Course:

WRIT 111  Thinglish: Language Meets Object

Professor:

Michael Ives  

CRN:

90288

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin 309

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

In this class we'll explore how words not only name things, but how they capture the "thingness" of things – their vivid appearance, their sharp particularity, be it a plant, a garment, a wheelbarrow, a house, an objet d'art, the crest of a wave, a twist of leaves in wind. We'll strive to write what renowned Bard poet, Robert Kelly, calls "Thing-lish," and we'll do this by examining many different species and textures of writing from the lyric to the scientific, from poems and short fiction to brief essays, art historical descriptions, reviews of paintings and perfumes, lists and indices, the journals of naturalists, and the specialized vocabularies of selected disciplines, all in the service of cultivating concrete immediacy in our writing and an attentiveness to the things we hold dear. We will practice object-oriented meditation as a source of solace to the frayed mind, and seek out the power of talismans to calm us in our turbulent world. Journal entries and weekly writing experiments (poetry and prose) will be keyed to both the readings and forays into the thing-scape. This class is open to WA majors and non-majors alike.

 

Course:

WRIT 121 A Fiction Workshop I

Professor:

Mary Caponegro  

CRN:

90283

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

14

Credits:

4

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. Through our own creative work, and the close, critical reading of our stories, we will try to become better artisans of language and narrative. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering. This class is reserved for first-year students.

 

Course:

WRIT 121 B Fiction Workshop I

Professor:

Benjamin Hale  

CRN:

90284

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

14

Credits:

4

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. Through our own creative work, and the close, critical reading of our stories, we will try to become better artisans of language and narrative. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering. This class is reserved for first-year students.

 

Course:

WRIT 122  Principles of Prose

Professor:

Wyatt Mason  

CRN:

90287

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

This course presents the breadth of formal possibilities available to writers of prose. The workshop will look at how sentences function in a written work, whether non-fiction or fiction, and our reading will span the divide between these limiting categories as we attempt, in our own writing, to achieve authority. Students will workshop—i.e., read and comment on—pieces and parts by Aristotle, Montaigne, Twain, Poe, Beckett, Nellie Bly, George Orwell, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Guy Davenport, Leonard Michaels, Susan Sontag, Vladimir Nabokov, Ben Metcalf, David Foster Wallace, Claudia Rankine, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Amia Srinivasan, Mary Gaitskill and Lydia Davis. Workshopping these established writers enables students to learn what a piece of writing does as well as how to workshop a piece of writing. In addition to daily writing, three pieces of prose of increasing length by each student in the class will be workshopped during the term. These three pieces will all address one, specific area of interest that the student will choose at the beginning of the term. Through independent reading on the subject throughout the term, students will gain the expertise that will allow them to write clearly, meaningfully, and originally.

 

Course:

WRIT 123 A Poetry Workshop I

Professor:

Michael Ives  

CRN:

90285

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin 307

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

In this course, we'll approach poems as crafted experiences that arise out of enmeshed acts of collecting, assembling, shaping, and dramatizing. Considerable attention will be given to language and silence as delivery mechanisms—modes of transport into myriad states of feeling, attending, thinking, and being. Over the course of the term, we'll sample a spectrum of poetic forms, voices, structures, and encounters, and learn to probe them for they can teach us. Students will be encouraged to extend their range and sharpen their creative and critical gifts through developing their ear, and inviting new lexicons, syntactical structures, and tonal variations to seep into their work. Class will be structured around the original composition of poetry, supplemented by critical analysis of assigned poems and texts on poetics, peer critique, in-class writing exercises, and discussions on creative process. This class is reserved for first-year students.

 

Course:

WRIT 123 B Poetry Workshop I

Professor:

Jenny Xie  

CRN:

90286

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     5:40 PM - 7:00 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

14

Credits:

4

In this course, we'll approach poems as crafted experiences that arise out of enmeshed acts of collecting, assembling, shaping, and dramatizing. Considerable attention will be given to language and silence as delivery mechanisms—modes of transport into myriad states of feeling, attending, thinking, and being. Over the course of the term, we'll sample a spectrum of poetic forms, voices, structures, and encounters, and learn to probe them for they can teach us. Students will be encouraged to extend their range and sharpen their creative and critical gifts through developing their ear, and inviting new lexicons, syntactical structures, and tonal variations to seep into their work. Class will be structured around the original composition of poetry, supplemented by critical analysis of assigned poems and texts on poetics, peer critique, in-class writing exercises, and discussions on creative process. This class is reserved for first-year students.

