Writing Courses

K30.1020 Revision: From the Inside Out
Madeleine Beckman R 6:20-9:00 4 CR

Hemingway rewrote a manuscript thirty-nine times. Picasso made hundreds of sketches for Guernica. Revision is the process of discovery during which the work’s structure, its very meaning, changes and grows stronger. Revision involves a commitment to uncovering what one is wishing to communicate. Students will work a piece of writing from idea through first and subsequent drafts. Exercises and readings will assist students to go deeper, to open the conduit between mind and paper, to close the gap between intention and result. Some questions to be asked: When are you revising or just skimming the surface? When have you abandoned previously held concepts, making way for new ideas? Readings to include: Borges on Writing; Revision: A Creative Approach to Writing; essays by Roland Barthes, John Berger, and Dore Ashton. Guest writers and artists will be invited.

K30.1025 Style and Substance: Tools for Writing
Melanie Hulse TR 4:55-6:10 4 CR

Writing is a deliberate, conscious act. Whether it is short or long, fiction or nonfiction, the finished work is as meticulously designed and executed as a cathedral. This course examines how writers use the various elements of narrative to realize their ideas with precision and grace. Specific craft elements—plot and structure, characterization and dialogue, and point of view—are explored through close reading of exemplary writing, in-class exercises, and take-home assignments. Class discussions analyze storytelling strategies in the published work of established writers; workshopping students’ writing is scheduled in the second half of the term. The readings include personal essays, journalism, excerpted fiction, and scripts. Taped interviews with writers and other professionals are screened and discussed, and information about interacting with the publishing industry is offered.

K30.1033 Writing About Popular Music
Stephen Wetta MW 2:00-3:15 4 CR

Popular music is a product of integration: the melding of Anglo-Celtic folk ballads, African-American laments and rhythms, Eastern European accordian tunes, Calypso, jazz, country, blues and more. In turn, American popular music, more than any other cultural trend in recent history, has left its mark on literature, film, classical music, art and politics. In this class, students will explore the rich world of popular music, and write responsive, critical, and research essays on the music’s form and content. Essays will engage with the politics and social forces involved in popular music as treated by particular performers. Research may focus on the social and material forces that might have created music as we now know it, and how the music has in turn recreated us. Readings will include works by Nick Tosches, Peter Guralnick, and Greil Marcus.

K30.1037 Advocacy Writing
Janine Jaquet W 6:20-9:00 4 CR

Most journalists claim to cover stories without bias. But what happens when journalists conclude that telling the truth means that they can’t give equal weight to both sides of an issue? The results can be propagands, fine journalism, or both. In this course, we will read those journalists from across the political spectrum whose work represents various movements—New Journalism, Civil Journalism and Advocacy Journalism, among them—that challenge the centrality of objectivity. Students in this course will research topics of their choice, and will write essays that advocate for a particular position. Readings will include classic journalism, such as the work of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, as well as columns and essays from The Weekly Standard, the National Review, The Nation, Harpers’ and American Enterprise.

K30.1210 Writing the Human Predicament
Nettie Jones R 2:00-4:45 4 CR

This course questions the boundaries of traditional discourse and asks what it means to write about life. We will travel vicariously, metaphorically, and physically--seeking grist for our creative mill. Our primary goal is to find fascinating and mind-expanding sources of inspiration for writing prose in everyday life. We will explore dramatic lifestyles and scenes through biographical and autobiographical naratives, as well as critical exposition. Texts may include The Autobiography of DMX, Micheal Eric Dyson’s Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur, David Ritz’s Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, David Nathan’s Soulful Divas, and the documentary In the Shadow of Motown.

