The Principles of Prose

Professor: Wyatt Mason  

Course Number: WRIT 122

CRN Number: 10398

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 107

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

This workshop presents the breadth of formal possibilities available to writers of prose. The course will consider how a sentence functions in a written work, our reading moving us beyond limiting categories (fiction; non-fiction) into spaces where, whatever the label, writing might achieve authority. Students will workshop—i.e., read and comment on—writing by Hilton Als, Aristotle, Roberto Bolaño, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Rebecca Curtis, Guy Davenport, Lydia Davis, Emily Dickinson, Gustave Flaubert, Jon Fosse, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, H.D., Gerard Manley Hopkins, Bohumil Hrabal, Edward P. Jones, Jamil Jan Kochai, Nam Le, Alfred Lobel, Janet Malcolm, Javier Marías, Shane McCrae, Leonard Michaels, Maggie Millner, C.E. Morgan, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Sigrid Nunez, Marcel Proust, Christina Stead, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Mark Twain, Simone Weil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and William Butler Yeats. By workshopping established writers, students will learn to weigh what writing can do and to notice how it achieves its effects. In addition to daily writing, students will produce five pieces of prose to be workshopped during the term, pieces that will pursue the expressive varieties of form. As we cultivate a rigorous aesthetic practice, we will also address the essential matter of fairness, exploring the ethical implications of our attempts at representation.

Poetry Workshop I

Professor: Jenny Xie  

Course Number: WRIT 123

CRN Number: 10397

Class cap: 14

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin Language Center 208

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Poetry and poet derive from the ancient Greek term for a creator, a maker. In this course, we’ll approach poems as crafted experiences—made pieces—that arise out of enmeshed acts of collecting, assembling, shaping, and dramatizing. Considerable attention will be given to language and silence as delivery mechanisms—modes of transport into myriad states of feeling, attending, thinking, and being. Over the course of the term, we’ll sample a spectrum of poetic forms, voices, structures, and encounters, and learn to probe them for what they can teach us. Students will be encouraged to extend their range and sharpen their creative and critical gifts through developing their ear, and inviting new lexicons, syntactical structures, and tonal variations to seep into their work. Class will be structured around the original composition of poetry, supplemented by critical analysis of assigned poems and texts on poetics, peer critique, in-class writing exercises, and discussions on creative process.

Principles of Journalistic Practice

Professor: Wyatt Mason  

Course Number: WRIT 212

CRN Number: 10400

Class cap: 20

Credits: 2

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Bard Chapel

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

For Bard Observer participants (and the newspaper-curious), this spring continuation of the fall course will focus on the varieties of journalistic form (you do not need to have taken the fall term to take the spring term). Last term was about production; this term is about writing and editing, to the end of giving students an understanding of how to structure different kinds of journalistic pieces. You will experience such thrilling terms as peg, lede, subhed, kicker, dek, tk, and many others (most of which look like typos). More meaningfully, you'll learn the very different structural expectations for reported pieces, profiles, editorials and opinion pieces, not to say various kinds and lengths of review. The class will meet once a week for 80 minutes, and we are going to try to meet on Wednesdays from 10:10-11:30...but it is possible that we will need to find a different time that will allow all members of last term's group/Observer participants to continue into this term.

The Unhinged Narrator

Professor: Jenny Offill  

Course Number: WRIT 218

CRN Number: 10402

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     3:30 PM - 5:50 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

This course will focus on literature narrated by characters who are unhinged from the conventions of a given society. They may stand apart from the mainstream because of exile, prejudice, eccentricity or madness, but in each case their alienation provides them with a unique perspective, one that allows the reader to see the world they describe without the dulling lens of insularity. We will explore what authors might gain by narrating their works from such a viewpoint as well as study how the form and structure of these books reflects the unstable and bewildering world we live in. Over the course of the semester, you will use these texts as a springboard for creating your own creative work. Texts may include works by Octavia Butler, Samanta Schweblin, Franz Kafka, Donald Antrim, Claudia Rankine, Ha King, and CA Conrad among others. 

