CRWR

This course introduces students to poetry writing by guiding students through generative exercises focused on imagery and diction, then revising the material with an eye toward formal shaping choices. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project. 

Popular notions of “the fairytale” are often synonymous with childhood: bedtime stories, adventuring children, and cautionary tales warning young people away from wayward behaviors (“Never go into the woods at night”; “You must be wary of strangers”). In many ways, however, fairytales serve as a vital link between historic and contemporary storytelling traditions: In the words of Angela Carter, “[…] the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.” In this course, we will explore how authors such as Sabrina Orah Mark, Helen Oyeyemi, Lily Hoang, Kiik Araki Kawaguchi, Benjamin Niespodziany, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum have used fairytales as foundations for their own stories, gleaning inspiration from—and finding creative freedom within—pre-existing narratives, tropes, and characters. Each student will also write their own fairytale revision and receive critical oral and written workshop feedback. 
 

Secret knowledge, withheld or discovered, has explosive power in literature. Deft management and containment of secrets has dramaturgical consequences for a story’s architecture. This course will examine narratives that skillfully deploy the strategies listed by Roland Barthes in his description of the hermeneutic code: snares, equivocations, partial answers, suspended answers, and jammings. 

In the course of our close study of these strategies, we will also investigate their generative potential. We will read stories and excerpts from writers such as Miranda July, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ken Liu, and Tom McCarthy.

What does plot need to sustain itself, to make itself, as Aristotle wrote, “a whole action”? For John Barth, a story’s middle “performs its double and contradictory functions of simultaneously fetching us to the climax and delaying our approach thereto.” 

This workshop will explore the successive complications of conflict (its incremental perturbations, in Barth’s words). It will examine how writers arrive at or invent or otherwise architect their ‘middles.’ Our investigative focus will be on how accretion and cumulation are created through sequence. We will read stories and excerpts from writers such as Alice Walker, Roald Dahl, John Le Carré and Jorge Luis Borges.

Beginning Poetry Workshop: Imaginary Music

The poet Aimé Césaire suggests that “The only acceptable music comes from somewhere deeper than sound. The search for music is a crime against the music of poetry which can only be the beating of the mind’s wave against the rock of the world.” What is this music “deeper than sound”? How is it related to the more obvious “audible” sounds of poetry? This course guides students in exercises that work with both the actual sounds of poetry, like alliteration and rhythm, and the inaudible, “imagined” music of the mind, to write and workshop poems. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project.

The past few years have seen a proliferation of major awards for works of contemporary world literature that have been translated into English (among them the International Booker Prize, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle Book in Translation Prize). While such awards certainly elevate translation as a mode of writing comparable to that of other literary arts, they also raise important questions about the production, circulation, and reception of translated literature in the Anglosphere. In this course, we will read a number of recent award-winning books in English translation (both poetry and prose), considering how these books traveled from origin to translation, and how we as readers engage with them – as translations and as literary texts. How are translations made? How do we evaluate books that have two writers: author and translator? What larger forces (social, aesthetic, commercial, political) are at work when deciding which translated books will hold value for Anglophone readers? We’ll explore these questions through weekly readings and discussions, student presentations, critical analyses and creative responses. As a final project, students will develop their own evaluative rubrics from which to award a prize to one of the translations we’ve read.

Ever since humans started drawing on cave walls, the ways in which we communicate meaning through stories has been evolving. This class will look at various forms of narrative—fiction, creative non-fiction, narrative poetry, and film—and explore the “grammar” of these different genres, what they share and where they differ and how their particular strengths and failings influence the ways in which they most effectively communicate. 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 creative non-fiction, (which must always adhere to facts), differently than poetry (which condenses a story to its essences)? How is meaning conveyed differently through each? How do these different grammars influence the stories they tell and the effects they achieve? Students will view read various works of fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, view films, and read critical and craft-oriented texts and complete weekly reading responses, as well as creative exercises. A paper focusing on a specific element from the class will be due at the end of the course.  

The concept of “voice” comes up often in writing. How does a narrator’s personality, their way of seeing the world, imbue the writing in an unforgettable way? How we are drawn in, charmed, confounded, and driven to epiphany? In this course, we will consider this nebulous yet essential aspect of writing by examining our own original stories in workshop and by reading published works from Grace Paley, Bette Howland, Lucia Berlin, Kathleen Collins, and others. Ideally, you will develop and embrace your own authorial voice over the course of the quarter.

Ancient Mesopotamian flood narratives, Cold War nuclear Armageddon, existential climate catastrophe: as long as literature has existed, we have used it to speculate on our own demise. In this Intro to Genres course, we will explore apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing, how it intersects with other genres, how it has fluctuated or remained stable as a genre over time, and how it reveals our changing cultural anxieties about what threatens us as a species. We will read broadly across poetry, fiction, nonfiction and film, exploring the various flavors of apocalyptic writing, from scientific excess to natural disasters, and examining the role style and tone play in creating meaning around devastation. Representative authors will include T.S. Elliott, Rachel Carson, Elissa Washuta, Carmen Maria Machado, Ursula K. Leguin, and Chris Marker. Students will be asked to write and workshop their own creative writing in a chosen genre and produce a critical essay that focuses on one thematic element of the class.

Choices about form and shape are not unique to nonfiction writing, but nonfiction presents unique challenges. Unlike fiction we cannot simply invent information or insert details in order to maintain traditional narrative forms. Instead, we are tasked with finding or creating forms that meets the needs of our content. In this beginning workshop we will explore a range of possible forms that fit the needs of various genres of nonfiction. From traditional narrative nonfiction and memoir that follow the kinds of story arcs or hero's journeys familiar to fiction and theatre on the one hand, to more associative and fractured structures that make space for uncertainty and missing information on the other, we will explore the role form plays in shaping the content of nonfiction. We will read more traditional essays from classic and contemporary writers like James Baldwin, Joan Didion, John Jeremiah Sullivan and Hanif Abdduraquib and compare these works to formally experimental work from writers such as Renee Gladman, Aisha Sbatini Sloan, Eula Biss, and Maggie Nelson. Students will be asked to produce their own work that explores the potentials and limitations of both traditional and experimental forms, engage in respectful and constructive workshop, and reflect on the role of form as it relates to the works we have read in one critical essay.