BEGINNING FICTION WORKSHOP

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in fiction is designed for students with little or no experience writing literary texts in fiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually produce their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. The focus of the course is on the rudiments of voice, character, setting, point of view, plot, and lyrical use of language. Students will begin to develop the critical skills that will allow them to read like writers and understand, on a technical level, how accomplished creative writing is produced. Outside readings of a wide range of fiction supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• W 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• R 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Ronald L Jr. Robertson
  Info
• Instructor: Sophie F Kemp
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• Instructor: Rebecca A Winterich-Knox
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• Instructor: Sofia Montrone
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• Instructor: Jacqueline Wu
  Info
• 3 points

BEGINNING NONFICTION WORKSHOP

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with little or no experience in writing literary nonfiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually submit their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

• W 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Peter M Raffel
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• Instructor: Chyana M Deschamps
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• Instructor: Emma D Golden
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• 3 points

BEGINNING POETRY WORKSHOP

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning poetry workshop is designed for students who have a serious interest in poetry writing but who lack a significant background in the rudiments of the craft and/or have had little or no previous poetry workshop experience. Students will be assigned weekly writing exercises emphasizing such aspects of verse composition as the poetic line, the image, rhyme and other sound devices, verse forms, repetition, tone, irony, and others. Students will also read an extensive variety of exemplary work in verse, submit brief critical analyses of poems, and critique each others original work.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Latif A Ba
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• Instructor: Iva E Moore
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• 3 points

INTERMEDIATE FICTION WORKSHOP

Intermediate workshops are for students with some experience with creative writing, and whose prior work merits admission to the class (as judged by the professor). Intermediate workshops present a higher creative standard than beginning workshops, and increased expectations to produce finished work. By the end of the semester, each student will have produced at least seventy pages of original fiction. Students are additionally expected to write extensive critiques of the work of their peers. Please visit 
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
 for information about registration procedures.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Halle Butler
  Info
• Instructor: Joss Lake
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• 3 points

APPROACHES TO THE SHORT STORY

The modern short story has gone through many transformations, and the innovations of its practitioners have often pointed the way for prose fiction as a whole. The short story has been seized upon and refreshed by diverse cultures and aesthetic affiliations, so that perhaps the only stable definition of the form remains the famous one advanced by Poe, one of its early masters, as a work of fiction that can be read in one sitting. Still, common elements of the form have emerged over the last century and this course will study them, including Point of View, Plot, Character, Setting and Theme. John Hawkes once famously called these last four elements the "enemies of the novel," and many short story writers have seen them as hindrances as well. Hawkes later recanted, though some writers would still agree with his earlier assessment, and this course will examine the successful strategies of great writers across the spectrum of short story practice, from traditional approaches to more radical solutions, keeping in mind how one period's revolution -Hemingway, for example - becomes a later era's mainstream or "commonsense" storytelling mode. By reading the work of major writers from a writer's perspective, we will examine the myriad techniques employed for what is finally a common goal: to make readers feel. Short writing exercises will help us explore the exhilarating subtleties of these elements and how the effects created by their manipulation or even outright absence power our most compelling fictions.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Ronald L Jr. Robertson
  Info
• 3 points

INTERMEDIATE NONFICTION WRKSHP

The intermediate workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with some experience in writing literary nonfiction. Intermediate workshops present a higher creative standard than beginning workshops and an expectation that students will produce finished work. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects. By the end of the semester, students will have produced thirty to forty pages of original work in at least two traditions of literary nonfiction. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
 for information about registration procedures.

