Writing

This class will both investigate journalism as a social, cultural, and historical phenomenon and employ journalism as a practice by which to encounter the world. We will immerse ourselves in journalism’s intricacies and complexities, its strengths and faults, and come to understand it not only as a working trade and history’s first draft but also as a literary art in its own right—one with as many deep imperatives and as rich a tradition as poetry or fiction. We will survey the best (and a little bit of the worst) of short- and long-form journalism and, over the course of the year, craft everything from brief profiles to ambitious investigative pieces. How does a writer know which details to highlight and which to subordinate? What is the nature of good interviewing technique? How does one interview a willing source as opposed to a resistant one? When should one write concisely, and when is it appropriate to expatiate? What are the ways in which a journalist interacts with—and runs the danger of contaminating—his or her subject? We will ask and answer these and many other questions and spend significant time puzzling out the ways in which fundamental journalistic practice leaps from print to television to new media. Prominent journalists will be invited to talk to us and tell us what they do. Readings will range from H. L. Mencken, George Orwell, Janet Malcolm, Joseph Mitchell, and Truman Capote to Joseph Roth. Weekly individual conferences, first semester; biweekly individual conferences, second semester.

This FYS version of Forms and Fictions begins with the reading and writing of folk and fairy tales; moves on to incidents, episodes, stories, poetic translations, frame stories, personal essays, graphic novels, and lyrics; and, finally, plans for a novel, its opening, end, and first chapter. The emphasis here is on trying on forms, learning which form works best for which kind of content, which works best for each student, what your aesthetic is, what you have to say, as well as how you might say it. There will be weekly readings and exercises in each form, in dialogue, pacing, editing, portraiture, plot and its philosophical underpinnings. Also, students will send each other 100-word pieces every week. Conference work will be planned, written, and revised over the course of the semester. The emphasis in conference work is on vision, revision, editing, finishing, and presentation, a process useful for any course or endeavor. In addition to classes, we will meet every other week for individual conferences and every week for a group session to talk about whatever comes up: campus activities, procrastination, New York City, dropping or adding classes, laundry, food, internships, sports, roommates, whatever students and their don need or want to explore.

One of the exciting literary developments in recent years is the plethora of work that disrupts the notion of genre—by writers such as Eula Biss, Jenny Offill, and Ben Lerner. In this workshop, we will read a book each week and consider architecture, diction, association, metaphor, and other issues of craft. Students will be required to bring in a new piece of writing each week and to write critical responses to the reading. This class will be a good fit for students who are comfortable reading 100-200 pages a week, in addition to generating their own creative writing. For workshop, students may submit poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or anything in between. We will aim to locate a piece’s heat—its linguistic, figurative, and musical energy—and consider how that energy might be developed, or maximized, in subsequent drafts. Half of each class will be devoted to discussing the weekly reading; the other half will be spent discussing student work. Occasionally, we will also do in-class writing exercises. There will be weekly writing prompts, and students will work on their own hybrid projects. At the end of each semester, students will turn in a revised, final portfolio with at least two earlier drafts for each piece, as well as their hybrid project. There will be biweekly conferences. 

A novelist once began a lecture by asking how many people in the audience wanted to be writers. When almost everyone raised a hand, he said, “So, why the hell aren’t you home writing?” The novelist was asking the right question. The only way to improve as a writer is to write a lot. You might have all the talent in the world, and you might have had a thousand fascinating experiences; but talent and experience won’t get you very far unless you have the ability to sit down, day after day, and write. Accordingly, my main goal is to encourage you to develop or sustain the habit of steady writing. You’ll be sharing a very short piece with the class every week in response to prompts that I’ll provide, and you’ll also be writing longer stories and essays that we’ll discuss in one-on-one conference meetings. In the fall semester, students will read and write short fiction; in the spring, students will read and write personal essays. Writers whose work we’ll study include James Baldwin, Anton Chekhov, Joan Didion, Jennifer Egan, Percival Everett, Carmen Maria Machado, Katherine Mansfield, Haruki Murakami, George Orwell, Philip Roth, George Saunders, and Zadie Smith. Given the range of writers that we’ll be reading, it’s safe to say that everyone in the class will be encountering stories they find disturbing and ideas they find objectionable at some point during the year. If you believe you can be harmed by exposure to points of view that differ starkly from your own, it would be best not to register for this class. We will meet in individual conferences every week until the October Study Days break, after which our conferences will meet every other week.

After reading a story by an older writer, the young James Joyce wrote, “Is this as near as [he] can get to life, I wonder?” You could say that Joyce was pointing toward a goal for which many great fiction writers strive: the goal of bringing to the page one’s unique way of apprehending life rather than relying on formula and convention. Something like this striving lay behind Chekhov’s revolt against traditional plot, Woolf’s search for new ways to render the subtleties of consciousness, Stein’s experiments with language, and Garcia Marquez’s adventures in magical realism. In this lecture class, we’ll read short stories old and new, with the aim of learning both from those who’ve come before us and those who are working now. Writers we’re likely to encounter include Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Percival Everett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Gaitskill, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Carmen Maria Machado, Katherine Mansfield, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer, Grace Paley, George Saunders, and Virginia Woolf. Though formally a lecture, this will heavily be a discussion-based class; so please consider registering for it only if you’re interested in sharing your thoughts about the readings every week.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” poet John Keats said. He’s right that those are the two main qualities to which art aspires, but they’re not as identical as his statement implies. Maybe we can think of truth as content and beauty as form. Good writing requires both. In this class, we will seek those qualities as displayed by student stories and perceived by student critiques. You write what you want—or need—to write, and together we consider it. That process makes your writing better. There’s the goal.

All great stories are built with good sentences. In this workshop, students will create short stories or continue works-in-progress that will be read and discussed by their peers. Class sessions will focus on constructive criticism of the writer’s work, and students will be encouraged to ask the questions with which all writers grapple: What makes a good story? Have I fully developed my characters? And does my language convey the ideas that I want? We will talk about the writer’s craft in this class—how people tell stories to each other, how to find a plot, and how to make a sentence come to life. This workshop should be seen as a place where students can share their thoughts and ideas in order to then return to their pages and create a completed imaginary work. There will also be some short stories and essays on the art of writing that will set the tone and provide literary fodder for the class.

Toni Morrison once wrote, “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” She referred to the interior life of her ancestors as being a large (perhaps the largest?) charge that she, as an author, faced; the characters she created—in part from pictures, in part from the act of imagination—yielded “a kind of truth.” We are experiencing a new age of Black artists and activists, charging the world to heed their truths; as writers, we’ll delve into the fullness of their experiences. Nana Ama Adjei-Brenyah brings magical realism to the doorstep of our daily lives; Edward P. Jones establishes setting as character, garnering comparisons to James Joyce. Ta-Nehisi Coates posits large questions about writing and Black identity, while Jocelyn Nicole Johnson uses satire to address themes of class and culture; and both Danielle Evans and Jamel Brinkley write in a charged realist tradition that is RIEBY (my new acronym: right in everybody’s back yard!). Class readings will include essays on craft and technique, as well as short stories and memoir. This workshop will also have at its heart the discussion of student manuscripts and the development of constructive criticism. Talking about race, talking about craft, and talking about our own fiction should occur in an environment where everyone feels valued and supported. The road may be bumpy at times—but how else to get to that truth that Toni Morrison so prized?

This is a course with writing at its center and other arts—mainly, but not exclusively, visual—around it. We will read all kinds of narratives, children’s books, folk tales, fairy tales, graphic novels...and try our hand at many of them. Class reading will include everything from ancient Egyptian love poems to contemporary Latin American literature. For conference work, students have created graphic novels, animations, quilts, a scientifically accurate fantasy involving bugs, rock operas, items of clothing with text attached, nonfiction narratives, and dystopian fictions with pictures. There will be weekly assignments that involve making something. This course is especially suited to students with an interest in another art or a body of knowledge that they’d like to make accessible to nonspecialists.

