MYSTERIES

Mystery once referred primarily to religious ideas: divine revelations, unknown rites, or the secret counsel of God. In the 20th century, the word began to be used in reference to more prosaic things, like whodunits. But what is coming to be known in a story? Why and what is a reader tempted to try to know, and what, today, can she possibly think is going to be revealed? When do the ‘tricks’ of withholding information annoy, and when do they compel? What are clues? What are solutions? In what ways can and do stories not straightforwardly written as mysteries use the tropes of mystery? And to what mechanisms of meaning-making do these tropes point?

In this course we will read with the intention of noticing how writers have borrowed, avoided, warped, translated, or disguised the structures of mystery. In this way, we will think about what techniques of mystery we might integrate into our own work. There will also be four five to seven page creative writing assignments, based around: the Clue, the Crime, the Search and the Detective.

In addition to the creative writing assignments, each student will be responsible for one presentation on a reading. The guidelines for presentations are appended after the sample syllabus below.