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Clare Sestanovich
  Info
• 3 points

TRADITIONS IN NONFICTION

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The seminar provides exposure to the varieties of nonfiction with readings in its principal genres: reportage, criticism and commentary, biography and history, and memoir and the personal essay. A highly plastic medium, nonfiction allows authors to portray real events and experiences through narrative, analysis, polemic or any combination thereof. Free to invent everything but the facts, great practitioners of nonfiction are faithful to reality while writing with a voice and a vision distinctively their own. To show how nonfiction is conceived and constructed, class discussions will emphasize the relationship of content to form and style, techniques for creating plot and character under the factual constraints imposed by nonfiction, the defining characteristics of each authors voice, the authors subjectivity and presence, the role of imagination and emotion, the uses of humor, and the importance of speculation and attitude. Written assignments will be opportunities to experiment in several nonfiction genres and styles.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Peter M Raffel
  Info
• 3 points

INTERMEDIATE POETRY WORKSHOP

Intermediate poetry workshops are for students with some prior instruction in the rudiments of poetry writing and prior poetry workshop experience. Intermediate poetry workshops pose greater challenges to students and maintain higher critical standards than beginning workshops. Students will be instructed in more complex aspects of the craft, including the poetic persona, the prose poem, the collage, open-field composition, and others. They will also be assigned more challenging verse forms such as the villanelle and also non-European verse forms such as the pantoum. They will read extensively, submit brief critical analyses, and put their instruction into regular practice by composing original work that will be critiqued by their peers. By the end of the semester each student will have assembled a substantial portfolio of finished work. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
 for information about registration procedures.

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Alexander Dimitrov
  Info
• 3 points

APPROACHES TO POETRY

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. One advantage of writing poetry within a rich and crowded literary tradition is that there are many poetic tools available out there, stranded where their last practitioners dropped them, some of them perhaps clichéd and overused, yet others all but forgotten or ignored. In this class, students will isolate, describe, analyze, and put to use these many tools, while attempting to refurbish and contemporize them for the new century. Students can expect to imitate and/or subvert various poetic styles, voices, and forms, to invent their own poetic forms and rules, to think in terms of not only specific poetic forms and metrics, but of overall poetic architecture (lineation and diction, repetition and surprise, irony and sincerity, rhyme and soundscape), and finally, to leave those traditions behind and learn to strike out in their own direction, to write -- as poet Frank OHara said -- on their own nerve.

• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Quincy Jones
  Info
• 3 points

TRADITIONS IN POETRY

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. 

“For those, in dark, who find their own way by the light of others’ eyes.” —Lucie Brock-Broido

The avenues of poetic tradition open to today’s poets are more numerous, more invigorating, and perhaps even more baffling than ever before. The routes we chose for our writing lead to destinations of our own making, and we take them at our own risk—necessarily so, as the pursuit of poetry asks each of us to light a pilgrim’s candle and follow it into the moors and lowlands, through wastes and prairies, crossing waters as we go. Go after the marshlights, the will-o-wisps who call to you in a voice you’ve longed for your whole life. These routes have been forged by those who came before you, but for that reason, none of them can hope to keep you on it entirely. You must take your steps away, brick by brick, heading confidently into the hinterland of your own distinct achievement.

 

For the purpose of this class, we will walk these roads together, examining the works of classic and contemporary exemplars of the craft. By companioning poets from a large spread of time, we will be able to more diversely immerse ourselves in what a poetic “tradition” truly means. We will read works by Edmund Spencer, Dante, and Goethe, the Romantics—especially Keats—Dickinson, who is mother to us all, Modernists, and the great sweep of contemporary poetry that is too vast to individuate.

 

While it is the imperative of this class to equip you with the knowledge necessary to advance in the field of poetry, this task shall be done in a Columbian manner. Consider this class an initiation, of sorts, into the vocabulary which distinguishes the writers who work under our flag, each of us bound by this language that must be passed on, and therefore changed, to you who inherit it. As I have learned the words, I have changed them, and I give them now to you so that you may pave your own way into your own ways, inspired with the first breath that brought you here, which may excite and—hopefully—frighten you. You must be troubled. This is essential

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Latif A Ba
  Info
• 3 points

INTRO TO AUDIO STORYTELLING

LEC - INTRO TO AUDIO STOR

The medium of audio offers possibilities and challenges all its own: no images, no visual text, only sound. In this class, we will explore principles of the form both by studying and by making. Students can expect to leave with an understanding of the niceties of script writing and basic technical aspects of audio creation, as well as the beginnings of a portfolio of work. The class will encourage movement along a spectrum: you are encouraged to experiment in an unbounded way with audio as an art form, and to progress toward an understanding of how to create refined, public-facing work. 