Materials and Techniques of Poetry

Professor: Michael Ives  

Course Number: WRIT 230

CRN Number: 10401

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 302

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Literature

It is the unique capacity of poetry to capture the movement of mind and body in a resonant verbal architecture. In this course, students examine, from the ground up, the elements of that architecture by asking what, in the most concrete terms, makes a poem a dynamic, saturated language event. Rather than thinking of structure as an imposition, this workshop considers it an aid to the freeing of the imagination. Along the way, students encounter such aspects of poetic form as patterns of repetition; the infinite varieties of syntax, punctuation, meter, and typography; the “color” of vowels; and the rhythmic implications of word choice and sentence structure. Participants explore a range of techniques and materials from around the world and from the beginning of recorded history right up to the present moment. Writing for the course takes the form of creative responses to a wide variety of reading and weekly “experiments”. This class is intended for students who have moderated into WA as poets. Please contact the professor by email in advance of registration with a note about why you want to be in the class, and a portfolio of four to five poems.

Experiments in Enduring Forms

Professor: Derek Furr and Erica Kaufman

Course Number: WRIT 253

CRN Number: 10399

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 301

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Ezra Pound’s imperative to “make it new” signifies the way modernist and postmodern poets tend to be characterized as opposed to, or at least skeptical of, formal practices that impose meter, rhyme, syllable count, and other constraints on expression. But even as poetry changed radically (and continues to change), certain forms persist and prove valuable, even to the most experimental of practitioners. In this course we will consider how some of the forms most associated with “tradition” evolved and remain vital to English-language poets now.  Rather than survey many forms, we will work extensively with a small number, such as ghazal, tanka, and sonnet. Similarly, while we will examine many examples, we will also delve deep into the formal experiments of several poets—such as Terrance Hayes with the sonnet, Adrienne Rich with the ghazal, or Harryette Mullen with the tanka. As we study these individual forms, students will also conduct their own formal experiments, writing through the container of form in order to grapple with the contemporary. Please send the professors a note explaining your interest in the course prior to registration.

Writing with Style

Professor: Joseph O'Neill  

Course Number: WRIT 254

CRN Number: 10403

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Hegeman 200

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

What is a writer’s style? What effects does it produce, and to what purpose? How does it relate to the writer’s voice and technique? What does it tell us about the artistic conscience? In this course we’ll be reading (and occasionally rewriting) a variety of literary stylists. Thomas Browne, Gertrude Stein, George Orwell, Renée Gladman, Roberto Bolaño, Nicholson Baker, Robert Walser, Langston Hughes, Theodor Adorno, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, Raymond Queneau—these are some of the writers whose thrilling work we may encounter.

Writing Poetries of Resistance: Resisting the Information Overload

Professor: Dawn Lundy Martin  

Course Number: WRIT 255

CRN Number: 10404

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Experimental Humanities

There is a certain perversity in knowing. The disciplinary apparatuses of the state have taken forms of which we are newly aware. They watch and document under the auspices of providing safety for citizens. We, in turn, provide almost everyone with excess access to what we do, who we believe ourselves to be, and what we think. Is counter documentation possible? What does it mean to attempt to speak against power? What narratives, forms, languages, gestures, and means toward performance can help us create future selves liberated from the overabundance of record? In this course, we will work toward uncovering the effects of surveillance and AI on writing and imagine strategies for refusing those effects. Together we will generate anti-dossiers that resist totality and information accumulation (secret or other).

Writing Workshop for Non-majors

Professor: Mary Caponegro  

Course Number: WRIT 323

CRN Number: 10409

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

   Thurs    3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Reem Kayden Center 200

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

This course is designed to give non-Written Arts majors the opportunity to explore the medium of creative writing in a rigorous fashion, through a combination of prompts and student-generated topics.  Some prior experience of independent writing is required, but no formal training.  Students are encouraged to allow knowledge of their particular field, as well as extracurricular interests, to enrich their creative endeavors.  Students are asked to send a brief paragraph about their background and their interest in the course.

