2022-2023

Essay, derived from the French term essayer, means an attempt. To essay is to try, to experiment, to fail. In this class, we will explore a spectrum of these nonfiction experiments, moving from fractured, lyric, mosaic texts to linear, scene-driven, and found structures. In examining the relationship between content and form, we will parse the ways form itself has narrative agency. Students will analyze how language and image can drive a piece of nonfiction; we will consider the role of white space, silence, absence, and gaps. Our approach will recontextualize scene-driven narrative as an aesthetic choice, not a hallowed tradition. Students will develop a portfolio of reading responses and short creative pieces that explore this vibrant genre which is at once confiding and solitary; free and unfinished. “A good essay seems to question itself in a way that a novel or short story does not – or perhaps it is simply that an essay leaves the questions on the page, there for everyone to see; it is a forum for self-doubt, for an attempt whose outcome isn’t assured.” Students will leave this class with a strong grasp of the essay tradition and how to bring – and leave – their own questions around the form. Readings will include Terese Marie Mailhot, Carmen Maria Machado, Mark Spragg and others.

In her seminal essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf writes, “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear. [...] On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes.” This seminar will actively examine these bodily interventions in writing, and explore the merits of engaging deeply and precisely with the taboo subjects of sex, aging, illness, bodily change, and bodily difference. We will also discuss the concept of embodied writing—and the embodiment of physical experience through writing —using the body-centered prose of Bruno Schulz, Annie Ernaux, Rebecca Brown, Yasunari Kawabata, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and other writers. Assignments will include short critical and creative responses, a final fiction assignment, and a final presentation.

Rightly dismissed, sometimes, as the home of costume dramas and simplistic crowd-pleasers, historical fiction was once the forge of European realism, honing priorities of detail, scene, and character development that could bring the bare historical record to life.  Today, some historical fiction remains a site of pressing experiment, and in this seminar we’ll read such work to unlock the arguments of craft that spur fiction to distinguish itself from non-fiction in ways that still feel fresh.  Analytical and creative responses will follow readings in historical magical realism (Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Toni Morrison), counterfactual historical fiction (John Keene or Laurent Binet), imagined biography (Fleur Jaeggy, Marcel Schwob, or Virginia Woolf), and in scholarship that itself borrows the tools of fiction (John Demos or Saidiya Hartman).  Along the way we’ll discuss illuminating critical polemics, and at the quarter’s end students will prepare an essay or experiment that uses historiography to throw the techniques of fiction into a new light

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing world-building, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing world-building is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from character dynamics, to setting, to social systems, and even the story or novel’s conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of realism, historical fiction, or science fiction, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful world-building, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to what to look for. We will also focus on how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works of long and short fiction with an eye to its world-building, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class. The class will also be linked with the History Department’s ExoTerra Imagination Lab.

Characterization in any literary form seeks to bring a person, a story, and a world or worldview to life; but whether on the page or beyond it, what does it actually mean to be a character and to have character? In this course, we will approach this question not just as a matter of literary craft, but as an inquiry into how we see and construct our own humanity. Characterization, in that sense, involves more than design and imagination; it requires us to examine the various lenses we use to define ourselves collectively and personally as human beings—the lens of truth, of morality, of empathy, of self, etc. This can be a thorny but clarifying endeavor for a writer. Simply put: to create character, you have to interrogate who you are, even when your characters are nothing like you. To that end, we will discuss the fiction, essays, memoir, and poetry we read as exemplars of compelling and beautiful characterization, as well as a (speculative) reflection of who the authors think they are and how they see the world. We will also do reading responses, creative writing exercises, and presentations that will help us consider and apply what each of us means when we use the word character.

