Undergraduate

The sonnet form has a unique place in Western poetics--as a site for affective expression, formal exploration, and poetic narration. This advanced poetry workshop takes the historical tradition of the sonnet sequence--from the early modern period to contemporary avant-gardes across a range of languages and regions--as a model for serial lyric form. Authors will range from Petrarch, Dante, Sidney, and Shakespeare to Tonya Foster, Ed Roberson, and Wanda Coleman. (Please note students will *not* be required to write sonnet sequences!) Writing exercises will explore questions of lineation, recursion, seriality, and poetic narratology.

Poetry Thesis Workshops are open to Creative Writing Intensive Majors, Creative Writing Legacy Majors and Minors completing an optional thesis, and MAPH Creative Writing Specialists. Students will build off a project already in-progress to complete a collection of 10-15 polished poems. Students are expected to have at least 50% of an initial draft of their project completed prior to the first day of class.    

Beginning writers are often told to imitate ‘great authors’ to discover their voices. One way to reconcile imitation with originality is to copy works from literary history with a comic touch. In this course, students will satirize poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from the history of Western literature to learn how art works. Parodying Stein’s portraiture illuminates the workings of literary mimesis; satirizing Lispector’s proliferating points of view adumbrates perspectival horizons in narrative; satirizing Tanizaki’s praise of shadows illustrates the mechanics of nonfiction polemic. Students will write imitations of literary works and a final mock-academic essay on parody and mimesis.

Literary ecosystems that support underrepresented voices often require strategic interventions to create robustness. This Studio course will use the South Asian Literary Translation Project (SALT) as a case study for a hands-on examination of these kinds of interventions. Close reading of translations that have emerged from SALT will help equip us with the tools to read literature in translation from any language, while focusing on specific strategies used by translators to bring literature from this particular region into English. These readings will also serve as lenses to closely examine the interventions that helped bring these works into being: literary mentorships, subventions to publishers, reader’s reports, translation workshops, travel and publicity grants, community building, and awards. We will discuss with writers, translators, publishers, and literary nonprofits how these discrete features work in conversation to nourish a given literary ecosystem; what’s been working with SALT, and the challenges it faces; performance indicators that can be used to judge success. The final student portfolio will include two reader’s reports and a 1000-word blueprint for a project to address the needs of a particular literary ecosystem.

This course explores the characteristics and features of non-democratic regimes and tyrannies as they are reflected in literature and film: how and why they come about, what sustains them, why some resist them and others do not, and how/why they fall. Analyzing films, novels, and articles left in the wake of dictatorships like those of Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Rafael Trujillo, we will investigate the effects of absolute authority, how ordinary people react to repression, and the shaky transition from despotism to freedom. We will consider a diverse range of writers including Suetonius, Shakespeare, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell. Assignments include critical essays, creative exercises, and a final creative piece. 

Literary Nonfiction Thesis Workshops are open to Creative Writing Intensive Majors, Creative Writing Legacy Majors and Minors completing an optional thesis, and MAPH Creative Writing Specialists. Students will build off a project already in-progress to complete 15-30 pages of polished prose—typically in the form of essays or an excerpt from a longer work. Students are expected to have at least 50% of an initial draft of their project completed prior to the first day of class. 

Ever since humans were drawing on cave walls, the ways in which we communicate meaning through stories has been evolving. This class will look at three forms of narrative—fiction, narrative poetry, and film—and explore their “grammars” (i.e. the modes, tools, elements of craft, etc. that a particular genre uses to convey meaning or achieve certain effects). How does film (a visual medium that offers a voyeuristic experience) tell a story differently than does fiction (which invites the reader to participate more in an act of shared imagination), differently than poetry (which condenses a story to its essences)? How is meaning or emotion conveyed differently through each? How do different grammars influence the effects they achieve? Students will look at and discuss various works of fiction, poetry, and film, read critical and craft-oriented texts, complete weekly reading responses, and write creative exercises. A hybrid creative/analytical paper will be due at the end of the course. 

Fiction Thesis Workshops are open to Creative Writing Intensive Majors, Creative Writing Legacy Majors and Minors completing an optional thesis, and MAPH Creative Writing Specialists. Students will build off a project already in-progress to complete 15-30 pages of polished prose—typically in the form of short stories or an excerpt from a longer work. Students are expected to have at least 50% of an initial draft of their project completed prior to the first day of class.  

Beginning a novel can be daunting, but this class aims to remove some of the mystery behind the process and get students started on that long journey into the unknown. We will examine the early stages of developing and writing a novel: choosing the POV and narrative voice, establishing the setting, developing the main characters and the dynamics between them, setting up the conflicts and seeding themes, choosing areas to research, etc. As a class we will read, break down, and discuss the openings of a handful of published novels as you work on your own opening chapters, which will be workshopped as part of the course. Students are expected to submit two opening chapters of a novel-in-progress (and a revision of one) as well read and critique chapters from your peers for workshop. 

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing worldbuilding, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing worldbuilding is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from setting, to social systems, to character dynamics, to the story or novel’s conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, or even contemporary realism, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful worldbuilding, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to what to look for, to how to implement them. We will also focus on how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works of  fiction with an eye to their worldbuilding, as well as critical and craft texts. In addition to readings and creative exercises each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.