91520

WRIT 121 A First Fiction Workshop

Benjamin Hale

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 303

PART

This course involves both intensive reading and writing of the short story, and is intended for students who have made prior forays into the writing of narrative. Class size: 12

91521

WRIT 121 B First Fiction Workshop

Benjamin Hale

M . W . .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 303

PART

See above. Class size: 12

92118

WRIT 121 C First Fiction Workshop

TBA

M . W . .

11:50 am – 1:10 pm

HEG 201

PART

See above.

91519

WRIT 122 Introduction to Nonfiction

Susan Rogers

. T . Th .

3:10 pm – 4:30 pm

HEG 300

PART

This course is for students who want to write “creative” essays. Creative nonfiction is a flexible genre that includes memoir, the personal essay, collaged writings, portraits and more. They can range from lyrical to analytical, meditative to whimsical. We will read a range of works and then offer up our own creative experiments. In particular we will pay attention to the relationship between language and ideas. Weekly writings and readings. No prior experience with creative nonfiction is needed. Class size: 12

91522

WRIT 123 First Poetry Workshop

Robert Kelly

. . W . F

11:50 am -1:10 pm

RKC 200

PART

Open to students who have never had a workshop in poetry, and who desire to experiment with making their own writing a means of learning, both about literature and poetry, and about the discipline of making works of art.  Attention is mainly on the student's own production, and in the individual’s awareness of what sorts of activities, rhythms, and tellings are possible in poetry, and how poets go about learning from their own work. The central work of the course is the student's own writing, along with the articulation, both private and shared, of response to it. Readings will be undertaken in contemporary and traditional poets, according to the needs of the group, toward the development of familiarity with poetic form, poetic movement, and poetic energy. Attendance at various evening poetry readings and lectures is required. Class size: 12

91524

WRIT 221 Fiction Workshop II

Mary Caponegro

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 308

PART

This workshop is open to any thoughtful mode of making fiction, whether traditional or experimental or in between. Students will be expected to produce and revise three or four carefully developed stories and to provide written critiques of their peers' work, as well as to read and respond to published fiction. Class size: 14

91956

WRIT 226 WRITING THE WORLD: NONFICTION PROSE

Verlyn Klinkenborg

. . . Th .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

RKC 200

PART

This is a course in two skills: learning to make excellent nonfiction prose and learning to see the world around you. When it comes to the art of nonfiction prose, the emphasis nearly always falls on the personal, and especially on essay and memoir. In this course, I want to turn our gaze outward and to think about how we write from direct experience of events. Our models will be drawn from history and from the broad category of nonfiction writing often, and absurdly, called “current events.” Our goal will be to become compelling witnesses and makers of acute prose—but our goal will also be art, not journalism. Students will be expected to write 4-5 pages every week. Class size: 12

91523

WRIT 230 Materials and Techniques of Poetry

Michael Ives

. T . Th .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 101

PART

It is the unique capacity of poetry to capture the movement of mind and body in a resonant verbal architecture. In this course we will 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, we’ll consider it an aid to the freeing of the imagination. Along the way we’ll 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 will 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 will take the form of creative responses to a wide variety of reading and weekly “experiments.” Class size: 13

91525

WRIT 234 Reading and Writing contemporary Mythology

Benjamin Hale

. T . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 303

PART

Roland Barthes writes in Mythologies: “Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions. Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things.” In this course we will examine mythologies in the contemporary world. We will read, among other authors, Barthes, Sontag, Borges, Zadie Smith, Joe Wenderoth, David Foster WRITllace, Rebecca Solnit, Tom Bissell, and Will Self, writing on a diverse range of subjects: mass-produced children’s toys, professional wrestling, striptease, Hollywood blockbusters, fast food, video games, commercial still-life photography, tourism, lobsters—the horde of material, often ugly and often unexpectedly beautiful (but always interesting), that feeds the mythology of our chaotic contemporary culture. This course will also involve working on our own writing as much as the reading and discussion of published works. Writing assignments will be in dialogue with the pieces we read, and while this is nominally a nonfiction workshop, the pieces you write in this class will be perfectly free, perhaps even encouraged, to tread the nebulous borderlands between fiction and nonfiction. Class size: 12

