MA Creative Writing

This course focuses on a range of twenty-first century texts (including novels, short stories, and works of ‘autofiction’), and it does so with a dual focus:  

First, it focuses on contemporary literature as not just words on a page, but as (also) an industry, a scene, a set of practices, coteries, markets. We will consider the contexts of production and reception of contemporary literature and discuss questions of value and canonicity; we will consider the role of reviews, the construction of readership(s), and the impact of prize culture, and will discuss how ‘literariness’ is constructed and understood in the twenty-first century. 

Second, the course focuses on questions of genre and form. It asks questions about the formal and generic possibilities of fiction in the twenty-first century: how malleable are the boundaries between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’? Or between fiction and autobiography? What, if anything, can short stories do that novels cannot (and vice versa)? What are the key genre influences in recent fiction? To what extent can we think of ‘literary fiction’ as a genre (albeit one that denies its status as such)?
 

Week 1: John Banville, The Sea (2005) 

Week 2: Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005) 

Week 3: Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005) 

Week 4: Selected short stories by Mariana Enriquez, Camilla Grudova, and Carmen Maria Machado 

Week 5: Selected short stories by Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh, and Eley Williams 

Week 6: Chus Pato and Erin Moure, Secession/Insecession (2014) 

Excerpts from Nicole Brossard, Museum of Bone and Water (2021) 

Week 7: Erin Moure, The Unmemntioable (2012) 

Week 8: Ben Lerner, 10.04 (2014) 

NON-TEACHING PERIOD AND EASTER BREAK 

Week 9: Rachel Cusk, Outline (2014) 

Week 10: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013) 

Week 11: Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019)