OCER 5570 - Found in Translation: Writing the Other in Fiction

This course aims to both make you a careful reader and to guide you as you produce your own writing: this is not a translation course, but a creative writing course with a focus on translation. We will focus on the study of literary short stories and novel excerpts written by North American and international authors, some of whom write both in English and in their mother tongue. By reading fiction in translation, we will be taking a step back and considering our own languages from another perspective. No second language is required for this creative writing class. Rather, we will be looking at translation both at the micro and macro levels: thinking about the difficulty of translating one text, one word, or one’s culture, one’s world. We’ll examine these questions both critically—by discussing our readings and comparing different translations of a single text—and creatively—by crafting your own full-length short story. Thus, in this class, you will be challenged to explore these issues in your own writing—setting your story in unfamiliar places, choosing the point of view of an outsider, highlighting the values of another society or (sub)culture. The weekly writing exercises are designed to encourage you to get out of your comfort zone, as a writer and as a thinker: they will help you, over the course of the term, write your fiction piece—a first draft that will be shared with the class, and revised according to your peers’ feedback. In this class, you will also be led to question the political stances of choosing to write fiction in English or in another language, thinking in terms of audience and interrogating the power dynamics at stake. Finally, we will be discussing the role of the translator, both as a medium and as a creator. Together, we will work toward becoming better readers, critics and writers of short fiction, as actors of an international literary scene.

Aucun.

The course will be "pass" or "fail". The validation of the course will be based on class participation, timely compliance with deadlines and the overall quality of the writing assignments.

To validate the course, the student is expected to pass the following assignments:

1°) Engagement. This rubric takes into account your participation in individual, small group, and large group discussions, as well as your overall engagement with the course materials (discussion questions, workshop letters, conference, mini-workshops, etc.)

2°) Writing Exercises. By responding to weekly writing prompts, you’ll be applying to your own writing the different technics discussed in class, as well as exploring the key craft elements of fiction writing. We’ll have mini-workshops every week where you’ll have the opportunity to share your piece once during the term. You’ll also be submitting one of your pieces on Moodle, which I will review.

3°) Short Story & Revised Story. On top of responding to writing prompts, you will produce a short story that will be shared with your peers and discussed in workshop. You will then be expected to use the feedback you received in workshop and during our one-one-one conference to revise and polish this first draft.

See previous section