Course:

WRIT 112  Something Old, Something New

Professor:

Derek Furr  + Erica Kaufman

CRN:

15751

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     8:30 AM - 9:50 AM OSUN

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 14

An introduction to reading, writing, and writing about poetry, Something Old, Something New pairs poetry of the past with poetry of the contemporary to examine how poets respond to each other and their social context. Poetry travels, so our scope will be global, with an emphasis on the ways that language, form, genre and convention transform as poets seek alternatives to their own traditions by reaching back to others, often across international borders, languages, and centuries. We will study how some modern poetries take song traditions as their point of departure—for instance, the relation between Native American song and contemporary Native American poets—and how others resonate with ancient spiritual poetries—for example, the influence of the Quran on Mahmoud Darwish. Matters of historical context and theories of translation will guide us, even as the principal focus will always be the practice of reading the poetry itself. We will give particular attention to lyric traditions from the regions represented by the OSUN network. Some of the contemporary poets we’ll read include: Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), Zeyar Lynn (Myanmar), Etel Adnan (Lebanon/France), Najwan Darwish (Palestine). We’ll also consider work from the Tang dynasty, medieval Japan, Renaissance and Romantic Europe, and the Latin American 20th century. As an introductory course, Something Old, Something New does not require previous experience reading poetry—in fact, we welcome students who are new to it, as well as students who thrive on it. This is an OSUN class and is open to Bard students as well as students from multiple OSUN partner institutions.

 

Course:

WRIT 121  Fiction Workshop I

Professor:

Dinaw Mengestu  

CRN:

15752

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 107

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 14

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 Edward P. Jones, Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, 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.

 

Course:

WRIT 122  Nonfiction Workshop

Professor:

Susan Rogers  

CRN:

15753

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 107

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 14

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. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering.

 

Course:

WRIT 123  Poetry Workshop I

Professor:

Michael Ives  

CRN:

15754

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 306

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 13

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.

 

Course:

WRIT 231  Reading and Writing the Birds

Professor:

Susan Rogers  

CRN:

15759

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      9:30 AM - 10:50 AM Olin 308

Thurs    7:30 AM - 10:50 AM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

Crosslists: 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. This is an Engaged Liberal Arts & Sciences (ELAS) course. In this course you will be given the opportunity to bridge theory to practice while engaging a community of interest throughout the semester. A significant portion of ELAS learning takes place outside of the classroom: students learn through engagement with different geographies, organizations, and programs in the surrounding communities or in collaboration with partners from Bard's national and international networks. To learn more please click here.

 

Course:

WRIT 241  Rhythms and Words

Professor:

Michael Ives  

CRN:

15755

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

The poet Robert Creeley wrote: it is all a rhythm, / from the shutting/door, to the window / opening, / the seasons, the sun’s / light, the moon, / the oceans, the/growing of things ... Reality, then, appears to resolve to nests of rhythms, from the vast cosmos to the infinitesimal quantum. This course will consider how poetry captures and reflects this profound principle of Being, and ask how the intentional patterning of language is both a mnemonic tool and a source of great pleasure. How does rhythm make meaning?  We will explore the rhythmic phenomena that surround and in-form us, from nature’s diurnal cycles to our own internal cardiac, pulmonary, and motor rhythms. We will examine phoneme, syllable, line and stanza; we will listen to the rhythmic properties of chants, prayers, and spells to discover how they arouse emotional, psychological, and physical responses. We will discuss the formal use of metrical schemes, symmetries, the inflectional patterns of ordinary speech, groove poetics, and of course consider the profound relation between poetics and music. The class will include a component of performance practice, which will include a great deal of reading aloud. Students are asked to send a brief paragraph about their background and their interest in the course.

 

Course:

WRIT 247  Writing the Senses, Sensing the World

Professor:

Ann Lauterbach  

CRN:

15756

Schedule/Location:

 Tue   Fri   1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 208

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

The novelist Richard Powers asks, “. . .how did we lose our sense of living here on Earth? How did we become so alienated and estranged from everything else alive? How did we get convinced that we’re the only interesting game in town, and the only species worthy of extending a sense of the sacred to?” This course will ask, how can writing revitalize our sense of the world and challenge our relation to it?  After pandemic isolation and in the ongoing privations of our ubiquitous screens, cold and hard to the touch, we will use our time to practice translating the sensed world into language. How do words convey our body’s physical responses to the immediate environment, and how do these, in turn, touch the deep affective chords in the human sensorium and so contribute to our knowledge of ourselves as part of, engaged with, the world? What does it mean to say something makes sense? The class will be divided between a practical laboratory and readings/examples from a variety of sources: poems, prose fiction, neuroscience, botany, ecology, art, music, and the culinary arts. Please send the professor a note explaining your interest in the course prior to registration.

