How does literature give us access to times, places, and experiences different from our own? What resonates across history and cultures to our present moment, and what remains difficult, esoteric, “academic,” or inaccessible? Is this resonance sometimes interconnected with what we could call “lived experience?” Do certain experiences sometimes demand new or different forms to be captured or expressed? And is there anything about lived experience that resists art, or resists becoming art, or which we resist as readers and writers?

In this class we will look at experiences both extraordinary and mundane: from the gossipy diary of a handmaid in Japan’s 10th century imperial court to the travelogue of a poet and lay monk; from war and national trauma in East Asia and Europe to our own very specific, personal losses; and from struggles to find our place in a hostile or indifferent world to the experiments of writers turning every day life into art. Through our encounters with these texts, as well as our own creative exercises, we will work together to understand the multifaceted form and content of lived experience.