Columbia University School of the Arts
Graduate Writing Program
FALL 2014
COURSEBOOK

Workshops  Seminars  Translation Courses
 Lectures  Master Classes
Updated: August 22, 2014
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Courses by Day and Time
Workshops
1
Seminars and Translation Courses
2
Lectures
4
Master Classes
5
Course Descriptions
Seminars
6
Translation Courses
23
Lectures
26
Master Classes
30
WORKSHOPS (6 - 9 points)
FICTION – Open (6 points)
NONFICTION – Open (6 points)
Bharati Mukherjee
Monday, 10am-1pm
Sam Lipsyte
Monday, 1:05pm-4:05pm
Ben Marcus
Monday, 1:05pm-4:05pm
Donald Antrim
Thursday, 5:35pm-8:35pm
Victor LaValle
Tuesday, 12:15pm-3:15pm
Deborah Eisenberg
Wednesday, 1:05pm-4:05pm
Binnie Kirshenbaum
Wednesday, 1:40pm-4:40pm
Stacey D’Erasmo
Wednesday, 3:10pm-6:10pm
Paul Beatty
Thursday, 12:05pm-3:05pm
Nicholas Christopher
Thursday, 2:10pm-5:10pm
Alexander Chee
Friday, 11am-2pm
Daniel Bergner
Monday, 6:15pm-9:15pm
Patricia O'Toole
Tuesday, 3:10pm-6:10pm
Alana Newhouse
Wednesday, 10am-1pm
Cris Beam
Thursday, 5:15pm-8:15pm
POETRY – Open (6 points)
Mark Strand
Monday, 1:05pm-4:05pm
Richard Howard
Tuesday, 4pm-7pm
Lucie Brock-Broido
Tuesday, 4:30pm-8:30pm
Timothy Donnelly
Tuesday, 4:30pm-8:30pm
Dorothea Lasky
Wednesday, 12:05pm-3:05pm
NONFICTION – Thesis (9 points)*
Phillip Lopate
Monday, 1:05pm-4:05pm
Lis Harris
Tuesday, 1:15pm-4:15pm
Richard Locke
Tuesday, 2:10pm-5:10pm
Margo Jefferson
Wednesday, 10am-1pm
*Second-Years only
1
SEMINARS AND TRANSLATION COURSES (3 points)
—MONDAY—
—TUESDAY—
Wayne Koestenbaum (NF)
Notebooks and Other Irregular Accountings
Monday, 11am-1pm
Lis Harris (NF)
Profiles
Tuesday, 10am-12pm
Rivka Galchen (F)
Hideous (and Other) Progeny
Monday, 4:10pm-6:10pm
Christine Schutt (F)
The Novel in Transit
Tuesday, 10am-12pm
Rebecca Godfrey (F)
Anti-Heroines
Monday, 4:10pm-6:10pm
Lara Vapnyar (F)
Sensual Writing
Tuesday, 11am-1pm
Sigrid Nunez (F)
Life and Story
Monday, 4:10pm-6:10pm
Matvei Yankelevich (CG)
The Art of the Book
Tuesday, 11am-1pm
Erroll McDonald (F)
William Faulkner and World Fiction
Monday, 5pm-7pm
Phillip Lopate (NF)
The Personal Essay
Tuesday, 12:05pm-2:05pm
Michael Greenberg (NF)
Writing the City
Monday, 6:15pm-8:15pm
Deborah Eisenberg (F)
Studies in Short Fiction
Tuesday, 1:05pm-3:05pm
Timothy Donnelly (P)
Shakespeare’s Poetics
Tuesday, 1:15pm-3:15pm
James Lasdun (F)
Murder and Mayhem
Tuesday, 5:15pm-7:15pm
William Wadsworth (CG)
Mot Juste
Tuesday, 6:15pm-8:15pm
2
SEMINARS AND TRANSLATION COURSES (cont’d.)
—THURSDAY—
—WEDNESDAY—
Darryl Pinckney (F)
Uses of the First Person
Thursday, 10am-12pm
Alyson Waters (T)
Literary Translation:
Introductory Workshop
Wednesday, 11am-1:30pm
Susan Bernofsky (T)
Literary Translation:
Advanced Workshop
Thursday, 11am-1:30pm
Alan Ziegler (CG)
The Writer as Teacher
Wednesday, 12:15pm-3:15pm
Nicholas Christopher (CG)
Mosaics: Unified Collections of
Fiction and Poetry
Thursday, 11am-1pm
Wendy Lesser (NF)
Writing About the Arts
Wednesday, 1:05pm-3:05pm
Susan Bernofsky (T)
The European Fairy Tale: A Modern History
Wednesday, 2:10pm-4pm
Sheila Kohler (NF)
Narrative Techniques in
Freud’s Case Histories
Thursday, 12:05pm-2:05pm
Elissa Schappell (F)
Where Are You Going,
How Do You Get There?
Wednesday, 3:10pm-5:10pm
Lucie Brock-Broido (P)
The Practice of Poetry
Wednesday, 3:20pm-6:20pm
David Hinton (T)
Another Universe: A Meander
Through Wilderness Thought in
Ancient Chinese and Modern
American Poetry
Thursday, 2:10pm-4:10pm
Darcey Steinke (F)
Among the Believers
Wednesday, 4:10pm-6:10pm
Patricia O’Toole (NF)
Thickening the Plot
Thursday, 3:10pm-5:10pm
Ben Metcalf (F)
An Earnest Look at Irony
Wednesday, 4:45pm-6:45pm
Teddy Wayne (F)
The Mechanics of Plotting Literary Fiction
Thursday, 4:15pm-6:15pm
Benjamin Taylor (NF)
Finding a Usable Past
Thursday, 4:15pm-6:15pm
Alan Gilbert (P)
Postwar American Poetry:
The 1950s and 1960s
Thursday, 6:20pm-8:20pm
3
LECTURES (3 points)
—MONDAY—
Joshua Cohen
Twentieth-Century Fiction: A Primer
Monday, 10am-1pm
(Note: This course runs Oct. 27 – Dec. 15.)
Brenda Wineapple
The Historical Imagination
Monday, 1:15pm-3:15pm
—TUESDAY—
Donald Antrim
The Fantastic and the Suspension of Disbelief
Tuesday, 5:35pm-7:35pm
—WEDNESDAY—
James Fenton
Hardy, Lawrence, and Auden
Wednesday, 10am-12pm
—THURSDAY—
Richard Locke
Twentieth-Century Literary Nonfiction
Thursday, 2pm-4pm
4 -
MASTER CLASSES (1 – 1.5 points)
—MONDAY—
—THURSDAY—
Peg Boyers
Throwing Our Voices: Translation and
Ventroliquism for Vampires and
Writers (1 pt.)
Sept. 15 – Oct. 6
Monday, 11am-1pm
Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
Memoir Strategies: Learning
From Other Literatures (1 pt.)
Oct. 2 – Oct. 23
Thursday, 10am-12pm
Clifford Thompson
Unique by Definition: The Personal
in the Critical/Journalistic (1 pt.)
Oct. 30 – Nov. 20
Thursday, 10am-12pm
Mitzi Angel
The Long and the Short of It (1.5 pts.)
Oct. 6 – Nov. 17
Monday, 6:15pm-8:15pm
—MONDAY and TUESDAY—
—FRIDAY—
Richard Ford
Using Place in Fiction (1.5 pts.)
Nov. 10, Monday, 11am-1pm
Nov. 11, Tuesday, 3:20pm-5:20pm
Nov. 17, Monday, 11am-1pm
Nov. 18, Tuesday, 3:20pm-5:20pm
Nov. 24, Monday, 11am-1pm
Nov. 25, Tuesday, 3:20pm-5:20pm
Stephen Burt (1 pt.)