While this class involves a fair amount of reading, much of what we will study and discuss is audio material. We will consider sound stories from the ground up – from folkloric oral traditions, to raw, naturally captured experimental pieces, to seemingly straightforward radio news segments, to highly polished narrative podcasts. At the same time that we study these works, each student will also complete small audio production exercises of their own; as a final project, students will be expected to create a fully rounded “pilot episode” for a theoretical show, from 7 to 20 minutes in length. 

This is an intro class intended to open exploratory space across fields of interest, but writers in particular stand to benefit. Our lessons will focus most rigorously on the lexical mechanics of scripting: how to “tell” a story. Oral storytellers arguably understand suspense, humor and showmanship in ways only a live performer can. Even if you are a diehard writer of text for readers, you may find, once the class is over, that you have learned techniques that can translate across borders: your readers may benefit. Alternatively, you may discover that audio is the medium for you.

This class is split into two parts: each week, you’ll meet for a lecture; separately, you’ll meet again during the week for a discussion section, where you may be asked to share and workshop your work, to analyze outside audio, and generally go deep in ways you can’t in lecture. The class is intended for beginners to the audio tradition. There are some tech requirements: a recording device (most phones will suffice), workable set of headphones, and computer. You’ll also need to download the free audio editing software Audacity.

• W 10:10 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Mallika Rao
  Info
• 3 points

INTRO TO AUDIO STORYTELLING

INTRO TO AUDIO STORY DISC

Required discussion section for WRIT UN2400 Around the Fire: Introduction to Audio Storytelling

• F 11:10 a.m.-noon
• F 2:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
• 0 points

WRITING WATER

Human beings have always been drawn to water. We rely on it to survive, but we also set sail on it, extract its resources, swim in it, and walk down to its edges to contemplate its beauty. Water has long been a potent source of meaning and imagination for writers, but in the last thirty years water has taken on new associations. As the oceans rise, as rivers dry up, as migrants boats capsize at sea, and as we reappraise histories of empire and colonization, writers are more than ever before turning their attention to water and learning to tell new stories about it.

This class will investigate the relationship between one of the most important elements of the natural world – water – and the stories that human beings choose to tell about it. We will read and think about swimming, migration, rising oceans, extraction, sea creatures, and ghosts. Students will produce both critical and creative work, and while this is a fiction class, we will take our lessons from writers working across many different formats. By considering novels, essays, poetry, and short stories that embody and describe the human relationship to water, students will learn to consider the ways in which we, as writers, can address ourselves to the natural world as it changes around us, and how water in all its forms can be both a source of fear and a source of consolation.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Madeleine J Watts
  Info
• 3 points

ADVANCED FICTION WORKSHOP

Building on the work of the Intermediate Workshop, Advanced Workshops are reserved for the most accomplished creative writing students. A significant body of writing must be produced and revised. Particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Nicola M Goldberg
  Info
• Instructor: Samuel Lipsyte
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 3 points

SENIOR FICTION WORKSHOP

Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major. Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the professor will be tailored to needs of each student. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Heidi S Julavits
  CULPA: 1 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

HOW TO BUILD A PERSON

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Departmental approval NOT required. Character is something that good fiction supposedly cannot do without. But what is a character, and what constitutes a supposedly good or believable one? Should characters be like people we know, and if so, how exactly do we create written versions of people? This class will examine characters in all sorts of writing, historical and contemporary, with an eye toward understanding just how characters are created in fiction, and how they come to seem real to us. Well read stories and novels; we may also look at essays and biographical writing to analyze where the traces of personhood reside. Well also explore the way in which these same techniques of writing allow us to personify entities that lack traditional personhood, such as animals, computers, and other nonhuman characters. Does personhood precede narrative, or is it something we bestow on others by allowing them to tell their story or by telling a story of our own creation on their behalf? Weekly critical and creative exercises will intersect with and expand on the readings and discussions.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Mina Seckin
  Info
• 3 points

APOCALYPSES NOW

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Molly L McGhee
  Info
• 3 points

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE

Ecstasy of Influence

What does it mean to be original? How do we differentiate plagiarism from pastiche, appropriation from homage? And how do we build on pre-existing traditions while simultaneously creating work that reflects our own unique experiences of the world?