 

Course:

WRIT 248  Music in Fiction

Professor:

Franz Nicolay  

CRN:

15757

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 15

Writing about music presents an expansive arena, an irresistible challenge, and a protean device for fiction writers. This class will investigate—using close-readings, exercises, and longer student work—how fiction writers use music as a subject, as a signifier, as social positioning, as an object of contemplation, as formal model, as a scene-setting tool, and more. Readings may include selections and/or works from Donald Barthelme, Paul Beatty, Thomas Bernhard, Willa Cather, Rachel Cusk, Jennifer Egan, Ralph Ellison, E.M. Forster, Wayne Koestenbaum, Hari Kunzru, Thomas Mann, Carson McCullers, and others.

 

Course:

WRIT 315  The Adventure

Professor:

Joseph O'Neill  

CRN:

15764

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     3:30 PM - 5:50 PM Olin 310

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

Is the adventure an archaic form—of writing and of seeing? What space—psychological, political, cultural, geographic—remains for the adventure in hyper-modern times? In this course we'll be reading texts that embrace or refuse the idea of the exciting or hazardous venture, and we'll be writing fiction that investigates this territory. Authors may include Borges, Portis, Cusk, Melville, Stevenson, Sarrazin, Wright, Bunyan. Buckle up.

 

Course:

WRIT 324  Fiction Workshop III

Professor:

Benjamin Hale  

CRN:

15769

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Reem Kayden Center 200

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 14

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).

 

Course:

WRIT 327  Great Political Essays

Professor:

Masha Gessen  

CRN:

15765

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     3:30 PM - 5:50 PM Olin 309

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

Crosslisted: Human Rights

A great political essay can alter the way we see the world. A great political essay can transform language. A great political essay can spur a movement. A great political essay may change the world. What makes a great political essay? In this course students will be given a large selection of political essays that many people think are great. Every week, each student will read one or two of as many as a dozen essays suggested for that week (students can also add their own selections to the syllabus) and write a one-page reaction to it (or them). The course includes readings from Montague, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Vaclav Havel, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah Jones, and many others. Each student is expected to workshop and write three great (but short) political essays, at least one of which is argumentative and one narrative.

 

Course:

WRIT 349  Poetry and Pressure

Professor:

Jenny Xie

CRN:

15964

Schedule/Location:

 Wed      3:30 PM - 5:50 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

What gets forged in the poetic imagination through the forces and tensions produced by pressure? In this course, we’ll probe some of the ways that pressure and crisis—as it emerges in the political, the social, the economic, the ethical, the temporal, and the formal—impresses upon poetry and the imagination. How does pressure, elastically defined, act as a constraint, an engine, and also a mode of attention? And how does crisis and moments of sustained vulnerability find their way into poetic forms? As part of our collective lines of inquiry, we’ll analyze and think through a range of gestures, movements, and forms that emerge in the work of poets who composed under, or in response to duress, instability, and precarity. Readings will include selections from the work of Paul Celan, Adrienne Rich, Ilya Kaminsky, Jamaica Kincaid, Nazim Hikmet, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ricardo Maldonado, Myung Mi Kim, Danez Smith, Chinese migrant worker poets, Claudia Rankine, Rachel Zucker, Sahar Muradi, Solmaz Sharif, and Brian Teare, among others. Students will write short critical responses provoked by the course readings, generate poems that respond to and arise out of felt pressures, and discuss one another’s writing in a seminar setting.

 

Course:

WRIT 353  Writing the Roots

Professor:

Robert Kelly  

CRN:

15783

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Shafer

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 2

 

Class cap: 7

By playing with the root meanings of words, we will try to free ourselves from indifference to the splendor of ordinary language. Weekly writing required. A writing sample is optional; please email the instructor with a request to take the course.

 

Course:

WRIT 359  41 False Starts: The Profile as a Literary Form

Professor:

Wyatt Mason  

CRN:

15761

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 307

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

The mainstream magazine or newspaper profile has a long history in English, one that dates back to Daniel Defoe’s pioneering efforts, efforts that--significantly--ran in parallel to the emergence of the English novel. In this course, we will hopscotch through the history of the profile in English as we attempt to come to an understanding of how a written portrait of a real-live person--Defoe’s profile of the criminal Jack Sheppard, for example--differs in nature and form from a written portrait of an invented person--such as Robinson Crusoe in Defoe’s novel by that name. A writing workshop, this course will be focused, nonetheless, on reading. We will analyze how writers through time who have worked on deadline have managed the formally repetitive task of seizing facts about a person and forging them into a written portrait that offers a distant reader a fair--though sometimes unfair--picture of an individual human being. Readings will be drawn from the history of the practice of journalism of this kind, and will include texts by Defoe, De Quincey, James Boswell, Rebecca West, George Orwell, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Janet Malcolm, Henry Louis Gates, Katharine Boo, Jennifer Egan, David Foster Wallace, Hilton Als, Leonard Michaels, Parul Sehgal, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah and others. In addition to regular writing (and drawing, and photography) assignments, students will also produce a final, longform profile of their own.

