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.
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
- W 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
- T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
- R 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
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Instructor:
Aziza Kasumov
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Instructor:
Jayne K O'Dwyer
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Instructor:
Dimitra Loumiotis
Info -
Instructor:
Celine R Ipek
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.
- T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
- R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Gabriella N Etoniru
Info -
Instructor:
Ade Khan
Info - 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 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
- R 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Addison T Schoeman
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Instructor:
Jane H Crager
Info - 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.
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Heidi S Julavits
CULPA: 1 Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Keri E Bertino
Info - 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.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Celine R Ipek
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.
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
- 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.
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.
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Instructor:
Alexander Dimitrov
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
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Jane H Crager
Info - 3 points
SHORT PROSE FORMS
Prerequisites: No Prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. Flash fiction, micro-naratives and the short-short have become exciting areas of exploration for contemporary writers. This course will examine how these literary fragments have captured the imagination of writers internationally and at home. The larger question the class seeks to answer, both on a collective and individual level, is: How can we craft a working definition of those elements endemic to short prose as a genre? Does the form exceed classification? What aspects of both crafts -- prose and poetry -- does this genre inhabit, expand upon, reinvent, reject, subvert? Short Prose Forms incorporates aspects of both literary seminar and the creative workshop. Class-time will be devoted alternatingly to examinations of published pieces and modified discussions of student work. Our reading chart the course from the genres emergence, examining the prose poem in 19th-century France through the works of Mallarme, Baudelaire, Max Jacob and Rimbaud. Well examine aspects of poetry -- the attention to the lyrical, the use of compression, musicality, sonic resonances and wit -- and attempt to understand how these writers took, as Russell Edson describes, experience and made it into an artifact with the logic of a dream. The class will conclude with a portfolio at the end of the term, in which students will submit a compendium of final drafts of three of four short prose pieces, samples of several exercises, selescted responses to readings, and a short personal manifesto on the short prose form.
- R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Alan Ziegler
CULPA: 5
Info
- 3 points
Inhabiting Form: Writing the Body
The body is our most immediate encounter with the world, the vessel through which we experience our entire lives: pleasure, pain, beauty, horror, limitation, freedom, fragility and empowerment. In this course, we will pursue critical and creative inquiries into invocations and manifestations of the body in multiple genres of literature and in several capacities. We will look at how writers make space for—or take up space with—bodies in their work.
The etymology of the word “text” is from the Latin
textus
, meaning “tissue.” Along these lines, we will consider the text itself as a body. Discussions around body politics, race, gender, ability, illness, death, metamorphosis, monstrosity and pleasure will be parallel to the consideration of how a text might function itself as a body in space and time. We will consider such questions as:
What is the connective tissue of a story or a poem? What is the nervous system of a lyric essay? How is formal constraint similar to societal ideals about beauty and acceptability of certain bodies? How do words and language function at the cellular level to build the body of a text? How can we make room to honor, in our writing, bodies that have otherwise been marginalized?
We will also consider non-human bodies (animals & organisms) and embodiments of the supernatural (ghosts, gods & specters) in our inquiries. Students will process and explore these ideas in both creative and analytical writings throughout the semester, deepening their understanding of embodiment both on and off the page.
- M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Samantha Zighelboim
Info - 3 points
A PICTURE + A THOUSAND WORDS: COMICS AND
We’ve all heard “A picture is worth a thousand words” but what is the worth a picture
and
a thousand words? In this seminar, we’ll explore how the practice of visual art in combination with writing can open up a world of possibilities and how experimenting with ideas in different mediums help us push through creative stagnation. We’ll investigate different traditions of art and language across cultures and time. Readings will range from graphic memoirs to prose architecture to a bird eating a letter. There’s no drawing ability required or necessary for the course, only the willingness to experiment with your own creativity as you exercise Einstein's concept of “Combinatory Play.”
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.
- M 10:10 a.m.-noon
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Marie G Lee
CULPA: 3 Info -
Instructor:
Sophie F Kemp
Info - 3 points
SENIOR FICTION WORKSHOP
Prerequisites: The department's permission required through writing sample. Please go to 609 Kent for submission schedule and registration guidelines or see http://www.arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate. 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.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Samuel Lipsyte
CULPA: 5
Info
- 4 points
Time Moves Both Ways
What is time travel, really? We can use a machine or walk through a secret door. Take a pill or fall asleep and wake up in the future. But when we talk about magic machines and slipstreams and Rip Van Winkle, we are also talking about memory, chronology, and narrative. In this seminar, we will approach time travel as a way of understanding "the Fourth Dimension" in fiction. Readings will range from the speculative to the strange, to the realism of timelines, flashbacks, and shifts in perspective. Coursework will include short, bi-weekly writing assignments, a completed short story, and a timeinflected adaptation.