In a 2007 essay for
Harper
’
s
magazine, Jonathan Lethem countered critic Harold Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence” by proposing, instead, an “ecstasy of influence”; Lethem suggested that writers embrace rather than reject the unavoidable imprints of their literary forbearers. Beginning with Lethem’s essay—which, itself, is composed entirely of borrowed (or “sampled”) text—this class will consider the nature of literary influence, and its role in the development of voice.

Each week, students will read from pairings of older stories and novel excerpts with contemporary work that falls within the same artistic lineage. In doing so, we’ll track the movement of stylistic, structural, and thematic approaches to fiction across time, and think about the different ways that stories and novels can converse with one another. We will also consider the influence of other artistic mediums—music, visual art, film and television—on various texts. Students will then write their own original short pieces modeled after the readings. Just as musicians cover songs, we will “cover” texts,  adding our own interpretive imprints.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Adam Z Wilson
  Info
• 3 points

ADVANCED NONFICTION WORKSHOP

Advanced Nonfiction Workshop is for students with significant narrative and/or critical experience. Students will produce original literary nonfiction for the workshop. This workshop is reserved for accomplished nonfiction writers and maintains the highest level of creative and critical expectations. Among the many forms that creative nonfiction might assume, students may work in the following nonfiction genres: memoir, personal essay, journalism, travel writing, science writing, and/or others. In addition, students may be asked to consider the following: ethical considerations in nonfiction writing, social and cultural awareness, narrative structure, detail and description, point of view, voice, and editing and revision among other aspects of praxis. A portfolio of nonficiton will be written and revised with the critical input of the instructor and the workshop. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Lars Horn
  Info
• 3 points

WRITING ABOUT ART

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. 

This course will introduce students to writing about visual art. We will take our models from art history and contemporary art discourse, and students will be prompted to write with and about current art exhibitions and events throughout the city. The modes of art writing we will encounter include: the practice of ekphrasis (poems which describe or derive their inspiration from a work of art); writers such as John Ashbery, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, and others who for periods of their life held positions as art critics while composing poetry and works of fiction; writers such as Etel Adnan, Susan Howe, and Renee Gladman who have produced literature and works of art in equal measure. We will also look at artists who have written essays and poetry throughout their careers such as Robert Smithson, Glenn Ligon, Gregg Bordowitz, Moyra Davey, and Hannah Black, and consider both the visual qualities of writing and the ways that visual artists have used writing in their work. Lastly, we will consider what it means to write through a “milieu” of visual artists, such as those associated with the New York School and Moscow Conceptualism. Throughout the course students will produce original works and complete a final writing project that enriches, complicates, and departs from their own interests and preoccupations.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Eliza B Callahan
  Info
• 3 points

SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Meehan J Crist
  Info
• 3 points

HISTORY OF NONFICTION

In this seminar we will consider modern nonfiction as “the literature of fact” as we trace the course of the genre’s development from the mid-19th century to the present day. Along the way, we’ll see how magazines emerged, beginning in the 1860s, as the prime venue for American nonfiction, with excursions into—and glimpses of—publications that have shaped our shared cultural history, including
The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Partisan Review, Esquire, Harper’s, New York
,
and Gourmet.
Our readings will include reportage, criticism, memoir, and profile-writing and we will ask questions about these various nonfiction forms: Can criticism be the equal of art? How do nonfiction writers establish “authority”? How do they investigate the past and make sense of the new? How do they create work as rich and challenging as the best literary novels and short stories? What roles do voice, point-of-view, character, dialogue, and plot—the traditional elements of fiction—play? Some of the writers we will consider: Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, James Agee, Edmund Wilson, Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, James Baldwin, Janet Malcolm, Robert Caro, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace.