This large seminar looks at the ineffable nature of voice and its intertwining relationships with narrators, authors, and interpretations. We will build stories and their inhabitants using source material that is meaningful to each of us: literature, of course, but also music, film and video, visual art, semiotics, fashion, architecture, games, urban myths, podcasts and voiceovers, family lore and history, and more. Through this process, we’ll identify and deepen voice as the vernacular of our imaginations. Students’ writing will be workshopped in small-group conferences. We will read work by writers such as Samuel Beckett, James Hannaham, Garielle Lutz, Carmen Maria Machado, Bhanu Kapil, Edouard Leve, Philip K. Dick, Robert Lopez, William Saroyan, Denis Johnson, and Shelly Oria. We will also listen to music, watch videos and excerpted films, look at art, and examine popular culture and our own families as if we were anthropologists. We will work to shed ideas of what we should be writing and discover what’s already inside us ready to be written.

Speculative fiction is a blanket term for writing that speculates on a world unlike our own. Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are a few of the best-known categories; but speculative fiction also encompasses the uncategorizable—work that challenges our understanding of causality, time, the self, the mind, and the cosmos…or that just barely cracks the surface of the familiar, allowing the weird to seep through. At its best, speculative fiction uses imagination and metaphor to explore ideas and facets of the human experience that would otherwise remain unexpressed. In this course, we will read short stories and novels by mostly contemporary speculative-fiction authors, with a writerly eye for technique. We will also workshop fiction by students; discuss process and goals; and form a supportive, constructive community where even the wildest visions can flourish.

The story begins, “Once upon a time,” or the story begins, “Call me Ishmael,” and with this initiating sentence a fictional world unspools. The word and the sentence are our first tools as writers; and, in this class, we will study how sentences shape story. We will also consider how the story requires more than great sentences. This is a class heavy on writing and reading. We will develop our craft through weekly exercises and experiments in form, character, narrative, stance, authority, point of view, dialogue, scene, situation, style, tropes, and syntax. Additionally, memory as a tool will be considered—both the writer’s memory as it is reimagined, reinvented in a work of fiction (family memory, historical memory), as well as the use of memory inside a work of fiction (character memory, place memory, historical memory). Students will develop stories from first draft through at least one extensive revision.

Who doesn’t love Frog and Toad? Have you ever wanted to write something like it—or like Charlotte’s Web or A Snowy Day? Why do our favorites work so well and so (almost) universally? We will begin by reading books we know and books we missed and discuss what makes them so good. We will be looking at read-to books, early readers, instructional books for children, rude books, chapter books, books about friendship, and (possibly) young adult books. We may consider what good children’s history and biography might be like. We will talk about the place of the visual, the careful and conscious use of language, notions of appropriateness, and what works at various age levels. Invariably, we will talk about childhood, our own and as part of an ever-changing set of social theories. We will try our hand at writing picture books, early readers, friendship stories, collections of poems like Mother Goose. Conference work will involve making a children’s book of any kind, on any level. Classes will be in both lecture and conversational mode, and group conferences will involve looking at our writing.

The goal of this class is to start an audio fiction revolution. In this class, students will learn to write and produce groundbreaking contemporary audio dramas, while also experimenting with the form, and ask what it means to create the audio fiction of their dreams. We will listen to works from venerable podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale, Magnus Archives, The Truth, Radiotopia, and other podcasts from around the world. We will listen to audio fiction from collectives like Mermaid Palace that explicitly address identity and sexuality to challenge the status quo. We will also create our own critical discourse for contemporary audio drama—analyzing writings and essays from the fields of screenwriting, sound art, contemporary music, and literature—to help understand and analyze the works that we are creating. Creators from Welcome to Night Vale, Audible, and others will join our discussions to talk about their stories and production processes. Throughout the semester, students will make works and create their own podcasts. At the end of the semester, students will pitch their fiction ideas to audio executives at Audible.

What is a novel? Different writers have defined the form differently. D. H. Lawrence said that the novel is “the one bright book of life.” Stendhal said that a novel is “a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet.” Randall Jarrell, admitting that even the greatest novels are flawed in some way, said that a novel is “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” In this class, we’ll be reading a wide variety of novels published after 1970 in order to gain an appreciation of the richness and flexibility of the form. Writers whose work we’ll consider include Nicholson Baker, Octavia Butler, Italo Calvino, Teju Cole, Jennifer Egan, Milan Kundera, Ben Lerner, Sigrid Nunez, Jenny Offill, Padgett Powell, Mary Robison, Fran Ross, and George Saunders. I don’t have a treasure chest of craft lessons to offer; my hope is that if we spend the semester reading ambitious novels and talking about them as fellow writers, we’ll all learn something by the end. In conference, we’ll be looking at your writing. You’ll be asked to give me a finished short story or novel excerpt every two weeks.

Stories are immensely complex mechanisms. When we talk about how they work, we often confine our discussion to their most straightforward elements: the relationship between conflict and suspense, for example, or between verisimilitude and believability. But stories also derive a substantial proportion of their meaning and force from elements not so easily pinned down: from the potency of their images, from their surprising and suggestive juxtapositions, or from other qualities more easily apprehended by the unconscious than the conscious mind. The villagers in Kafka’s A Country Doctor strip the doctor naked and place him in bed with his grotesquely wounded patient—an action with little clear connection to the conflicts established in the story and little to recommend it in regard to verisimilitude. And yet it is precisely weird, suggestive, and not entirely interpretable images such as this that make Kafka’s writing so feverishly compelling and grant it its measure of beauty and truth. During the first half of the semester, students will read, discuss, and write two- to three-page imitations of folk tales and myths, as well as short stories, by some of the great fabulists of the modern era, including Donald Barthelme, Teju Cole, Percival Everett, Nikolai Gogol, Allegra Hyde, Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Karen Russell, Bruno Schulz, and Barry Yourgrau. The second half of the semester will be devoted to workshopping students’ own stories. All readings will be from a PDF packet.

Writing begins with our bodies in present time and space: Our minds are nestled in our bodies, and our imaginations are nestled in our nervous systems. In this class, we will consider present bodies as mediums, sources, oracles, and anchors. From autofiction to high fantasy, all our stories are born this way; speculation itself is imaginative projection. Every aspect of writing—from the sounds of our words to the objects of our characters’ desires to the use of punctuation—can be found in our own present embodiment. We will generate new writing through experiments during and outside of class. These include experiential exercises such as immediate sensory awareness work, dream logs, and studies of inexplicably vivid memories. We will explore ways to release our writing from cerebral control while mindfully steering it: breaking fallback linguistic patterns, collaborating with other writers, and working outside our usual forms. In individual and small-group conferences, we will discuss your fiction, along with your writing processes and practices. Authors we will read may include Franz Kafka, Yasunari Kawabata, Eugene Ionesco, Karin Tidbeck, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Uchida Hyakken, Carmen Maria Machado, Paul La Farge, and Rivka Galchen. Texts by Pema Chodron, Peter Levine, Richard Schwartz, Natalie Goldberg, and others will support our projects.

Speculative fiction is a blanket term for writing that speculates on a world unlike our own. Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are a few of the best-known categories; but speculative fiction also encompasses the uncategorizable—work that challenges our understanding of causality, time, the self, the mind, the cosmos…or that just barely cracks the surface of the familiar, allowing the weird to seep through. At its best, speculative fiction uses imagination and metaphor to explore ideas and facets of the human experience that would otherwise remain unexpressed. In this course, we will read short stories and novels by mostly contemporary speculative-fiction authors, with a writerly eye for technique. We will also workshop fiction by students; discuss process and goals; and form a supportive, constructive community where even the wildest visions can flourish.

