17 Aug Write a fiction based on historical events

Write a fiction based on historical events

Historical Fiction Your project must include primary research documents that you include in some part of your narrative. These can be historical images or other artifacts, including objects, legal documents, diaries, pamphlets, news clippings. The point is to use primary resources (rather than secondary) that have not already been filtered by history. The availability of these sorts of mass-digitized historical archives means that there will be voices, stories, perspectives that have previously gone unnoticed and are available for exploration in your own narrative explorations, whether in the form of work of historical fiction, gothic, supernatural, horror or in a more multi-genre open-ended story.

Speculative Fiction A work of speculative fiction might also use these sorts of historical primary documents to tell the story, for instance to construct a story of as an alternative past, present, or even a future.

• Will you utilize genre in your story and if so, what and how? For instance is there a way that you can utilize aspects of the gothic fiction to tell a story that does not simply reproduce the normative binaries and hierarchies that are common to the genre and rooted in the 19th and 20th centruy?
• How can [popular] genres such as gothic and horror–in which the narrative relies on tropes of otherness, exclusion and fear– be utilized in the 21st century as strategy for recovering/expressing the silenced/ marginalized Other?
• How are the generic tropes of heteronormativity, patriarchy, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, undone by the introduction of hybrid or alternative narrative forms?
• How can embodied writing and phenomenology be used to make visible the “symbolic code” that defines the genre?
• How can a focus on spatially embodied relationships and ecosystems define an alternative approach to storytelling and narrative? Consider the physical interrelationships between living bodies in an ecosystem (plant, animals, insects, landforms) and the way that closely attending to the “tissue of connections”—- be it physiological, biological, chemical, phenomenal –can work to subvert binary notions of self and other that are critical to the many popular genres of fiction, including gothic and horror.
• How can we include multiple perspectives rather than singular dominant narrative? How can we make speak that which is silent? how can we include the past as part of a narrative, as a haunting, a ghostly figure, in the traces on the wall and the wear of the floor?