BFA Fiction Workshop: ESLit

Course Description

Summary

Reversing the typical shame around so-called "ESL" speakers, this course explores the rich history of modern and contemporary Anglophone literature written by authors who learned English as a second language or within a bi/multilingual context. This rigorous reading list is then used as a springboard for cultivating diverse voices and stories in the classroom. The course’s seminar and workshop portions complement each other.

Seminar portion:

The idea of “outsiderness” serves as our entry. Together we ask how this outsider position opened up possibilities for these texts, both thematically and formally. What Others are produced in these texts, and what does Otherness look like within their pages?

We consider, and also critique, the popular idea that there is something special about the so-called “mother tongue.” Putting those claims to task, we explore the politics of this feminization of language (i.e., why “mother?”). We furthermore consider how the idea of the mother tongue has been used as a tool of racist colonial policing, shutting racialized others out of official discourse. Recognizing that embracing a “mother” tongue has also been used as a tool of anticolonial resistance, that is, as a way to create space for a self threatened with erasure, we nevertheless consider authors who claim space in and through English-as-imperial tongue, whether by explicitly rejecting the mother tongue (e.g., Yiyun Li) or by more vexedly treating English as a site of loss or melancholia (e.g., Valeria Luiselli) – or still more, by embracing diglossia and multilingualism (e.g., Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) alongside self-translation (e.g., Jhumpa Lahiri).

Readings may also include ESLit authors not typically—or no longer—regarded as outsiders, such as the famous examples of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov.

Workshop portion:

Our workshop utilizes this heterogenous mapping to make room for your work and your peers. We will devote the same time and attention to one another’s work as to this published literature. Our readings might also open room for experimentation with new themes or forms. 

Tackling both line-level and big-picture critiques, we will learn to hone our craft as fiction writers.