What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what we may write? In this class, we’ll discuss an array of choices that writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. You'll be asking to read excerpts from five books: Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett’s  Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War; Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism; and Peter Dale Scott’s long poem, Coming to Jakarta. Group conferences will function as writing workshops and to offer feedback on your letters in progress, in addition to various writing exercises. This is not a history or a literature class; our lens will be that of a writer, using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present.

There is such an alive quality to reading a notebook—a laboratory of interrupted and ongoing consciousness, whose very irregularities or imperfections give it a wildness unmatched by more plotted or studied works. In this yearlong writing seminar, we will begin in the fall by reading writers’ and other artists’ notebooks: some that were meant to be published and considered as formal works; others, not. We will consider journals that are circling around an activity or process (gardening, trance, the bus, drawing) and others that are more open. Besides the notebook, we will also read and think through first-person or documentary texts that use their own diary as a significant archive. In the fall, notebooks we will read include Sei Shonagan, May Sarton, Eva Hesse, Hervé Guibert, Annie Ernaux, Lauren Elkin, Franz Kafka, Susan Sontag, Sylvia Plath, Derek Jarman, David Wojnarowicz, Renee Gladman, and Bhanu Kapil. Every week, writers will keep a notebook. Conference will involve writers shaping and editing their notebooks, thinking of the notebook practice as its own serious and lively endeavor. In the spring, we will focus on long-form prose projects that are inspired by and taken from the notebook, works enthralled to the rhythms of the daily, the problem of the person in time and space, and the process of creation. We will read texts that borrow from the notebook but exist as essay, meditation, poem, address book, travelogue—including works by Sophie Calle, T. Fleischmann, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Jazmina Barrera, Heike Geissler, and Moyra Davey. This class is a yearlong prose class open to all genres but especially to those interested in the nonfiction impulse.

For 10 years, narrative podcasting has dominated the media space. Shows like This American Life, Serial, Radiolab, and numerous other story-driven shows have become the paradigm for podcasts such as 99% Invisible, Love + Radio, and many others. We’ve also entered the age of the serialized podcast, with limited-run series and others put out by podcast companies such as Audible, iHeart, Wondery, and so many others. This class will teach students the practicalities of how narrative audio podcasting works, while we explore what this narrative movement means. Students will learn practicalities; e.g., pitching both multipart and narrative stories, using the actual “call for stories” from studios and shows; the fundamentals of how to record and mix stories, using the latest digital-editing technology; what narrative editors expect in a series; and the skills necessary for a podcast internship. We will also reflect on the theoretical and ethical considerations of narrative podcasting. We will ask questions such as: How do imposing narrative structures affect nonfiction storytelling? How do narrative shows deal with ethical missteps? What does it mean to have “a voice”? Does it matter who gets to tell the story? (Answer on the last question is “yes.” We’ll discuss why.) Producers, editors, and freelancers for This American Life, Audible, Radiolab, and others will visit the class to provide insight into their shows and answer student questions—and students will pitch audio executives their ideas at the end of the course.

This course is for students who want to break free of the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss examples of formally innovative nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. Completed assignments will also be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces, which they will have written in consultation with the instructor as a part of their conference work. Required texts: The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, and Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra. All other readings are in a photocopied handout.

This course is for students interested in the relationship between nonfiction and reality; that is, how nonfiction writers—that’s us—construct reality on the page rather than assume its coherence. Each week, in class, we will discuss nonfiction by writers like Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany, alongside a wide array of writers who trouble the distinction of what we consider possible. Our aim in reading as writers will be in metabolizing the formal strategies of language situated across “genres” in order to make something new through short exercises and longer workshops. Likely writers we will read include Jami Lin Nakamura, Saidiya Hartman, Tanya Tagaq, and Fernanda Melchor, among others. We will pay special attention to the relationship between difference and truth across a range of perspectives, making difficulty our focus and vantage point.

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. In the first unit, People You Know, students will write personal narratives involving people in their lives and read, as models, published examples of such works; for example, Phillip Lopate’s portrait of his family in the essay “Willy.” In the second unit, Place, we will read and write essays about authors’ relationships to particular places—less travelogues than investigations of the dynamic between the person and the place; examples of published essays we will read for this unit are “Stranger in the Village,” by James Baldwin, and Annie Dillard’s essay, “Aces and Eights.” For the third unit, The Personal in the Critical/Journalistic (or PCJ), a work in that genre combines personal reflection with consideration of an outside subject, such as a favorite movie or an event like 9/11—the interaction of the personal and the outside subject yields a third element, an insight that would not be possible without the first two elements—for example, Jonathan Lethem’s personal essay about the movie The Searchers.

In this one-semester class, we will explore the intersection of sports and literary writing and journalism. We will read a mixture of books and essays by writers such as Mitchell Jackson, John McPhee, Ross Gay, and Hanif Abdurraqib, along with a sports poetry anthology edited by Natalie Diaz. There will be weekly critical responses. Writing assignments will include: an interview/portrait of an athlete, a first-person sports essay, a sports short story, and a sports poem. For conference work, each student will write an in-depth story about a local sports issue on the high-school or collegiate level. Students will be expected to interview the main characters in their piece and write multiple drafts, finding the story within the story and exploring it from multiple angles.

We write personal essays to learn about ourselves, to face our demons, to understand what entangles us, to expose the lies that we have allowed ourselves to believe, to recognize what we are running away from, to find insight, and/or to tell the truth. This workshop is designed for students interested in doing that work and learning to craft what they have written so that their readers can share in that learning. We will learn to read as writers, write as readers, and, where relevant, draw connections between writing and other creative fields such as music and film.

In addition to being the title of Michael Clune’s memoir or a theory in the hands of McKenzie Wark, video games have now invaded social space—and, therefore, our literary imaginations—in a way that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. And yet, how do we write about games? About the experience both of playing these aesthetic objects and living in an arguably gamified world with the same intensity, curiosity, and rigor that we might otherwise bring to any centuries-old ekphrastic attempt? In this course, we will query the limits, techniques, and new forms of nonfiction writing made possible through video games, taking the anthology Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games as a springboard for our own experiments through short exercises and workshop. We will focus on the interplay between social position and form where, rather than an escape, video games pose new questions of difficulty in prose and in life. No experience playing video games will be required, though this will certainly not hurt; smaller indie games may be used as examples.

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. The first unit, Demons, will focus on writers’ personal challenges, from mental illness (as in Suzanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted) to migraines (the subject of Joan Didion’s essay “In Bed”). The second unit focuses on braided essays; the class will read essays whose authors juxtapose seemingly disparate topics in forming coherent works. Melissa Febos’s “All of Me,” for example, reveals how writing, singing, tattoos, and heroin addiction all relate to the need to deal with pain. For the final unit, Critical Survey, we will read and write critical takes on works or figures in particular fields; for example, B. R. Myers’ “A Reader’s Manifesto,” his take on the novelists of the day, and James Baldwin’s book, The Devil Finds Work, about the movies of his youth.

Any writer who tries to capture the likeness of another—whether in biography, history, journalism, or art criticism—must face certain questions. What makes a good profile? What is the power dynamic between subject and writer? How does a subject’s place in the world determine the parameters of what may be written about him/her/them? To what extent is any portrait also a self-portrait? And how can the complexities of a personality be captured in several thousand—or even several hundred—words? In this course, we will tackle the various challenges of profile writing, such as choosing a good subject, interviewing, plotting, obtaining and telescoping biographical information, and defining the role of place in the portrait. Students will be expected to share their own work, identify what they admire or despise in other writers’ characterizations, and learn to read closely many recognized practitioners of the genre. We will also turn to shorter forms of writing—personal sketches, brief reported pieces, physical descriptions—to further illuminate what we mean when we talk about “identity” and “character.” The goal of this course is less to teach the art of profile writing than to become better readers and writers generally.