91532

WRIT 240 The Poetics of Space, Language and Visuality

Ann Lauterbach

. T . Th .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 310

PART

Cross-listed: Art History, Literature Poets, critics, novelists and philosophers have long pondered the mystery of how writing conveys a sense of space (place) and the objects found in it: persons, plates, roses, cars, fences, cats, stars. Words do not resemble things, and so writers must find ways to conjure material presences in the mind’s eye. Beginning with the grapheme and glyph, we will examine figures such as image, metaphor, simili and metonymy; ideas of description and depiction, mimesis and ekphrasis, and the complex relation between verbal particulars and abstraction. We will ask questions about the difference between a blank page and a screen, and contemplate the ways in which the digital age has altered our sense of near and far, the tactile and the corporeal; how the emphasis on visual information alters our relation to memory and knowledge. We will consider the possible connection between the aesthetics of visuality and the Western bourgeois culture of desire. This course will have reading, viewing and writing components; students will be expected to write critical and creative responses. Class size: 15

91957

WRIT 310 EGOCIRCUS

Anne Carson

. . W . .

1:30 am – 3:50 pm

RKC 200

PART

Cross-listed: Theater This is a workshop in the methods and practice of collaboration. We will explore collaborations between and among artists drawn from various periods and genres. Students will be expected to make brief collaborative works each week which will be performed in class; in addition, there will be weekly presentations of established collaborative works drawn from a range of historical and contemporary artists. Among these are John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg; Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, FLUXUS, Gilbert and George, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Destroy all Monsters Collective, and the Piña Bausch company. The final project will be a five to ten minute performance in which the entire class will participate. Class size: 15

91528

WRIT 324 Fiction Workshop III

Joseph O'Neill

M . . . .

11:50 am -2:10 pm

RKC 200

PART

This is a workshop in prose fiction for advanced students. Students will be expected to submit at least two works of fiction to the workshop and critique their peers' writings. Class size: 12

91526

WRIT 340 Affinities & Discoveries: How to Sustain a Literary Life During and After Bard

Mona Simpson

TBA

.

PART

In this course, we will engage with a broad range of literary magazines, in print and on-line, from samizdat to Conde Nast. Students will be guided to recognize and identify literary sensibilities, developing their own affinities and eventually engaging in a more concrete way with the particular periodicals they most admire (in various forms potentially including submission of their own work). In this manner an ongoing conversation can begin to take place: one that can extend well beyond graduation from Bard. Throughout the semester, we will discuss the mechanics of literary community building, from submitting, interning, blogging, tweeting (one recent editor of the Paris Review Daily maintains a twitter feed about all things Pym), forming literary chat rooms and real life book clubs. We will consider strategies for sustainable engagement with the reading and writing students have cherished at Bard, extending into their twenties and far beyond. The professor will come for intense sessions (two days in a row) three times during the semester. The weeks in between, the class will meet and Skype with the professor. The professor will also require written responses to the reading bi-weekly. Class size: 14

91529

WRIT 405 Senior Colloquium: Written Arts

Mary Caponegro

M . . . .

4:45 pm -6:00 pm

OLINLC 115

0 credits Written Arts Majors writing a project are required to enroll in the year-long Senior Colloquium. Senior Colloquium is an integral part of the 8 credits earned for Senior Project. An opportunity to share working methods, knowledge, skills and resources among students, the colloquium explicitly addresses challenges arising from research and writing on this scale, and presentation of works in progress. A pragmatic focus on the nuts and bolts of the project will be complemented with life-after-Bard skills workshops, along with a review of internship and grant-writing opportunities in the discipline. Senior Colloquium is designed to create a productive network of association for student scholars and writers: small working groups foster intellectual community, providing individual writers with a wide range of support throughout this culminating year of undergraduate study in the major. Class size: 35