Places and Poems about Places
Nov. 7 – Dec. 5
Friday, 11am-1pm
Owen King (1.5 pts.)
The Sportswriters
Sept. 12 – Oct. 17
Friday, 1:05pm-3:05pm
—TUESDAY—
Lia Purpura
The Lyric Essay (1 pt.)
Sept. 5 – Sept. 26
Friday, 1:05pm-3:05pm
James Wood
Fictional Technique in Novellas
and Short Stories (1 pt.)
Sept. 16 – Oct. 7
Tuesday, 3:20pm-5:20pm
Sadie Stein
Food in Writing (1 pt.)
Oct. 31 – Nov. 21
Friday, 1:05pm-3:05pm
—WEDNESDAY—
Rachel Sherman
The Mother Reflected in Literature (1.5 pts.)
Oct. 29 – Dec. 3
Wednesday, 10am-12pm
Lynn Chandhok
The Sentence (1 pt.)
Section 1: Sept. 5 – Sept. 26
Section 2: Oct. 3 – Oct. 31
(no class on Oct. 10)
Section 3: Nov. 7 – Dec. 5
Friday, 3:10pm-5:10pm
5 SEMINARS
Lucie Brock-Broido
The Practice of Poetry
(POETRY: Open to 1st-­‐Year Poetry students only) Wednesday, 3:20pm-­6:20pm Based on an unauthorized anthology which I’ve been shaping for twenty years (working title is Even More & More Trouble in Mind), we’ll be looking at an array of contemporary American poems through the lens of thirteen ways of inventing a Voice on the page. Each of these chapters is built around a particular assignment including: Leaping Poetry (Bly), The Numinous (Kunitz), The Duende (Lorca). We’ll be studying the construction of the line, the choreography of the voice on the page, the art of Violent Concision, the shaping of an American Sonnet, Closures, The Objective Correlative, The “Widerruf,” The Manifesto, Self-­‐Portraits, Triggering Poems, the Art of Revision, and, finally, we’ll move toward a definition of a new School called “Feral Poetry”—(which does not exist). Until we construct it. You’ll respond to each of the thirteen assignments. And these we’ll distribute and read aloud. And each of these assignments will be tailored to provoke a “subversive” exercise, that is to say—every rule may be bent unto broken. This is a seminar for first-­year poets only. The World According to Us. By way of introducing your work to your peers, please bring a poem to the first class which may be construed as either a Self-­Portrait or an Ars Poetica. Nicholas Christopher
Mosaics: Unified Collections of Fiction and Poetry
(CROSS-­‐GENRE) Thursday, 11am-­1pm We will examine assorted volumes of interconnected stories and book-­‐length sequences of poems and prose-­‐poems. The complex tension in such collections between the discrete, often eclectic, elements—whether stories or poems—and the unified whole make them a potent form that rivals the novel or long poem in imaginative resonance. By virtue of their verve and uniqueness, these books have influenced many others in their particular genres. The reading list is international, and thematically varied. 6
Reading list to include: A Universal History of Iniquity, Jorge Luis Borges The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter My Education: A Book of Dreams, William S. Burroughs Mr. Cogito, Zbigniew Herbert Red Cavalry, Isaac Babel Oriental Tales, Marguerite Yourcenar Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson The World Doesn’t End, Charles Simic Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Pu Songling In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway The Ink Dark Moon, Onono Komachi & Izumi Shikibu, trans. by Jane Hirshfield Sanskrit Love Poetry, trans. by W.S. Merwin Concerning the Angels (selections), Rafael Alberti Paris Spleen (selections), Charles Baudelaire The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz Timothy Donnelly
Shakespeare’s Poetics
(POETRY) Tuesday, 1:15pm-­3:15pm This course will examine Shakespeare’s major poetry (the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece) and four of his plays with emphasis on their versification, rhetoric, metaphor, wordplay, and commentary on the nature of language. Fundamental to our project will be a study of the sonnet form, including its transplantation into English, the sonnet craze of the 1590s, and a reading of Sir Philip Sidney’s sequence Astrophil and Stella in addition to Shakespeare’s own relatively late contribution to the tradition. We’ll also consider the history of blank verse from Surrey’s Aeneid through its evolution in the dramatic work of Marlowe and Shakespeare as well as a survey of Renaissance poetic and rhetorical theory, including such treatises as Sidney’s Apology for Poetry and Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric. Attention will also be paid to the “dynamic instability” of the early modern English, which was only just beginning to settle into respectability as an artistic medium when Shakespeare first set quill to parchment. Plays will include Romeo and Juliet (1595–96), Hamlet (1600–01), King Lear (1604–05), and The Tempest (1611), as well as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592). Readings will be supplemented by some of the most important Shakespearean and Renaissance scholarship from the last quarter-­‐century, including work by Harold Bloom, Stephen Greenblatt, Ted Hughes, Frank Kermode, Eve Sedgwick, and Helen Vendler. 7
Requirements: a few brief writing assignments, a short in-­‐class presentation, and two 5-­‐page written projects (critical or creative). Deborah Eisenberg
Studies in Short Fiction
(FICTION) Tuesday, 1:05pm-­3:05pm In this course we will read short things, and so it will be possible for us both to read a wide variety of things and to read with detailed attention. And, because narrative per se is rarely the dominant or most conspicuous element of short fiction, certain questions may present themselves with great clarity: In what, for example, if not the narrative exactly, does the substance and effect of one or another piece reside? What is it, in other words, that makes a particular text interesting or compelling? If we don’t believe (and I don’t happen to) that a piece of writing is excellent in so far as it conforms to ideas of how something ought to be written, then what is it that does make a particular piece of writing excellent? And it is excellence of one sort or another—profundity, power, inexhaustibility, beauty, integrity, passion, ambition, strangeness—for which course readings have been selected, rather than for point-­‐yielding properties or susceptibility to analysis and discussion. Although our main focus will be aesthetic matters, it should be interesting to note how fiction can address social concerns in a way that is different from the way nonfiction does, but which is surely equally powerful. And, conversely, to read some examples of work that is pristinely untouched by the “real” or “political” world that no one could consider trivial. We’ll hope to read small amounts of work by James Joyce, Isaac Babel, Katherine Mansfield, Heinrich von Kleist, Ivan Turgenev, Roberto Bolaño, Jane Bowles, John Cheever, Franz Kafka, Felisberto Hernandez, Hans Christian Andersen, E.T.A. Hoffman, Junichiro Tanizaki, Mavis Gallant, and Gregor von Rezzori, but I like to go very slowly, and we probably won’t get to all of the readings. Rivka Galchen
Hideous (and Other) Progeny
(FICTION) Monday, 4:10pm-­6:10pm Taking Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a central text, this course will think through the begats and their begettors as portrayed (and conspicuously not portrayed) in 8
novels, short stories, essays, manifestoes, and family trees. As we read portrayals of babies, monsters, artistic and political creations, and self-­‐appointed children, we will pay special attention to the way the writers handle the numinous and the banal, to the kinds of language imagined for these fresh offspring, and to the way these varied progeny embody and undermine the projections of their progenitors. Reading list to include: The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe “The Sandman,” E.T.A. Hoffman The Golem, Gustav Meyrink Every Day is Mother’s Day, Hilary Mantel Mrs. Caliban, Rachel Ingalls The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald Pregnancy Diary, Yoko Ogawa A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft The Millstone, Margaret Drabble “Feathers,” Raymond Carver The Myth of the Bamboo Cutter, Anonymous The Human Condition (excerpt), Hannah Arendt Alan Gilbert
Postwar American Poetry: The 1950s and 1960s
