Description
Fabulism, that ever elusive label with its roots in fairytales and similarities with the surreal, the magical, and the absurd, is a mode singularly well equipped to respond to and process life’s inherent strangeness.This course will explore stories that play within a long tradition of using the fantastic to illuminate the difficult and prickly terrain of human nature. In this reading-intensive class we will study selections from the 1,001 Nights, Grimms’ tales and Calvino’s collected folklore, and such authors as Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Kenji Miyazawa, Jorge Luis Borges, Hassan Blasim, Aimee Bender, Rajesh Parameswaran, Ayse Papatya Bucak, and Laura Van Den Berg. We will examine fabulist modes of narrative and through discussions interrogate the motivations behind the fabulous and capabilities such stories afford.