From Milton (Satan) to Dryden to Dr. Johnson to Coleridge to De Quincey to Melville (Ahab) to Woolf to Auden to Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim to Kurosawa (Throne of Blood and Ran) to Peter Brook (The Mahabharata) to Julie Taymor to Taylor Swift...writers, artists, performers, and thinkers in the West, the East, and the South have gained enormous mileage by appropriating, purloining, replying to, adapting, being enraged by, and escaping Shakespeare—or merely by living under his shade. We will plunge into the enormous and still billowing artistic energy generated by this person. We will look at eight major plays, one a week, from every phase of his career—with a sampling of their critical and scholarly paraphernalia—and examine the writerly problems he faced and how he solved them and examine closely his incomparable rhetorical skills. We will try to pluck the heart out of the mystery of this most mysterious artist in order to help ourselves as artists. Conference projects, designed to be presented to the class, can comprehend poetic responses, fictive or dramatic responses, films and multimedia concoctions, or critical or essayistic responses to the entire body of work or to one of its many elements. It has been said that Shakespeare invented the idea of the human. We will think about this. Sonnet sequences are welcome.

The Iowa Writers Workshop was founded by Wilbur Schramm in 1936. Schramm went on to a many-faceted career, which included writing a postwar manual for the Army, called The Nature of Psychological Warfare. He saw the writing workshop as a way to train “the kind of young persons who can become the kind of writers we need” in a future framed by the dominance of the United States. In much American poetry, the consequences of this project of domination are unseen. As is often not true elsewhere, the prison is seen (or unseen) from the point of view of the free. This course looks for the traces of this project of domination and asks what might happen for writers when the domination is seen from the point of view of the dominated and the free from the point of view of the prison. Why are censorship and incarceration such central facts of what it’s meant to be a poet elsewhere? Why hasn’t that been true in the United States? How does Archibald MacLeish’s “a poem should not mean but be” or T. S. Eliot’s “like a patient etherized upon a table” sound beside Adam Wazyk’s “how many times must one wake you up before you recognize your epoch?” or Suzanne Césaire’s surrealism as a tool to recover stolen power, “purified of colonial stupidities”? What is real freedom? What are its ways? What might the poetry be that comes from it? Our text will be an anthology and workbook, The Most Beautiful Sea: Poems & Pathways Toward Poems, including the work of Nas, Elizabeth Bishop, Refaat Alareer, Nazim Hikmet, Marie Howe, Joshua Bennett, Lucille Clifton, Nipsey Hussle, Mahmoud Darwish, Dionne Brand, and the greatest of all poets: Anonymous. You’ll be asked to do in-class writing exercises, write letters with a partner, and bring drafts to conference. Each term, you’ll be required to make an anthology and a chapbook. In the words of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, we’ll look together for “The most beautiful sea” that “hasn’t been crossed yet”—aka “the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you/I haven’t said yet.”

Poetry is as old as humans. We sang to our babies. We sang to cast spells, to bless, to seduce, to celebrate, to mourn, to survive, to instruct, to imagine. This class is open to anyone who wants to read and write poetry. Beginners and experienced writers are welcome. (We are all beginners.) We will read contemporary poems and poems written many years ago. We will practice observing the outer and inner worlds. We will practice the poetic arts: creating images, making metaphors, and employing off rhyme and assonance. We will practice organic forms. We will experiment with ecopoetry, ekphrastic poetry, and persona poetry. You will meet with me in an individual conference every other week and with each other in weekly poetry dates. Each of you will revise your weekly poems so that, at the end of our semester, you should have a deeper sense of the art and a revised collection of your work. I ask for your curiosity, care, and commitment. We will have a wonderful time.

This course will focus primarily and humanistically on participants’ own work. Roughly a third of discussion time will be devoted to seminal contemporary poems, with attention to poets of color and marginalized voices. We’ll examine poetics, prosody, and issues of form, pace, voicing, and tone in contemporary poetry and in radically experimental texts. We’ll focus on the revision process—how do artists push themselves toward new worlds? How do poets achieve spontaneity without sacrificing rigor? How do texts reconcile clarity and unpredictability? How do poets develop their own exploration tools—and how do we go beyond intent? Our emphasis is on craft and individual style, not judgment. Expect to read widely, to approach texts in new ways, and to create many wild drafts and a finished portfolio of six-to-infinity poems.  There is no formal prerequisite, but I’m not conceiving of this as an introductory course. There will be a paper, as well as creative writing.

In this one-semester class, we will look at contemporary American poetry (1980 to the present) through the lens of the Pitt Poetry Series, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. We will read a book each week. Students will write a critical response to each book and also have weekly writing prompts. Authors to be read include: Etheridge Knight, Sharon Olds, and Larry Levis from the 1980s and ’90s and Paisley Rekdal and Ross Gay from the 2000s. Roughly half of each class will be spent discussing published work; the other half will be spent discussing student work. The semester will culminate with each student turning in a portfolio of at least seven poems—three drafts for each poem. Students will also write a paper comparing a more recent Pitt poet with a writer from the syllabus.

In this class, we’ll look together for, in the words of Nazim Hikmet, “The most beautiful sea” that “hasn’t been crossed yet” and “the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you/I haven’t said yet.” We’ll search as readers, via our class workbook text, The Most Beautiful Sea: Poems & Pathways Toward Poems, and as writers, using in-class exercises, weekly letters with a partner, and weekly drafts. You’ll be required to work as partners and to make a chapbook of at least 10 pages by the end of the course. The only prerequisites are: a desire to be challenged, a thirst for reading that equals your thirst for writing, the courage to give up spectatorhood for active participation, and a willingness to undertake whatever labors might be necessary to read and write better on our last day of class than on our first.

Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and reattaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting. —Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

I’m always looking for new lenses to use with the writing and reading of poetry. As poets, we are natural collectors—collecting images, bits of dialogue, phrases, titles. In this poetry workshop, we will discuss and write about our collections (collections of facts, objects, memories) while looking at how collections of poems and prose are constructed/corralled/arranged. Books discussed will include, among others: The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, Obit by Victoria Chang, Frank Sonnets by Diane Seuss, Hoarders by Kate Durbin, The Octopus Museum by Brenda Shaughnessy, and various essays and handouts on collecting and artists who use collection as part of their practice. This semester, you might collect dreams or facts or an object that you regularly encounter on the street. How this informs your writing can be organic. You might become obsessed with a collector’s collection and write about it. You might use your collected delights to add a new color to your emotional palette. You might start looking at the objects in your poems in a different way, writing about them with greater specificity. Most weeks, there will be a collecting or poem prompt. Each student will give a 10- to 15-minute presentation on one of their collections.

How does a chronic illness affect a person’s orientation to the everyday? What are the social and political forces that underpin life in a homeless shelter? What is the experiential world of a blind person, a musician, a refugee, or a child at play? In an effort to answer these and like-minded questions, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in developing phenomenological accounts of particular lived realities in order to understand—and convey to others—the nuances and underpinnings of such realities in terms that more general social or symbolic analyses cannot achieve. In this context, phenomenology offers an analytic method that works to understand and describe in words phenomena as they appear to the consciousnesses of certain peoples. The phenomena most often in question for anthropologists include the workings of time, perception, selfhood, language, bodies, suffering, and morality as they take form in particular lives within the context of any number of social, linguistic, and political forces. In this course, we will explore phenomenological approaches in anthropology by reading and discussing some of the most significant efforts along these lines. Each student will also try their hand at developing a phenomenological account of a specific social or subjective reality through a combination of ethnographic research, participant observation, and ethnographic writing.