(POETRY) Thursday, 6:20pm-­8:20pm The 1950s in the United States are frequently portrayed as a time of uniformity and conventionality, both in society and in poetry. This seminar will examine groundbreaking poetic practices that arose in the wake of World War II and served as challenges to the dominant academic poetry of the time. It will focus primarily on the “confessional” poetry of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and others, and on the New American Poetry of figures such as Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Barbara Guest, etc. Although these two tendencies developed divergent forms and content, they initially shared a common dissatisfaction with the condition of poetry and the role of the poet in the United States as it moved from the relatively calm 1950s to the turbulent 1960s. We will look to connect the themes and poetic lineages discussed in class with our own poetry. The writing requirement is a 15-­‐
page creative portfolio or a critical paper of equal length. 9
Rebecca Godfrey
Anti-Heroines
(FICTION)
Monday, 4:10pm-­6:10pm In this seminar, we will explore the depictions of anti-­‐heroines in works by a range of authors in order to closely examine how these unruly characters disrupt conventional notions of femininity, as well as the story itself. We'll discuss the ways complex anti-­‐heroines, whether central or peripheral, can complicate and enrich novels and the short story. The course will focus particularly on characterization, language, and voice in both contemporary and classic works. The anti-­‐heroines discussed will often be wayward or unwanted—“fallen” women: recluses, seducers, imposters, eccentrics, and terrorists. Reading list to include: Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys Passing, Nella Larsen The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Marguerite Duras Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart Out, Natsuo Kirino Trance, Christopher Sorrentino Inferno (A Poet’s Novel), Eileen Myles NW, Zadie Smith Short stories by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Flannery O’Connor, Louise Erdrich, ZZ Packer, William Vollman, Jayne Anne Phillips, Lydia Davis. Michael Greenberg
Writing the City
(NONFICTION)
Monday, 6:15pm-­8:15pm This course will focus on the art of writing about city life, of penetrating a city's surface and being attuned to its deeper and unexpected energies. We will dip into some of the great literature of cities, both fiction and nonfiction, including I.B. Singer's Shadows on the Hudson, Dreiser on Chicago and New York, Dickens, Martin Amis and Iain Sinclair on London, Phillip Lopate, Teju Cole, Baudelaire, Joseph Roth and the great flâneurs, Maximum City by Suketu Mehta on Bombay, Raymond Chandler, Nathaniel West, Mike Davis and James Ellroy on Los Angeles... 10
Inspired by the reading, students will receive specific assignments to write short pieces about New York. Our goal will be to understand and identify how the city becomes alive within us, and how we can reflect this aliveness—in original ways—
in our writing. Lis Harris
Profiles
(NONFICTION)
Tuesday, 10am-­12pm One of the few forms of literary nonfiction available to serious writers that is still welcome in the magazine world, the profile form provides an opportunity to lavish attention both on the breadth of the profile subject’s life and on the profession, métier, or culture that is always the profile’s second subject. We will examine exemplary profiles by masters of the form, including A.J. Liebling, Joe Mitchell, Kenneth Tynan, and Lillian Ross, and identify the qualities their essays, as well as more recent pieces, have in common. The authors we study will be used as models for one profile submission at the end of the semester. The course will emphasize selection, interview, and research techniques and affords a rare opportunity to explore an off-­‐campus reported subject in depth. The problems and process of each student’s work-­‐in-­‐progress will be discussed weekly. Wayne Koestenbaum
Notebooks and Other Irregular Accountings
(NONFICTION) Monday, 11am-­1pm In this seminar, we will read autobiographical texts that work irregularly, spasmodically, haphazardly, with interruptions, in fragments, in abject states of disassembly, obeying the periodicities of the day, the commute, the mental lapse, the aside, the list, the epistle-­‐without-­‐addressee. These literary adventures—or accidents—go by many names: notebook, journal, pillow book, essay, treatise, novel, poem, letter. We might hesitate to call them anything in particular; we might, instead, apologize for their existence, and wish they would shape up. Or we might feel loyalty toward these wayward creatures; without wishing to corral them into a category, we might believe that they deserve congregation, that they have chartable and treasurable resemblances, and that they are inspiring models for contemporary composition. Our readings may include texts by Sei Shonagon (The Pillow Book), Henry David Thoreau (Journals), Alice James (Diary), Franz Kafka (The Blue Octavo Notebooks), Ludwig Wittgenstein (On Certainty), Walter Benjamin (On Hashish), Francis Ponge 11
(Mute Objects of Expression), Michel Leiris (Nights as Day, Days as Night), James Schuyler (Diary), Susan Sontag (As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks, 1964-­1980), Toi Derricotte (The Black Notebooks), Hervé Guibert (Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-­1991), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (A Dialogue on Love), David Markson (Vanishing Point), Clarice Lispector (Água Viva), Friedericke Mayröcker (brütt, or The Sighing Gardens), Myung Mi Kim (Dura), and Josep Pla (The Gray Notebook). Texts not originally written in English we will read in translation. Each week, students will write a two-­‐page essay, in response to specific assignments. These essays may exercise a notebook’s freedom to engage in irregular accounting. Sheila Kohler
Narrative Techniques in Freud’s Case Histories
(NONFICTION)
Thursday, 12:05pm-­2:05pm Why do we still read Freud’s case histories with such fascination? Why did he receive the Goethe prize and not the Nobel? Here we will discuss the literary aspects of these cases: language, structure, verisimilitude, and the ability to persuade us of “truths” that lie at the heart of the conflicts in the lives of these five patients: “Dora,” a seventeen-­‐year-­‐old girl who suffers from a plethora of ailments; “Little Hans,” a five-­‐year-­‐old child who is frightened of horses; the “Ratman,” a young lawyer preoccupied by a cruel torture involving rats; the “Wolfman,” a rich Russian who dreams of white wolves, and finally the President Schreber, who believes he can bring bliss back to the world if he is only to change his sex. Participants will be asked to read these texts closely, to discuss, and to write short essays on the case histories or related subjects of their choice. James Lasdun
Murder and Mayhem
(FICTION)
Tuesday, 5:15pm-­7:15pm Why does crime interest us? What goes into the making of a great crime story? How have different writers used the inherent fascination of criminality to tell stories that grip, thrill, disturb, enlighten, or otherwise affect us? This seminar will be partly an exploration of the range and conventions of crime writing, from Procedural Mystery to Psychological Thriller, from Noir to True Crime, and partly an examination of the larger possibilities of the form, whether for social commentary, stylistic innovation, or philosphical inquiry into the nature of evil. We will look at reportage as well as fiction, classics as well as contemporary works. 12
The books we’ll study will include the following: Double Indemnity, James M. Cain The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith The Vanishing, Tim Krabbe The Secret History, Donna Tartt In Cold Blood, Truman Capote The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler Miami Blues, Charles Willeford The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, George V. Higgins The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn Wendy Lesser
Writing About the Arts
(NONFICTION)