- M 10:10 a.m.-noon
-
Instructor:
Hilary J Leichter
Info - 3 points
How to Write Funny
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
--Mel Brooks
"Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the
End." --Sid Caesar
"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." --E.B. White
"What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke." --Steve Martin
"Patty Marx is the best teacher at Columbia University."
--Patty Marx
O
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Patricia A Marx
Info - 3 points
BUILDING BETTER WORLDS
As 20th century literary traditions prove increasingly ill-equipped to capture the realities of 21st century life, readers look towards fictional worlds for inspiration and escape from the political chaos of day-to-day existence. When we write we shape the world, because the worlds we imagine impact the world we inhabit. But what does it mean for a writer to 'build a world?' What obligations does the creator of a fiction have to readers who inhabit a world they wish to escape? Are the worlds we build for escape always political? Can we build another world as an avenue to better understand this one?
In this seminar we will explore the concept of "world building" by looking at a variety of work from authors who are known for their immense secondary worlds (such as J.R.R. Tolkein, Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, or Octavia Butler) but also at fiction that applies techniques of both immersion and politics in ways that may subvert our understanding of what it means to 'create.' Writers discussed are as wide ranging as Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, all the way up to contemporary writers whose works populate our best loved Independent bookstores: Helen Oyeyemi, Victor LaValle, Ted Chiang, Marlon James, Jeff VanderMeer, Colson Whitehead, Salman Rushdie, Carmen Maria Machado, Alexandra Kleeman, or Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Molly L McGhee
Info - 3 points
NOT EXACTLY SCIENCE FICTION
In this course we will explore the possibilities of scientific language and ideas both as literature and in literature. The texts we will consider will range from science fiction, to writings by scientists, to nature writing, and much else. We will also consider works that might at first appear unrelated to scientific thinking, such as folk tales, mysteries, and fantastical stories. Special attention will be paid to the special effects generated by scientific language when it appears near other styles of expression. Students will also be responsible for four short creative assignments inspired by the readings, as well as a brief in-class presentation.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
-
Instructor:
Rivka R Galchen
CULPA: 6
Info
- 3 points
SENIOR NONFICTION 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.
INTERACTIVE MEMOIR
What does it mean to invite readers to play in—and with—your memories? Can memoir writing be…a game? In this seminar, we will explore the basics of interactive narrative design as applied to memoir, essay, and creative non-fiction, investigating how games and interactivity can transform what it means to tell your life story. We will will read, play, and discuss videogames, artgames, interactive (non-)fiction, innovative digital media, and experimental non-fiction, developing an aesthetics of interactive nonfiction writing that informs two open-platform interactive memoir projects over the course of the semester. Tutorials on interactive narrative tools like Twine, Bitsy, and Downpour will accompany playtesting workshops to establish a game-literate creative community committed to pushing the boundaries of the form.
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- 3 points
AT THE NEW YORKER
In this seminar we will consider the history, legacy, and ongoing cultural contribution of
The New Yorker
, a magazine that is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. During the past century, the magazine has been the primary venue for what we might call the “the literature of fact”—nonfiction writing with belletristic flair and high ambition across all genres: profiles, essays, personal histories, reporting, and criticism. We will read across the genres as we 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? How did T
he New Yorker
create a—perhaps even
the
—modern American literary style?
Week to week, since 1925, the magazine has showcased work from a staggering diversity of contributors. We will consider many of them, including James Thurber, Janet Flanner, E.B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, John Hersey, Edmund Wilson, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Calvin Tomkins, Renata Adler, Pauline Kael, Kenneth Tynan, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier, Arlene Croce, Janet Malcolm, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Robert Caro, Tony Horowitz, Zadie Smith, and Susan Orlean. In addition, we will be keeping our eye on issues of
The New Yorker
as they roll out each week.
We will welcome guest speakers from the magazine—editors and contributors, from past and present.
- M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Mark Rozzo
Info - 3 points
EDITING, REVISING, PITCHING, PUBLISHING
EDIT, REVISE, PITCH, PUBL
What does an editor do? How do writers revise? How do writers pitch and place pieces? This cross-genre seminar aims to demystify the art of editing, and to empower students to edit their own work and that of others with sensitivity, imagination, and skill. Through the close analysis of case studies, essays on craft and American literary history, long-form interviews, letters, and corrected manuscripts and typescripts, we will learn about the decision-making processes of writers and editors such as Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish, Samuel R. Delany, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, Elizabeth Bishop, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Max Perkins, Ursula K. Le Guin, Diane Williams, George Saunders, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as editors at publishers like Random House and Scribner’s, major literary publications like the
New Yorker
and the
Paris Review
, and small magazines like
NOON
and
Gigantic.
