Technical Seminars

This course seeks to study the mixed literary history of coming-of-age narratives, beginning with 19th century autobiography and the Bildungsroman through to modern memoir in order to inform the writing of our own coming-of-age narratives. The analytical and creative habits of mind will be closely linked in this course as we learn about how childhood, adolescence and development took on new significance in the nineteenth century, setting generic terms that were continually mobilized, revised and reimagined in the coming-of-age memoirs of the twentieth century and beyond. Readings by Mary Prince, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Bronte, George Orwell, Blake Morrison, Helen McDonald, and Jan Morris. 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:00am-12:20pm

Whether a memoir operates in the past or present tense, its narrator must reckon with some kind of unfinished business. While memory is the raw material of an autobiographical story, the drama exists inside the act of remembering, of reckoning with the “why” or “how” a narrator’s previous character or worldview has been transformed. In this class, we will study the structural, tonal, and representational possibilities of the "privileged perspective”: the vantage point from which a narrator writes across time and emotional distance from an experience, usually with the goal of resolution, revelation, or the conveyance of something that can only be approximated. We will close-read a number of contemporary memoirists that teach us how the privileged perspective works to drive forward a narrator’s agenda while upholding the reader’s stake in a story, exploring a multitude of interpretations through student-led presentations. Authors may include Jean-Dominique Bauby, Vladimir Nabokov, Vivian Gornick, Hisham Matar, Darin Strauss, and Joan Didion. In addition to one group presentation, students will be expected to track and analyze the functions of the privileged perspective via critical reading reports and technical writing prompts.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:30-3:20pm

Where do art and fact meet? Our seminar will explore how creative nonfiction responds to timely issues through vivid scene work, responsible fact-checking, and artistic expression. We will investigate the ways to communicate enormous subjects to a readership. Students will develop a clearer vision of how to approach current crises of climate change, social justice, public health, and more, through storytelling. Our readings will highlight the ways in which creative nonfiction is borne of traditions in reportage and literary writing. To wit, we will ask how “lyrical” reportage is driven not only by narrative and veracity, but language, tone, image, and form. Through close readings and brief writing assignments, students will engage with models of how to: use different kinds of media to recreate very specific spaces; make music of technical jargon; hone creative, humanist approaches to writing research. Readings will include texts by Eula Biss, Timothy Egan, Maggie Nelson, Elena Passarello, Claudia Rankine, Luis Alberto Urrea, and *visiting writers.*

Day/Time: Monday, 9:30am-12:20pm

In her seminal essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf writes, “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear. […] On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes.” This seminar will actively examine these bodily interventions in writing, and explore the merits of engaging deeply and precisely with the taboo subjects of sex, aging, illness, bodily change, and bodily difference. We will also discuss the concept of embodied writing—and the embodiment of physical experience through writing—using the body-centered prose of Bruno Schulz, Annie Ernaux, Rebecca Brown, Yasunari Kawabata, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and other writers. Assignments will include short critical and creative responses, a presentation, and a critical essay.

Day/Time: Mondays, 1:30-4:20pm

This technical seminar will investigate the purposes and possibilities of beginnings in fiction. Students will read opening lines, paragraphs, pages, and occasionally chapters, from Aimee Bender, Miranda July, Dorthe Nors, Kobe Abe, and others, asking: what work do these beginnings do—and why, to what end? Of course, this means we will also read the stories that follow, to analyze these introductions in the framework of their narratives. How do openings guide—or mislead—the reader? How should they balance introduction and momentum? How do they orient us, not only to character, setting, and conflict, but also to elements like tone and sensibility, to a story’s own sense of itself? What archetypes or common “moves” can we identify and use? What are the implications and meanings of beginnings—of starting in a particular place and way, when a story might very well start in any number of places? And how do such authorial decisions ripple through the story? Students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises putting what they learn into practice.