Wednesday, 1:05pm-­3:05pm In this course, students will learn to write descriptive and evaluative essays about the visual and performing arts. Outside field trips—some during class hours, some on evenings and weekends—will include visits to major art museums, small Chelsea galleries, sites of architectural interest, and rehearsals and performances of dance, music, opera, and theater. Class discussion will focus on these experiences as well as on the background reading, which will include two novels about the lives of performing artists: Henry James’s The Tragic Muse and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. There will be frequent in-­‐class writing and two assigned papers. Phillip Lopate
The Personal Essay
(NONFICTION)
Tuesday, 12:05pm-­2:05pm The personal essay is one of the oldest, noblest, and supplest of literary forms. At present it is, like the memoir and other creative nonfiction, going through a revival as a way for writers to come to terms with past experience and express thoughts and uncertainties through an exploratory process. Personal essays also suggest a voice of friendship, bonding reader to writer through candor and conversational qualities. This seminar will explore the personal essay in all its formal and topical varieties (memoir piece, rumination, humor, diatribe, nature writing, manners and lifestyle, politics, psychology, film criticism, lyric essay, experimental collage). 13
Readings will emphasize the masters of the historical tradition (such as Montaigne, Hazlitt, Lamb, Woolf, Orwell, McCarthy, Baldwin) as well as contemporary practitioners (such as Didion, Hoagland, Rodriguez, Sedaris, Mairs, Lethem). We will discuss the techniques by which one establishes a personal, confiding, trustworthy, and engaging voice on the page, and how one opens out the essay’s structure from its original premise. We will examine how personal essayists organize memories and experiences into discrete—if not discreet—personal essays. Students are expected to write two papers over the course of the term (either literary criticism or personal essay), and do one in-­‐class presentation of an author. Erroll McDonald
William Faulkner and World Fiction
(FICTION)
Monday, 5pm-­7pm Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez unabashedly claims William Faulkner as “my master,” says that “Faulkner is present in all the novels of Latin America,” and mischievously insists that “The Hamlet is the best South American novel ever written.” Since the 1950s, other major writers from around the world have similarly trumpeted the crucial influence of Faulkner on their writing. Why? What about Faulkner excited their imagination and inspired their work, allowing them to achieve their own singularities? This course aims to elucidate not only Faulkner’s formal inventions and literary techniques but his social and moral concerns, so as to examine how they inform such writers as Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia), Antonio Lobo Antunes (Portugal), Toni Morrison (United States), Juan Rulfo (Mexico), and Kateb Yacine (Algeria). Among the works we will read are: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Sanctuary, and The Sound and the Fury, Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent, Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, Lobo Antunes’s Act of the Damned, Morrison’s Beloved, Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, and Yacine’s Nedjma. The course will conclude with a reading of selections from Faulkner, Mississippi, meditations upon the writer by Martinican poet and critic Edouard Glissant. The course requirements are: a short (3-­‐5 page) piece of literary criticism on a clearly defined topic to be determined in consultation with the instructor—this essay will be orally presented to the class—and a 12-­‐15 page final exercise in imitation of any writer covered during the semester. 14
Ben Metcalf
An Earnest Look at Irony
(FICTION)
Wednesday, 4:45pm-­6:45pm In this seminar, we will examine works of fiction and that of a few crackerjack poets in order to determine what, precisely, we mean when we talk about irony on the page and what, precisely, we mean when we talk about earnestness. How are these very different effects (and affects) achieved? What are their benefits to the student author? What pitfalls, perceived or otherwise, attend the allure of each? What is the relationship of humor to earnestness, and of seriousness to irony? Is the absence of irony really the same thing as earnestness? Does the absence of earnestness somehow necessitate irony? With an eye toward technique, we will attempt to answer these and further questions by time spent among the words of those who fall all along, though often refuse to stay put on, the earnest-­‐ironic continuum. Students will be expected to write four short-­‐short (2-­‐ to 5-­‐page) stories throughout the semester, exploring for themselves this treacherous but ultimately skiable slope. With readings from Walter Abish, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), John Cheever, James Thurber, Raymond Carver, Veronica Geng, Donald Barthelme, Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Vladimir Nabokov, Stevie Smith, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett, James Baldwin, Brendan Behan, James Joyce, Anthony Burgess, Alice Munro, Zadie Smith, William Trevor, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Max Beerbohm, Margaret Atwood, Padgett Powell, Saki, W.E.B. Du Bois, Arthur Miller, Bruce Chatwin, David Foster Wallace, Paul West, J. M. Coetzee, Katherine Anne Porter, and others. Sigrid Nunez
Life and Story
(FICTION)
Monday, 4:10pm-­6:10pm In this seminar, we explore some of the very different ways writers have used material from life as a source for stories. How do writers transform personal experience into imaginative writing? How do a writer’s memories become a work of fiction? What is the difference between the self who narrates an event from the past and the self who actually lived through it? How is it possible for a work to be autobiographical and anti-­‐autobiographical at the same time, or for confessional writing to avoid narcissistic self-­‐absorption? Among the writers whose work will be discussed are Edward St. Aubyn, Christopher Isherwood, Jean Rhys, William Maxwell, John Cheever, Edna O’Brien, J. M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, David Markson, Jamaica Kincaid, Lydia Davis, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. 15
Patricia O’Toole
Thickening the Plot
(NONFICTION) Thursday, 3:10pm-­5:10pm Reality, the stuff of nonfiction, is disorganized, formless, random, unending. In short, reality has no plot. Authors of nonfiction narratives must discover the meanings and patterns in their subject matter and impose a plot—the force that gives a good narrative its momentum, tension, and direction. Through readings, class discussion, in-­‐class exercises, and written assignments, students will explore a wide range of plots and plot devices, principles for selecting one plot over another, and techniques for imposing a plot on the chaos that is reality. The class might also take in a movie, or visit a museum, in order to consider “plot” in other arts and in nature. Among the readings will be Tobias Wolff, “Bullet in the Brain”; essays by Richard Holmes and Jonathan Freedland, journalism by Katherine Boo, selections from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate and Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes; a couple of novels (Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge and Ian McEwan’s Saturday), and some book-­‐length works of nonfiction, including Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards and Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Darryl Pinckney
Uses of the First Person
(FICTION)
Thursday, 10am-­12pm In this seminar we will read and discuss imaginative prose in the first person that blurs the line between fiction and autobiography or memoir. The class will explore the use of the first person as a narrative strategy, especially when the writer is introducing unknown social history to his or her audience. The readings will include James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-­Colored Man, Safe Conduct by Boris Pasternak, The Pure and the Impure by Colette, Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Stop-­Time by Frank Conroy, Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid, The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, and What Is the What by Dave Eggers. 16
Elissa Schappell
Where Are You Going, How Do You Get There?
