental application information' below for the application requirements for this workshop. The application is via Submittable -- see the English Dept website for more information and help on this -- and you will be notified via Submittable. Upper-level students and students with previous experience of workshops are prioritized (but this is by no means a cast-iron principle).

 

Absence and late work policies:

See below.

 

 

CFE: Advanced Fiction Workshop

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Fall semester, 2024.

Wednesdays, 3-5:45 pm ET.

 

Classroom: TBD.

 

Neel Mukherjee (neelmukherjee@fas.harvard.edu)

 

Office hours: Tuesdays, 11 am-1:00 pm. BUT PLEASE E-MAIL FIRST TO PICK A SLOT.

Office: Barker 075.

 

Enrollment: Limited to 12 students.

 

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION: The course will consist of two halves. In the first hour of each class, we will be doing close readings/literary-critical analyses of an assigned text (see below, ‘Course Schedule’, for all the reading material for the semester), with the aim of isolating some aspect of the craft of writing in order to take bearings for your own. We will be looking at technical things such as point of view, free indirect discourse, narration, character, interiority, style, movement, affect, but also at broader issues: metaphysics, politics, inequality, race, colonialism/imperialism, the white gaze. You will not only have read the assigned text with critical rigor but also taken notes of the points you want to raise in class. While I do not expect you to hand in short critical essays on the texts, I will be looking for engaged, alert discussions, so it may help to have something written down to facilitate our conversations.

 

Please note: Reading the assigned text is obligatory. Previous Creative Writing workshop experience is desirable. If you’re writing YA fantasy, there are other courses on offer that would be a better fit.

 

In the second half of the class, divided into two equal segments of 55 minutes each, we will be workshopping the writing of two students. To this end, every week two students will hand in something they have written, to the tune of 2,500-5,000 words, to me and to everyone in the group, ideally one week before their turn. At our first meeting, I will circulate a rota for you to put down your names and walk you through the syllabus, the aims and objectives of the course, workshop rules, expectations, requirements etc. For our first workshopping session, two students should hand in work five to seven days before. Our goal is for each of you to have two turns, and approximately 5-10,000 words of your work critiqued, by the time semester ends. Copies of these writing samples will be returned to you at the end of each workshop with comments from me and from everyone in class. Work submitted must be single-sided, double-spaced, paginated and, ideally, bearing a title. It must have your name on it and, on the top right-hand corner of the first page, my name and ‘Advanced Fiction, Fall 2024’.

 

IMPORTANT: Supplemental Application Information: Please submit 3-5 pages of creative writing in prose (fiction is preferable, but non-fiction is also fine) along with a substantive letter of introduction in which you write about why you’re interested in this course; what experience you’ve had writing, especially what Creative Writing workshops you’ve already taken at Harvard; some of your favourite writers; what some of your favourite works of fiction are and why.

 

 

 

COURSE SYLLABUS & SCHEDULE:

 

  1. Week 1 (4 September): Introductions, course objectives, critiquing, the workshop model, rota and submission of work.
  2. Week 2 (11 September): Anton Chekhov, TBD.
  3. Week 3 (18 September): Ann Petry, ‘The New Mirror’ and ‘The Bones of Louella Brown’, both from Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971).
  4. Week 4 (25 September): Joy Williams, ‘The Little Winter’ and ‘Honored Guest’, both from The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories (Knopf, 2015; Vintage Contemporaries edn., 2016).
  5. Week 5 (2 October): Zoë Wicomb, ‘Trompe L’Oeil’, from The One That Got Away (The New Press, 2009).
  6. Week 6 (9 October): Lucia Berlin, ‘Silence’, in A Manual for Cleaning Women (FSG, 2015).
  7. Week 7 (16 October): TBD.
  8. Week 8 (23 October): Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ (1936), in The Collected Stories (Everyman’s Library, 1995).
  9. Week 9 (30 October): Mavis Gallant, ‘The Cost of Living’ (1962), from The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories (NYRB Classics, 2009).
  10. Week 10 (6 November): Edward P. Jones, ‘Marie’, from Lost in the City (William Morrow, 1992), and ‘Tapestry’, from All Aunt Hagar’s Children (Amistad, 2006).
  11. Week 11 (13 November): James Baldwin, ‘Sonny’s Blues’ (1957), from Going To Meet The Man (1965).
  12. Week 12 (20 November): Kij Johnson, ‘At the Mouth of the River of Bees’, in eponymous collection (2012).
  13. Week 13 (27 November): THANKSGIVING BREAK.
  14. Week 14 (4 December): Octavia Butler, ‘Bloodchild’ (1984), and ‘Speech Sounds’ (1983).

 

SOME RULES FOR THE WORKSHOP:

 

NO PHONES AND LAPTOPS IN THE CLASSROOM. All devices must be put on silent mode and put away during the class.

 

 

  1. Do not confuse attack with criticism. While we are going to subject everyone’s writing to forensic examination, finding ways of how it can be bettered and what we can learn from it, we are going to be scrupulous in avoiding cruelty, personal criticism, sarcasm, mockery, condescension, and try to keep everything firmly in the domain of the analytical and the sympathetic.
  2. It is expected that you will have read the work we are workshopping at least twice, written constructive comments in the margins and on the verso of the printed page, and written a short 250-500-word piece on it. This piece will be used in the workshop for critiquing the week’s writing and can also be handed, if you wish, to the writers whose work we will be discussing.
  3. Engagement is all. Lean in with the full weight of your intellectual and sympathetic faculties when reading and discussing your peers’ writing. This is what you would want from others for your work, so give it too.
  4. Please try to read a work on its own terms, i.e., don’t criticize Heaney because he is not Keats. If someone has handed in a piece of sci-fi, do not say, ‘I don’t do sci-fi’. Instead, open your mind and try to see what the work in question is attempting to do.

 

OTHER POINTS TO NOTE:

Attendance is crucial. You will need a cast-iron excuse for any absence. Any subsequent no-show for illness after the first absence – the first absence is ‘free’, as it were – will require a doctor’s certificate. More than two missed classes will result in a grade in the low-Bs or Cs.

 

Strictly no use of cellphones and laptops in class. Please turn off your phones and put them away before you enter the room. Eating and drinking are permitted. Sharing of food, especially fries, pizza, cakes, and doughnuts, strongly encouraged, especially with the professor. The fries should be accompanied by mayonnaise.

Plagiarism is a serious offence. You are urged to be extremely assiduous in avoiding it.

 

GRADING:

Your grades will be based on a combination of things: attendance (25%); quality of engagement and discussion – of both assigned texts and peers’ work – in the workshop (25%); quality of the written work you hand in for the workshops (25%); your final portfolio (25%), which could be a rewritten version of one of the stories we have workshopped during the course of the semester, or entirely new work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Course Summary:

Date Details Due