Writing Courses
The Essayist as Critic
K30.1010 4 CR TR 11:00-12:15 Lisa Goldfarb
For many writers the essay offers an opportunity to present, in a condensed form, a strongly developed argument about a pressing issue. We find such arguments in Montaigne’s classic expressions of the essay form, in essays that we read on the editorial pages of newspapers, and in scholarly journals across the disciplines. In this course we will explore the power of the critical essay by examining the many ways in which writers have shaped the form, and by writing critical essays. The course will include a substantial workshop component in which students will practice writing and refining their own work and critiquing each other’s work. Readings may include works by Montaigne, Emerson, King, Orwell, and Woolf; more current essayists such as Katha Pollitt, Steven Jay Gould, and Edward Said; and works by other contemporary journalists, art critics, and scholars.
Feature Writing: The Profile
K30.1026 4 CR F 12:30-3:15 Melanie Hulse
This course offers grounding in the approaches used to create short, compelling biographies of intriguing people. We will examine the evolution of the form by reading examples drawn from classic and contemporary literature, explore research methods including the use of archival sources and interviewing, and investigate techniques propounded by established writers. Field trips to archives are a required part of the coursework. Students will compose four profiles: two short pieces (one in the “just-the-facts” style of the Dictionary of American Biography, the other an obituary that encapsulates and celebrates the subject’s core achievements), and two longer pieces (one based on archival research and one based on interviews). Readings will include: biographies of Julius Caesar by Suetonius and Plutarch; “The Life of Savage” from Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson; selections from Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey; “The Art of Biography” by Virginia Woolf; The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm, and more.
Writing About Performance
K30.1034 4 CR MW 11:00-12:15 Julie Malnig
This writing seminar will train students to become critical viewers of performance and translate their “looking” into descriptive and analytical prose. Students will be introduced to a variety of critical strategies and approaches—from formalist to ethnographic to various forms of sociological and cultural criticism—to develop their interpretive skills. These analyses will help students discover how various performance mediums are constituted, how they “work”, and how they create meaning for viewers. Assignments will include interviews, artists’ profiles, performance documentations, cultural reviews, and critical and/or theoretical analyses. Occasional group excursions to performances will be arranged, as well as class speakers. Some of the authors, essayists, and artists whose works we may read include: Susan Sontag; Michael Kirby; Edwin Denby; Deborah Jowitt; Joan Acocella; Joyce Carol Oates; Anna Deavere Smith; Spalding Gray; and Henry Louis Gates, jr.
Writing as Social Action
K30.1038 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 June Foley
In this course, students read and write nonfiction that aims to change hearts, minds, and public policy. We begin by examining exemplary essays and journalism of the past by such writers as Swift, Woolf, Orwell, and Baldwin, then move on to reading and analyzing more recent works on a variety of issues and in a variety of genres. We also find inspiration in the e-newsletter, Voices That Must Be Heard, which translates stories from about 200 NYC ethnic presses. Students choose an issue of their own to research and advocate, then write about it in a number of genres, including the Editorial, Op-Ed piece, NPR reportage, interview, and a longer work that includes research. Readings will likely include selections from works by Jamaica Kincaid, Mark Salzman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Frank Rich, Patricia J. Williams, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Amy Tan, Katha Pollitt, Alex Kotlowitz, and Nancy Mairs.
Creative Nonfiction
K30.1300 4 CR F 11:00-1:45 Cris Beam
Course will begin on Friday, January 26.
Creative nonfiction marks the intersection between journalism and literature, and bears the hallmarks of both. Stories feature strong character development, well-developed, nuanced scenes, and a tangible narrative arc. But they also privilege thorough research, live reporting and a writer’s quizzical, intelligent stance. In this course, students will not only learn the components of a good story, but what makes an idea compelling to a diverse audience to begin with. Students will choose their own topics, but we’ll all write and revise one profile and one long investigative-style piece of researched and reported literary nonfiction. We will workshop these longer stories in sections, and students will learn effective editing strategies for their own writing by working closely with their peers. We’ll read masters of the genre like Joseph Mitchell, Katherine Boo, and Alex Kotlowitz as well as some newer or more experimental voices like Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela and Lauren Slater. We’ll also look at broader ethical questions like going undercover, cloaking source identities, and writing outside of one’s own experience.