(FICTION)
Wednesday, 3:10pm-­5:10pm It’s ironic the stories that we most need to write, the ones that we alone can write, are often ones we are not writing. Why? The stakes are too high. The material makes us uncomfortable. We simply feel unequal to the task. Ridiculous. All we need are new traps. We need new tools, forms, and narrative devices that will allow us to move beyond our comfort zone under cover of artifice, so we can write something true. In this class, we will be doing both in-­‐ and outside class exercises, guided by the voices of authors such as Jayne Anne Phillips, Alice Munro, Etgar Keret, A.S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood, Amy Hempel, David Means, Toni Cade Bambara, Maggie Nelson, and David Gates. No creeps, no whiners. Christine Schutt
The Novel in Transit
(FICTION)
Tuesday, 10am-­12pm Inspired by Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel Sepharad, a course to do with journeys: “. . .(O)n the train on which he was deported to Auschwitz, Primo Levi met a woman he had known years before, and he says that during the journey they told each other things that living people do not tell, that only those on the other side of death dare say aloud.” People brought together on a journey tell stories to pass the time or entertain each other, and these stories, often intimate and always revelatory, are part of the transporting experience of novels involving travel in trains and cars, on boats and horses. Traveling from point A to B, the reader is often as disoriented by episodic, fragmentary, picaresque elements of the narrative as by the stories the travelers tell. Like clowns in the tiny car routine, characters emerge from memory to crowd the narrative. Even if chronology is strictly observed then, are such novels inherently retrospective? In consideration of this and other questions on character development and structure, novels by Michael Ondaatje, Antonio Munoz Molina, and Graham Swift, among others, will be read, as well as fiction by such writers as Marilynne Robinson and Denis Johnson where narrative is shadowed by images of transport. Beyond the expectation of active class participation, assessments will include several short writing assignments in response to the moods these authors cultivate and the strategies they employ. 17
Darcey Steinke
Among the Believers
(FICTION)
Wednesday, 4:10pm-­6:10pm All fictional characters have some sort of theology, what they believe in, what they yearn for, how they see themselves in the world of the material and the spiritual. Sometimes this belief system is religious and sometimes it is not. Writers also have a theological outlook that informs the themes and movement of their books. In this class we will discuss novels and short stories that deal in some way with the religious impulse. We will read works concerned with Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism, as well as novels that focus on a more primal religious impulse. The class will culminate in a party/salon at my house where we will share our final papers. Reading list will likely include: The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky Wise Blood, Flannery O’Conner The End of the Affair, Graham Greene The Passion According to GH, Clarice Lispector The Collected Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer Diary of a Country Priest, Georges Bernanos Let Me Show You More, Jamie Quatro Gravity and Grave, Simone Weil The Moviegoer, Walker Percy Ceremony, Leslie Silko Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami Home, Marilynne Robinson Benjamin Taylor
Finding a Usable Past
(NONFICTION)
Thursday, 4:15pm-­6:15pm Mortality makes us historical—moments in the sequence, links in the chain. We are not only ourselves but also those who came before us. We live not just in the present but in “the present moment of the past,” as T. S. Eliot famously says, the living stream of history, and if we know more than those who preceded us, it is because what they did, felt, thought, made and left behind are what we know. This seminar ranges across a variety of genres (autobiography, historical fiction, travel writing, political testimony, reportage) in order to explore how writers have discovered themselves anew by giving new life to the past. 18
We read most of the following: Father and Son, Edmund Gosse Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather The Pure and the Impure, Colette The Gate of Angels, Penelope Fitzgerald Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison American Pastoral, Philip Roth Another Day of Life, Ryszard Kapuscinski The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro Students will be asked to find a usable past of their own in a short story, memoir, or essay of between four and five thousand words, due on the last day of class. Please read Gosse’s Father and Son prior to our first meeting. Lara Vapnyar
Sensual Writing
(FICTION)
Tuesday, 11am-­1pm “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin,” Marcel Proust writes in Remembrance of Things Past . We will start the class by sampling a real petite madeleine moistened in Linden tea to experience the taste that inspired these words and started an entire literary movement. We will proceed to study works of literature that appeal to our senses and the works of literature that grow out of them. We will learn how sensory images make our writing come to life. We will discuss writing about sex at length, because sex actually involves all five senses (and sometimes even a mysterious sixth.) We will also explore such topics as writing about food, the role of smell in fiction, visual and audio images, descriptions of touch, and sensory abnormalities like Nabokov’s famous synesthesia. The class will involve writing assignments and some fieldwork, when the students will be encouraged to go outside and smell, touch, or taste things. The readings will include short stories, novels, excerpts from longer novels and the occasional memoir by Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, Karl Ove Knausgard, and others.
19
William Wadsworth
Mot Juste
(CROSS-­‐GENRE: Open to Fiction and Nonfiction students only)
Tuesday, 6:15pm-­8:15pm “Tout le talent d’ecrire ne consiste après tout que dans le choix des mots.” —Gustave Flaubert “Le mot juste” in French means “the right word.” This is a seminar for fiction and nonfiction students interested in understanding how various aspects of poetic practice intensify the power of language on the page. We will begin with an overview of sonic technique in traditional versification, specifically the relationship of rhythm to meter, patterns of repetition and rhyme, and the differing affects of the historical lexicons that comprise the English language. We will then consider ways in which modern poets have adapted classical allegory and myth to multiply layers of meaning in poetic narrative. We will conclude by considering how the art of literary translation demonstrates the range of choices available to render any given text, or to tell any given story. The overall intent of the course is to read a wide range of poetry—some classical, mostly modern—and learn by imitation how poets have made choices, from the micro-­‐level of the syllable to the macro-­‐level of context, to make the written word enduringly memorable. We will read poems by Sappho, Shakespeare, George Herbert, Blake, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Marina Tsvetaeva, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, Zbigniew Herbert, Wislawa Szymborska, Vasko Popa, Derek Walcott, Ted Hughes, Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney, James Fenton, Anne Carson, Paul Muldoon, and Dagmara Kraus, among others. Students will be asked to submit a poem every other week employing the techniques we have discussed in the seminar sessions. Teddy Wayne
The Mechanics of Plotting Literary Fiction
(FICTION)
Thursday, 4:15pm-­6:15pm E.M. Forster famously defined story as “The king died, and then the queen died,” and plot as “The king died, and then the queen died of grief.” Conceiving a riveting, causal plot is a challenge for many writers of literary fiction, who are typically drawn to their art not by an affinity for plot but for language, character, and detail. In this course we will read various page-­‐turning novels (along with some short stories and nonfiction texts geared to screenwriters) with an eye toward their narrative constructions, laying bare conventionally but ingeniously plotted works, 20
those with unorthodox structures, and suspenseful thrillers, with authors ranging from Gabriel García Márquez to Gillian Flynn. Students will be responsible for a short in-­‐class presentation and will write one critical essay. Reading list to include: Excerpts from Story, by Robert McKee, and The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, Christopher Vogler Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel García Márquez The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith Speedboat, Renata Adler The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Ayana Mathis Blindness, José Saramago The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson The Plot Against America, Philip Roth Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-­Time, Mark Haddon 3 weeks of short stories Matvei Yankelevich
The Art of the Book: A Practical and Historical Guide to
the Book as (Art) Object
(CROSS-­‐GENRE) Tuesday, 11am-­1pm The focus of this course is the book’s potential existence as an art object and—
simultaneously—as a container of and vessel for literary texts. We will investigate the practical aspects of the invention, design, and making of books, with special emphasis on issues of editorial practice, DIY production tactics, distribution strategies, and the social nature of the small press endeavor. To provide context for our own book-­‐making endeavors, we will survey the history of the artists book, and the literary artists book in particular, beginning with the illustrated books of William Blake and William Morris, the livre d’artiste tradition, the modernist experiment (Blaise Cendrars & Sonia Delaunay’s Prose of the Trans-­
Siberian and Russian Futurist books), experiments in visual language (Bob Brown, Henri Michaux, Aram Saroyan, Letrisme, and CoBrA), and conceptual book projects. The work of contemporary artists/writers (Johanna Drucker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tom Phillips, and Jen Bervin), and literary artists books by presses (Coracle, Granary), will provide an important backdrop for our conversations and class projects. Topics of reading and discussion include: the democratization of art in the post-­‐Ruscha “multiple” and its influence on literary culture (zines, etc.); the role of 21
the book-­‐object in the tradition and contemporary practices of little magazines and chapbook presses; the place of the book in the digital age.
Students will be given a basic grounding in book craft and assigned a variety of individual book-­‐making projects which involve both research and original writing, and the formulation of aesthetic vision and editorial practice. In addition to practicums, readings and discussions, we will have guest speakers (writers, book artists, artist book publishers, book-­‐arts collectives) and a field trip or two to significant book-­‐arts organizations.
