ENGL 070I. Fiction Workshop: Breaking the Egoic Trance

We are wired - at least in some parts of our brains - to view ourselves as the center of the world; stuck in what some mindfulness teachers call “the egoic trance,” we see our pain as the most painful, our shame as the most shameful, our life and life-story as the most vivid, detailed, complicated and real. At some point, of course, or at many points, each of us recognizes the deep absurdity of such delusions, and yet, again and again, we are lulled back into the trance, both by internal mechanisms, and by a culture that hallows and sanctifies notions of hyper-individualism, capitalist accumulation, fixed national borders, private property, et cetera. How, then, can reading and writing fiction serve as path toward awakening, again and again, from the fiction of the separate Self? In this class, we will turn both to teachers of mindfulness and practitioners of fiction writing -Ruth Ozeki, Thich Nhat Hanh, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jalaluddin Rumi, Toni Morrison, Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Marilynne Robinson, Ram Dass, the Dalai Lama, George Saunders, Tara Brach, and more- to grapple with these questions, and will incorporate practices of mindfulness into our fiction writing and reading; the course will also center around workshopping one another’s fiction, in a method and manner that uplifts both mindfulness and self- and other-compassion, and seeks, in itself, to break the egoic trance.
Intermediate workshop
Prerequisite: At least one, ideally two, previous workshops.
Humanities
1
Spring 2025. Rothman-Zecher.
Catalog chapter: English Literature
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature

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