In this class, graduate and upperclass undergraduate students with a special interest and experience in the creation of time-based artworks that include live performance will design and direct individual projects. Students and faculty will meet weekly to view works-in-progress and discuss relevant artistic and practical problems, both in class on Tuesday evenings and in conferences taking place on Thursday afternoons. Attributes of the work across multiple disciplines of artistic endeavor will be discussed as integral and interdependent elements in the work. Participation in mentored, critical-response feedback sessions with your peers is a key aspect of the course. The engagement with the medium of time in live performance, the constraints of presentation of the works both in works-in-progress and in a shared program of events, and the need to respect the classroom and presentation space of the dance studio will be the constraints imposed on the students’ artistic proposals. Students working within any number of live-performance traditions are as welcome in this course as those seeking to transgress orthodox conventions. While all of the works will engage in some way with embodied action, student proposals need not fall neatly into a traditional notion of what constitutes dance. The cultivation of open discourse across traditional disciplinary artistic boundaries, both in the process of developing the works and in the context of presentation to the public, is a central goal of the course. The faculty members leading this course have roots in dance practice but also have practiced expansive definitions of dance within their own creative work. The course will culminate in performances of the works toward the end of the semester in a shared program with all enrolled students and within the context of winter and spring time-based art events. Performances of the works will take place in the Bessie Schönberg Dance Theatre or elsewhere on campus in the case of site-specific work.

As we want to engage in individual and collective efforts toward sustainable and climate-change mitigating solutions, this workshop offers an opportunity for students to explore the multiple ways in which “sustainability” can be fostered and developed at an institution like Sarah Lawrence College. Students will work in small groups on a variety of projects and produce research and educational material that can lead to concrete and actionable proposals for the College and our community to consider. Students will determine their own areas of interest and research, from energy and water-usage monitoring to composting solutions, recycling/reusing and consumer sobriety, landscaping choices, pollinators and natural diversity, food growing, natural and human history of the land, and community collaborations, to name a few. As part of their project effort, students will engage with College administrators who are actively working toward sustainable solutions, as well as student, staff, and faculty groups such as the Warren Green vegetable garden, the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collective on the Environment (SLICE), and the Sustainability Committee. We will also explore the possibility of writing grants in coordination with other actors at the College. This workshop will meet once a week for one hour. It is offered as pass/fail based on attendance and a group project that will mostly be developed during our meeting time. It is open to all students, including first-year students. All skills and areas of expertise are welcome, from environmental science to writing and visual and studio arts—but any interest in issues of sustainability and a strong sense of dedication will suffice!

This course will take the form of a screening and discussion seminar designed to provide an overview of alternative and experimental animations derived from the creative practice of transforming stories of trauma and struggle into films of artistic merit. We will examine various forms of animated work produced between 1960 and the present, asking ourselves: Can animations about serious subjects lighten sad, macabre, depressing, and even horrific moments with a sense of playfulness and controlled distance? The class will survey a wide range of work from a diverse selection of artists operating in cinematic film forms alternative to commercial animation. These will include, but not be limited to, hand-drawn, cell-painted, cutout, stop-motion, pixilated, puppet, digital, and, more recently, CGI independents. In most cases, auteur artists working with stories of trauma, memory, language, and struggle—whether personal, social, or political—are attempting to put their subjects in perspective. Using the core of these sources to pose difficult and personal questions, artist-animators tackle tough issues that ultimately serve as a reflection and reframing of experience. In response to the films we watch, the class group will discuss how personal and cultural struggles have been used as resonating topics large enough to act as a central conflict for animated films. Through screenings, readings, panels of visitors, and discussions, we will investigate both the reasoning for and success of animation's ability to confront the problems that challenge us. Students in this class will be expected to participate in discussions during conference meetings. Animation production will not be taught; however, a creative conference project in studio arts, writing, media, or performing arts will be required. In addition, students will be expected to complete weekly readings and entries in a research/creative practice notebook.

This is a course in which you will conceive a short film from its very basis to the final completion. In the first half of the year, we will explore a creative and deep examination of the foundations and processes of writing with images and sounds. The course provides a path to a certain type of sensitivity that helps writers create not just the screenplay for the course but also all of their screenplays to follow. What are the fundamental skills you need for writing a film? What is the time of observation that we need to do in order to be able to translate it into words? The script is a descriptive representation of the images and sounds that the writer has created in his or her imagination—beginning with the construction of an image that nests a story and exploring its possible forms and shapes, imagining characters from the inside outward, and then situating them in the image to let them grow. In the second part of the year, we will be exploring all of the areas of staging and styles in order to digest all of the information that we can make out of the script—from the very first impression of our story, through the actual image, until the editing. Working with each other on projects in a constructive and meaningful way and exploring an audiovisual style, the course will provide interaction and exposure to a wide range of types of film styles— from small to large productions. Some of our guiding questions will be: How do we understand the core of our image? How do we see scripts from a directing point of view? How is the image able to transmit emotions and thoughts? How can we develop critical and well-formulated thoughts of a film idea and expand our personal visual research? This class will have weekly conferences at least for the first semester.

Animation is the magic of giving life to objects and materials through motion. Whether through linear storytelling or conceptual drive, a sense of wonder is achieved with materials, movement, and transformation. In this class, students will learn the fundamentals of making animated films in a hands-on workshop environment where we are actively creating during class meetings and labs. The class will include instruction in a variety of stop-motion techniques, including: cut-out paper animation, sand on glass, sequential drawing using pencil and paper or chalk boards, object animation, and simple puppet animation. We will cover all aspects of progressive movement, especially the laying out of ideas through time and the development of convincing (if abstract) characters and motion. The course will cover basic design techniques and considerations, including materials, execution, and color. We will also have a foundational study of the history of experimental animation by viewing the animated film work of artists from around the globe. During the semester, each student will complete five short, animated films ranging in length from 30 seconds to one minute. Students are required to provide their own external hard drives and some additional art materials. Software instruction will include AfterEffects, Adobe Premier, and Dragonframe.

In this course, students will develop animation and micro storytelling skills by focusing on the process of creating frame-by -frame digital drawings and keyframe movement for animation. This course is essentially an introduction to both the professional digital software, Harmony by Toon Boom, and the process of digital drawing and rotoscoping. Instruction will be based in the software, Toon Boom Harmony Premium, and will include line style, visualization, character development, continuity, timing, and compositing. All of the production steps required to develop simple 2D digital animations will be demonstrated and applied through exercises aimed at the production of a single animated scene. Participants will develop and refine their personal style through exercises in digital animation and assignments directed at increasing visual understanding. Digitally-drawn images (with the option to include live action and photographs) will be assembled in sync to sound. Compositing exercises will cover a wide range of motion graphics, including green screen, keyframing, timeline effects, 2D and 3D space, layering, and pose-by-pose movement. This one-semester class will provide students with a working knowledge of the emerging and highly efficient software Harmony, recently adopted by the film and TV animation industry. Conference projects involve each student’s production of a single, refined animated scene. Students interested in then continuing in 2D digital animation in the spring semester will be encouraged to take the subsequent Intermediate/Advanced 2D Animation course.

This course will take the form of a screening and discussion seminar designed to provide an overview of alternative and experimental animations derived from the creative practice of transforming stories of trauma and struggle into films of artistic merit. We will examine various forms of animated work produced between 1960 and the present, asking ourselves: Can animations about serious subjects lighten sad, macabre, depressing, and even horrific moments with a sense of playfulness and controlled distance? The class will survey a wide range of work from a diverse selection of artists operating in cinematic film forms alternative to commercial animation. These will include, but not be limited to, hand-drawn, cell-painted, cutout, stop-motion, pixilated, puppet, digital, and, more recently, CGI independents. In most cases, auteur artists working with stories of trauma, memory, language, and struggle—whether personal, social, or political—are attempting to put their subjects in perspective. Using the core of these sources to pose difficult and personal questions, artist-animators tackle tough issues that ultimately serve as a reflection and reframing of experience. In response to the films we watch, the class group will discuss how personal and cultural struggles have been used as resonating topics large enough to act as a central conflict for animated films. Through screenings, readings, panels of visitors, and discussions, we will investigate both the reasoning for and success of animation's ability to confront the problems that challenge us. Students in this class will be expected to participate in discussions during conference meetings. Animation production will not be taught; however a creative conference project in studio arts, writing, media, or performing arts will be required. In addition, students will be expected to complete weekly readings and entries in a research/creative practice notebook.