Alan Ziegler
The Writer as Teacher
(CROSS-­‐GENRE) Wednesday, 12:15pm-­3:15pm This is a hybrid course: part seminar and part practicum. We will cover an overview of research into the writing process and the place of the writer in the classroom, and address the pedagogical and editorial skills utilized in eliciting and responding to creative writing, including: creating and presenting writing assignments; designing workshops; and presiding over group critiques and individual conferences. We will discuss the teaching of creative writing at all levels (primary and secondary schools, undergraduate and graduate programs), and there will be visits from exemplary practitioners of the art and craft of teaching. In the third hour, we will replicate classroom situations in small groups and individual presentations. (On any given class day, we may use none, some, or all of the third hour.) A wide variety of reading material will be handed out. There will be several short, practical papers (including informal responses to the readings). Attendance and punctuality are essential, as is active participation in class discussions and groups. 22
TRANSLATION COURSES Susan Bernofsky
Literary Translation: Advanced Workshop
Thursday, 11am-­1:30pm This is a workshop for advanced apprentices in the field of literary translation. The goal for the semester is to help you refine your skills as a translator, developing an enhanced feeling for and control over the style, tone, and texture of your translations with an end toward representing and producing linguistic and literary innovation in English. In consultation with the instructor, each participant will choose an individual project to work on over the course of the term; this can be thesis material for students pursuing the LTAC joint concentration. Weekly readings, mostly of essays by accomplished writer-­‐translators, will familiarize participants with a range of perspectives on translation and its relationship to writing. Susan Bernofsky
The European Fairy Tale: A Modern History
Wednesday, 2:10pm-­4pm This is an undergraduate seminar open to graduate MFA students and may be used to fulfill LTAC seminar coursework requirements. Interested students should email Clarence Coo at ckc2115@columbia.edu to reserve a spot in this course. Chances are you know something about the Brothers Grimm, but not so much, perhaps, about the complex storytelling traditions to which the stories they collected belonged. This seminar will explore the European fairy tale in all its glorious history, including works written or collected by Charles Perrault, Jean de La Fontaine, Marie de Beaumont, Marie-­‐Catherine d’Aulnoy (who first coined the term “conte de fée” or “fairy tale”), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Alexander Afanasyev, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde and George MacDonald, as well as the German Romantic “Kunstmärchen” (“art fairy tale”) authors such as Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann whose tales inspired Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. Throughout the semester, we’ll be talking about issues of translation in these tales and comparing them to the fairy-­‐tale-­‐inspired writing of our own age, including work by Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Anne Sexton, John Ashbery, 23
Kelly Link, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Yoko Tawada, George Saunders, and others. Analytical, translational, and fantastical assignments. No foreign language skills required. David Hinton
Another Universe: A Meander Through Wilderness
Thought in Ancient Chinese and Modern American
Poetry
Thursday, 2:10pm-­4:10pm The ancient Chinese picture of the universe is fundamentally different from the picture that has dominated our Western tradition, and it has produced the distinctive form of Chinese culture. However distant it may seem, this worldview also feels remarkably contemporary in our secular and scientific age. In this picture, the Universe is a living and harmonious whole, constantly self-­‐generating (and so, female in nature), and humans are an integral part of that whole. This integration of human and Universe is the deep subject of ancient China’s major art forms: poetry, painting, and calligraphy. It is also the subject of a contemporary philosophical movement called “deep ecology,” and it has had a profound influence on the arts of the West during the last century. We will use the spiritual insights of this worldview as the starting point for this meander of a course. First we will read the seminal spiritual texts from ancient China: Tao Te Ching (poetry) and Chuang Tzu (prose) Then we will explore the poetic tradition that grew out of that spirituality, generally in English translation, but also in the original Chinese (with English notes), which will give us the chance to experiment with translation across the huge gap separating these two languages and cultures. We will also explore other aspects of ancient Chinese culture: Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, painting, calligraphy. Somewhere along the way, we will explore the Land Art (Earth Art) movement in contemporary Europe and America, which uses natural materials and landscape to make art, thereby integrating human and Cosmos. Finally, we will wander on to look at modern American poets whose work was either influenced by ancient Chinese thought and poetry or whose poetic thought evolved in concurrent ways: Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Olson, John Cage, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Larry Eigner, A.R. Ammons, Lorine Neidecker, Mary Oliver, and others. No knowledge of Chinese is necessary or even desirable for this seminar. 24
Alyson Waters
Literary Translation: Introductory Workshop
Wednesday, 11am-­1:30pm This course is designed to introduce students to the art of literary translation and to encourage them to explore ways in which translation can enrich their own writing and revision process. Participants will work with the instructor to develop individual projects that will be revised and workshopped over the course of the term. Weekly readings (including essays by accomplished writer-­‐translators and selections of multiple translations of a single text) will familiarize students with a range of perspectives on translation and its relationship to writing. We will be particularly concerned with nuances of style and tone, voice and cadence, and methods of representing and producing linguistic and literary innovation in English. This course is designed to accommodate both students with strong knowledge of a foreign language and previous translation experience and rank beginners. Basic reading knowledge of a second language is desirable, but students without foreign-­‐
language skills who are interested in experimenting with translation are also encouraged to register. 25
LECTURES
Donald Antrim
The Fantastic and the Suspension of Disbelief
Tuesday, 5:35pm-­7:35pm The class will consider the suspension of disbelief as a fundamental and necessary operation in reading and in writing. We’ll begin with More’s Utopia and read a range of works, some more overtly fantastical (Frankenstein, Phantastes, Alice in Wonderland, A Clockwork Orange), and some less (Party Going, The Remains of the Day), in order to study the history, evolution, and uses of the Fantastic, and to ask questions about the mechanics of sustained invention. What is the Fantastic? How is it made? Are theories of the Fantastic in literature technically applicable? Is an understanding of the Fantastic useful to writers working in less fantastical modes? What do rules and logic have to do with it all, and why, when a writer works toward building new worlds, does attention to the concrete become so overwhelmingly important? Questions about fantasy and the Fantastic—its initiation, its maintenance, its production of unlikely or even impossible Realities, its pleasures and rewards—become questions about all narratives, and lead us toward more nuanced readings of our own work as writers. Joshua Cohen
Twentieth-Century Fiction: A Primer
(Note: This course runs Oct. 27 – Dec. 15.) Monday, 10am-­1pm Covering the totality of last century’s fiction in the course of a single semester is folly, but formal experience with folly is perhaps the best preparation for a writer’s life, and this is a class for writers. Traditional academic analysis of assigned texts will be subordinated to class lectures and discussions regarding how the assigned texts were made, which implies, how that making can inform your own “practice.” Further, an ironic stance will be cultivated regarding use of the word “practice.” Writing a course description is as difficult for me as writing a poem. I’ve grouped our reading thematically and not chronologically, for the following reason: the purpose of this class is not to inculcate an appreciation or conception of literary history, rather of literary technique. To me, literary technique includes but is not limited to: “Voice,” “Point of View,” tense, time-­‐manipulation, symbolism, description, dialogue, mood, pacing (why do certain characters never eat? never 26
