15061

WRIT  121   

 First Fiction Workshop

Porochista Khakpour

. T . Th .

11:50am-1:10pm

OLIN 107

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 but who have not yet had a fiction workshop at Bard. In spring term this course is not restricted only to first-year students.Prospective registrants must submit a writing portfolio c. 10 days before registration. Deadline and guidelines will be announced via email and at writtenarts.bard.edu.

Class size: 14

 

15062

WRIT  122   

 Nonfiction Workshop I

Wyatt Mason

M . W . .

1:30pm-2:50pm

OLIN 305

PART

This course will present the breadth of formal possibilities available to writers of short non-fiction. We will begin by workshopping -- i.e. reading and commenting on critically and insightfully -- *published* pieces, pieces by Montaigne, De Quincy, 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. We will be workshopping these established writers to learn both what a piece of non-fiction 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 non-fiction writing of their own, guided by formal lessons learned through reading the best in the form.Prospective registrants must submit a writing portfolio c. 10 days before registration. Deadline and guidelines will be announced via email and at writtenarts.bard.edu.  Class size: 12

 

15067

WRIT  220   

 Text in Performance: the ecstatic word

Michael Ives

. T . Th .

3:10pm-4:30pm

OLINLC 206

PART

Cross-Listed: Music In this performance workshop, participants will explore the border territory where sound meets poetry meets music meets drama known as sound/text composition. We’ll examine notable examples from this ever evolving tradition and produce pieces in creative response. Among the historical materials we’ll investigate: glossolalia, Russian avant-garde Zaum and allied notions of trans-rational and imaginary language; Sprechstimme; European and American sound/text composition; sound poetry (from Kurt Schwitters to Christian Bök); experimental radio (Beckett, Cage, Nordine, Firesign Theater, among others); the jazz poetry movement; field recording and found materials; contemporary experimental performance poetry; and if time permits, digital voice manipulation. The course will place a decided emphasis on live reading skills and performance practice. Students will be expected to commit to at least one, if not more, fully realized public presentations of their work. Both writers and musicians interested in exploring language as a compositional medium are welcome.  Prospective registrants must submit a writing portfolio c. 10 days before registration. Deadline and guidelines will be announced via email and at writtenarts.bard.edu.  Class size: 12

 

15065

WRIT  221   A

 Fiction Workshop II

Porochista Khakpour

. T . Th .

1:30pm-2:50pm

OLIN 107

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.

Prospective registrants must submit a writing portfolio c. 10 days before registration. Deadline and guidelines will be announced via email and at writtenarts.bard.edu.  Class size: 14

 

15064

WRIT  221   B

 Fiction Workshop II

Teju Cole

M . W . .

1:30pm-2:50pm

OLIN 307

PART

See above.  Prospective registrants must submit a writing portfolio c. 10 days before registration. Deadline and guidelines will be announced via email and at writtenarts.bard.edu.  Class size: 14

 

15063

WRIT  224   

 Literary Reportage

Ian Buruma

M . W . .

10:10am- 11:30am

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights  This course will introduce students to the art of journalism. At best, journalism can rise to literary excellence. We will be studying reportage as well as criticism, looking at examples of both genres since Macaulay’s contributions to the Edinburgh Review. The question is what lifts journalism to a higher literary level. We will consider some famous examples: John Hersey on Hiroshima, Michael Herr’s dispatches on the Vietnam War, Alma Guillermoprieto on Latin American politics, Hunter S. Thompson on the party conventions, V.S. Naipaul on Trinidad. Other questions dealt with in this course include the vexed one of literary license. Reportage by Ryszard Kapuscinski and Curzio Malaparte is fine literature, to be sure. Both claimed to be writing journalism. But they clearly made things up. Can a writer have it both ways: the license of fiction, and the claim to be presenting the truth? Finally, we will read some of the best critics, including Cyril Connolly, Edmund Wilson, and Pauline Kael.  Class size: 18

 

15066

WRIT  236   

 Writing the Natural World

Susan Rogers

. T . Th .

11:50am-1:10pm

FIELD STATION

PART

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies In this course we will read and write narratives that use the natural world as both subject and source of inspiration. We will begin the course reading intensively to identify what is nature writing and what makes it compelling (or not). What is the focus of the nature writer and what are the challenges of the genre? To this end we will read works by Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir, and then move forward to contemporary writers such as Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, and Edward Abbey. There will be weekly writings on the readings and an occasional quiz. In addition, students will keep a nature journal and produce one longer creative essay that results from both experience and research, and one longer creative paper. This means that students must be willing to venture into the outdoors—woods, river or mountains. Prior workshop experience is not necessary. A curiosity about the natural world is essential. Class size: 14

 

15074

WRIT  320   

 THE DYING ANIMAL: Literary Criticism AS AN ENDANGERED JOURNALISTIC FORM

Wyatt Mason

M . W . .