Imagining Nonhuman Consciousness

Professor: Benjamin Hale  

Course Number: WRIT 345

CRN Number: 10410

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

  Thurs     3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 303

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities; Human Rights

Philosopher Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” Ultimately, he determined the question unanswerable: A bat’s experience of the world is so alien to our own that it is beyond the human understanding of subjective experience. That’s arguable. But it is true at least that a bat’s experience—or that of any other nonhuman consciousness—is not inaccessible to human imagination. In this course we will read and discuss a wide variety of texts, approaching the subject of nonhuman consciousness through literature, philosophy, and science. We will read works that attempt to understand the experiences of apes, panthers, rats, ticks, elephants, octopuses, lobsters, cows, bats, monsters, puppets, computers, and eventually, zombies. Course reading may include Descartes, Kafka, Rilke, Jakob von Uexküll, Patricia Highsmith, John Gardner, J.A. Baker, Eduardo Kohn, David Foster Wallace, Zora Neale Hurston, Temple Grandin, Jane Goodall, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Susan Daitch, Giorgio Agamben, Bennett Sims, and E. O. Wilson, among others, in addition to a viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and possibly other films.  There will be several long writing assignments over the course of the semester, and a workshop component. Students interested in this workshop must email bhale@bard.edu

Poetry & Pressure

Professor: Jenny Xie  

Course Number: WRIT 349

CRN Number: 10407

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin Languages Center 208

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

What gets forged in the poetic imagination through the forces and tensions produced by pressure? In this course, we’ll probe some of the ways that pressure and crisis—as it emerges in the political, the social, the economic, the ethical, the temporal, and the formal—impresses upon poetry and the imagination. How does pressure, elastically defined, act as a constraint, an engine, and also a mode of attention? And how does crisis and moments of sustained vulnerability find their way into poetic forms? As part of our collective lines of inquiry, we’ll analyze and think through a range of gestures, movements, and forms that emerge in the work of poets who composed under, or in response to duress, instability, and precarity. Readings will include selections from the work of Paul Celan, Adrienne Rich, Ilya Kaminsky, Jamaica Kincaid, Nazim Hikmet, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ricardo Maldonado, Myung Mi Kim, Danez Smith, Nicole Sealey, Chinese migrant worker poets, Claudia Rankine, Rachel Zucker, Sahar Muradi, Solmaz Sharif, and Brian Teare, among others. Students will write short critical responses provoked by the course readings, generate poems that respond to and arise out of felt pressures, and discuss one another’s writing in a seminar setting.

John Ashbery: The Art of Response

Professor: Ann Lauterbach  

Course Number: WRIT 373

CRN Number: 10405

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin Languages Center 206

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Literature

John Ashbery (1927-2017) is widely regarded as the most significant and influential post-war American poet. He wrote poems that were tonally detached, urbane and syntactically meandering, often including arcane words alongside cartoon-like diction, and references to music, art, pop culture, and film. Although primarily a poet, he also wrote art criticism and translations of French poets, including Raymond Roussel and Arthur Rimbaud, whose famous remark “Je est un autre” (“I is another”), Ashbery took to heart, allowing the personal pronoun to shift easily into you or we or they, which gave his work a sense of diffuse inclusivity. We will read Ashbery’s poems, and works by some of his friends ( Frank O’Hara, Harry Mathews, Barbara Guest), as well as his own critical writings and translations. We will look at some pictures and listen to some music and write responses to them. We will ask if John Ashbery’s cosmopolitan ease is still relevant in our troubled times, and what we might learn from his “wide authority and tact.” Weekly responses; one term writing or critical project. Please send the professor a note explaining your interest in the course prior to registration.

Rhythms and Words

Professor: Michael Ives  

Course Number: WRIT 374

CRN Number: 10406

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Hegeman 102

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists: Literature

The poet Robert Creeley wrote: it is all a rhythm, / from the shutting/door, to the window / opening, / the seasons, the sun’s / light, the moon, / the oceans, the/growing of things ... Reality, then, appears to resolve to nests of rhythms, from the vast cosmos to the infinitesimal quantum. This course will consider how poetry captures and reflects this profound principle of Being, and ask how the intentional patterning of language is both a mnemonic tool and a source of great pleasure. How does rhythm make meaning?  We will explore the rhythmic phenomena that surround and in-form us, from nature’s diurnal cycles to our own internal cardiac, pulmonary, and motor rhythms. We will examine phoneme, syllable, line and stanza; we will listen to the rhythmic properties of chants, prayers, and spells to discover how they arouse emotional, psychological, and physical responses. We will discuss the formal use of metrical schemes, symmetries, the inflectional patterns of ordinary speech, groove poetics, and of course consider the profound relation between poetics and music. The class will include a component of performance practice, which will include a great deal of reading aloud. Students are asked to send a brief paragraph about their interest in the course.

