92182

WRIT 121 A

Fiction Workshop I

Benjamin Hale

M W 3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 107

PART

This introductory-level course is for students interested in writing fiction as a means of both critical and creative engagement. Over the course of the semester we will read works that reflect a range of aesthetic approaches in order to broaden our exposure to literature and enrich our palettes as emerging practitioners. Readings will include stories from authors such as Angela Carter, John Cheever, and Italo Calvino, as well as narratives from contemporary and classical authors in translation. Through our own creative work, and the close, critical reading of our stories, we will try to become better artisans of language and narrative. In fall term this course is restricted to first-year students. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering. Class size: 14

92183

WRIT 121 B

Fiction Workshop I

Dinaw Mengestu

T Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLIN 310

PART

See above. Class size: 14

92184

WRIT 122

Nonfiction Workshop I

Wyatt Mason

T Th 3:10 pm- 4:30 pm

OLIN 304

PART

This course presents the breadth of formal possibilities available to writers of short nonfiction. Students workshop—i.e., read and comment on critically and insightfully—published pieces by Montaigne, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Baudelaire, Poe, Dreiser, Twain, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, Joan Didion, John McPhee, Guy Davenport, Leonard Michaels, John Updike, Ben Metcalf, David Foster Wallace, Marilynne Robinson, Cynthia Ozick, Jeanette Winterson, James Wood, and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Workshopping these established writers enables students to learn both what a piece of nonfiction writing is as well as to learn how to workshop something: It isn’t a given! In addition to short writing exercises throughout the term, the course will build to a final assignment that will see students attempt substantive pieces of nonfiction writing of their own, guided by formal lessons learned through reading the best in the form. This course is restricted to first-year students, registration will take place in August. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering. Class size: 14

92185

WRIT 123

Poetry Workshop I

Michael Ives

T Th 3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 107

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, 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, private and shared, of response to it. Readings are 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. This course is restricted to first-year students, registration will take place in August. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering.

Class size: 14

92187

WRIT 227

Reading as Writing as Reading

Michael Ives

T Th 1:30 pm-2:50 pm

OLIN 305

PART

The idea for this class is simple: reading and writing are joined at the mind through the eye, ear and heart; how we write is informed by what we read. The hope is that, by reading various writings, you will discover methods and means for furthering your own work. The aim of the class is to help you explore the possibilities of form in relation to your chosen subject-matter. Form, by definition, involves limits. Free verse is not free. The poetic line is one simple limit; tone and cadence and diction are aspects of formal limits. Then there are imposed or prescribed limits, like the decision to write using only nouns beginning with the letter “M”, or to write a poem without any adjectives, or a poem written using a procedure that moves language into unanticipated places, or a sonnet. Immediately after registering online, applicants for this class must email [email protected], explaining their interest in the course and providing information about their reading and writing backgrounds. Class size: 12

92241

WRIT 228

MYSTERIES OF NARRATIVE

Rivka Galchen

Th 1:30 pm – 3:50 pm

OLIN 301

PART

Mystery once referred primarily to religious ideas: divine revelations, unknown rites, or the secret counsel of God. In the twentieth century, the word began to be used in reference to more prosaic things, like whodunits. But what is coming to be known in a story? Why and what is a reader tempted to try to know, and what, today, can she expect to be revealed? What are clues? What are solutions? When do the "tricks" of withholding information annoy, and when do they compel? In what ways can stories not straightforwardly written as mysteries use the tropes of mystery? Throughout this course, we will read stories, novels and case histories with the intention of noticing how writers have borrowed, avoided, warped, translated, or disguised the structures of mystery. In this way, we will think about what techniques of mystery we might integrate into our own work. We will also write and workshop two short mysteries and will read works by authors including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Marcel Proust, Haruki Murakami, Penelope Fitzgerald, Edgar Allan Poe, Muriel Spark, Roberto Bolaño, James Baldwin, Vera Caspary and Kobo Abe. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering. Class size: 14