Day/Time: Wednesdays, 10:30am-1:20pm

This technical seminar explores different theoretical and practical approaches to imagery and description in poetry. To begin with, we’ll try to distinguish between the two terms, to the extent necessary and possible. Then we will examine and practice writing radically different approaches to image making and description (e.g. synesthetic, collaged, surrealist, eco-poetic, abstract, juxtapositional, haiku, etc.). Along the way, we’ll consider theories about the rhetorical functions of imagery and description in the poetic text. Although this course focuses on poetry, it is certainly relevant to prose writers interested in the role of descriptive detail in literary writing, and for comparison we will examine famous examples of description in works of fiction. Students should plan to submit a weekly exercises, write a critical essay, and give a class presentation.

Day/Time: Friday, 11:00am-1:50pm

"Accuracy," according to Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera, "does not mean hitting something on the wall. Rather, one creates the target as the dart is thrown." Style, writers know, does not adorn stories; it builds them. In workshop, we may find it easier to discuss other things-we rightly speak of scenes, point of view, or plot-yet everything that happens in fiction still happens in sentences. In this seminar, we will explore the difficulties both of discussing sentence style and of developing it. After an introduction to some useful concepts in the history and description of sentences, we'll turn to reading and imitating noted stylists such as William Faulkner and Jamaica Kincaid, finding in each writer's sentences the grain of their politics, epistemology, and approach to story. And in the last part of the course students will submit their own exploration of sentence style, whether creative or analytic, to sharpen our knowledge of style's powers.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:00-4:50pm

"Time is a created thing," according to Lao Tzu. In this course, we will look at how fiction writers "create" the sense of time in their stories, and how they grapple with temporality as an organizing narrative force. To that end, we will study how and why writers implement flashbacks, flash forwards, memories, jump cuts, and repeating scenerios, among other techniques. We will look at both straightforwardly chronological and intuitively nonchronological timelines, and discuss how different temporal approaches create different stories. Readings may include works by Roberto Bolaño, Lauren Groff, and William Maxwell. In addition, please come to class prepared to engage with creative exercises.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 12:30-3:20pm

Some of the most compelling works of fiction are built around moral, social, and psychological dilemmas. Characters are set loose in a dark woods of ambiguity and conflicting values, where they reveal themselves (and their/our humanity) through the decisions they make, the actions they undertake. Such stories present a dramatized prism of arguments and resist easy "lessons." Rather, they end with a question mark that invites conversation between reader and narrative long after the story has ended. The challenge for writers, of course, is to avoid polemic, instead exploring this moral, social, and psychological terrain in a way that is even-handed and flows organically out of character. In this technical seminar, we will read fiction (by writers like James Alan McPherson, Graham Greene, Tayari Jones, and Cynthia Ozick, among others) that centers on an uneasy choice between moral positions. We will examine how the dilemma shapes conflict and plot, and, perhaps most important, how the writer invites the reader to get lost in a dark woods alongside the story's characters. The emphasis of this course will be on critical writing, but students will also have opportunities to write creative responses to the readings and experiment with the craft techniques we discuss.

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:30am-12:20pm

From ancient Sumerian temple hymns to 7th-century Japanese death poems to avant-garde ekphrasis in the 21st century, the history of poetry is as rich in genres as it is in forms. Why does it feel so good to write a curse? What is an ode and how is it different from an aubade? In this technical seminar we will study the origins, transcultural functions, and evolving conventions of some of the oldest-living genres of lyric poetry – the ode, the elegy, the love poem, the curse, to name a few. We will read living writers such as Alice Oswald, Danez Smith, Kim Hyesoon, and Natalie Diaz alongside historical forerunners including Aesop, Sei Shonagon, John Keats. Federico Garcia Lorca, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan. Students will write weekly experiments of their own in response to our readings, and for a final project they will edit a mini-anthology of a genre of their choice, including a short critical introduction. 

Tuesday 12:30pm-3:20pm