3:10pm-4:30pm

OLIN 303

PART

How does one write -- on deadline -- about new works of literary enterprise for an intelligent audience outside of the academy? How does one, when given 5000 words of real estate in TheNew York Review of Books, or the New Yorker, or Harper's, write an essay which will engage the new work of literary merit -- a collection of poetry or stories; a novel; a biography of a writer of any of these forms -- and offer an opinion of the work's merits that is as fair to the ambitions of the author in question as it is to the larger endeavor of literary enterprise? How, in short, do you say what you think while the clock ticks and a reputation awaits being made or unmade? And how do you do that in a literary culture where less and less space is given over to this essential humanistic endeavor: the public conversation about books? In this workshop, we will read examples of literary criticism from throughout its history including writing by Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincy, Virginia Wolff, Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, John Updike, Denis Donoghue, David Foster Wallace, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Rivka Galchen, and James Wood. Through this exposure to the varieties of argumentative experience, we will learn how such pieces are structured and how arguments -- aesthetic ones -- are mounted and defended, to the end of writing a final, 3500-word piece of long-form literary criticism of our own. Contact professor by email in advance of registration for approval.  Class size: 12

 

15068

WRIT  324   

 Fiction Workshop III

Benjamin Hale

. T . . .

4:40pm-7:00pm

OLIN 101

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

 

15071

WRIT  335   

 Poetry Practicum: how forms become contents

Ann Lauterbach

. T . . .

1:30pm-3:50pm

OLIN 301

PART

Practicum is a Latin word meaning the practice of something as one moves from learning about it to doing it. This course will have the spirit of experiment, in the sense of testing things, and a sense of inquiry, in the sense of looking closely at how specific choices—words, punctuation, syntax, etc. -- inform how meanings are made. We’ll look at examples from Sappho to Stevens to Silliman, as well as at critical writings to help align your intentions to your writing practice.Prospective registrants must submit a writing portfolio c. 10 days before registration. Deadline and guidelines will be announced via email and at writtenarts.bard.edu.  Class size: 15

 

15069

WRIT  336   

 Prose Studio

Luc Sante

. . . Th .

1:30pm-3:50pm

OLIN 301

PART

Just as the visual arts employ studios to stretch muscles, refine technique, and launch ideas, so this class will function for writers of fiction and nonfiction. Every week there will be paired reading and writing exercises concerning, e.g., voice, stance, texture, rhythm, recall, palette, focus, compression, word choice, rhetoric, and timing. For serious writers only.Prospective registrants must submit a writing portfolio c. 10 days before registration. Deadline and guidelines will be announced via email and at writtenarts.bard.edu.  Class size: 15

 

15070

WRIT  340   

 Affinities & Discoveries II: how to sustain a literary life during and after bard

Mona Simpson

TBA

 

.

PART

This course continues from Fall 2014 into Spring 2015: no new students will be accepted in the spring semester. Given that, there may be no need to list it in the course catalog—but if it does appear, it should do so with a disclaimer, so that students are aware they cannot register for this class if they were not previously enrolled in it.  Class size: 14

 

15073

WRIT  405   

 Senior Colloquium:Written Arts

Mary Caponegro

M . . . .

4:45pm-6:00pm

OLINLC 118

 

Senior Colloquium in the Written Arts is an integral part of the eight credits of 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 will be 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 will supplement but never supplant the primary and sacrosanct role of the project adviser.

Program faculty and alumni, career development and other staff, and outside speakers (such as editors, translators, MFA graduates and directors, publishing personnel, etc.) will all 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.  Class size: 15

 

15072

WRIT  422   

 Writing Workshop for Non-Majors

Robert Kelly

. . . . F

1:30pm-3:50pm

SHAFER

COMMON ROOM

PART

A course designed for juniors and seniors, who are not writing majors, but who might wish to see what they can learn about the world through the act of writing. Every craft, science, skill, discipline can be articulated, and anybody who can do real work in science or scholarship or art can learn to write, as they say, “creatively.” This course will give not more than a dozen students the chance to experiment with all kinds of writing. Prospective registrants must email the instructor with a brief letter of inquiry detailing their current writing activities (e.g., senior project) and their writing interests, or must set up a meeting with the instructor in advance of registration. Class size: 13