The course will welcome guest speakers.

• M 6:10 p.m.-8:10 p.m.
• Instructor: Mark Rozzo
  Info
• 3 points

ADVANCED POETRY WORKSHOP

This poetry workshop is reserved for accomplished poetry writers and maintains the highest level of creative and critical expectations. Students will be encouraged to develop their strengths and to cultivate a distinctive poetic vision and voice but must also demonstrate a willingness to broaden their range and experiment with new forms and notions of the poem. A portfolio of poetry will be written and revised with the critical input of the instructor and the workshop. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
 for information about registration procedures.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Emily Luan
  Info
• 3 points

TRAUMA & ITS AFTERMATH: POETIC FORM(S) O

“After a great pain, a formal feeling comes —" 

—Emily Dickinson 

The history of literature has, in many ways, become inseparable from the history of trauma. Poetry can be an excavation site of memory and the subconscious dreamscape, and inevitably, trauma is what is unearthed there. Poems working with, through, and out of personal and collective trauma can create what Dorothea Lasky calls “the material imagination;” a shared world inhabited by both poet and reader long after the poem has been read—a physical space we are in together that helps us move through, process, and in the best of cases, rewrite trauma into the generative and healing space of metaphor and imagery. In this way, poems are—in both their content and their form (which are often are indivisible)—an invitation to the reader to access the depths and complexities of the human psyche that we are all connected by, perhaps in a way they might not have before. The poem creates a finite terrain that anchors infinite possibility. This class will study texts that stem from, speak to, document and process historical, ecological, collective and personal trauma. How can a poem hold, house, and reconfigure traumatic events for both reader and poet through its formal and thematic architecture?

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Samantha Zighelboim
  Info
• 3 points

PAYING ATTENTION WITH ANNIE DILLARD

PAYING ATTENTION ANNIE DI

Annie Dillard was only in her twenties when she began writing what would become the nature writing classic
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Over several seasons, she took her notebook to the creek and paid close attention to the muskrats, water bugs, and birds, focusing on the miraculous minutiae of the material world, and compiled what Thoreau might have called “a meteorological journal of the mind.” With a child’s capacity for awe, Dillard captured what she found to be holy and singular about nature, and reveled in the “scandal of particularity” that so bedeviled theologians. “Why, we might as well ask, not a plane tree, instead of a bo?” Dillard wonders. “I never saw a tree that was no tree in particular.” Since its publication,
Pilgrim
has inspired generations of writers who return to it for its commitment to specificity and its joyous prose. What does the moon look like? Like “a smudge of chalk,” or “softly frayed, like the heel of a sock.” What do you call the shedding of leaves in fall? “A striptease.” What does cold air do? “Bites one’s nose like pepper.” (And so on.)

In this cross-genre seminar, we will read
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
and use the book as a guiding text to hone our own faculties of attention, observational writing skills, and descriptive ability. We will work and rework our descriptions so that no tree is just a tree, and no sunset is just a sunset. The output of this course will not be stories, essays, or poems, but rather, lists of descriptions of oranges, the texture of bark, weather, and a repertoire of new vocabulary words for describing colors and materials. Weekly exercises will prompt us to become nature writers in the city: we will stalk pigeons, inventory trash and weeds, study maps of buried streams, and examine a drop of puddle water through a microscope. We will dissect Dillard’s prose to see how she puts her words together to achieve various effects. We will compile lists of active verbs and make our sentences somersault and sing. Though taking inspiration from
Pilgrim
and based in the natural world, the exercises in this class are meant to carry over into other kinds of writing; paying close attention is an asset no matter what the subject matter. Field trips will include a walk in Riverside Park, a visit to the Greenpoint Sewage Plant, and an optional day-trip to the Beinecke Library to se

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Anelise I Chen
  Info
• 3 points

PAYING ATTENTION WITH ANNIE DILLARD

PAYING ATTENTION DISC

Required discussion section for WRIT UN3400 Paying Attention With Annie Dillard

• F 10:10 a.m.-11 a.m.
• 0 points

MYSTERIES

Mystery once referred primarily to religious ideas: divine revelations, unknown rites, or the secret counsel of God. In the 20th century, the word began to be used in reference to more prosaic things, like whodunits. But what is coming to be known in a story? Why and what is a reader tempted to try to know, and what, today, can she possibly think is going to be revealed? When do the ‘tricks’ of withholding information annoy, and when do they compel? What are clues? What are solutions? In what ways can and do stories not straightforwardly written as mysteries use the tropes of mystery? And to what mechanisms of meaning-making do these tropes point?

