L204 2508 INTRODUCTION TO FICTION
Laura Shackelford

12:30p - 1:20p D (25 students) 3 cr., A&H, IW.

TOPIC: “Structures of Feeling” in Fiction and other Imagined Communities

This course is centered around short stories and novels that exploit fiction as a “vehicle of emotion,” to use Martha Nussbaum’s term. The selected works of fiction we’re reading both exploit and reflect on fiction’s capacity to construct, evoke, shape, stimulate, circulate and to redirect or regulate feelings within an imagined community of readers and beyond. In the introductory unit of the course, we will consider the different ways in which works of short fiction and novels evoke readers’ emotions (among these strategies plot, point-of view, character, tone, diction, and symbolism are key). In addition to paying close attention to the formal strategies these works of fiction use to engage with feeling, we will go on to consider their explicit engagements with, and reflections on, the topic of feeling as a theme. How do these works of fiction help to construct, re-define, and critique socially acceptable and unacceptable “structures of feeling?” Following a historical trajectory from the early 19th century to the present, we will consider the ways in which these works of fiction, and the literary movements in which they participate (sentimentalism, modernism, and postmodernism), reproduce and/or challenge socially acceptable, legible “structures of feeling.” In particular, we will examine the ways in which social economies of feeling work to define and to differentiate people according to gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality.

By practicing written literary analysis and explication, we will actively enter into dialogue with the works of fiction, attempting to both understand and critique the “structures of feeling” they evoke and figure. Careful, critical reading of the fiction is essential to your success in this course. It will allow you to actively contribute to, and profit from, lively class discussions and, subsequently, to develop your insights on these works of fiction into clear, coherent, and compelling written analysis. (Please keep in mind that you will be composing approximately twenty-five pages of polished, thought-provoking critical analysis over the course of the semester as this is a COAS intensive writing course). Assignments will include three short literary analysis papers around four-five pages in length, two two-page microthemes, a comprehensive exam, and regular reading quizzes and in-class activities.

Required Texts:
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Toni Morrison, Love
Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats
Selected short stories and critical essays on e-reserve