Note that students are permitted to apply simultaneously for multiple workshops of any level and/or genre within a given semester. However, the Program does not allow students to take two or more workshops concurrently; if you place into more than one workshop, the Program will choose one for you.

Students enrolled in the Written Arts Senior Project may not take workshops. Workshops are graded on a P/D/F system. No workshops are restricted to Written Arts majors, and none has official academic prerequisites.

17321

WRIT 121

Fiction Workshop I

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. Class size: 14

17322

WRIT 122

Nonfiction Workshop I

Susan Rogers

M W 1:30pm-2:50pm

OLIN 304

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 be lyrical or analytical, meditative or whimsical. Students will read a range of works and then offer up their own creative experiments, paying particular attention to the relationship between language and ideas. Weekly writings and readings. No prior experience with creative nonfiction is needed. In spring term this course is not restricted only to first-year students. Class size: 14

17324

WRIT 123

Poetry Workshop I

Michael Ives

T Th 11:50am-1:10pm

OLIN 101

PART

This course is 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. In spring term this course is not restricted only to first-year students.

Class size: 14

17320

WRIT 125

The Arc of the Short Story: conversations with authors

Alaa Al-Aswany

F 3:00pm-5:00pm

RKC 102

2 credits. Led by distinguished Egyptian author, Alaa Al-Aswany this course will offer students the opportunity to critically engage with a vast range of short stories from a writer’s perspective. Class discussions will focus on the architecture of individual stories, with special attention paid to how authors have employed this narrative form to address their own moral, political, and aesthetic concerns. The course will also investigate how writers across the globe have deliberately subverted the story’s conventions in order to create texts that challenge our understanding of what constitutes a story. Discussions will be led by Aswany and visiting guest authors. Students will also play a critical role in leading the conversations through individual presentations, and through their own creative responses to the stories discussed. Readings will include works by Anton Chekhov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nicolai Gogol, Guy de Maupassant, as well as contemporary works of short fiction by authors such Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, and Edwidge Danticat. Class size: 20

17326

WRIT 224

Literary Journalism

Ian Buruma

M W 10:10am-11:30am

OLIN 301

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights This course will consider what constitutes literary journalism, as opposed to other forms of comment or reporting. It will include famous polemics, such as “’s J’Accuse,” literary and arts criticism, and political reportage. Great critics, ranging from Cyril Connolly on literature to Lester Bangs on rock music, will be read. We will look at famous reportage, such as Mary McCarthy’s pieces on Vietnam, and Alma Guillermoprieto on the killings in Mexico. H. L. Mencken’s articles on the Monkey Trial of 1925 will be on the list, as will Hunter S. Thompson on the Hell’s Angels. The fine (but important) line between factual reportage and fictional imagination will be explored in the work of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Curzio Malaparte. Students will be shown that journalism can be a literary genre. By reading some of the best, or most controversial practitioners, they will come to a better idea of what it is. Class size: 18

17325

WRIT 230

Materials and Techniques of Poetry

Michael Ives

T Th 3:10pm-4:30pm

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, 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.” Class size: 14

17323

WRIT 231

Reading & Writing the Birds

Susan Rogers

T 10:10am-11:30am

Th 7:30am-11:30am

OLIN 303

PART

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies Students will become familiar with approximately a hundred local birds by ear and by sight, then write about the birds using both experience and research. To guide our writing we will read narratives of bird discovery and adventure from Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon to Olive Thorne Miller, Florence Merriam Bailey, Roger Tory Peterson, and Kenn Kaufman. Tuesdays will involve in-class discussion of readings and small group workshops, and Thursdays will often be held in the field (we will not always meet at 7:30 but you must be ready and willing to attend class at that hour). A good pair of binoculars is suggested. Class size: 12

17327

WRIT 245

Hybrid Narratives

Dinaw Mengestu

M 3:10pm-5:30pm

OLIN 310

PART

While we often divide literature into distinct categories and genres—poetry, nonfiction, fiction—writers have always strayed across these boundaries, borrowing from other forms and genres to create hybrid texts that are a product of multiple literary styles, techniques, and traditions. Over the course of the semester we will read from a broad range of classical and contemporary writers whose work is a deliberate hybrid of form, style, and genre. We will read essays that have the texture and imagination of a short story; stories that are closer to poems, journalists who use the tools common to fiction, and novelists whose work straddles the line between autobiography and fiction. Our reading for the semester will be based around broad, thematic concerns. We will discuss the relationship between form and content; the ethics of narration; and, ultimately, how we can apply the tools and techniques of the writers we’ve read to our own creative and critical writing. This is a writing-intensive course. Students will be expected to write short, critical responses throughout the semester, as well as generate a substantial body of creative text. Class size: 14

