Word: fictions
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Elizabeth Phang: I took two fiction workshops last year, and I wrote two stories for each. I’m using three of them in my thesis. I had also taken a non-fiction and a poetry workshop, but I hadn’t done any fiction after high school until last year...
Naipaul’s latest novel, the thin, peculiar and effective Half a Life, goes some distance toward showing that the two spheres represented by his travelogues and his fiction are, for Naipaul, hardly separate. Half a Life’s protagonist, Willie Somerset Chandran, undergoes a series of life changes and geographic moves that illuminate how the colonial condition makes its subjects bury their own pasts, both personal and collective, as they adjust themselves to their native, colonial and adoptive homelands...
...Willie to the West. He aims for Canada, home country of the missionaries who educated him in India. He ends up in England, where he studies, struggles to overcome his sexual awkwardness, and eventually begins a career as an unrecognized writer and BBC script-man. Ultimately, his efforts at fiction are little more than transparent cribbing of Hollywood stories, redone to fit Indian contexts...
...Rushdie in East, West and The Satanic Verses. In Naipaul’s younger days, he had a sense of humor as sharp as Rushdie’s, but always muted by wry restraint. By now this restraint has entirely choked away the humor in Naipaul’s fiction, as well as much of the dark gravity that made Naipaul’s post-comic fiction so attractive. The final section, with its political uncertainty and sense of alienation, faintly resembles a low-key A Bend in the River. And even the very frank sexuality, which has been absent...
David Kornhaber: I took a fiction workshop freshman year and two playwriting workshops sophomore year, one through the English department and one with the Dramatic Arts Committee. I’ve had two of my plays performed at college, one in the Loeb Experimental Theater and one in Leverett Old Library...