Russian formalists isolated fabula, what really happened, from syuzhet, how the story is told. Stories that desynchronize the two are said to be experimental. This workshop will discuss how to manage layers of formal complexity with plot complexity, and when these laminations overload and opacify the truth. We will discuss how to balance discontent with inherited narrative structures with transgressions on the reader’s trust, however lawful and deserved. Story time is usually measured in terms of progress, change, and transformation. It is purified of discursivities like chance, indeterminacy, and impermanence.

This workshop will inquire how and why we link otherwise disjunct impulses into a single container of meaning. Does a traditional story exist, or is it an ideological mirage? Does relegating the experimental to an aesthetic category defang its political possibilities? Does its alterity only serve to naturalize the cultural hegemony of the conflict-resolution model under liberalism? This is a generative workshop, which means we will spend the first hour discussing an assigned story, and then move into writing exercises in the second hour. We will read a selection of texts by Fredric Jameson, Roberto Bolaño, Shuang Xuetao, Joy Williams, Xu Zechen, Denis Johnson, Julio Cortázar, Renee Gladman, and others.

Laminations: An Experimental Fiction Workshop will take place every other Sunday at 1:00 PM (PST), starting on January 26, and meeting February 9th, February 23rd, and March 9th.

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REGISTER

This workshop will take place virtually, over Zoom.

All those who register will receive a zoom link on January 19th.