In this course we will read with the intention of noticing how writers have borrowed, avoided, warped, translated, or disguised the structures of mystery. In this way, we will think about what techniques of mystery we might integrate into our own work. There will also be four five to seven page creative writing assignments, based around: the Clue, the Crime, the Search and the Detective.

In addition to the creative writing assignments, each student will be responsible for one presentation on a reading. The guidelines for presentations are appended after the sample syllabus below.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Rivka R Galchen
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 3 points

MYSTERIES

MYSTERIES DISC

Required discussion section for WRIT UN3402 Mysteries

• F 1:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• 0 points

STORIES WITHIN STORIES

The science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in her sly, radical manifesto of sorts “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” proposes an idea of the “bottle as hero”: instead of conflict serving as our central organizing theory for narrative, she suggests that “the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag.” In other words: a container. These containers needn’t only apply to novels, I contend, but many types of literary narratives, whether they are classified as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or some hybrid of forms.

With this in mind, the generative cross-genre craft seminar Stories within Stories aims to uncover beautiful and practical approaches to gathering small narratives into a larger, cohesive whole. Readings will include Svetlana Alexievich’s devastating novels in voices, Percival Everett’s incendiary novel-within-a-novel
Erasure
, Ted Chiang’s mesmerizing historical fantasy, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s braided essays of restoration, Nâzım Hikmet’s epic in verse
Human Landscapes from My Country
, Renee Gladman’s cross-disciplinary approaches to writing and drawing, Yevgenia Belorusets’s dispatches from Ukraine, Edward Gauvin’s identity-memoir-in-contributors’ bios, Saidiya Hartman’s speculative histories, Gary Indiana’s gleefully acerbic roman à clef
Do Everything in the Dark
, Alejandro Zambra’s standardized test-inspired literature, W. G. Sebald’s saturnine essay-fiction, and Lisa Hsiao Chen’s meld of biography and autobiography, as well as fiction and nonfiction by Clarice Lispector, Vauhini Vara, Eileen Myles, Olga Tokarczuk, and Julie Hecht, among other texts. 

In addition, we will also read essays on craft and storytelling by Le Guin, Gladman, Zambra, Lydia Davis, Walter Benjamin, Garielle Lutz, Ben Mauk, and more. What we learn in this course we will apply to our own work, which will consist of regular creative writing responses drawn from the readings and a creative final project. Students will also learn to keep a daily journal of writing.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: James C Yeh
  Info
• 3 points

STORIES WITHIN STORIES

STORIES WITHIN STORIES DI

Required discussion section for WRIT UN3404 Stories Within Stories

The science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in her sly, radical manifesto of sorts “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” proposes an idea of the “bottle as hero”: instead of conflict serving as our central organizing theory for narrative, she suggests that “the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag.” In other words: a container. These containers needn’t only apply to novels, I contend, but many types of literary narratives, whether they are classified as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or some hybrid of forms.

With this in mind, the generative cross-genre craft seminar Stories within Stories aims to uncover beautiful and practical approaches to gathering small narratives into a larger, cohesive whole. Readings will include Svetlana Alexievich’s devastating novels in voices, Percival Everett’s incendiary novel-within-a-novel
Erasure
, Ted Chiang’s mesmerizing historical fantasy, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s braided essays of restoration, Nâzım Hikmet’s epic in verse
Human Landscapes from My Country
, Renee Gladman’s cross-disciplinary approaches to writing and drawing, Yevgenia Belorusets’s dispatches from Ukraine, Edward Gauvin’s identity-memoir-in-contributors’ bios, Saidiya Hartman’s speculative histories, Gary Indiana’s gleefully acerbic roman à clef
Do Everything in the Dark
, Alejandro Zambra’s standardized test-inspired literature, W. G. Sebald’s saturnine essay-fiction, and Lisa Hsiao Chen’s meld of biography and autobiography, as well as fiction and nonfiction by Clarice Lispector, Vauhini Vara, Eileen Myles, Olga Tokarczuk, and Julie Hecht, among other texts. 

