Writing Courses
The Practice of Writing: The Poetics of Expression
K30.1015 4 CR M 3:30-6:10 Scott Hightower
This course focuses on writing as a writer's process. This practicum will be part workshop, part symposium. There will be weekly presentations of pieces and discussions about possibilities and process. Discussions will focus on 1) the primacy of the sentence, 2) the distinction between observation and inference, and 3) the basic dynamics of successful writing. Students may work on various literary forms--fables and parables, profiles, interviews, journals and letters, autobiographical reflections and personal essays, critical reviews, and literary analyses. To share what one observes, what one deduces, and what one wants to frame for others clearly and effectively, takes skill and practice. What does it mean to bring proportion and perspective to one’s writing?
Style and Substance: Tools for Writing
K30.1025 4 CR R 6:20-9:00 Melanie Hulse
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.
Writing about Popular Music
K30.1033 4 CR MW 2:00-3:15 Stephen Wetta
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.
Writing on Wealth and Power
K30.1047 4 CR F 2:00-4:45 Nettie Jones
Part of the story that Americans tell themselves about themselves has to do with the Horatio Alger tales about how talent, hard work and a little luck yields success, money, status, fame and power. Going from “rags to riches” in the span of one generation has thus become part of how we define the American dream—even as that dream recedes further and further away from the grasp of most citizens. Using autobiographies such as Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father; Frank Kofsky’s Black Music, White Business; and classic sociological works such as C. Wright Mill's The Power Elite; this writing seminar focuses on researching and writing fiction and non-fiction about “making it in America.” Students will write experiential, narrative, and academic essays on the economic power of the men and women who have achieved or inherited it. We will also devote time in the class to discussing editing, and revising.
Writing About Film
K30.1070 4 CR T 2:00-4:45 Christopher Bram
Writing about movies is more than just issuing thumbs-up, thumbs-down judgments. In this class, whether you like a particular film or not is the least of the issues. Instead, you will learn to describe what you think various films mean. By learning to use a new critical vocabulary particular to film studies, and by expanding your command of general critical writing, you will begin not only to appreciate the language of narrative cinema but also to put that language to use. Readings may include essays by James Baldwin, James Agee, Molly Haskell, and others, along with American Movie Critics: From Silents Until Now by Phillip Lopate and Film Studies by Ed Sikov. Screenings are required but will occur outside of class (all films will be available on DVD at Bobst); films may include The Aviator, Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Far from Heaven, and Inside Man. Students will write (and rewrite) papers ranging from three-page essays to an eight-page final paper.
Advanced Creative Nonfiction
K30.1301 4 CR W 3:30-6:10 Cris Beam
Prerequisite one advanced writing course, preferably nonfiction. Email instructor for permission to register: beamc@earthlink.net
This is a course for students with some experience in reporting, researching and writing nonfiction, who want to experiment in literary, long-form journalism. Students will choose a small culture or community on which to focus throughout the semester. We’ll start by writing one profile of a member of this community, developing interviewing skills, and learning about voice and point of view. We’ll also write a reflective piece on interrogating the ways we explore this community without exploiting, exoticizing or oversimplifying our sources. Then students will move on to one major work of literary feature-writing—the bulk of the semester’s work—which will be written in sections and go through several revisions. Borrowing the best tools from fiction writing—like charac-ter development, a strong arc, and engaging scenes—these features will be rich in narra-tive and as complex as the communities they portray. Students will learn advanced re-porting techniques, story organization and editing skills, and debate the ethical issues inherent to truth-gathering. Readings will likely include Joseph Mitchell, Katherine Boo, Alex Kotlowitz, Leon Dash, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Peter Hessler.
Crafting Personal Essays and Fiction
K30.1308 4 CR F 9:30-12:15 Meera Nair
Voice, characterization, dialogue, pacing, point of view, imagery, structure—these elements of craft are indispensable to both the personal essayist and fiction writer. We will learn how to use a writer’s tools to shape essays drawn from your life as well as short stories and novel chapters spun from your imagination. We will use exercises to jumpstart your writing and revision to polish it. In this cross-genre course we will write, read and workshop personal essays and fiction. Texts may include essays by Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Jonathan Lethem, Julio Cortazar, Ha Jin, Nathan Englander and Junot Diaz among others.
