| Gen Sem: Chronotopes |
Writing |
4001 (001) |
Fall 2026 |
|
Description
An artist marks her journal with traces of food. An essayist compiles a glossary of terms for moving water. A novelist invents fragments of an outlaw¿s short life, while poets pay tribute to beech trees, miners, and railroads. They all document. They process their investigations through sketches and journal entries, interviews and testimonies, video clips and photographs, songs and maps. In this multi-genre course, students will research and write into one of their preoccupations. Through fieldwork, reading, critique, and revision, they will capture their discoveries. The final project will be a box that holds a creative work in dialogue with an archive of documents. Readings, references, and examples will draw from work by Lorine Niedecker, Terrence Hayes, Muriel Rukeyser, Robin Coste Lewis, Juliana Spahr, Paisley Rekdal, C.D. Wright, Robert Macfarlane, Claudia Rankine, Susan Howe, Mai Der Vang, Michael Ondaatje, and more.
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Class Number
2006
Credits
3
|
| WRIT: BFAW Thesis Workshop |
Writing |
4927 (001) |
Spring 2026 |
|
Description
In this course students will create a singular written project and enrich their understanding of how that project fits into a larger tradition. Through full-class workshops, small-group critiques, individual conferences, and engaged revision, students will deepen the grooves of their writing process and cultivate a practice that is open to feedback and that lets in surprise. Students' thesis projects can take multiple forms: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, comics, drama, hypertext, performance, hybrid work, or a combination thereof. The course's readings and inquiries will be driven both by students' own studies into material significant to their writing and by their productive engagement with their classmates' work. By the end of the semester, students will have completed a BFAW thesis, consisting of three parts: (1) a creative project; (2) an annotated bibliography; and (3) a reflective essay, which will examine an issue of craft, subject, process, or genre.
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Class Number
1879
Credits
3
|
| Wksp: Modalities of the Visible |
Writing |
5001 (002) |
Spring 2026 |
|
Description
In the third chapter of his landmark novel, Ulysses, James Joyce defines the 'ineluctable modality of the visible' as a form of 'thought through the eyes,' a sensory technique that transcribes the 'seen' into forms of knowledge and scenography. What does it mean to (strictly, only) write what one sees? What does 'thought through the eyes' look like, sound like, read like? In this course, we¿ll be playing with this concept by extending it into other realms of writing beyond just fiction: poetry, creative nonfiction, and screenwriting. More significantly, we'll be studying the intersections between cinema and writing that could provide avenues for exploration and experimentation in different visual-textual modalities. We will read work by authors like Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Bernadette Mayer, Nathalie Leger, Susan Howe, Danielle Colobert, and Lisa Robertson; and we'll analyze the work of filmmakers like Jean Cocteau, Sergei Parajanov, Marguerite Duras, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Barbara Loden, and Jim Jarmusch. Course work will consist of weekly creative writing assignments, revision exercises, in-class review sessions, a research statement, and a final portfolio of work.
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Class Number
2084
Credits
3
|
| Sem: Translation and Alterity |
Writing |
5500 (003) |
Fall 2026 |
|
Description
In this course, we will think across the different disciplinary modes of translation: between languages, between aesthetic mediums, and between forms of thought. It is not required nor essential that students be multilingual, but we will play with the act of translation as a form of re-creation, whether as a 'sacralization' or 'desecration' of aesthetic and textual signification. In thinking through translation, we will also approach and think through alterity ('otherness') as a contrapuntal force that allows for creative rhythms to occur and resonate between difference and repetition. We will read broadly (from John Dryden to Anne Carson) and experiment with the different approaches and theories that have defined translation over the years, especially in writing and literature, and we'll work on translating other works into the language of our own medium. Course work will vary but typically will include weekly reading assignments, short low-stakes writing assignments, a research-oriented group project, and a final creative project that engages with the course topic.
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Class Number
2088
Credits
3
|
| Grad Projects:Writing |
Writing |
6009 (007) |
Fall 2026 |
|
Description
Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.
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Class Number
1270
Credits
3 - 6
|
| Grad Projects:Writing |
Writing |
6009 (012) |
Spring 2026 |
|
Description
Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.
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Class Number
2349
Credits
3 - 6
|