In addition, we will also read essays on craft and storytelling by Le Guin, Gladman, Zambra, Lydia Davis, Walter Benjamin, Garielle Lutz, Ben Mauk, and more. What we learn in this course we will apply to our own work, which will consist of regular creative writing responses drawn from the readings and a creative final project. Students will also learn to keep a daily journal of writing.

• F 12:10 p.m.-1 p.m.
• 0 points

PROCESS WRITING & WRITING PROCESS

The act of writing is often mythologized, romanticized, or dismissed as peripheral to the text itself.  This course will address the process as a primary lens for looking at art, focusing on literature that explicitly investigates the experience of its creation.  Readings will include writings by visual artists who produce documents of performances, surrealists who use “automatic” methods to reveal the unconscious, poets who seek to capture states of enlightenment or intoxication, and novelists who employ extreme conditions to achieve unexpected results.  For the class, students will experiment with their environment, lifestyle, and methods to increase their awareness of how everything they do can affect what appears on the page.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Christine M Smallwood
  Info
• 3 points

FICTION WORKSHOP

• F 10 a.m.-1 p.m.
• R 5:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m.
• R 10 a.m.-1 p.m.
• R 1:10 p.m.-4:10 p.m.
• R 4:15 p.m.-7:15 p.m.
• R 1:10 p.m.-4:10 p.m.
• T 1:10 p.m.-4:10 p.m.
• M 1:10 p.m.-4:10 p.m.
• T 1:10 p.m.-4:10 p.m.
• T 10 a.m.-1 p.m.
• Instructor: Hannah L Assadi
  Info
• Instructor: Maisy Card
  Info
• Instructor: Frances H Cha
  Info
• Instructor: Nicholas Christopher
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Joshua Furst
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Joanna B Hershon
  CULPA: 3 Info
• Instructor: Heidi S Julavits
  CULPA: 1 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Samuel Lipsyte
  CULPA: 5 Info
• Instructor: Benjamin Marcus
  Info
• Instructor: Matthew Salesses
  Wikipedia Info
• 6 points

NONFICTION WORKSHOP

• T 4:15 p.m.-7:15 p.m.
• T 5 p.m.-8 p.m.
• M 1:10 p.m.-4:10 p.m.
• W 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
• Instructor: Jaquira Diaz
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Wes Enzinna
  Info
• Instructor: Michelle Orange
  Info
• Instructor: Heather E Radke
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 6 points

POETRY WORKSHOP

• R 1:10 p.m.-4:10 p.m.
• R 4:15 p.m.-7:15 p.m.
• T 10 a.m.-1 p.m.
• M 4:15 p.m.-7:15 p.m.
• T 10 a.m.-1 p.m.
• Instructor: Mark Bibbins
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Timothy B Donnelly
  Info
• Instructor: Shane McCrae
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Asiya Wadud
  Info
• Instructor: Lynn Xu
  Info
• 6 points

SPECIAL PROJECTS WORKSHOP

• T 6:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m.
• Instructor: Thomas A Donovan
  Info
• 6 points

INDEPENDENT STUDY

• Instructor: Rivka R Galchen
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 0.5-6 points

INTERNSHIP

• Instructor: Deborah Paredez
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 1-3 points

INTERNSHIP

• Instructor: Deborah Paredez
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 1-3 points

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

THE WRITER AS TEACHER

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

• M 4:15 p.m.-7:15 p.m.
• Instructor: Keri E Bertino
  Info
• 3 points

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

Travellers Tales

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

• R 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Nicholas Christopher
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

