2018-2019

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, economical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we'll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale. By pairing readings with generative exercises in stylistics and constrained writing, we will build toward the translation of a short work of contemporary fiction into English. To participate in this workshop, students should be able to comfortably read a literary text in a foreign language.

Are memoirs self-indulgent? Yes. But ideally the self that they indulge is the reader's, not the author's. In this class you'll learn firsthand the pitfalls of the genre, mainly by writing your own. You'll start by visiting the form's historical landmarks: Rousseau's Confessions, St. Augustine's Confessions, as well as faux memoirs, i.e., novels written in the first person. ("Call me Ishmael.")_Although your memoir is about what happened, ultimately it has to be about what what happened means. To help you figure that out, we'll start with theories proposed by Vivian Gornick in her book, The Situation and the Story, as well as To Show and To Tell, by Phillip Lopate. You'll apply these ideas in workshop via intensive line edits and searching, essayistic critiques. Every week we'll read and discuss published exemplars by Alison Bechdel, Vladimir Nabokov, Lucy Grealy, and others.

Wallace Stevens suggests that "The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used." How does form provide a kind of freedom for a poet? How does it manifest itself in a poem? Does it mean we have to follow prescribed rules, or is there a more intuitive approach? This course will give students a chance to try out a range of traditional and experimental forms, both as an attempt to improve as writers and in order to interrogate form and its other, what Bataille called the formless, or "unformed" (l'informe). We'll exam in depth rhythm, meter, and the line, as well as forms such as the ballad, the villanelle, the sonnet, the pantoum, and the sestina. We'll also engage with non-traditional forms such as rhizomatic structure, serial poems, list poems, somatic exercises, and walk poems. Readings will likely include an anthology such as the Norton, Carper and Attridge's Meter and Meaning, work by contemporary poets such as A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Alice Notley, and Lyn Hejinian, and theoretical texts by by the likes of Bataille, Adorno, Glissant, and Deleuze. Students will be expected to submit exercises each week for workshop, write an essay, serve as discussion leaders, and complete a final portfolio of original poems.

In this advanced workshop, we will explore the range of strategies and techniques that fiction writers employ to make readers suspend their disbelief. We will consider how imagined worlds are made to feel real and how invented characters can seem so human. We will contemplate how themes, motifs, and symbols are deployed in such a way that a story can feel curated without seeming inorganic. We will consider how hints are dropped with subtlety, how the 'rules' for what is possible in a story are developed, and how writers can sometimes defy their own established expectations in ways that delight rather than frustrate. From character consistency to twist endings, we'll investigate how published authors lend a sense of realism and plausibility to even the most far-fetched concepts. Through regular workshops, we will also interrogate all students' fiction through this lens, discussing the ways in which your narratives-in-progress create their own inner logic. Students will submit two stories to workshop (one to be submitted early in the term) and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

"Make a poem the way nature makes a tree," wrote Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. In this course we'll think about how poems about places and objects are made, and how formal decisions can be used to enact a setting or scene. We'll also look at poems that take other works of art, namely photographs and paintings of landscapes and still lifes, as starting points. Students will consider not only conventional questions of form, such as line, meter, diction, stanzas, but also radical departures from such conventions, such as visual juxtapositions, calligrams, sound poems, and sculpture.

This technical seminar course will look at fiction and some film to explore the use and function of setting in narrative works. We will consider its uses beyond simply as a tool in world-building or backdrop creation, looking into how it informs character, defines perspective, affects mood, pushes plot, and even makes us see the world differently. Students will read various works of long and short fiction with an eye to their use of setting, 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.

In this fundamentals course, students will investigate the complicated relationship between writers, fictional characters, and readers, toward determining what place_literary_empathy_has in our conversation about contemporary literature._James Baldwin once observed that,_"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."_We will use weekly reading assignments including fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction to ask questions about what Virginia Woolf described as the "elimination of the ego" and "perpetual union with another mind" that take place when we read. Students will write critical responses, creative exercises, and a final paper on a topic to be approved by the instructor. Readings include Baldwin, Bishop, Beard, Carson, Walcott,_and Woolf.

To write in any genre is a gesture that puts one in a relationship with predecessors and precursors. While this relationship if often constructed as a dialogue, it can also be a conflict, full of clatter, disagreement and intentional offensiveness. In this sense, the writer's mark crosses out the predecessors' work, and functions as an act of desecration. Writing becomes an intertextual act of rebellion that calls into question the conventional, the canonical, and the sacred. Readings may include avant garde manifestos, erasure poetry, and poetry and fiction by Shakespeare, William Blake, Joyce Mansour, Sylvia Plath, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Federico Garcia Lorca, Haruki Murakami and Georges Bataille. Students will be expected to write creative works in response to prompts, and write an academic essay. The prompts will form the basis of a final portfolio, which will be accompanied by an original essay.

A monolith manifests in orbit around Jupiter, emitting a signal. A beacon? A man spontaneously discovers the ability to teleport. An evolutionary accident? The origin of human life proves to be malicious. Divine fate? Space travel is enabled by the ingestion of enormous quantities of a geriatric spice a messianic figure auspiciously learns to manipulate. A drug trip?! Among popular genres, science fiction is the riskiest conceptually and among the trickiest to master. The difference between an amazing idea and a rotten story is often slim. What makes good sci-fi work? And how best to write it? Let's put on our gravity boots and solar visors and see what we can discover. In this course, you'll read some novels (by Frank Herbert, Alfred Bester, and Ursula K. LeGuin), poetry (by Andrew Joron), a graphic novel (by Chris Ware), and screenplays (by Damon Lindelof, and Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke). And all the while, you'll try your hand at bending each other's minds with your own science fiction.

What is love? How does it speak? To whom does it speak and how do we, let's say, begin to speak about it? "One finds that love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange," write Judith Butler, "uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their faulty vision." In this course, we will pursue this faulty vision with a vengeance, following love's many apparitions -- its voices, bodies, and forms -- through various discourses (poetry, philosophy, films, artworks, and so on) into ecstatic swirls of self-possession and apocalyptic visions of self-doubt. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative responses for class discussion._