Only Connect: Strategies for Writing
K30.1317 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Ed Park
The late W.G. Sebald perfected a sublime art of connection—teasing out associations between ancient snapshots, newspaper clippings, and the words of others. His elegantly haunting books (which blurred novel, history, and memoir) couldn’t be more different from the typical posts that proliferate in the so-called blogosphere. Yet blogging, with its hyperlinks and screen-grabs, calls upon a magpie instinct that Sebald and other illustrious writers would instantly recognize. This course takes students on a tour of writing methods as old as The Anatomy of Melancholy and as current as Gawker, imparting a ravenous approach to composition useful for work in any genre: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and the borderlands of our virtual reality. Classes will focus on the use of images in text, the cento, the footnote, the double-jointed review, and more. Assignments include brief weekly “connections” reports, the regular maintenance of a blog, and a final paper. Readings include works by Borges, Barthelme, Nicholson Baker, Harry Stephen Keeler, Raymond Roussel, Lawrence Weschler, Carole Maso, Eliot Weinberger, Maureen Howard, and others.
Journeys Past and Present
K30.1323 4CR F 9:30-12:15 Susan Brownmiller
This seminar is designed for students who completed the fall semester of Travel Writing and wish to continue their explorations of narrative reportage that is linked to a journey. In this semester a journey may be into the past. Recollections of trips abroad, family feasts, and holiday traditions become grist for stories, but so do further investigations of New York’s outer boroughs, ethnic enclaves, parklands, and cultural milieus by foot or bicycle. In some pieces the past and present may merge. Instructional emphasis will be placed on the myriad ways to create a participatory adventure and capture it on paper with sensory observations, revealing fragments of dialogue, and storytelling skills. Rigorous attention will be paid to a clean sentence, a precise word, a fresh turn of phrase. New students are welcome.
The Letter as Literature
K30.1326 4 CR TR 4:55-6:10 Victoria Blythe
The letter as a genre of literature is situated in a middle space between private and public discourse. This writing seminar will inhabit the “space of the letter” to experiment with the letter-format as a unique modality of self-inscription. We will examine the “space of the letter” as an especially productive location for writing, and the literary letter as a vehicle with the potential to transport our writing from personal communication to literary work. We will theorize the letter by reading other people’s mail, such as Sylvia Plath’s “Letters Home”, Kafka’s “Letter to My Father”, and Rilke’s “Letter to a Young Poet”, letters written as literary works, and letters never intended to be read. We will investigate the rhetoric, psychology and economy of the letter, a trajectory that will take us through the dead letter office (Derrida’s “Post Card”) and into the realm of blackmail (Poe’s “Purloined Letter”). As a community of writers we will “send and receive” letters in various literary formats, and take our place on the cutting edge with the electronic letter as it shifts the paradigm of this familiar, but strange, literary genre.
Writing New York City
K30.1340 4 CR F 2:00-4:45 Nettie Jones
New York City is one of the contemporary world’s great dramatic characters. It is an “ark,” housing representatives of every nation and ethnicity. International and cosmopolitan, the city is a site of contestations in terms of class, identity, power, and desire. In this course, we survey fictional and nonfictional representations of the city and use the city as inspiration for our own writing. Seminar participants are expected to produce unique narrative prose from a variety of perspectives about the city. The focus is on the process of selecting appropriate materials both from the literature and from exploration of the city, from Harlem to Lower Manhattan. Possible texts include E.B. White’s Here is New York and Luc Sante's Low Life, videos such as Dark Days: The Mole People, The Cruise, Taxi Driver, and Midnight Cowboy; and outings to The Waldorf Astoria, The Algonquian Hotel, The Shomberg Center, Faisons’ Fire House Theater and Shooting Star Theater.