17330

WRIT 324

Fiction Workshop III

Benjamin Hale

M 1:30pm-3:50pm

HEG 200

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. Class size: 12

17331

WRIT 325

Translating "Illuminations": Illuminating translation

Wyatt Mason

W 1:30pm-3:50pm

HAC CONFERENCE ROOM

PART

Cross-listed: French Studies Over the course of the term, each of the students in this class translates—in its entirety—Arthur Rimbaud’s series of prose poems that has come to be called Illuminations. The purpose of the class is not to come up with a collective translation; rather, class discussions and independent research into the meanings of words inform participants enough about both French and English for them to arrive at their own individual translations of the poems. The class goes through the poems line by line, discussing the meanings of the words in the French originals and the boggling range of alternatives they present in English. The course functions as a writing workshop because learning to translate from a foreign language into English is writing at its most pure: it is the key to learning how to write resourcefully and powerfully, to knowing the weight and weft of words. Writing assignments are due every week and include both rigorous research into the French language and deep engagement with every writer’s best friend, the O.E.D. Translation is supplemented by reading previous translations of Rimbaud as well as essays on translation—not theoretical essays but writing on translation as a practice, a habit of mind. It is essential that students have both a passion for English usage and a background in the French language.

Class size: 10

17332

WRIT 336

Prose Studio

Luc Sante

T 1:30pm-3:50pm

OLIN 306

PART

Just as the visual arts employ studios to stretch muscles, refine technique, and launch ideas, so this class functions for writers of fiction and nonfiction. Every week there are 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. Class size: 12

17333

WRIT 340 B

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

Mona Simpson

TBD -

PART

This is the second semester of a yearlong class, and is closed to new registrants. All students who took this course in Fall 2016 must continue it in Spring 2017. Class size: 8

17329

WRIT 341

Poetics of Space: Language and Visuality

Ann Lauterbach

T 1:30pm-3:50pm

ALBEE 106

PART

Cross-listed: Literature Poets, critics, novelists and philosophers have long pondered the mystery of how writing conveys a sense of space, or place, and the objects found in it: persons, plates, roses, cars, fences, cats, stars. Beginning with the grapheme and glyph, we will examine linguistic figures such as image, metaphor, simile, and metonymy; read varieties of description and depiction, inquire about mimesis and ekphrasis, and investigate the relation between verbal particulars and abstractions. 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, narrative, and knowledge. We will consider the possible connection between the aesthetics of the visual and the Western bourgeois culture of desire. Possible readings drawn from Proust, Auerbach, Bachelard, Roland Barthes, J. W. T. Mitchell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georges Didi-Huberman, John Berger, T. J. Clark, W. G. Sebald, Don DeLillo, Mallarme, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Marianne Moore, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, George Oppen, Nathaniel Mackey, Lyn Heijinian, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Michael Palmer, Claudia Rankine and Will Alexander. Class size: 12

17334

WRIT 345

Imagining Nonhuman Consciousness

Benjamin Hale

Th 1:30pm-3:50pm

OLIN 107

PART

Cross-listed: 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 remains inaccessible to human cognitive empathy. 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, elephants, parrots, lobsters, cows, ants, monsters, puppets, computers, and eventually, zombies. Course reading may include Descartes, Kafka, Rilke, Jakob von Uexküll, Patricia Highsmith, John Gardner’s Grendel, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, David Foster Wallace, Irene Pepperberg, Temple Grandin, Donna Haraway, Isaac Asimov, Frans de Waal, E. O. Wilson, Giorgio Agamben, and Bennett Sims’s A Questionable Shape, among others, in addition to a viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and possibly other films. This is also a craft class, as each student will produce a substantial project over the semester: The assignments will be open-ended, as I am open to both creative and analytical works; but a major component of the class will be incorporating these ideas into our own writing.

Class size: 12

17335

WRIT 405

Senior Colloquium:Written Arts

Benjamin Hale

M 4:40pm-6:00pm

OLINLC 115

1 credit. The Senior Colloquium in the Written Arts is an integral part 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 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. Class size: Required for all students enrolled in a Written Arts Senior Project. Class size: 35

17605

WRIT 422

Writing Workshop for Non-Majors

Porochista Khakpour

T 1:30pm – 3:50pm

OLIN 310

PART

This course is designed for juniors and seniors who are not Written Arts majors but who wish to see what they can learn about the world through the act of writing. Every craft, science, skill, and 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.” Students read a range of works then produce their own prose writings for critique. Class size: 12