POETRY FOR PROSE WRITERS

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

• T 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Shana M Ferrell
  Info
• 3 points

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

THE COMMA SUTRA: GRAMMAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

• T 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.
• Instructor: Barbara K Fischer
  Info
• 3 points

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

Avant-Garde Writing

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

• T 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.
• Instructor: Alan Gilbert
  Info
• 3 points

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

Editing and the Writer

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

• W 5:10 p.m.-7:10 p.m.
• Instructor: Brigid Hughes
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

BRIDGING STORIES & NOVELS

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• W 2 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: James Canon
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

Scandal of Particularity

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• F 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Anelise I Chen
  Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

Contemp. Pol. & the Novel

.

• W 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Ruth Franklin
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

Science in Literature

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• T 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Rivka R Galchen
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

Place in Fiction

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• W 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Nalini M Jones
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

Word, Sentence, Paragraph

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• T 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.
• Instructor: Binnie Kirshenbaum
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

Future of the Short Story

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• R 1:10 p.m.-3:10 p.m.
• Instructor: Benjamin Marcus
  Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

FAULKNER AND WORLD FICTION

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• M 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.
• Instructor: Erroll G McDonald
  Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

SPECULATIVE FICTION

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• F 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Lincoln M Michel
  Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

Theory for Writers

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• W 3 p.m.-5 p.m.
• Instructor: Matthew Salesses
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

UNHINGED NARRATORS

.

• T 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Lynn S Strong
  Info
• 3 points

FICTION SEMINAR

BUILDING A SCENE

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• W 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Lara Vapnyar
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

NONFICTION SEMINAR

INTEGRATIONS

.

• W 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Chloe Jones
  Info
• 3 points

NONFICTION SEMINAR

SPECULATIVE NONFICTION

.

• M 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.
• Instructor: Jaquira Diaz
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

NONFICTION SEMINAR

FAMILY MATTERS

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• R 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Lis Harris
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

NONFICTION SEMINAR

WRITING ABOUT COMMUNITIES

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• W 2 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Susan Hartman
  Info
• 3 points

NONFICTION SEMINAR

ARCHIVE FEVER

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• T 1:10 p.m.-3:10 p.m.
• Instructor: Leslie S Jamison
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

NONFICTION SEMINAR

REPORTING NON-NEWS

.

• M 1:10 p.m.-3:10 p.m.
• Instructor: Gideon Lewis-Kraus
  Info
• 3 points

NONFICTION SEMINAR

CLIMATE AND TIME

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• W 2 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Wendy Walters
  Info
• 3 points

POETRY SEMINAR

NONSENSE

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• T 1:10 p.m.-3:10 p.m.
• Instructor: Timothy B Donnelly
  Info
• 3 points

POETRY SEMINAR

Read & Write (Meter)

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• R 10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Shane McCrae
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

POETRY SEMINAR

Sentence in Prose &Poetry

.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4:10 p.m.
• Instructor: Alice Quinn
  Info
• 3 points

POETRY SEMINAR

Forms of Attention

.

• W 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.
• Instructor: Emily F Skillings
  Info
• 3 points

TRANSLATION WORKSHOP

LIT TRANSLATION WRKSHP

• R 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
• R 4:15 p.m.-6:45 p.m.
• M 4:15 p.m.-6:45 p.m.
• Instructor: Susan Bernofsky
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Michael Moore
  h-index: 2 Info
• Instructor: Yasmine Seale
  Info
• 3 points

TRANSLATION SEMINAR

Supernatural Poetics

TRANSLATION SEMINAR

• W 2 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Katrine O Jensen
  Info
• 3 points

TRANSLATION SEMINAR

Tracing the Uncanny

TRANSLATION SEMINAR

• T 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.
• Instructor: Jeremy Tiang
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

FICTION LECTURE

Story, Plot, Narrative

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• M 1:10 p.m.-3:10 p.m.
• Instructor: Joshua A Cohen
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

NONFICTION LECTURE

REAPING THE WHIRLWIND

NONFICTION LECTURE

• R 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m.
• Instructor: Benjamin Taylor
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points