K30.1319 Lives of New York
Leo Rubinfien TR 3:30-6:10 4 CR

This course is organized around a set of assignments on living in New York City. Students work from direct observation, and write about their own experiences, people who interest them, places, and past, present or imaginary events. The course aims to help a student to write a concise, powerful essay with steady dramatic development; to sift through his or her own observations with honesty; to see how a specific fact can unfold into a general truth; to better appreciate the beauty and expressiveness of the English language, and to find ways in which writing can surprise a reader. Meanwhile, all students will learn a great deal about New York itself, a city so vast and dense that it can never really be known by any one person. The course also includes readings of work by Louis Auchincloss, John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Hardwick, Alfred Kazin, Grace Paley, J.D. Salinger, James Salter, I.B. Singer, and others.

K30.1321 Travel Writing
Susan Brownmiller W 3:30-6:10 4 CR

A sense of place, dialogue and dialect, the creation of a narrative through a sequence of anecdotes—these are some of the particular demands in travel writing. Students will be required to take a few short trips in the New York area in order to experience an ethnic neighborhood or a cultural milieu that is not familiar to them. When writing their pieces they will practice the literary skills that convey adventure and sensory impressions while incorporating a fair amount of factual information and historical background. They will look for the unique, revealing detail, and learn to exploit the value of the unexpected encounter. They will discover that there are many ways to write about a journey, and many different reasons to read a travel story. Texts for this class are Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps; Barbara Greene, Too Late to Turn Back; Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar; M.F.K. Fisher, Two Towns in Provence; and additional magazine pieces.


K30.1329 Writing the Frament
Victoria Blythe MW 3:30-4:45 4 CR

This writing seminar will explore the fragment as a literary genre and as a modality for literary production. Our engagement with the fragment will focus on interruption as a force for generating writing, a dynamic that leaves in its wake literary debris to be collected and recouped. Revisiting our own literary scenes of destruction we will develop a writing technique based on bricolage. Using the writing workshop as a literary archeological dig we will learn to recognize our usable fragments, to reconfigure and recontextualize them into revitalized works. (Students will bring fragments from their own work to the project). We will look at some famous literary fragments such as the classic “Anaximander Fragment”, the remains of Sappho’s odes on love and Dante’s “Vita Nuova”. Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Eliot’s “Wasteland,” Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” and selections from Benjamin’s monumental bricola ge-work will figure in our itinerary among the ruins. Theorists may include Said (“Beginnings”) and Blanchot (“Writing the Disaster”). Students will revisit and redeploy their own literary fragments and will also work within the genre of the “intentional fragment.”

K30.1495 Writing the Documentary Film
Robert Seidman W 6:20-9:00 4 CR

Writing the script for a documentary film involves integrating several kinds of writing. It is part journalism, part history, and part narrative film; depending on the subject matter, it may also involve social criticism, biography, sociology, and several other disciplines. This course will examine this unique genre of writing and help students write their own documentary film scripts. We’ll concentrate on the entire process of writing the script, from the conception of the initial idea, through the research process (including doing interviews), and into the organizational stage. We will examine the three-act and five-act structures as well as the issue of chronological narrative versus alternative organizational principles. We will examine several excellent documentaries, including Crumb, Tony Silver’s and Henry Chalfont’s Style Wars, the Maysles’ Running Fence and at least two films that the instructor was involved in writing, “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America” and “Riding the Rails” (nominated for an Academy Award). Students will develop and write their own documentary scripts, and class time will involve a workshop approach in which students share and discuss their work.

K30.1510 Writing Comedy
Barry Goldsmith R 6:20-9:00 4 CR

This workshop introduces students to writing various forms of comedy, including the monologue (standup and TV talk shows), television sitcoms, comic plays and movies, and humorous essays. In order better to understand the many styles of contemporary comedy, the course examines several great works in the history of comedy which form the basis for today’s comedy. The course also explores how social context has historically shaped these comic genres and how the technological advances of the twentieth century have caused the multimedia culture to produce such a wide variety of comic expression. The course will also include celebrity guest speakers. Texts may include Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Plautus’ Pseudolus, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Voltaire’s Candide, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, and films such as Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, and Sullivan’s Travels.