This course delves into the foundational aspects of preproduction and developmental concepts for media projects. Students will engage in “World Building” exercises, wherein they research and design thematic approaches for specific projects. Emphasis will be placed on character development, compositional illustration, object and prop design, and scene building. Through the exploration of prompt themes, students will craft fully-realized projects that embody visual style, consistent form and function, and unified meaning, leading to the creation of unique media concepts. Both hand-drawn techniques and digital drawing tools will be utilized throughout the semester, with various software employed for character design, background paintings, and concept presentations. This course demands a commitment to the further development of drawing skills and is labor intensive. While having basic drawing skills is advantageous, students will be challenged to expand their abilities throughout the course. Multiple preproduction projects will be created to deepen understanding of thematic concepts. The final project will involve the production of a fully-developed, multicharacter/environment concept presentation. The knowledge gained in this course can be applied to creating and enhancing a preproduction or art portfolio, establishing a concept outline for an interactive media project, or developing characters and environments for graphic novels or films.

This course is designed to enlighten our creative consciousness, using music and nonfiction filmmaking as tools for liberation. Music and other sonic experiences are intrinsically connected to how we witness, experience, and tell nonfiction stories. In this course, we will examine work where the score itself plays a character while creating films of our own inspired by the soundtrack as a living piece of our form. Broken into groups, students collectively create a five-minute film that invites the viewer into subjects that are engaging and new while challenging the binary and often Western notion of what storytelling can be. The role that music and sound can play as a form of protest, meditation, and transformation is at the heart of our visual experience. In the spirit of global movements toward a more just and sustainable world, this course infuses a cinematic quest for truth in storytelling with the undeniable power that music brings to our understanding of a moment in time a scene, a relationship, and ourselves. From American Utopia to Amazing Grace and Gimme Shelter, students will screen, discuss, and be inspired to create work that challenges all of the senses.

Film has become one of the most dominant forms of visual media and creative expression. In this seminar/workshop for the budding director, we will first focus on the filmmaking fundamentals that every filmmaker needs to know in order to tell an effective story on screen: basic filmmaking terms, crew positions, camera operation, shot angles and composition, camera movement, basic lighting, sound recording, and editing. Students will also learn to how to create shot lists, floor plans, and other important tools necessary for a successful shoot. Initially, solo shooting assignments will be given, allowing students to begin to develop their own cinematic voice. Because collaboration is key in filmmaking, students will also be divided into small groups for several weekly assignments, giving them the opportunity to serve in various roles on the crew. The idea is for students to acquire the skills needed for creating compelling cinematic work on their own and with others.

Film has become one of the most dominant forms of visual media and creative expression. In this seminar/workshop for the budding director, we will first focus on the filmmaking fundamentals that every filmmaker needs to know in order to tell an effective story on screen: basic filmmaking terms, crew positions, camera operation, shot angles and composition, camera movement, basic lighting, sound recording, and editing. Students will also learn to how to create shot lists, floor plans, and other important tools necessary for a successful shoot. Initially, solo shooting assignments will be given, allowing students to begin to develop their own cinematic voice. Because collaboration is key in filmmaking, students will also be divided into small groups for several weekly assignments, giving them the opportunity to serve in various roles on the crew. The idea is for students to acquire the skills needed for creating compelling cinematic work both on their own and with others.

The screenplay is the starting point for nearly every film, television, or web series. The majority of our favorite films and television shows begin with a writer and an idea. Aimed at the beginning screenwriter, this course will focus on the fundamentals of visual storytelling—story, structure, style, character development, dialogue, outlining, and formatting. Weekly writing prompts will be given, focusing on the highlighted fundamentals of the previous week. Assignments will then be read and discussed in class, using a structured feedback paradigm. In addition, students will be given weekly viewing and reading assignments as a way to strengthen their script-analysis skills. For conference, students will work on an independent, short screenplay that they will outline, write, and revise throughout the semester.

In this yearlong seminar, we will begin by examining competing paradigms and approaches to understanding “development” and the “Third World.” We will set the stage by answering the question: What did the world look like 500 years ago? The purpose of this part of the course is to acquaint us with and to analyze the historical origins and evolution of a world political economy of which the "Third World" is an intrinsic component. We will thus study the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of merchant and finance capital, and the colonization of the world by European powers. We will analyze case studies of colonial "development" to understand the evolving meaning of this term. These case studies will help us assess the varied legacies of colonialism apparent in the emergence of new nations through the fitful and uneven process of decolonization that followed. The next part of the course will look at the United Nations and the role that some of its associated institutions have played in the post-World War II global political economy, one marked by persistent and intensifying socioeconomic inequalities as well as frequent outbreaks of political violence across the globe. By examining the development institutions that have emerged and evolved since 1945, we will attempt to unravel the paradoxes of development in different eras. We will deconstruct the measures of development through a thematic exploration of population, resource use, poverty, access to food, the environment, agricultural productivity, and different development strategies adopted by Third World nation-states. We will then examine globalization and its relation to emergent international institutions and their policies; for example, the IMF, World Bank, AIIB, and WTO. We will then turn to contemporary development debates and controversies that increasingly find space in the headlines—widespread land grabbing by sovereign wealth funds, China, and hedge funds; the “global food crisis”; epidemics and public-health challenges; and the perils of climate change. Throughout the course, our investigations of international institutions, transnational corporations, the role of the state, and civil society will provide the backdrop for the final focus of the class: the emergence of regional coalitions for self-reliance, environmental and social justice, and sustainable development. Our analysis of development in practice will draw upon case studies primarily from Africa but also from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States. Conference work will be closely integrated with the themes of the course, with a two-stage substantive research project beginning in the fall semester and completed in the spring. Project presentations will incorporate a range of formats, from traditional papers to multimedia visual productions. Smaller creative projects are also a component of the course, including podcasts, videos, art, music, and other forms. Where possible and feasible, students will be encouraged to do primary research during fall study days and winter and spring breaks. Some experience in the social sciences is desired but not required.

Qualified students will attend the twice-weekly group conferences for Intermediate Greek (see course description) and complete all assignments required for those conferences.

Qualified students will attend the twice-weekly seminar meetings for What Should I Do? Democracy, Justice, and Humanity in Ancient Greek Tragedy (see course description under Literature) and complete the reading assignments for that course. Students will also meet in group conference twice a week to read (in Greek) and discuss one ancient Greek tragedy selected by the group. 

South Asia, a region at the geographic center of the world’s most important cultural, religious, and commercial encounters for millennia, has a rich history of cultural exchanges. Its central location on the Indian Ocean provided it with transnational maritime connections to Africa and Southeast Asia, while its land routes facilitated constant contact with the Eurasian continent. The region has witnessed numerous foreign rules, from the early Central Asian Turkic dynasties to the Mughals and, finally, the British. After gaining independence from British colonial rule, the region was eventually partitioned into three different nations—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—each with its distinctive form of government. South Asia has produced a significant diaspora worldwide, preserving its cultural heritage and creating further cultural exchanges with the adopted nations, thereby influencing global culture. Despite facing development challenges and political instability, South Asia is rapidly developing within the capitalistic world economy and becoming an important player on the global scene, both politically and culturally. This course will provide students with a survey of South Asia from the era of the early Indus Civilization to the present. Lectures and sources will trace major political events and the region’s cultural, ecological, and economic developments that have significantly shaped South Asian history. Students will analyze both primary and secondary sources, enhancing their understanding of this diverse society. They are expected to engage in lectures, reading, class discussions, group work, and writing to examine the major themes and debates in South Asian history and develop sound arguments.