92188

WRIT 324

Fiction Workshop III

Benjamin Hale

T 11:50 am-2:10 pm

HDR 106

PART

This is a workshop in prose fiction for advanced students. Students are expected to submit at least two works of fiction to the workshop and critique their peers’ writings. This course is restricted to students who have taken at least one previous Written Arts workshop (in any genre: fiction, poetry, or nonfiction). No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering. Class size: 14

92189

WRIT 326

Writing and Resistance

Joseph O'Neill

M 11:50 am-2:10 pm

OLIN 310

D+J

PART

DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights Our current political reality demands that we return to the problematic and remarkable relationship between literature and politics. With renewed urgency and awareness of the role language plays in constructing and reshaping our reality, we will read across a broad range of texts, asking: how can resistance, protest, ideological critique, and indoctrination inhabit a piece of fiction? How can the imagination take part in the events of the day? What sort of creative response can be offered to the structures of power and justice? We will be investigating these and other urgent questions through a reading of various texts by the likes of P. B. Shelley, Jonathan Swift, Barbara Ehrenreich, James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, Roberto Bolano, Doris Lessing, and Muriel Spark; and we'll be writing “political” stories and essays of our own. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering. Class size: 14

92223

WRIT 338

Reading and Writing the Hudson

Susan Rogers

T 10:10 am-11:30 am

Th 8:00 am-11:30 am

HEG 300

FIELD STATION

PART

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies “To those who know it, the Hudson River is the most beautiful, messed up, productive, ignored, and surprising piece of water on the face of the earth,” writes Robert Boyle in The Hudson: A Natural and Unnatural History. In this course students will get to know the Hudson in all of its complexity through reading a range of works and through writing personal essays of place. Readings will range from history to natural history, literature to environmental policy. In addition, each student will be required to undertake independent research into some aspect of the river, from the brick or whaling industry to gardens or villas of the valley. This research, combined with personal experience of the valley, will be used to develop extended creative nonfiction essays. These personal essays will be read and critiqued in a workshop format. This course is open to all students interested in creative nonfiction writing from a researched, interdisciplinary perspective. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering. Class size: 11

92239

WRIT 350

The Short Story

Mona Simpson

TBD

PART

In this course, students will read, reread, discuss, and respond in writing to a number of short stories with a view to analyzing how they function and how students can adapt the writers' forms, styles, approaches, and other tools in their own work. The class will start with works in translation: Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Flaubert; then move to Hawthorne, Munro, Trevor, and Yiyun Li. Close reading and weekly essays will be an important part of the class, as will long-term writing projects (short stories, personal or critical essays, etc.). This low-residency seminar convenes in person for six meetings over the course of the semester, with weekly discussions held via video conferencing. In addition, students are expected to make time for one-one-one virtual meetings with the professor. Immediately after registering online, applicants for this class must email a five-to-twenty-page double-spaced *PDF* sample of their strongest fiction and/or nonfiction to date to [email protected]. Class size: 10

92191

WRIT 405

Senior Colloquium:Written Arts

Dinaw Mengestu

M 4:45 pm-6:00 pm

OLIN 201

1 credit. 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, and should not (cannot) register themselves manually for Colloquium. Class size: 20

Cross-listed courses:

92225

ANTH 351 THE INTERVIEW: REPORTAGE, HUMAN RIGHTS, LITERATURE, ETHNOGRAPHY, FILM

John Ryle

T 3:10 pm – 5:30 pm

HEG 102

SSCI

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies; Film, Human Rights; Written Arts

92142

LIT 3033

Toward (A) Moral Fiction

Mary Caponegro

T 4:40 pm-7:00 pm

OLIN 101

D+J

ELIT

DIFF

Cross-listed: Written Arts Class size: 15

92173

LIT 3036

Poetic Lineages

Cole Heinowitz

W 1:30 pm-3:50 pm

HEG 200

ELIT

Cross-listed: Written Arts Class size: 15