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In 2002, when I was an MFA student in poetry at Washington University in St Louis, the poet Carl Phillips put a copy of Alexander Chee’s then newly-published debut in my hands and said, “You have to read this right now.” (He never did this with another book.) I did, and felt I was reading a novel that was at once carrying forward recognizable traditions (James Baldwin, Marguerite Duras) and forging something radically new. In the twenty years since its publication, Edinburgh has attained something like legendary status among readers, and has influenced a broad range of younger writers, including Brandon Taylor, R.O Kwon, and me.
In this seminar, we’ll read the book with an eye to its manipulations of time and point of view; its remarkably brave exploration of difficult questions around desire, power, and cycles of abuse; its construction of a narrative structure that Chee has described as “stereophonic”; its use of strategies from the Gothic, fairy tale, melodrama, myth; its very daring evocation of modernist linguistic textures, coming close at times to “pure poetry,” in what never quite stops being a variety of realism; its status as a response to AIDS. Each class will begin with comments from me and then open up to discussion.
NOTE: Alexander Chee joined us for the final thirty minutes of the final class, where he responded to participant questions.
Reading schedule:
Session 1: Prologue & Songs of the Fireflies (pp 1-69)
Session 2: January’s Cathedral (pp 73-120)
Session 3: And Night’s Black Sleep upon the Eyes (pp 123-168)
Session 4: Blue (pp 171-209) + Alexander Chee Q&A
In 2002, when I was an MFA student in poetry at Washington University in St Louis, the poet Carl Phillips put a copy of Alexander Chee’s then newly-published debut in my hands and said, “You have to read this right now.” (He never did this with another book.) I did, and felt I was reading a novel that was at once carrying forward recognizable traditions (James Baldwin, Marguerite Duras) and forging something radically new. In the twenty years since its publication, Edinburgh has attained something like legendary status among readers, and has influenced a broad range of younger writers, including Brandon Taylor, R.O Kwon, and me.
In this seminar, we’ll read the book with an eye to its manipulations of time and point of view; its remarkably brave exploration of difficult questions around desire, power, and cycles of abuse; its construction of a narrative structure that Chee has described as “stereophonic”; its use of strategies from the Gothic, fairy tale, melodrama, myth; its very daring evocation of modernist linguistic textures, coming close at times to “pure poetry,” in what never quite stops being a variety of realism; its status as a response to AIDS. Each class will begin with comments from me and then open up to discussion.
NOTE: Alexander Chee joined us for the final thirty minutes of the final class, where he responded to participant questions.
Reading schedule:
Session 1: Prologue & Songs of the Fireflies (pp 1-69)
Session 2: January’s Cathedral (pp 73-120)
Session 3: And Night’s Black Sleep upon the Eyes (pp 123-168)
Session 4: Blue (pp 171-209) + Alexander Chee Q&A