The Indian Ocean is the third-largest ocean in the world and contributes almost 30 percent to the total oceanic realm of our planet. Current scholars have defined the Indian Ocean to include the oceanic and littoral spaces in the southwest from the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, to the Red Sea in the north, then horizontally through to the South China Sea in the east, and down to Australia in the southeast. Commerce around the Indian Ocean continued as a web of production and trade that spanned across the ports of India, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Indian Ocean ports were the fulcrum of maritime trade that precipitated spontaneous transcultural interactions between traders and inhabitants of different geographic regions who mingled there to exchange commodities. Ships followed monsoons or seasonal wind patterns, and sailors were obliged to wait at length for return departures from ports, which was a significant cause of cultural transfer. Various religions, including Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, were mobile across the Indian Ocean networks; and extant beliefs, practices, and material cultures are evidence. The study of the Indian Ocean World (IOW), as some historians have termed it, is a newly emerging field in world history. New evidence from historical research of the last 30 years has recovered the lost significance of this region, which was the center of a robust and complex trade and cultural network for a millennium and that continues today. This course is designed to provide students with a survey of Indian Ocean world history from the medieval to the colonial era. Lectures and sources will help students deepen their knowledge of peoples and cultures around the Indian Ocean and gain a wider appreciation for the transnational trade and cultural and religious networks that existed there. Students will learn to examine that globalization is not a modern phenomenon but, rather, an ongoing aspect of the Indian Ocean. Each week, students will evaluate sources that explore the discrete regions of the Indian Ocean, their people, and the religious networks, commercial exchanges, migrations, and political events that they engender to make a complex and dynamic connected history. Students are expected to engage in lectures, reading, class discussions, group work, and writing to examine the major themes and debates in Indian Ocean history and develop sound arguments.

This course, for students with no previous knowledge of Italian, aims at providing a complete foundation in the Italian language, with particular attention to oral and written communication and all aspects of Italian culture. The course will be conducted in Italian after the first month and will involve the study of all basic structures of the language—phonological, grammatical, and syntactical—with practice in conversation, reading, composition, and translation. In addition to material covering basic Italian grammar, students will be exposed to fiction, poetry, songs, articles, recipe books, and films. Group conferences (held once a week) aim at enriching the students’ knowledge of Italian culture and developing their ability to communicate. This will be achieved by readings that deal with current events and topics relative to today’s Italian culture. Activities in pairs or groups, along with short written assignments, will be part of the group conference. In addition to class and the group conferences, the course has a conversation component in regular workshops with the language assistant. Conversation classes are held twice a week (in small groups) and will center on the concept of Viaggio in Italia: a journey through the regions of Italy through cuisine, cinema, art, opera, and dialects. The Italian program organizes trips to the Metropolitan Opera and relevant exhibits in New York City, as well as the possibility of experiencing Italian cuisine firsthand as a group. The course is for a full year, by the end of which students will attain a basic competence in all aspects of the language.

This course aims at improving and perfecting the students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, as well as their knowledge of Italy’s contemporary culture and literature. In order to acquire the necessary knowledge of Italian grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary, a review of all grammar will be carried out throughout the year. As an introduction to modern Italian culture and literature, students will be introduced to a selection of short stories, poems, and passages from novels, as well as specific newspaper articles, music, and films in the original language. Some of the literary works will include selections from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Marcello D’Orta, Clara Sereni, Dino Buzzati, Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi, Alberto Moravia, Achille Campanile, and Elena Ferrante. In order to address the students’ writing skills, written compositions will be required as an integral part of the course. All material is accessible on MySLC. Conferences are held on a biweekly basis; topics might include the study of a particular author, literary text, film, or any other aspect of Italian society and culture that might be of interest to the student. Conversation classes (in small groups) will be held twice a week with the language assistant, during which students will have the opportunity to reinforce what they have learned in class and hone their ability to communicate in Italian. When appropriate, students will be directed to specific internship opportunities in the New York City area, centered on Italian language and culture.

One of the goals of this course is to demonstrate the ways in which modern poetry originated in the Romantic period. In the wake of the French Revolution, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge invented a new kind of autobiographical poetry that internalized the myths they had inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inner life became the inescapable subject of the poem. In the second semester, we will trace the impact of Romanticism on subsequent generations of poets writing in English, from Walt Whitman to T. S. Eliot. Our preeminent goal will be to appreciate each poet’s—indeed, each poem’s—unique contribution to the language. Our understanding of literary and historical trends will emerge from the close, imaginative reading of texts. Authors will include, among others: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Hardy, Frost, Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. Individual conferences will meet every week until October Study Days and every other week thereafter.

Autobiographies, biographies, diaries, and memoirs are all ways of capturing a life between the covers of a book. This FYS course in literature will examine various genres of life writing from the 19th through 21st centuries, from works that attempt to tell a full “cradle-to-grave” story of a life to experiments with shifting points of view or exploring nonhuman consciousness. We will read examples of life writing from the Victorian and Modernist periods, as well as more recent graphic memoirs and works of autofiction. Texts on the syllabus by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Orwell, Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson, and others reveal the expansiveness of life-writing genres. These texts will raise questions about how to distinguish truth from fabulation, whether it is possible to fully know ourselves or others, the degree to which an individual is shaped by his/her social environment, and the reliability of memory. We will look at how memoirists connect the introspective and personal to wider political and historical concerns and how biographers address both the triumphs and the failings of their famous subjects. Visiting speakers will discuss their experiences writing biographies and memoirs and what they have learned in the process about writing, researching, and publishing. Throughout the semester, students will engage in analytic and reflective writing that connects the course content to their own experiences and observations. For conference work, students will have a choice between three group conferences that will meet biweekly. Each conference group will focus on a distinct life-writing skill: reviews, interviews, and archival research. Conference projects will include the following options: 1) creating a review of books of recent biographies and memoirs; 2) contributing to an interview-based podcast series; and 3) making a digital project based on archival research. The goal of the course is to learn a range of writing and research skills while also tackling big questions about what it means to live a good life. Examining how to write a life, we will also explore how to make a life as a writer in college and beyond.

This course will examine literature written by late 19th- and 20th-century Italian women writers. In the newly unified Italy, middle-class women began in great numbers to access and contribute to literature as both readers and writers. The increasing presence of women writers caused great upheaval, as the male literary establishment viewed the potential for a disruption to the canon. The anxiety caused by their presence is visible in the manner in which they were dismissed as imitating male literary models, accused of excessive sentimentality and self-disclosure, or dubbed by critics il pericolo roseo, “the pink danger” (L. Zuccoli, Corriere della sera, March 24, 1911). Yet, many of these women writers reveal sophistication in their ability to experiment with genres and styles and engage with some of Italy’s literary movements (e.g., verismo, futurism, magic realism, neorealism) and intellectuals, as well as crucial historical events such as fascism and World War II. As we will see, they often question or reverse traditional depictions of femininity. They show an awareness of the social roles and expectations demanded of them and often interrogate such roles and some of the tropes present in the works of the time (e.g., the femme fatale, the self-sacrificing wife and mother). Many of them assert their own defiant voice and their own perspective as women writers, (re)claiming a place in the canon of Italian literature. In this course, we will explore how their works address social issues related to family, marriage, and women’s changing roles, as well as the place of women’s writing in the Italian literary canon. Our readings will include works by Marchesa Colombi (M. A. Torriani), Sibilla Aleramo, Grazia Deledda, Ada Negri, Rosa Rosà, Paola Masino, Renata Viganò, Joyce Lussu, Anna Banti, Anna Maria Ortese, Alba de Céspedes, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and Dacia Maraini. These works will be examined in dialogue with the literary production and ideas of male or canonical authors. Primary sources will range from fiction (novels, short stories, and fictional diaries) to autobiographical texts, poems, plays, and newspaper articles; these sources will be supplemented by secondary readings on women’s literature and history and on occasion by films. No previous knowledge of Italian is required. Students proficient in Italian may opt to read sources in the original. Conference topics may include the study of a particular author, literary text, or topic relevant to the course and that is of interest to the student. As an FYS course, students will meet individually in conference with the instructor/don every week until October Study Days and every two weeks after that.