K30.1540 Reading and Writing the Short Story
Carol ZorefM 6:20-9:00 4 CR

This short story workshop is designed for the writer who believes that there is as much to be learned from reading the works of others as from writing their own stories. We will devote a portion of each class to discussions of master stories, as well as to careful readings and discussions of stories by the members of the workshop. Exercises will be assigned each week as a way of developing and reinforcing each writer’s relationship to literary craft. Each writer will take one of their own stories through its initial drafting, which they will present in class, as well as a final revision, which they will also present in class. Workshop members are required to meet with one other class member each week outside of class on a rotating basis to discuss their work, as well as actively participate in classroom critiques.

K30.1495 Writing the Documentary Film
Robert Seidman W 6:20-9:00 4 CR

Fiction Writing
K30.1550 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Steven Smith
This course provides students interested in writing fiction an opportunity to explore various forms of fiction—short story, novella, and novel—in a workshop environment. The main objective of the course is to help students develop their individual styles and voices and to make them aware of the various techniques available to them. Emphasis is on characterization, structure, and dramatization. Every aspect of the craft of writing fiction is examined: point of view, narrative voice, plot, tension, time, sequence, crisis, resolution, dialogue, symbolism, etc. Students present their own fiction, respond to the writings of others, and pose questions about literature, editing, and publishing. The workshop group and instructor provide a supportive audience that listens and responds to the work of each member.

K30.1555 Advanced Fiction Writing
Stephen Rinehart T 6:20-9:00 4 CR

Prerequisite: K30.1550 or V41.0815 or permission of the instructor.
This semester will focus on craft as opposed to theory. We’ll concentrate on how to write well, and more importantly, how to tell the difference between what belongs in a story and what doesn’t. We will assume everyone at the table is a working writer—you’ll have plenty of work to do—and the dynamic will be similar to that of medical students examining a living patient. We’ll mostly discuss your work, but also will include some directed reading. Grading is a combination of participation and the quality of the submitted work.

K30.1560 The Art and Craft of Poetry
Scott Hightower MW 4:55-6:10 4 CR

In this workshop poets will focus on the foundations and intricate dynamics of poetry as a writer’s process and on poetry as a two-headed tradition, having an oral tradition and a written tradition. A weekly reading of a poem by each poet in the circle will serve as point of departure for discussions of the relationships of craft and expression. The emphasis is on inhabiting the quality of language; some time is spent at defining clarity, aesthetics, elegance, and eloquence. The course also covers a brief review of some of poetry’s history, including metric and syllabic measures of writing from the Anglo-Saxon to modern free verse.

K30.1564 Advanced Poetry Writing
Emily Fragos M 6:20-9:00 4 CR

Prerequisite: K30.1560 or V41.0830 or permission of the instructor.
A workshop designed for serious poets, this class will teach students how to take their writing to another level both intellectually and artistically; depth of theme, imagination, and craft will be discussed. Emphasis will be placed on developing and strengthening one’s personal style and voice. Through work-shopping, students will further refine their critical eye as poet and reader. The class will include exercises, readings, and guest poets; submission of work will be discussed and encouraged.

K45.1460 Literacy in Action
Paul Jurmo M 6:20-9:00 4 CR

 

K80.2550 Fiction Writing
Chris Spain W 6:20-9:00 4 CR

This graduate course is open to advanced undergraduates with permission from the M.A. program advisor.
This course provides students interested in writing fiction an opportunity to explore various forms of fiction—short story, novella, and novel—in a workshop environment. The main objective of the course is to help students develop their individual styles and voices and to make them aware of the various techniques available to them. Emphasis is on characterization, structure, and dramatization. Every aspect of the craft of writing fiction is examined: point of view, narrative voice, plot, tension, time, sequence, crisis, resolution, dialogue, symbolism, etc. Students present their own fiction, respond to the writings of others, and pose questions about literature, editing, and publishing. The workshop group and instructor provide a supportive audience that listens and responds to the work of each member.