Advanced Comedy Writing
K30.1511 4 CR R 3:30-6:10 Barry Goldsmith
Building upon the ability to write basic humor, jokes, monologues, short comedic stories, and sketches, students in this workshop will write individual sitcom scripts and comedy screenplays. We will focus on learning the basics of plot construction, style, and applying humor to dialogue and characterization. We will also study great comedic plays and movies and adapt them to our writing needs.
The Short Story: A Workshop on Revising
K30.1536 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Carol Zoref
This workshop is dedicated to the oft-repeated observation that all writing is re-writing. Each writer will focus their efforts on only one or two short stories, rather than starting many new stories and abandoning them in favor of yet another new beginning. Students will take each of their stories through a number of drafts and revise them in response to (though not necessarily in accord with) questions and comments raised by other members of the workshop. The objective is to learn ways of staying with such challenges as maintaining the story’s voice, determining the order of experience, and arriving at an ending that satisfies the design of the story as well as the intentions of the writer. Workshop members share their stories in class throughout the semester and comment in detail on one another’s work. Participants should have some experience writing short stories.
Content is King: Editing Short Fiction
K30.1546 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Steven Rinehart
This class explores the hard decision-making involved in fiction, and attempts to give the students tools for deciding which content belongs in a story and which needs to be put aside for later use, or discarded altogether. We look at ways to discover what the first and second drafts are about, and which parts of the story add to that idea and which detract. We will also hold a traditional workshop, discussing student stories in a roundtable session.
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 (and practice) 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 are encouraged to become part of a community of writers where they will work with their peers in a safe, honest and considerate environment). Students will 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.
Advanced Fiction Writing
K30.1555 4 CR T 9:30-12:15 Meera Nair
Prerequisite K30.1550 or V39.0815 or V39.0816 or V39.0820 or permission of the instructor.
The aim of this course is to fathom why fiction works when it works, and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t. We will attempt to teach ourselves to read like writers, so we can learn from those who have come before, so we can began to write like writers. We will engage all the elements that give a fiction a chance at success--obsession, seduction, evoking of the senses, the removal of filters, scene and summary, theatre of the mind, et cetera. Students--and the teacher--will turn in three first drafts of fiction, each 10-14 pages long, to be critiqued in a workshop setting. The critiques will be rigorous but constructive; no nastiness allowed. We will also complete short, extemporaneous, writing exercises. Readings taken from The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and others.
The Art and Craft of Poetry
K30.1560 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Emily Fragos
In this workshop poets will focus on the foundations and intricate dynamics of poetry as a writer’s process. 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.
Advanced Poetry Writing
K30.1564 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Scott Hightower
Prerequisite K30.1560 or V39.0817 or V39.0830 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.
Literacy in Action
K45.1460 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Maura Donnelly
This course combines volunteer work in New York City adult literacy and English as a second language programs with an academic introduction to the philosophy, history, and current issues of basic education. Students will work as volunteer teachers of reading and writing oral English or mentors at such institutions as the University Settlement, Union Settlement, International Rescue Committee, and Fortune Society. In class they will read about and discuss such key issues as which “basic skills” U.S. adults now need, which adults lack these skills and why, the implications for our economy, families, communities, and democracy, the instructional approaches developed for adults, and the steps that might be taken to build support for high-quality, adult basic-skills programs. Throughout the course, students will relate such issues to their own on-site experiences in class discussion and role-playing, and create a portfolio of writing that includes on-site observations, lesson plans, reflections, and a final analytical paper. Readings may include Making Meaning, Making Change (Auerbach); We Make the Road by Walking (Horton and Freire); and the journals, Focus on Basics and The Change Agent.