Are human beings capable of self-government? What does that require? As modern authoritarian movements imperil democratic institutions, norms, and the rule of law, ancient Greek tragedies illuminate values and aspirations underpinning democracy and modern liberal ideals of justice, equality, and universal human rights. Tragedy and democracy emerged simultaneously in ancient Athens in the late 6th century BCE and flourished throughout the 5th century BCE. Ancient Greece never achieved egalitarian politics or anything close to universal human rights, but Athenian tragedies emphasize the essential equality of all human beings in our vulnerability to suffering and death. Surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides dramatize the costs of tyranny, anger, vengeance, and cruelty—to perpetrators, as well as to victims. Commending honesty, generosity, and compassion, tragedies locate nobility not in genetic inheritance, group affiliation, socioeconomic status, numerical superiority, or even moral or ideological convictions but, rather, in our conduct as individuals. Tragedies expose the consequences of human words and actions, as characters make choices conducive to success or failure for themselves and their communities. State-sponsored and publicly performed, tragedies made self-reflection and self-criticism a fundamental feature of Athenian democratic politics and society. “What should I do?” encapsulates the central question of every ancient Greek tragedy and every moment of our own lives. This course is designed for anyone interested in understanding the false promise of authoritarianism and appreciating the origins, goals, and possibilities for a free, humane, equitable democratic society.

Against the backdrop of the bloodiest half-century in human history, Continental European culture produced an astonishingly rich and diverse body of lyric poetry. Robert Frost famously remarked that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But the unmistakable genius of modern European poetry survives its passage into English (inevitable losses notwithstanding), thanks in no small part to the inspired efforts of its translators. In this course, we will learn to hear the voices they have made available to English-language readers, often comparing multiple translations of a single poem or referring to the original in opposing-page editions. We will read selections from at least 12 poets translated from seven languages, including: Cavafy, Valéry, Rilke, Trakl, Pessoa, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Lorca, Cernuda, Montale, and Celan.

The creative process is paradoxical. It involves freedom and spontaneity yet requires expertise and hard work. The creative process is self-expressive yet tends to unfold most easily when the creator forgets about self. The creative process brings joy yet is fraught with fear, frustration, and even terror. The creative process is its own reward yet depends on social support and encouragement. In this class, we look at how various thinkers conceptualize the creative process—chiefly in the arts but in other domains, as well. We see how various psychological theorists describe the process, its source, its motivation, its roots in a particular domain or skill, its cultural context, and its developmental history in the life of the individual. Among the thinkers that we will consider are Freud, Amabile, Arnheim, Franklin, and Gardner. Different theorists emphasize different aspects of the process. In particular, we see how some thinkers emphasize persistent work and expert knowledge as essential features, while others emphasize the need for the psychic freedom to “let it happen” and speculate on what emerges when the creative person “lets go.” Still others identify cultural context and motivational or biological factors as critical. To concretize theoretical approaches, we look at how various ideas can contribute to understanding specific creative people and their work. In particular, we will consider works written by or about Picasso, Woolf, Welty, Darwin, and some contemporary artists and writers. Though creativity is most frequently explored in individuals, we also consider group improvisation in music and theatre. Some past conference projects have involved interviewing people engaged in creative work. Others consisted of library studies centering on the life and work of a particular creative person. And some students chose to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center and focus on an aspect of creative activity in young children.

Children’s books are an important bridge between adults and the world of children. What makes a children’s book attractive and developmentally appropriate for a child of a particular age? What is important to children as they read or listen? How do children become readers? How do picture-book illustrations complement the words? How can children’s books portray the uniqueness of a particular culture or subculture, allowing those within to see their experience reflected in books and those outside to gain insight into the lives of others? To what extent can books transcend the particularities of a given period and place? Course readings include writings about child development; works about children’s literature; and, most centrally, children’s books themselves—picture books, fairy tales, and novels for children. Class emphasis will be on books for children up to the age of about 12. Among our children’s book authors will be Margaret Wise Brown, C. S. Lewis, Katherine Paterson, Maurice Sendak, Matt de la Pena, Christopher Paul Curtis, E. B. White, and Vera B. Williams. Many different kinds of conference projects are appropriate for this course. In past years, for example, students have written original work for children (sometimes illustrating it, as well), traced a theme in children’s books, worked with children (and their books) in fieldwork and service-learning settings, explored children’s books that illuminate particular racial or ethnic experiences, or examined books that capture the challenge of various disabilities. At the end of each class session, we will have story time, during which two students will share childhood favorites.

In public discourse, we are bombarded with assertions of the newly “global” nature of the contemporary world. This assertion assumes that former stable categories of personhood, ideational systems, nation, identity, and space are now fragmented and transcended by intensified travel, digital technology, and cross-cultural contact. This seminar is based on the premise that people have traveled throughout history; current global moves are but the most recent manifestation of a phenomenon that has historically occurred in many forms and places. This long(er) view of mobility will allow us to rethink and reexamine not only our notions of travel but their shifting connotations and significance across time and space. We will explore how supposed stable categories—such as citizen, refugee, nation, and commodity—are constructed and consider several theoretical approaches that help us make sense of these categorizations, the processes accompanying their normalization and dissemination, and their underlying assumptions. Our questions will include: What are the political, navigational, and epistemological foundations that go into mapmaking and schemas of classification? How do nomads change into settled city dwellers or wageworkers? How does time become disciplined? How does travel change into tourism? How do commodities travel and acquire meaning? What is the relationship between legal and illicit moves? How do technologies of violence, such as weapons and drugs, circulate? What is the meaning of their circulation in different contexts? How do modern technologies enable time/space compression? What are the shifting logics of globalization? What is their relationship to our notions and constructions of authenticity, subjectivity, and identity? During the fall semester, we will begin by developing an analytical approach toward our topic (which we will continue to develop throughout the year). We will then consider the implications of classification, categorization, and mapping. For the remainder of the semester, we will follow the travel(s) of ideas, commodities, and people. In the process, we will begin to think about questions of time/space compression. In the spring, we will return to some of the themes of the fall semester but examine them in a different context and through a different lens. Among our concerns in the spring semester will be issues of fusion and hybridization in cultural practices regarding people and things (e.g., food, music, romance, families); shifting places (e.g., borders, travel, and tourism); time/space compression through new technologies of travel and communication; and drugs, terror, violence, and poverty. As our sources, we will rely primarily on interdisciplinary analytical writings but will also include travel narratives, literature, and films.

Experiment and explore contemporary performance art. Through surveying a range of important artworks and movements, we will review the histories, concepts, and practices of performance art. Born from anti-art, performance art challenges the boundaries of artistic expression through implementing, as material, the concepts of space, time, and the body. Examples of artists that we will review are John Cage, Joan Jonas, Adrian Piper, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Simone Forti, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Pope.L, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Janine Antoni, Suzanne Lacy, Aki Sasamoto, and Anna Halprin, to name a few. We will review dialogues and movements introducing performance art, such as art interventions, sculpture, installation art, institutional critique, protest art, social media, video art, happenings, dada, comedy, sound art, graphic notation, scores, collaboration, and dance/movement. Students will be able to relate the form and function of performance art through research, workshopping ideas, experimentation, and improvisation—thereby developing the ability to confidently implement any method of the performance art genre.

Since the early 20th century, artists have explored performance art as a radical means of expression. In both form and function, performance pushes the boundaries of contemporary art. Artists use the medium for institutional critique, for social activism, and to address the personal politics of gender, sexuality, and race. This course approaches performance art as a porous, transdisciplinary medium open to students from all disciplines, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, video, filmmaking, theatre, dance, music, creative writing, and digital art. Students learn about the legacy of performance art from the 1970s to the present and explore some of the concepts and aesthetic strategies used to create works of performance. Through texts, artists’ writings, video screenings, and slide lectures, students are introduced to a range of performance-based artists and art movements.