sleep?), the differences between “narrative” and “plot,” genre conventions, the frustration of genre conventions, parody, satire, frames, games, the essayistic or nonfiction mode in fiction, frustration. The texts, listed below, are starred for purchase, and any texts without a star will be made available in course-­‐packets, and/or electronically. Students will be expected to do each week’s assigned reading, and participate in classroom discussions. Grades will be contingent on both, as well as on an essay critical of one or more of the texts, due the class after Thanksgiving break, at a length of no less than 2,000 words. Also, attendance. Show up. Please. The reading list will be: “The Dead,” James Joyce, (story) “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner (story) Death in Venice, Thomas Mann * Glory, Vladimir Nabokov * “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges (story) “A Tomb for Boris Davidovich,” Danilo Kiš (story) The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald (excerpt) In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (excerpts) Nightwood, Djuna Barnes * The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke (excerpts) * Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick (excerpts) * Living, Loving, Partygoing, Henry Green (excerpts) * Herzog, Saul Bellow * Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry (excerpt) Underworld, Don DeLillo (excerpt) Trilogy, Samuel Beckett (excerpts) * Backbone, David Foster Wallace (story) Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West * A Fan's Notes, Frederick Exley * James Fenton
Hardy, Lawrence, and Auden
Wednesday, 10am-­12pm This course considers the work of three major English-­‐language poets: Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and W.H. Auden. You will not be expected to have read Hardy’s or Lawrence’s novels. The chief interest is in a detailed reading of the poems from the point of view of an aspiring or practicing poet. Hardy’s Collected Poems, Lawrence’s and Auden’s likewise, together with The English Auden (ed. Ed Mendelson) are the books you will need. 27
Richard Locke
Twentieth-Century Literary Nonfiction
Thursday, 2pm-­4pm A survey of criticism, reportage, polemics, memoirs, and meditations from the 1920’s to the present that explores the variety and flexibility of nonfiction styles and genres. The reading will include: The Edmund Wilson Reader (selections), Edmund Wilson The Common Reader: First Series (selections), Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf Essays (selections), George Orwell Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell Goodbye to Berlin in Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (selections), Joan Didion The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston “Prologue to an Autobiography” in Literary Occasions, V.S. Naipaul The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal Brenda Wineapple
Lecture: The Historical Imagination
Monday, 1:15pm-­3:15pm “‘Can't repeat the past?’ Jay Gatsby cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can.’” How writers repeat the past—how they invent ways to depict or evade it—will be one of the main subjects of this course. How do we as writers relive the past, narrate it, break with it, or throw over the forms of it we've inherited from others? For as William Faulkner reminds us, “the past is never dead”—sometimes it's not even past. The purpose of this course, then, is to consider and discover what history might mean in the context of narration, character, plot, research, and, in addition, in the context of the moral quandaries that confront a writer contemplating history as source, as inspiration, as burden, or as invention. Drawing on a variety of genres and styles, we will likely be reading T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land; Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Plutarch, selections from Lives; Henry James, The Aspern Papers; Simon Schama, Dead 28
Certainties; Giuseppe Lampedusa, The Leopard; W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants; Julia Blackburn, Daisy Bates in the Desert; John Williams, Augustus; Thomas Bernhard, The Loser; James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time; Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night; and Sybille Bedford, A Legacy. 29
MASTER CLASSES
Mitzi Angel
The Long and the Short of It
6 sessions / Oct. 6 – Nov. 17
Monday, 6:15pm-­8:15pm Writers who begin their careers with a short story collection are invariably urged by their publishers to produce a novel. Such urging, while it accurately reflects the realities of the publishing market, is at the same time curiously inattentive to the significant differences between short and long fiction for both readers and writers. In this class we will examine writers who have made the transition from the short story to the novel—or vice versa—and consider what demands the different lengths make of them, and conversely what opportunities each affords. We will be reading Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Elizabeth Bowen, Fiona McFarlane, and Jennifer Egan. Students will be asked to produce a piece of creative work in response to the classes: those currently working on short stories will expand a page or two from their work into ten pages of a novel; those at work on a novel will pick a scene and turn it into a story. Reading list: Falconer, John Cheever The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane Peg Boyers
Throwing Our Voices: Translation and Ventroliquism
for Vampires and Writers
4 sessions / Sept. 15 – Oct. 6 Monday, 11am-­1pm We all have the experience of being ‘stuck’ in our own voices and experience. This is a four-­‐week course in how one can use the practice of translation to strengthen and renew one’s own voice by immersing oneself in the voices of others. Translation will be engaged in, not as a pure enterprise in the service of someone else’s art, but selfishly, as the practice of throwing our voices to new places by following the paths of writers who have come before us. Thus, vampirically, we will hope to refresh our 30
poetic life-­‐blood, our diction, as well as our familiar frame of reference by swallowing whole that of others and by making of that ingestion something new. Borges, Neruda, Kundera, Baudelaire, and Celan will be among the writers we consider and translate—first, literally and then more freely. As students progress through the course, they will be employing the practice of ‘translation’ in order to appropriate material for use in their own work. Cultural and gender lines as well as language barriers will be crossed in order to find unfamiliar terrain on which to set up shop. Various genres—drama, fiction, non-­‐fiction, film, poetry—will be raided as well for the purposes of pushing students’ work to new places. The course will be conducted as a workshop in which students will be expected to produce new work for each class. Stephen Burt
Places and Poems About Places
4 sessions / Nov. 7 – Dec. 5
Friday, 11am-­1pm Why would you want to make a poem, a book of poems, a verse style, a poetics, reflect a region, a locale, a city, a house, a site? Why have so many poets tried to do that, and how does it work when they succeed? We’ll look at single poems and entire books closely attuned to particular regions and sites; we’ll read them as closely as possible for their linguistic textures—their verbal tactics—and we’ll also situate them alongside imaginative and critical prose about place (about place in general, and about that place). If, as Wallace Stevens says, “A Mythology Reflects Its Region,” how and why can poetry do the same? If, as Auden suggested, poets should be like cheeses—“local, but prized elsewhere”—how can they pull that off? And why would the idea that genuine poetry depends on local connections be almost the one precept on which apparently antithetical writers (Auden and William Carlos Williams, for example, or Roy Fisher and Elizabeth Bishop) agree? Reading will range as widely as practicable within 20th-­‐ and 21st-­‐century poetry in English, and will not be confined to the United States; we may look at James K. Baxter, from New Zealand, and at Mary Dalton, from Newfoundland, as well as at Bishop’s Canada and Brazil, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Chicago, C. D. Wright’s Ozarks, everybody’s New York, many poets’ London, and Killarney Clary’s L.A. Besides attending to specific poets’ use of place, we may look at theories of place and types of place: How do individual writers come up with poetics of desert life? Of the postindustrial city? Of the U.S.-­‐Mexico border? Of the upscale, or the downscale, suburb? Of cyberspace? Journalists, essayists, and philosophers, as well as poets and critics, may come up for discussion: readings towards the end of the class may respond to the places that interest students most. The class welcomes fiction and nonfiction writers with a strong interest in representations of place, though it is not 31
a class in how to write fiction; our closest attention to language and artistic making will, consistently, take place around poems. Lynn Chandhok
The Sentence
