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