Jonathan Bolton (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures)
First-Year Seminar 61U | 4 Credits (Fall 2024) | CANVAS SITE
Tuesday, 12:00 PM–02:00 PM
Short enough to read in a single sitting, but more complex and absorbing than short stories, novellas give us some of our most intense reading experiences. Indeed, many of the enduring classics of world literature, from Leo Tolstoys The Death of Ivan Ilyich to James Joyces The Dead, take advantage of the novellas compression and acceleration of plotfeatures that are also suited to horror, mystery, and other forms of genre fiction. In this seminar, we will read some of the great masters of the novella form, including Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Eileen Chang, and Alice Munro, as well as other examples from around the world, including Eastern Europe, China, and Japan. Readings of 80-150 pages a week will allow us to work closely with some classics of modern fiction, going down to the level of word choice and sentence structure; well also consider the way authors build and sustain suspense, the different forms of narrative resolution, and other questions of character, plotting, and structure. We will talk about how to get the most out of your weekly reading experiencesIll ask you to set aside solitary time for your reading each week and, as far as possible, to read each novella in just one or two sittings. Youll keep a handwritten reading journal, including 2-3 pages of writing each week; analytical writing assignments will help you understand the choices made by authors as they shape their stories for this most demanding and exciting of fictional forms.