Undergraduate

It’s clear, increasingly, that we live in a time of imperiling crisis—political, ecological, even religious. Apocalypse is one of the genres poets use to make moral claims on the present, as well as to envision the nature of reality to come. Apocalypse also refers to vision, to a way of seeing that is both allegorical and incendiary. How, within the realms and forms of the contemporary poetic imagination, can you persuasively engage apocalypse? In this workshop, students will approach your own apocalyptic claims with those of some visionary masters in hand, including Emily Dickinson, Robert Lax, Fanny Howe, Pam Rehm, Adonis, Lawrence Joseph, Brian Teare, Autumn Richardson, Tim Lilburn, and Richard Skelton. Forms, language, and vision will absorb our study with a focus on visualizing and sharing your own apocalyptic poetry.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40

Poetry writing is often undertaken with solemnity, but perhaps we’ve been approaching it all wrong. What if we read Prufrock as stand-up comedy? Dickinson as a dark humorist?  Stein as a prankster? Along with rethinking the daring but subtle humor of a few classic poets, this course will trace specific kinds of comedic moves in contemporary poetry. We’ll try to understand the maneuvers that make for varieties of humor, such as absurdity, irony, satire, parody, ridicule, and dark humor. Readings may include work by John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Russel Edson, Bernadette Mayer, Dorthea Lasky, James Tate, Dean Young, Mary Ruefle, Wendy Xu, Anne Carson, and Kenneth Koch. Students should expect to complete a series of writing exercises, give a presentation, and write a final essay. All while smiling.

Day/Time: Monday, 12:40-2:40

It’s long been said that there are no new stories, only new ways of telling old ones, but how do writers reengage familiar genres, plots, and themes without being redundant? This course will confront the literary cliché at all levels, from the trappings of genre to predictable turns of plot to the subtly undermining forces of mundane language. We will consider not only how stories can fall victim to cliché but also how they may benefit from calling on recognizable content for the sake of efficiency, familiarity, or homage. Through an array of readings that represent unique concepts and styles as well as more conventional narratives we will examine how published writers embrace or subvert cliché through story craft. Meanwhile, student fiction will be discussed throughout the term in a supportive workshop atmosphere that will aim not to expose clichés in peer work, but to consider how an author can find balance—between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between the predictable and the unpredictable—in order to maximize a story’s effect. Students will submit two stories to workshop and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:20-12:20

The art of nonfiction is sometimes described as the art of leaving things out, and nowhere is this more pronounced and problematic than in capturing character. The way you characterize people, places, and things ultimately says as much about you, the author, as it does about what you’re characterizing, and the goal of this class is to teach you to do so economically yet accurately, or at least fairly. Not reductively. We’ll start with the surface: with the eccentricities, tics, and quirks that make someone who they are, or appear to be. How to capture these oddities without sliding into caricature? Writers often default to physical description, but we’ll devote as much or more effort to the verbal, i.e., to exercises in dialogue, whose true power is not to convey information but character. We’ll also practice writing in body language, which is equally revealing of mien, demeanor, and underlying motivation. Beneath it all lies what we call ‘true character’: the values, morals, and ideals evident in deeds, facts, and what we might call properties, the essential characteristics of a culture, city, or place. Our weekly reading and writing assignments and exercises will culminate in a creative portfolio and a final essay, as well as the skills you’ll need to take workshops.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40

What is plot beyond the events that take place in a story? What is its function beyond engaging us in what happens to the story’s characters? If plot is dramatic movement in a narrative, in what ways can it move within and outside the traditional arc of rising action, climax, and denouement? And how can it become a vehicle for what we want to express about our characters, the world of our story or the world at large, our emotional or intellectual concerns, our very aesthetics as an artist? In this technical seminar, we’ll tackle such questions by examining 1) the broader, evolving cultural perspectives on plot and what that tells us about how and why we narrativize our lives, and 2) the practical mechanics of plot and its interaction with all the other crucial elements of a dramatic narrative. And alongside writing exercises where we’ll apply these lessons to our own fiction, our conversations will ideally help each of us clarify the kinds of stories we want and need to tell. 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:40-5:40

