Intermediate Courses: Creative Writing

The Personal Essay This course offers students the opportunity to write in an informal style and personal voice about a wide range of topics. The personal essay typically combines elements of storytelling and description with reflective exploration. By locating the writer’s personal experience within a larger context of ideas, the personal essay draws the reader into situations and settings that address questions of more universal relevance. Over the course of the term, students experiment with different ways of achieving the essay’s mixture of rendering and reflection. Students produce some new writing every two weeks, both on assigned topics as well as ones of their own choosing, and must write and revise two extended essays during the course of the term. Class time is spent discussing students’ writing and the work of published essayists, as well as occasionally engaging in informal writing activities. Prerequisite: Introduction to Creative Writing, or permission of the instructor.

Fiction Workshop For students who have some experience in writing short fiction and want to give and receive helpful criticism in a workshop atmosphere, this course combines structure and freedom: structure in the form of assigned exercises drawing attention to the elements and techniques of fiction and freedom in the form of longer, independently conceived stories. Some time is spent each week discussing short fiction by contemporary writers as well as that of students in the workshop, with the goal of sharpening our abilities as writers, editors, and critics. Admission to the course is selective; candidates must submit samples of their writing to the instructor before registration. Prerequisite: Literature 150 or permission of the instructor.

Poetry Workshop The workshop is intended for students willing to make their own writing a means of learning about poetry, poetic devices, and techniques, and the discipline of making and revising works of art. Class time is divided between a consideration of the students’ work and the work of modern British and American poets, but the central concern of the course is the students’ own writing, along with the articulation, both private and shared, of response to it. Prerequisite: Literature 150 or permission of the instructor.

Translation Workshop This workshop is intended for students interested in exploring both the process of translation and the way in which meaning is created and shaped through words. Class time is divided among consideration of various approaches to the translation of poetry and prose, comparisons of various solutions arrived at by different translators, and the students’ own translations into English of poetry and prose from any languages and texts of their own choosing. Prerequisite: one year of language study or permission of the instructor.

Media Studies Practicum: ’Zines, Blogs and Indies This course explores the theory, politics, and praxis of various forms of alternative news media: independent ’zines, weblogs, independent journals and presses, independent films, and other forms of “fringe” media on the American (and possibly global) scene today. Surveying a wide range of publications, from one-shot ’zines to ongoing blogs to more established alternative publications like The Nation or sites like alternet.org, students analyze these sites as forms of “new media,” as sociological peepholes into various subcultures and countercultures, and as social phenomena. Students also obtain hands-on experience in the production of alternative media, principally in the form of the collective student blog, PB&J, and individual and collective ’zines, which will be distributed to the campus community if appropriate. A number of independent films will also be screened throughout the semester. Issues of journalistic ethics, objectivity, slant, and civil liberties will be discussed, as well as nuts-and-bolts attention to the techniques of reporting and writing for various media formats and audiences.