3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

What even is a novella? Ian McEwan offers this starting point: Let’s take, as an arbitrary measure, something that is between twenty and forty thousand words, long enough for a reader to inhabit a world or a consciousness and be kept there, short enough to be read in a sitting or two and for the whole structure to be held in mind at first encounter.” McEwan promptly goes on to name “The Dead” – 15,000 words – as “the great novella,” so clearly rules are made to be broken. Whatever exactly we think the novella is, it offers unparalleled lessons for us in how to forge narrative structure that is lacking in superfluity and enormous of impact. Every week we will read at least one “novella;” sometimes we will read two; we will write weekly brief critical responses to our reading which will focus on craft; and each student will present on one of the assigned works in the course of the semester. Our reading list may include works by such authors as James Joyce, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, Katherine Anne Porter, Philip Roth, Shirley Jackson, Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys, Jane Smiley, George Saunders, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jenny Erpenbeck.