Fiction Seminar
Ben Marcus
Technologies of Heartbreak
This seminar will examine how emotion is attempted and transmitted in fiction, the various ways readers are captured and made to care about a story. Emotional effects—rapture, sympathy, desire, empathy, fascination, grief, repulsion—will be considered as techniques of language, enabled or muted by narrative context, acoustics, phrasing, and our own predispositions. How can a sentence, a phrase, a paragraph cause us to feel things, and is a high degree of feeling akin to “liking” a book? What is it to care about a character or the progress of a story, and how was that care installed in us? What are the various kinds and sequences of sentences that, when placed in a narrative, can produce emotional engagement in a reader, affection or distraction, or is it impossible to isolate our reaction to a book in terms of its language? The focus will be on some rhetorical strategies novelists and story writers have used to impart feeling, among them: concealment, indirection, revelation, confession, flat affect, irony, hyperbole, repetition, sentimentality, elusiveness, and sincerity. A tentative book list follows.
2/4 – Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates
2/11 – Mrs. Bridge – Evan S. Connell
2/18 – Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
2/25 – A Personal Matter – Kenzabarō Ōe
3/1 – Jernigan – David Gates
3/4 – Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
3/11 – The Emigrants – W. G. Sebald
3/25 – Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
4/1 – Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
4/8 – The Fifth Child – Doris Lessing
4/22 – Two Serious Ladies – Jane Bowles
4/29 – The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
5/6 – Correction – Thomas Bernhard