Only Connect: Strategies for Writing
K30.1317 4 CR F 11:00-1:45 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.
Travel Writing
K30.1321 4 CR F 2:00-4:45 Susan Brownmiller
A sense of place, dialogue and dialect, the creation of a narrative through a sequence of anecdote: 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 Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar; M.F.K. Fisher, Two Towns in Provence; and pertinent magazine pieces.
Writing the Fragment
K30.1329 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45 Victoria Blythe
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” and the remains of Sappho’s odes on love. Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Eliot’s “Wasteland,” Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” and selections from Benjamin’s monumental bricolage-work will figure in our itinerary among the ruins. Theoretical writings may include Said's “Beginnings” and Blanchot's “Writing the Disaster.” Students will revisit and redeploy their own literary fragments and will also work within the genre of the “intentional fragment.”
Writing Short Comedy
K30.1505 4 CR R 2:00-4:45 D.B. Gilles
This course introduces students to writing short humor, including political satire (The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Bill Maher), sketch humor (Saturday Night Live, Mad TV, Kids In The Hall), monologues (David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel), observational humor (stand up comedy), parody (essays, think pieces, video, Youtube) and improvisation. Students will learn the difference between a sketch and a bit, how to create memorable original characters, how to write a joke from premise to payoff and where to find humor. Students will experiment with writing a different specific piece each week, possibly including a parody of a TV commercial, fake news stories à la The Onion, a Letterman Top 10 list, monologue jokes for a talk-show host, a humorous piece for Youtube, and a humorous Op-Ed piece for The New York Times.
Crafting Short Fiction From the Sentence Up
K30.1537 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Steven Rinehart
This class explores the craft of writing, starting with the sentence and ending with the scene. Half of each class is devoted to craft exercises and the remaining half to a traditional workshop approach to discussing student submissions. By the end of the semester we’ll be able to talk intelligently about some of the "micro" parts of a short story or novel, giving the students some practical tools for editing those parts.
Reading and Writing the Short Story
K30.1540 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Carol Zoref
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 also present their own stories in class. Workshop members are required to actively participate in classroom critiques.
Fiction Writing
K30.1550 4 CR T 3:30-6:10 Lara Vapnyar
This course provides students interested in writing fiction an opportunity to explore (and practice) various forms of fiction—short story, flash fiction, novel, and graphic 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. 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 taught to look at texts from the unique perspective of a fellow writer and 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. Students will be required to write either two short stories, or a short story and a chapter from a novel, or a short story and several pieces of flash fiction. The reading assignments will include selections from old and contemporary authors such as Chekhov, Joyce, Borges, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Edward P. Jones, Junot Diaz, Marjane Satrapi.
Advanced Fiction Writing
K30.1555 4 CR W 6:20-9:00 Dave King
Prerequisite K30.1550 or V39.0815 or V39.0816 or V39.0820.
Good writing often depends on the balance of concrete and abstract, and this workshop course will likewise balance inquiries into fiction's grander theoretical questions with more mechanical considerations, such as how to apply dialogue, insert flashback material, and so on. Assignments will include outside essays and stories as well as occasional short exercises, but our true focus will be on student writing. Participants will be asked to read each others' work rigorously, with an eye to precision and plausibility, but also with the generous understanding that fiction itself has many goals, and that the colleague across the table may be on to something ingenious and inspired, even while the work itself is still in development.
The Art and Craft of Poetry
K30.1560/01 4 CR M 6:20-9:00 Emily Fragos
K30.1560/02 4 CR MW 3:30-4:45 Stacy Pies
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 brief review will cover some of poetry’s history including metric and syllabic measures of writing from the Anglo-Saxon to modern free verse. 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.
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, 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 Auerbach's Making Meaning, Making Change; Horton and Freire's We Make the Road by Walking; and the journals Focus on Basics and The Change Agent.
Fiction Writing
K80.2550 4 CR T 6:20-9:00 Chris Spain
Graduate course open to advanced undergraduates (juniors and seniors) with permission of the instructor (clspain@msn.com).
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.