 

Course:

WRIT 216  Contemporary Asian American and Asian Diasporic Poetics

Professor:

Jenny Xie  

CRN:

90387

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  American Studies; Asian Studies; Literature

When Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers arrived on the U.S. literary scene in 1974, it was both manifesto and provocation, inflaming what are still-ongoing debates over the borders, sensibilities, obligations, and political allegiances of the "Asian American writer." Since the entrance of Aiiieeeee and the beginnings of the Asian American Movement in the late 1960's, Asian American poetry has expanded to cover vast political and aesthetic terrain, though knotted questions remain over what designating a work as "Asian American" allows us to see and understand. In this course, we'll examine the aesthetic heterogeneity and capaciousness of this slippery category through the lens of contemporary AAPI and Asian diaspora poets who write in invigoratingly diverse modes, forms, styles, and visions. How do contemporary AAPI poets innovate poetically to address evolving concerns of the AAPI community? How do works by these poets deepen or destabilize our understanding of race and racialization? Course readings will include the poetry of Nellie Wong, Garrett Hongo, Theresa Cha, Bhanu Kapil, Rajiv Mohabir, Monica Youn, Solmaz Sharif, John Yau, Sarah Howe, Sally Wen Mao, Monica Sok, Hieu Minh Nguyen, and more. The class will also feature writings by Anne Anlin Cheng, Timothy Yu, Dorothy Wang, and Cathy Park Hong as critical frameworks for our conversations around race, form, and intersections between politics and aesthetics. In tandem with the course texts, students will write their own poetry, and engage in interdisciplinary modes of response. This course is open to all students with an interest in AAPI poetry and poetics, along with larger discussions around race and poetic innovation.

 

Course:

WRIT 217  The Here and Now: Inquiries into the Everyday

Professor:

Jenny Offill  

CRN:

90291

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Aspinwall 302

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

15

Credits:

4

In this course, we will look at a wide variety of literature, film, and art that concerns itself with the clarification and magnification of particular moments of being.  An emphasis will be placed on how these works highlight everyday things that often pass beneath our notice. In a series of cross-disciplinary projects, we will focus on the small, the habitual, the overlooked, and discuss how we might transform these seemingly modest things with the force of our attention. We will discuss why a specific (and at times mysterious-seeming) choice has been made by a writer or artist, as well as expanding our conversations to include larger philosophical questions prompted by these explorations of craft. Topics for discussion will include the science of attention, the uses of ritual and repetition, "the discipline of rightness" (as Wallace Stevens once described it), and why feeling so often precedes form. Readings/viewings will include work by Natalia Ginzburg, Rainer Marie Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Francis Ponge, Henri Lefebvre, Teju Cole, Jonathan Crary, Claudia Rankine, Joy Williams, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, John Cage, Gaston Bachelard and Tehching Hsieh among others. Over the course of the semester, we will use these texts and artworks as a springboard for writing our own original texts.

 

Course:

WRIT 347  Manifestations of the Self in Narrative: Metafiction to Autofiction

Professor:

Mary Caponegro  

CRN:

90294

Schedule:

  Wed     2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Reem Kayden Center 200

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Literature

The self-reflexive gesture in fiction can be traced back to Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, though our attention will be focused on the mid-twentieth century onward. We will reside initially with fiction that does not hold a mirror up to life, but rather, as a reaction against the conventions of realist fiction, employs formal strategies, often complex, ostentatious ones, to reveal and showcase its own artifice. We will move toward a more recent tendency in fiction to fuse author and narrator (or protagonist) so seamlessly that any allegiance to the fictive would appear to evaporate.  Though the term Autofiction was coined around the same period as Metafiction, it has in the last decade been in vogue for contemporary fiction that foregrounds the self, erecting no discernible wall between life and art.  How does the self transmute in each of these fictive arenas? Are they inversions of each other or two sides of one coin? Is the realm of Metafiction and/or Autofiction ultimately a narcissistic enterprise? Or a continuum of ingenuity that deconstructs the self? Students will be encouraged to respond both critically and creatively to the fiction they encounter. Readings will be drawn from among the following authors: Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, John Barth, Robert Coover, William Gass, Angela Carter, Ishmael Reed, David Markson, Nicolson Baker, Kathy Acker, Ben Marcus, Christina Milletti, Helen DeWitt, Valeria Luiselli, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jenny Offill, Ben Lerner, Zinzi Clemmons, and Sheila Heti.

 

Course:

WRIT 354  Plundering the Americas: On Violence Against Land and Bodies

Professor:

Valeria Luiselli  

CRN:

90293

Schedule:

Mon       2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

14

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Architecture; Environmental & Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities; Human Rights

This course focuses on the histories of extractivism and violence against land and against the female body in the Americas, centering on ways in which writing, art and activism have responded to systemic violence across the continent. We will be looking at work emerging across several different languages and cultures in the continent and thinking about their hemispheric intersections as well as about their disconnects. Some of the thinkers, authors and artists we will be engaging with are Aimé Césaire, Natalie DÍaz, Dolores Dorantes, Layli Longsoldier, Fred Moten, Yasnaya Elena Aguilar, and Vivir Quintana, as well as several art collectives. For each class session, students are expected to prepare a written response in the form of a developed question or questions about the readings; these should be concise (not more than a page) and geared to spur our discussion. Students will also work on short, prompt-based exercises, trying to connect the trans-hemispheric questions and issues that we explore in class. All students will work on a final project, which can range from a traditional non-fictional piece, to a sound-piece, to a combination of textual and visual explorations, to a collection of short-form interconnected pieces.