 

Course:

WRIT 360  Beyond Dread: Writing About Climate

Professor:

Jenny Offill  

CRN:

15763

Schedule/Location:

   Thurs    12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 14

This course will explore the role of literature and art in communicating climate impacts and imagining strategies for living in and remaking our damaged world. Readings/viewings may include work by Amitav Ghosh, CA Conrad, Donna Haraway, Joy Williams, Jon Raymond, Eduardo Kohn, Maya Lin, Lydia Millet, Olalekan Jeyifous, Timothy Morton, Albert Camus, and Natalie Diaz among others. Students will use these narrative and visual works as springboards for creating their own original texts.

 

Course:

WRIT 361  Poetic Style & Signature

Professor:

Jenny Xie  

CRN:

15766

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 210

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

“Everything has a style,” writes Jeff Dolven, in Senses of Style. “Take a shard of pottery, and place it in the history of Athens; take a safety pin, and stick it in your ear.” We learn to identify style through its likenesses, its deviations, its artifice, its affinities, its provocations, and its contradictions. But what makes a writer’s style recognizable? Relatedly, what marks the contours of our own authorial imprint? Together, we’ll probe some of the categories that can constitute a poet’s style, and think through what style carries and implies, through acts of analysis and imitation. We’ll consider how we separate one stylistic signature from another, what we may learn by mimicking the rhythm and gait of a poet and their lines, what style teaches us about its own history and its continuations, and how we can evolve into a style by examining our relationship to others’ voices and movements. Over the course of the term, students will study and emulate the work of Emily Dickinson, John Ashbery, Ikkyu, Carl Philips, Monica Youn, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Siken, Frank Bidart, Jean Valentine, Russell Edson, Eduardo Corral, C.D. Wright, Frank O’Hara, Jay Hopler, and Ross Gay, among others. Our coursework will also invoke concerns about what it means for AI language models and predictive text to detect and mimic an individual writing style, and what motivates the urge to capture one.

 

Course:

WRIT 362  Reading and Writing the Love Story

Professor:

Mona Simpson  

CRN:

15767

Schedule/Location:

    Fri -  By arrangement

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

Every week we will read (for pleasure, first) and study (in a second re-reading) a story which uses the tropes and mythologies of romantic love as its source of suspense, drama, movement and resolution. Students will be required to write a weekly response to the reading and to keep a daily writing journal, recording impressions, notes from the news, bits of conversation and imagined scenes. From these notebooks, students will mine the elements for two short stories (love stories!) to turn in over the course of the semester.. For these stories, we will allow a broad definition of the love story. Please note: this is an intensive workshop and students will be required to be present for three weekend sessions (four hour classes Saturday and Sunday) over the course of semester. Meetings between these in person intensive weekends will be via zoom.

 

Course:

WRIT 405  Written Arts Senior Colloquium

Professor:

Dinaw Mengestu  

CRN:

15785

Schedule/Location:

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

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 1

 

Class cap: 45

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 256  Writing the Film: Text to Voice

Professor:

Sky Hopinka  

CRN:

15817

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      10:10 AM - 1:10 PM Avery Film Center 117

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 12

Crosslists: Written Arts

 

Course:

FILM 312  Advanced Screenwriting

Professor:

A. Sayeeda Moreno  

CRN:

15830

Schedule/Location:

  Thurs     10:10 AM - 1:10 PM Avery Film Center 338

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

Crosslists: Written Arts

 

Course:

LIT 2381  Translating Tact

Professor:

Thomas Wild  

CRN:

15935

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    5:10 PM - 6:30 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: German Studies; Human Rights; Written Arts

 

Course:

LIT 331  Translation Workshop

Professor:

Peter Filkins  

CRN:

15728

Schedule/Location:

   Thurs    3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 307

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 12

 

Crosslists: Written Arts

 

 

Course:

REL 328  The River and the Desert in Writing and the Religious Imagination

Professor:

Shai Secunda  

CRN:

15620

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     9:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 10

Crosslists: Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Written Arts