Writing Short Stories with Global Partners

Professor: Mona Simpson  

Course Number: WRIT 375

CRN Number: 10408

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

        -  

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

This is an advanced class. I’m expecting everyone in the class to write daily, at least for a few minutes. I hope, during the course of the semester, that your daily practice will grow. We will be reading and writing stories every week. After Week 1, you will prepare presentations on the assigned stories, along with a partner. In addition to sessions in person with Professor Simpson at the beginning and end of the semester, this class will be held as a weekly three hour zoom session, with writing prompts, as well as a serious discussion of an assigned canonical short story (Chekhov, Lu Hsun, Grace Paley, Jamaica Kincaid,Yasunari Kawabata, Amy Hempel, Alice Munro, Isabella Hammad, Isaac Babel, Lauren Groff, Raymond Carver, Jhumpa Lahiri, Katherine Mansfield,Ghassan Kanafani and James Lasdun.) Half the class will be made up of Bard Students, half Palestinian students from Bard/Al Quds. Please send the professor a note explaining your interest in the course prior to registration.

Written Arts Senior Colloquium

Professor: Dinaw Mengestu  

Course Number: WRIT 405

CRN Number: 10411

Class cap: 45

Credits: 1

Schedule/Location:

Mon       5:40 PM - 7:00 PM Reem Kayden Center 103

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

The Senior Colloquium in the Written Arts is an important supplement to the Senior Project. It has several objectives: intellectual/artistic, social, and vocational. The primary purpose is to guide seniors, both practically and philosophically, in the daunting task of creating a coherent and inspired creative work of high quality within a single academic year. Emphasis is on demystifying the project process, including its bureaucratic hurdles, as well as exploring the role of research in the creative realm, and helping students use each other as a critical and inspirational resource during this protracted solitary endeavor, sharing works in progress when appropriate. This supplements but never supplants the primary and sacrosanct role of the project adviser. Program faculty and alumni/ae, career development and other staff, and outside speakers (such as editors, translators, MFA graduates and directors, publishing personnel, etc.) contribute their collective wisdom and experience, sharing the myriad ways in which writers move an idea toward full creative realization, and giving a glimpse of the kinds of internships and careers available to the writer. Required for students enrolled in a Written Arts Senior Project. All such students are enrolled automatically by the Registrar.  

Ancient Literary Criticism

Course Number: CLAS 329

CRN Number: 10110

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Professor:

Daniel Mendelsohn

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   

Crosslists:

Greek; Literature; Written Arts

Writing the Film

Course Number: FILM 256

CRN Number: 10458

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

Professor:

Brent Green

Schedule/Location:

   Thurs    10:10 AM - 1:10 PM Avery Film Center 117

Distributional Area:

PA  Practicing Arts   

Crosslists:

Written Arts

Writing about Images

Professor: Adam Shatz  

Course Number: HR 324

CRN Number: 10302

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      9:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 301

Distributional Area:

AA  Analysis of Art  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Film and Electronic Arts; Photography; Written Arts

Hope in the Dark: Eurasian Fantasy and Folklore

Course Number: LIT 164

CRN Number: 10261

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Professor:

Olga Voronina

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists:

Russian and Eurasian Studies; Written Arts

Bad Art: On Amateurs, Hacks, Sellouts, and Robots

Professor: Adhaar Desai  

Course Number: LIT 365

CRN Number: 10389

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists:

Written Arts

Reading Emily Dickinson

Course Number: LIT 379

CRN Number: 10294

Class cap: 14

Credits: 4

Professor:

Philip Pardi

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   10:30 AM - 4:30 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists:

American & Indigenous Studies; Experimentlal Humanities; Written Arts