Description
This seminar explores fiction that captures the complexity of memory, family, and identity through fragmented, nonlinear storytelling. Writers will examine how form shapes meaning, using vignettes, shifting perspectives, and unconventional structures to reflect lived experience.
We will root our discussion in a broad literary tradition of writers who use fragmentation to explore race, class, and belonging. Black Chicago writers like Gwendolyn Brooks (Maud Martha) and Toni Cade Bambara (The Salt Eaters) have long experimented with episodic, impressionistic storytelling to reveal the interior lives of their characters. More broadly, authors such as Justin Torres (We the Animals), Gayl Jones (Corregidora), and Claudia Rankine (Citizen) have used fractured narratives to mirror the ways memory, trauma, and family shape identity.