Regularly we will apply what we’ve learned to edits and revisions on our own texts as well as assigned texts drawn from the instructor’s experience as an editor at
McSweeney’s Quarterly
, the
Believer
, VICE, and
Gigantic
. Students will also work to revise a piece of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, and develop a nonfiction story idea, so that they will have a revised work to submit—and a polished story idea to pitch—by the end of the semester.
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
James C Yeh
Info - 3 points
SENIOR POETRY 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.
- T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Timothy B Donnelly
Info - 4 points
SURREALISM & PROSE POETRY
“Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.” —André Breton, Nadja
This infamous line, which concludes Breton’s second book, captures the complex spirit of surrealism and will equally serve as the guiding light for this course. Indifferent to talent, impatient with craft, and dismissive of poetic genius, surrealism calls to those who would delight in paroxysm and paradox, the upheaval of traditional forms and the collapse of categorical boundaries, the ruptured instant of reverie and—as René Char put it—the “exalting alliance of contraries.” This light which no longer binds beauty to a single static object, but blinds the beholder with a scene of simultaneities, will thus be our primary concern. To that end, we will consider the fundamental passageways of surrealist experience—irrational juxtapositions and chance encounters, inexhaustible unconscious desire and quotidian rapture—in the very playground of its hybrid compositions, specifically the prose poem, lyric essay, dream journal, fable, and aphorism, as well as trace the ways in which surrealist tendencies remain embedded within contemporary cross-generic forms. Our exploration of the radical amalgamation of genres will be conducted by close readings of, as well as theoretical approaches to, surrealist and surrealist-adjacent texts whose antithetical ontologies sing the emancipatory articulations of diverse aesthetic and social realities.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Jared D Fagen
Info - 3 points
LIVING AT THE MOVIES: THE PERSONA POEM I
Inspired by the Jim Carroll book of the same name, this class will examine the persona poem form specifically through the lens of film and television, focusing on how style, atmosphere and character translate from visual media to poetry. We will examine and discuss persona poems based on movie/television characters, writing the self into movies/television, and writing movie/television characters into personal experience. We will generate ideas and/or drafts of our own, centering the following questions, among others:
How do you create, sustain, and complicate tone without sacrificing clarity? How does a character transcend space/time limits to evolve from a first introduction to a cherished and known persona in a constrained space, whether that constraint be a 90-minute film or a 16-line poem? Which tensions accelerate and/or stifle character development, and which tensions permit a persona the most accessible, familiar, or surprising presence for a reader? What differentiates movie stars or actors from literary protagonists? Why are movies “cool,” how has “cool” evolved in film, and how do we render “cool” in poems, for the purpose of deepening the poem? What separates sentimentality from earnestness in film versus poetry?
The class is structured as a hybrid seminar/workshop: we will spend our time in class discussing assigned texts, visual media, and the connections and divergences between the two, as well as crafting our own poetic responses and interpretations and sharing them in a workshop format. Source material will include poetry that is persona-based in perspective or subject, film and television prompts, and field trips to meaningful NYC literary and/or filmic landmarks. We will explore possibilities in poetry to evoke and render common filmic techniques such as the tracking shot, the closeup, the montage, and others.
- R 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
- 3 points
DOCUMENTARY POETICS
WITNESSRECORDDOCUMENT
This seminar examines poetry’s relationship to documentation, acts of witness, and the archive. What labor and what ethical, political, and aesthetic considerations are required of poets who endeavor to witness, record, or document historical events or moments of trauma? How is this approach to poetry informed by or contributing to feminist theories, aesthetic innovation, and revisionist approaches to official histories? Course materials include: 1) essays that explore the poetics and politics of "poetry of witness" or "documentary poetry"; 2) a range of contemporary American poetry that has been classified as or has productively challenged these categories; 3) and audio, video, and photographic projects on which poets have collaborated. Our encounters with this work will be guided by and grounded in conversations about ideas of "truth," "text," the power relations of "documentation," and issues of language and representation in poetry. We will also critically examine the formal (rhyme, rhythm, diction, form, genre, point of view, imagery, etc.) and philosophical components and interventions of the work we study and create.
- R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Deborah Paredez
CULPA: 3
Wikipedia
Info
- 3 points