Instructor: Jake Fournier

In this Arts Core class, students will read some of the major literary innovators of mid-nineteenth-century America alongside their twentieth-century and contemporary inheritors. The course combines historical, critical, and craft emphases, asking questions like: What made the decade before the U.S. Civil War one of the greatest periods of literary experimentation in the nation’s history? What were the lasting consequences of this experimentation on American and world literatures? And, finally, what lessons can we glean from these historical writers for our own contemporary creative praxis?  Students should expect to encounter the central authors of the traditional American Renaissance (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson) alongside both their defenders and detractors, including writers highly critical of the sort of literary canon formation that produced the American Renaissance itself and imagined it as an almost exclusively white and mostly male affair. For example, they will read Thoreau alongside both N+1 co-founder Mark Greif and National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis, whose “Inhabitants and Visitors” reimagines the historical Black communities around Walden Pond. Other pairings include Dickinson with Susan Howe; Whitman with June Jordan, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, and Bernadette Mayer; and Herman Melville with Paul Beatty and Marlon James. In the process, students will do weekly writing exercises in multiple genres and give one class presentation. 

How does writing enact grief? What words address the dead? Can an elegy convey the complexity of a person, resisting hagiography? We’ll begin this investigation of the elegy by looking briefly at some Classical examples before turning our attention toward a range of modern and contemporary elegies in poetry and prose. As we read, we’ll pay particular attention to literary structures and devices writers use to manifest absence and incarnate the dead in the body of a text. Writers studied may include Catullus, Sappho, M. NourbeSe Phillip, Rick Barot, Raúl Zurita, David Wojnarowicz, Solmaz Sharif, W.S. Merwin, Brandon Shimoda, Sarah Schulman, and Aracelis Girmay. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to write critical and creative responses for group discussion.

In this core course, students will investigate connections between truth, art and beauty, by reading, watching, and writing works adapted from an historical record or "based on a true story." Weekly reading assignments include fiction, poetry, memoir, a graphic novel, and a film; students will be asked to write both critical essays and creative exercises that explore overlaps anddivergences between journalistic and artistic truth. Readings include works by Aristotle, Baldwin, Bechdel, Carson, Keats, Northup, and Rankine.

Instructor: Jake Fournier

Through readings in a wide variety of formal, free verse, and prose poetry, and attentive workshops of student writing, this class will offer a compendium of great English sentences, new strategies for composition, as well as refreshers in advanced and basic English grammar. Students will weigh the interaction of the sentence against fundamental metrical patterns in both verse and lyrical prose, and they will interrogate how a variety of grammatical and syntactical features evolve within dynamic poetic forms. Mostly short, exemplary readings in poetic genres will move from classical to contemporary voices and feature a diverse range of styles and sensibilities—from Phillis Wheatley to Tommy Pico, Emily Dickinson to Jos Charles, Gwendolyn Brooks to Diane Seuss (and more). The class is not just about writing better sentences and becoming better communicators; it is about playing with the underlying fabric of our creative expressions and of our thoughts themselves. Course work will vary, but students will be expected to workshop their own poetry, to write weekly reading responses, and to experiment with different meters and sentence forms.

In the same way that water is composed of two elements—hydrogen and oxygen—the personal essay essentially consists of anecdotes and reflections, i.e., facts and thoughts, or the objective and the subjective. What happened, and what what happened *means*. The artistry of the essay consists of not only balancing these two elements but combining them so that they complement but also contradict one another. In this workshop you’ll write multiple drafts of your own attempt at the form while line editing and critiquing your classmates’ attempts. At the same time we’ll read (and write about) foundational essays that are in overt dialogue with one another, starting with “Why I Write,” by George Orwell, and “Why I Write,” by Joan Didion. We’ll read James Baldwin in conjunction with the seminal essay he inspired Adrienne Rich to write, then look at infusions of poetry into the form via Natalia Ginzburg and Margaret Atwood. We'll end by reading Didion’s essay, “Goodbye to All That,” paired with Eula Biss' cover version, also titled "Goodbye to All That." You'll leave knowing the recent history, basic theory, and practice of nonfiction's most fundamental form.