Todd S. Hasak-Lowy

This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing as an art form in itself and as a vital element of interdisciplinary projects. We explore the possibilities of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices as writing for the page, as well as for performance, sound, installation, and image-based pieces. Readings include diverse examples of genre and form, as well as investigations of literary and thematic terminology. Students generate weekly responses to reading and writing exercises that focus on understanding the mechanics of writing, and are introduced to workshopping techniques and etiquette.

A study of the nature of the novel as an invented form of literary art. This course typically includes works by a variety of authors representative of a wide range of cultures and historical periods, so that the variety of the novel is explored.

In our increasingly visual culture, why bother with the novel at all? How can the novel possibly make sense of our fragmented reality, the incredible complexities of our recent history, and the increasingly dynamic nature of identity itself? This course offers students a chance to read a handful of recent ?major? novels by writers like Zadie Smith, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Philip Roth that demonstrate the genre?s impressive range and ability to represent the modern world in all its dizzying richness.

This course departs from a straightforward but far-reaching two-part claim about fiction: 1) Just about all successful works of fiction narrate an external story (actions out in the world) as well as an internal story (the psychological drama of the protagonist). 2) These two parts of the narrative are interwoven and in dialogue with each other. In the first part of the semester, we will combine close readings of (mostly contemporary) short fictions (by Lydia Davis, Leo Tolstoy, Jhumpa Lahiri, George Saunders, Charles Yu, among others) with a series of exercises that seek to isolate various features of this inner-outer story. These readings and exercises will give students a deeper understanding of how this dynamic operates at every level of the text, from a given sentence to the plot as a whole. The rest of the semester will be devoted to workshops, where students will share their attempts to create short fictions that satisfy the demands of this narrative double-helix. In addition to two stories written for workshops, students will submit a scene analysis and overall plot chart for two published works of fiction.

This course, in which we¿ll read three novels and a handful of short stories, focuses on fiction¿s ability to represent interiority. We will read these texts closely in order to understand the various techniques at fiction¿s disposal that are used to narrate consciousness and depict the experience of having a body. At the same time, we will study the ways in which these same works simultaneously situate their characters within their larger social, political, and historical contexts, in this way blending the micro with the macro¿or the internal with the external. Novels by Colson Whitehead, Han Kang, and Anuk Arudpragasam. Short stories by Virginia Woolf, Lydia Davis, and others.

This course offers an introduction to the theory and practice of nonviolence. Students will study nonviolence as a philosophy of social and political change, in large part by reading the writings of important nonviolent theorists and activists, including Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Vaclav Havel. We will also explore the history of specific nonviolent movements, in which this theory has been applied and tested, with special focus on the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In their own project, students will investigate the potential and limits of nonviolent change by researching other nonviolent movements in order to answer questions that arise during our study of this rich, complex topic.