4 sessions / See below for dates Friday, 3:10pm-­5:10pm This course is offered to reinforce our students’ skills in crafting clear, elegant sentences as they develop their prose and poetry styles. In the four class sessions, students will: 1) Refresh their memories: What is a sentence? What are its essential components? Can students identify subjects, verbs, and the various types of phrases and clauses that are used to build the sentence? 2) Review punctuation rules, especially comma rules, focusing on the effect of comma errors on clarity. 3) Review common sentence errors including problems with: parallel construction; shifting verb tense; agreement (subject-­‐verb, pronoun-­‐antecedent); dangling modifiers; unintentional use of passive voice; wordiness; vague pronoun reference. Can students recognize, describe, and resolve sentence errors that get in the way of the meaning they are trying to express? 4) Study sentence structures (simple, compound, compound-­‐complex), examining the use of hypotaxis and parataxis (periodic and running styles) and engaging in a variety of exercises designed to challenge their habits, alert them to their “tics,” and offer them new tools with which to develop and expand their individual writing styles. The class will give students a shared, but not overly technical, language with which to discuss their writing at the level of grammar and syntax, so that they can make meaningful suggestions as editors, and so that they make conscious choices as writers. In short, the course should help students avoid the problems that muddy their writing and should help them write more elegant, controlled sentences. Finally, students should understand that rigorous thinking about the craft of writing is part of every writer’s daily, lifelong work. This four-­session master class is a required course for all first-­year students. It will be held on Fridays, 3:10pm-­5:10pm, in three sections: Section 1| Sept. 5 – Sept. 26; Section 2| Oct. 3 – Oct. 31 (no class on Oct. 10); and Section 3| Nov. 7 – Dec. 5. Students will be assigned to one of the three sections by the Writing Program. 32
Richard Ford
Using Place in Fiction
6 sessions / Nov. 10 – Nov. 25
Monday, 11am-­1pm & Tuesday, 3:20pm-­5:20pm A conversation in six installments on the subject (among other things) of using place in fiction. Readings from Eudora Welty, Richard Hugo, William Kittredge, P.B. Shelley, and other luminaries. There will be a reading assignment preceding the first meeting. Conversation should range over the many other concerns. This master class is open to 2nd-­year Fiction students only and will be capped at 15. Students will be chosen by lottery. Owen King
The Sportswriters
6 sessions / Sept. 12 – Oct. 17 Friday, 1:05pm-­3:05pm How does an author approach a subject—sports—that is of such particular, obsessive fascination to some readers, and simultaneously of particular indifference, even antipathy, for many others? Does the essential narrative of competition, the story of one person’s or team’s victory and another’s loss, limit these projects? How does great writing about sports avoid or elevate well-­‐worn templates? Is it possible to make even golf interesting? As every sport has its own rules and shape, so various authors have mined their competition of choice for tragedy, comedy, myth, fantasy, and metaphor. Along those lines: Class One – “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak,” Jim Shepard Class Two – The Natural, Bernard Malamud Class Three – A Month of Sundays, John Updike Class Four – Selections by Joyce Carol Oates and Colson Whitehead Class Five – Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon Class Six – Selections by David Foster Wallace 33
Lia Purpura
The Lyric Essay
4 sessions / Sept. 5 – Sept. 26 Friday, 1:05pm-­3:05pm For a long time now, the lyric essay has been a sub-­‐genre in search of a definition—
and, at the same time, one that happily thwarts efforts to pin it down. I’m of two minds about the term itself: on one hand it’s floaty, wispy, poetical. On the other, anything striving for the elusive/transcendent qualities poetry can authentically offer is okay by me. I consider the essay to be a capacious form, containing the elements that make all writing of worth soar: exceptional language, engaging organization, profound and compelling reasons-­‐for-­‐being, the embodiment of an interesting mind on the move. It’s my belief (and practice) that a “lyric” essay is not so much a discernible form one applies to a subject, as it is a way of being, a sensibility, perhaps even a temperament. So, then, our mission (as readers and writers) will be to consider what’s “lyrical” about the lyric essay, and how such a sensibility might be conjured and sustained. To that end, we’ll read poems that think like essays and essays that move like poems; poems whose forms might teach a prose writer a thing or two about the organization of time and space; and essays that might teach poets about image and rhythm as vehicles for thought. Readings in both poetry and prose include work by A.R. Ammons, Annie Dillard, Mary Ruefle, Vievee Francis, Larry Levis, Ander Monson, Etheridge Knight, May Swenson, Albert Goldbarth, Charles Simic, and others. In addition to preparing the readings for discussion, students will sign up to submit rough drafts of essays (on weeks 2, 3, and 4)—that is, sketches of, attempts at the lyric form, so we can discuss the moves and methods you’re exploring. This writing, and the discussion it will make possible, differ radically from a traditional “workshop” and its modes of critique. Instead I mean to provide a place where essais (attempts, tries, shots at) can breathe a bit and respond to readings creatively (conversationally, imitatively, etc., and not merely critically), and where students have a chance to practice without concern about completion / perfection / assessment. Please read for class #1: “The Fourth State of Matter” by JoAnne Beard, “Paths and Pearls” by Gregory Orr, selection of poems by Larry Levis, and “Eclipse” by Anne Dillard. 34
Rachel Sherman
The Mother Reflected in Literature
6 sessions / Oct. 29 – Dec. 3 Wednesday, 10am-­12pm In this course we will read fiction focused on mothers, where the challenge of reconciling who they are to their children often defines who they are in the world and to themselves. We will explore how writers use the power of the mother/child relationship to both challenge and acknowledge the readers’ previous notions, and we will analyze why the “bad mother” is such a strong and frequent literary subject. We will look at the different ways in which motherhood is portrayed, and how literature reflects the forever changing ideas about what a mother should and shouldn’t be. Readings will include fiction by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Marge Piercy, Cynthia Ozick, Meg Wolitzer, Elena Ferrante, Dawn Raffel, Leni Zumas, and Leo Tolstoy, among others. Sadie Stein
Food in Writing
4 sessions / Oct. 31 – Nov. 21 Friday, 1:05pm-­3:05pm “Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.” —Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea To what extent are characters defined by what they eat? What does the culture of food reveal to us about a society, its people and their psyches? Can recipes enhance a work of literature? Can a recipe be work of literature? This seminar is dedicated the role of food in writing. We will explore its evolving role in fiction—from Mrs. Dalloway’s soup to Patrick Bateman’s tartare to Anna Karenina’s oysters—and the development of food writing as a serious genre. Authors read will include M.F.K. Fisher, David Foster Wallace, Laurie Colwin, and Elizabeth David. 35
Clifford Thompson
Unique by Definition: The Personal in the Critical /
Journalistic
4 sessions / Oct. 30 – Nov. 20 Thursday, 10am-­12pm The four-­‐session course will focus on essays that represent the meeting place of the personal and the critical, whether social or arts criticism. In these pieces the writers eschew Olympian authority in order to reveal the origins of their interest in particular topics; they acknowledge their subjectivity while adding new dimensions to discussions of books, films, cultural trends, or political developments in essays that are unique by definition. The course will examine the techniques writers use to strike a compelling balance between the personal and the critical/journalistic. It will also consider the challenge of making topics interesting to readers unfamiliar with them. Examples of essays in this genre, which will be included in the assigned reading, are: James Baldwin, “The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston”; Gerald Early’s essays on jazz in Tuxedo Junction; Joan Didion, “The White Album”; Ian Frazier, “Canal Street”; Jonathan Lethem, “Defending The Searchers”; Zadie Smith, “Speaking in Tongues.” The writing component of the master class will be to craft a piece that is both personal and critical. In-­‐class assignments will focus on trying approaches to personal/critical writing that we have observed in the assigned reading. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
Memoir Strategies: Learning From Other Literatures
4 sessions / Oct. 2 – Oct. 23 Thursday, 10am-­12pm In this four-­‐week course, using examples from artists from other cultures like Kenzabura Oe, and Eugene Delacoix and bi-­‐cultural ones like Meena Alexander and Michael Ondaatje, participants will explore different roots with which to feed their voices and enrich their subjects. In class discussions about narrative, the reach, limits and use of personal voice will be focused upon. A piece of writing of 5 to 8 pages, developed from in-­‐class exercises or an on-­‐going project, will be required by the last class. 36
James Wood
Fictional Technique in Novellas and Short Stories
4 sessions / Sept. 16 – Oct. 7
Tuesday, 3:20pm-­5:20pm In this class we will examine fictional technique in four short texts by Saul Bellow, Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Lydia Davis. We shall be examining characterization, realism, style, and form, and reflecting on a century of fictional experiment. Texts: Collected Stories, Saul Bellow The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald Collected Stories, Lydia Davis 37