Week Five: Fiction Indexing Reality

Gia Coppola and James Franco

Reading Assignment: Before coming to class please read short stories in the collection Palo Alto by James Franco. Read as many as you can.

Writing Assignment: Using the worldbuilding based questions we have been applying the last two weeks in our discussion of the novels we have been reading, write a blog post based on one of the questions (or part of the question) and discuss either the novel by Murakami or Jemisin. The idea of this assignment is to make more concrete some of your ideas from the group discussions by putting them into writing. 

In Class: We will watch Gia Coppola's film Palo Alto which is based on some of the stories in Franco's collection. Then we will discuss elements of the adaptation of the stories into film. We will especially inquire into what aspects of the stories did Coppolla incorporate into her work, what aspects you think are important that didn't get incorporated, and what values you think are reflected in the combination of the film and the stories?