 

Course:

WRIT 355  Writing the Place

Professor:

Robert Kelly  

CRN:

90295

Schedule:

  Wed     3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin 302

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

6

Credits:

2

Poetry giving voice to where we stand. Poetry of place. No writing samples need be submitted, but consult with Robert Kelly by email (kelly@bard.edu) or over the phone before registering.

 

Course:

WRIT 356  Life Writing

Professor:

Mona Simpson  

CRN:

90296

Schedule:

        TBA  

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

In this class, we'll read, re-read, take apart and put back together one beautiful short story every two weeks, mining techniques and strategies for our own fiction. Weekly responses will be required. In addition to remote class time, students also need to be available for three intensive weekend classes over the course of the semester. During these weekend retreats, we'll meet both Saturday and Sunday for four hours for an unplugged experience of reading, writing,walking and conversation.

 

Course:

WRIT 357  Problems of Perspective

Professor:

Dinaw Mengestu  

CRN:

90554

Schedule:

  Wed     2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

Over the course of this seminar, we will interrogate the function of perspective in establishing how a narrative, and the characters who inhabit it, not only see but also interpret the world, and how that perspective has been used to create distance, both real and imaginary, between an “us” and a foreign other. We will use our understanding of perspective to look critically at the world around us, and over the course of the semester will use a lab model to develop narratives that actively address and engage our surroundings. We will focus on the ethics as well as the aesthetics of narration, paying close attention to the function of individual words and the narrative traditions that we are operating within and at times breaking from. We will work on developing a critical and creative framework to understand the role language plays in shaping our public discourse and what roles we, as students, citizens, scholars, and writers, can play in creating narratives that offer a more complex and dynamic representation of our environment. We will examine how narratives reflect and in some instances actively construct cultural and political divisions, and how writers can address, and in some instances challenge those divisions. Selected readings will include, but are not limited to Susan Sontag, Saul Bellows, Sven Lindquist, Colson Whitehead, Katherine Boo, Claudia Rankine, Adania Shibli.

 

Course:

WRIT 358  Writing the Pandemic Year: What Has Happened to Us?

Professor:

Masha Gessen  

CRN:

90560

Schedule:

  Wed     2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Aspenwall 302

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

14

Credits:

4

There are ways to measure the damage the pandemic has done. More than half a million dead from COVID, at this writing - a number that has rendered the extreme mundane. Some eighty thousand dead from opioid overdoses - a grim record matched by the steady rise in alcohol consumption over the course of fifteen months. A variously measured but invariably staggering rise in mental health diagnoses, suicides, self-harm. And then there are things we can’t measure, such as the impact of an unprecedented era of loneliness. Neurologists say that our brains have gotten smoother for lack of stimulation over the course of the pandemic. On the other side of the equation is a stunning scientific breakthrough and the massive vaccine rollout. American cultural habits dictate that we should embrace our return to normal - whatever “normal” might be - and put the strange year of missing memories out of our minds. But wait. The pandemic will continue to influence our psyches, our culture, and our politics for years to come. Let’s pause to think, read, and write about it. In this course, we will read journalism, essays, poetry, and fiction from the pandemic months - one month for each week of the semester. Students will produce one piece of fiction and one piece of nonfiction.

 

Course:

WRIT 405  Written Arts Senior Colloquium

Professor:

TBA  

CRN:

90297

Schedule:

Mon       5:40 PM - 7:00 PM Reem Kayden Center 103

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

40

Credits:

1

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.

 

Cross-listed courses:

 

Course:

FILM 256A Writing the Film: Character and Story

Professor:

Lisa Katzman and Charles Burnett

CRN:

90332

Schedule:

  Wed     9:00 AM - 12:00 PM Avery Film Center 117

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Written Arts

 

Course:

FILM 256 B Writing the Film: Character and Story

Professor:

A. Sayeeda Moreno  

CRN:

90344

Schedule:

  Wed     2:00 PM - 5:00 PM Avery Film Center 338

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Written Arts

 

Course:

LIT 2319  The Art of Translation

Professor:

Peter Filkins  

CRN:

90272

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin 303

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap

15

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Written Arts

 

Course:

THTR 207  Writing Plays with Ghosts and Demons

Professor:

Chiori Miyagawa  

CRN:

90362

Schedule:

 Tue      2:00 PM - 5:00 PM Fisher Performing Arts Center Studio North

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap

10

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Written Arts