“Time is an illusion,” Einstein famously declared, articulating a truth about relativity that writers have understood at least since Homer compressed a decade of travels into 24 books of dactylic hexameter. In this creative writing seminar, we will consider a variety of approaches to the handling of time in the creation of literary illusions. We will concentrate on poetry and works of prose in which a fixed time frame—from a few moments to a few hours—gives urgent shape to the details of our writing as they unfold. How do certain works heighten our experience of time’s passage, giving us the illusion of speeding it, or stopping it? What is lyric time? What is real time? How do digression and plot relate to time? Reading the work of writers such as Jorie Graham, Alice Oswald, James Agee, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, and Gwendolyn Brooks, we will study how the art of description moves through syntax, and the art of syntax moves through time. Students will write critical responses, creative exercises, and a final paper on a topic to be approved by the instructor.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00 pm

How do you write silence? What is subtext? What is the structure of a joke? Dialogue is one of the most important elements of fiction because of its dynamism. It can, among other effects, reveal character, advance plot, and escalate tension.  In this seminar, we will read work that inspires, informs, and expands our understanding of the definition and usages of dialogue. We will read exemplars of fiction, nonfiction, drama, poetry, as well as watch film—all with the objective of discovering the aspects that make the dialogue (or written speech) in each text effective. The class will include work by Grace Paley, Ernest Hemingway, August Wilson, Toni Cade Bambara, Junot Diaz, Joan Didion, Tyehimba Jess, and Sally Rooney). We will discuss stylistic elements of the work, its ideas, and attempt to situate it in its cultural context. Class sessions will consist of informal writing, discussion, and lecture. Coursework includes two short creative assignments (with a critical component), questions for discussion, and informal writing.

Day/Time: Monday, 1:50-3:50

In the aftermath of war, we attempt to make sense of the senseless. We grapple with the pieces, we organize, we mold, and we give shape to the shapeless. In this course, using the Nigeria-Biafra War as a case study, we’ll investigate the practices that constitute authorship of war. We’ll read works by writers of the war generation, like Ken Saro-wiwa, as well as those who have inherited it, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We’ll identify and study their methods for reconstructing the past—lived experiences, research, and the imagination. We’ll consider the ethics of leaps of the imagination as we read works of realism alongside the speculative, like Nnedi Okorafor’s AfricanFuturist comic book take LaGuardia. We’ll study narratives like Chinelo Okparanta’s queer coming-of-age story Under the Udala Trees to consider what it means to depart from the national narrative in order to recover silenced or erased voices. In critical papers, we’ll analyze how genre, form, and media inform these works. Using the questions, techniques, and practices we identify, you’ll be asked to write and research narratives using a real war as its basis.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40

Some of the most compelling pieces of writing across all genre deal with, and often feature, deeply problematic central adversarial characters without which the poem, story, or essay would have no forward motion, and no cause to exist. From Capote’s In Cold Blood to Milton’s Paradise Lost, from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Sabato’s The Tunnel, literature returns again and again to the question of evil and the concept of opposition. This course is designed to explore this question alongside authors who have devoted their lives to understanding the role of evil in literature, its necessity, its appeal, its frivolity and its betrayal. The course will be divided into three section, each section devoted to a specific genre during which two to three texts will be explored, discussed and analyzed in class, and at the end of which one brief analysis paper will be due. One creative piece, in any of the three major genres, exploring the said topic will be due at the end of the course.

Day/Time: Thursday, 1:00-4:00

Do you believe in wizards? Are you a wizard? Then pack up your talismans, fetishes, and gamelans into the mysterious little satchel you carry at your side and get ready for some incantatory magic. We will investigate the figure of the wizard as an archetype, a literary symbol, a vehicle for fantasy, and as a commanding reality while considering such things as A Wizard of Earthsea, the figure of Merlin, The Teachings of Don Juan, Conversations with Ogotemmeli, the figure of Harry Potter, the poetry of W.B. Yeats and others, as well as additional things too secret to reveal at present, including the nature of esotericism.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00