This seminar will examine the various methods and madnesses that lie within and behind the composition of thirteen recent debut poetry collections. Each class will be structured as a brief reading by and interview with an acclaimed visiting author followed by a vibrant question & answer period. Students will come to class not only having read the books closely but having composed a one-page critical or creative response to each. Topics of discussion will include: the author’s influences, role models, and imagined audiences; the cultivation of the distinctive voice and the evolution of the manuscript; ideas of order and how to make it cohere; the path to publication; the hand of the editor; tales of production, publicity, and critical reception; the aftermath and how to get over it; what comes next and how to get on with it. Poets scheduled to appear include: Mary Jo Bang, Matthea Harvey, Matthew Rohrer and Tracy K. Smith.

Alexander Chee

The Graphic Novel

The graphic novel is a genre transgression, sequential art and text mixed to tell stories that meet the expressive standards for a novel or a short story collection, and it draws on traditions ranging from the comic book, prose literature, poetry, and film to painting, the pictograph, illustrated manuscripts, and the political cartoon. We’ll read some recent graphic novels and story collections, as well as examples of the graphic autobiography, history, memoir, and the essay, looking at the combinations of aesthetic influences and the expressive register of this form with an authorial voice made from the juxtaposition of sequential art and text. We’ll look for the formal constraints of a graphic novel, if any, the tropes it retains and celebrates from among its forebears, and the many narrative strategies the author-artist deploys. Class readings will include Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware, Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan, Big Questions by Anders Nilsen, Epileptic by David B, Palestine by Joe Sacco, Chicken With Plums by Marjane Satrapi, Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli, Wild Kingdom by Kevin Huizenga, The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes, Louis Riel by Chester Brown, Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine, Onward Toward Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki, and essays on visual culture, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, from Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, Simone Weil, Jonathan Lethem, and Bartok and Abraham, among others. At the midterm, students will produce a three- to five-page creative project or essay, and at the end of the course, a five- to ten-page creative final project or literary critical essay.

Nicholas Christopher

Travellers’ Tales: Poets & Novelists on the Road

Travel writings by poets and novelists that reflect how their worldly journeys fed into and often mirrored their artistic lives. We will examine how the geography of the imagination meshes vitally with the geography of the world at large.

Readings:

The Voices of Marrakesh, Elias Canetti (and several essays on Algeria by Albert Camus)

Venice Observed, Mary McCarthy

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (selections), Rebecca West

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Basho

The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller

Etruscan Places, D.H. Lawrence

Journey to the Land of the Flies, Aldo Buzzi

In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin

Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje

Ecuador, Henri Michaux

Mayan Letters, Charles Olson

The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen

My Journey to Lhasa, Alexandra David-Neel (discussed with excerpts from

Robert Byron’sThe Road to Oxiana)

Sonya Chung

(Re)Imagining True Lives

A seminar with mini-workshop component. The fact-fiction continuum is often explored via autobiographical fiction; but what of the dynamic between author and character / character and story /character and reader in fiction that features real-life figures who are not the author? In this seminar we will explore a subcategory of historical fiction, i.e., “biographical” fiction. We will read works that prominently feature real historical figures as characters—sometimes as protagonists/narrators, other times as secondary characters—and that imagine particular layers, facets, versions, and moments (from particular authorial viewpoints and angles of interest) of historically significant lives. Some of these figures are well-known in the common culture, others less so, and we’ll look too at how this relativity of cultural ubiquity might influence the writer’s conception and process, along with the reader’s engagement. We will read, among others, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham, Pat Barker’s Regeneration, Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, and Javier Marías’s Written Lives.

Students will do short presentations that involve research and investigations into the ways in which the author chose to meld “facts” with “fiction,” and together we will discuss to what effects or ends. Students will also write three short scenes (approximately 20 pages total) featuring real historical figures, one of which will be workshopped in class.

Stacey D’Erasmo

The Double, and Other Alternate Selves

The use in fiction of the double, the doppelganger, and the alternate self—or selves—has a long and varied history that encompasses and plays with psychoanalysis, politics, race, sexuality, gender, and, most recently, postmodern interrogations of what it is to be a self at all. The extraordinary allure and plasticity of the idea of the double (or more) spans the ages as well, from the myth of Narcissus, to Freud’s concept of the uncanny, to the fracturing and endless multiplication of identities on the internet. In this course, we will look at a variety of texts that make diverse uses of doubles, triples, potential, and alternate selves not only to consider the complex themes they explore and questions they raise, but also to address the craft issues and strategies that pertain to creating, and sustaining, fiction that floats two or more selves, and fates, within a single character and text. Students will have the choice of completing a creative project or a ten- to fifteen-page essay as their final assignment.

Readings will include the following titles:

The Golem, Meyrink

The Double, Dostoevsky

The Secret Sharer, Conrad

Borges and I, Borges

The Double, Saramago

Kornél Esti, Kosztolányi

Erasure, Percival Everett

Orlando, Virginia Woolf

Anagrams, Lorrie Moore

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer

Morpho Eugenia, A.S. Byatt

The Stone Gods, Jeanette Winterson

The Master, Colm Tóibín

Timothy Donnelly

Meter, Rhythm, and Form

This craft course is designed to provide students with a historical and theoretical overview of prosody in English and also to encourage original composition in—and informed experimentation with—traditional poetic meters and forms. Extensive primary readings will range from Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse through Modern free verse and onward to contemporary traditional and innovative work. Considerable emphasis will be placed on iambic pentameter (Surrey, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Frost) and the history of the sonnet. Critical readings will be rigorous, including Derek Attridge’sThe Rhythms of English Poetry and John Fuller’s The Sonnet as well as excerpts from Antony Easthope’sPoetry as Discourse and Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. We will also examine a handful of key defenses and manifestos, including Sidney’s “A Defense of Poesie,” Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry,” and Wordsworth’s Preface; crucial essays such as Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” Federico García Lorca’s “Theory and Function of the Duende,” and Paul Valéry’s “Poetry and Abstract Thought”; as well as shorter articles such as Louise Bogan’s “The Pleasures of Formal Poetry.” In the spirit of that essay, participants will be expected to question any received notion of traditional poetic form as merely restrictive. Weekly written assignments will aim to deepen the participants’ understanding and appreciation of traditional versification while affording them the opportunity to experience firsthand the aesthetic and expressive possibilities that traditional versification offers. Beginning in the third week, the third hour of every class will be devoted to an investigative workshop of students’ written work. The workshop will be ‘investigative’ insofar as our objective won’t be to provide editorial input towards the polishing and perfection of the individual work so much as to scrutinize its makeup, to perform an inquest into how and why the poet chose to make the poem the way he or she has chosen to make it.

Deborah Eisenberg

Studies in Short Fiction

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 will 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.

I have chosen some readings that are severely restricted to the domestic sphere and some that are explicitly inflected by the world beyond it. 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 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 Hernández, Hans Christian Andersen, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Junichiro Tanizaki, Mavis Gallant, and Gregor von Rezzori, but I like to go slowly, and we might not get to all of them.

Paul Elie

The First Book

Unlike the first novel, the first nonfiction book, as a literary entity, is rarely discussed and poorly understood. And yet a sequential reading of a number of strong nonfiction books of recent decades—each the first book by its author—reveals qualities and challenges that they have in common.

How does the writer develop a literary persona—voice, point of view, presence as a figure in the book—to introduce himself or herself as a writer who deserves the reader’s attention?

How does the writer master formative influences, mark off material, and invoke other works so as to make the first book at once stand in a tradition and stand out as original?

How can the writer refashion earlier work—essays, journals, reportage—so as to produce a whole and durable work of art?

With those questions in mind, we’ll read and discuss a dozen first books of nonfiction together. Students will be asked to write an essay about crucial passages of several first books—passages in which the authors can be seen coming into their own; ideally, this essay, and the course as a whole, will help students to understand the challenges they will face in writing their own first books, whether in the program or afterward.

Reading will include:

Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez

The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin

Dakota, Kathleen Norris

Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby

The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann

The Lost Children of Wilder, Nina Bernstein

We Wish to Inform You . . ., Philip Gourevitch

The Possessed, Elif Batuman

Harlem Is Nowhere, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

James Fenton

Hardy, Yeats, and Auden

This course considers the work of three major English-language poets: Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden. You will not be expected to have read Hardy’s novels, or Yeats’s plays and prose. 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, Yeats’s Collected Poems, Auden’s Collected Poems together with The English Auden (ed. Ed Mendelson) are the four books you will need.

John Freeman

Suburbia and American (Un)Happiness

In the 20th century, America’s urban ecology was exploded by suburbs. Conceived as moderately priced housing for young families, these suburban enclaves quickly evolved into a kind of tabula rasa for the American dream: a modest house on a square of land, a place where the children could ride their bicycles in the street and everyone was safe. But the standardization of the developments, the cultural homogeneity forged a new existential dilemma that was reflected in American literature. When all happy families are alike, is that really happiness? This class will examine the particular loneliness and disillusionment in the novels and stories set in the suburbs. How did the landscape of white picket fences take on elements of the gothic and the grotesque? How do we write with a fresh take of a place that is so readily and often parodied? How do we create complex characters when depicting people so easily defined by the superficial? How did these writers transcend the stereotypes and make fresh and original from what is “alike” and familiar?

One creative work influenced by the reading is required.

Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis

The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever

Rides of the Midway, Lee Durkee

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

Time Out of Joint, Philip K. Dick

Rabbit, Run, John Updike

Them, Joyce Carol Oates

A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood,

The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle

The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri

The New Yorker Stories, Ann Beattie

The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin

Rivka Galchen

Mystery

Mystery once referred primarily to religious ideas: divine revelations, unknown rites, or the secret counsel of God. In the 20^th century the word began to be used in reference to more prosaic things, like whodunits. But what is coming to be known in a story? Why and what is a reader tempted to try to know, and what, today, can she possibly think is going to be revealed? When do the “tricks” of withholding information annoy, and when do they compel? What are clues? What are solutions? In what ways can stories not straightforwardly written as mysteries use the tropes of mystery? What are the varieties of “page-turners”? Why do cliffhangers compel? What techniques of mystery can we integrate into our own fictions?

In this course we’ll read novels, stories, and case histories with the intention of noticing how writers have borrowed, avoided, warped, translated, or disguised the structures of mystery.

Readings:

H.P. Lovecraft stories

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

The Case Histories, Sigmund Freud

Memento Mori, Muriel Spark

The Golden Child, Penelope Fitzgerald

Bunny Lake is Missing, Evelyn Piper

Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles

The Tattoo Murder Case, Akimitsu Takagi

Out, Natsuo Kirino

Stories, Haruki Murakami

Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño

The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien

Epitaph of a Small Winner, Machado de Assis

The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

Everyman

Lis Harris

Family Matters

An exploration of a wide spectrum of literary approaches to writing about the people who gave you life and then made it glorious or a living hell—and about those who huddled alongside in the primal pack. The course will closely examine some of the aesthetic, ethical, and research issues that arise from writing about family as well as the novelistic, meditative, and lyric strategies that can expand this subject’s breadth and depth. Authors—of nonfiction and fiction—whose work we will read include Mary McCarthy (Memories of a Catholic Girlhood), Jean Renoir (Renoir, My Father), Philip Roth (Patrimony), William Maxwell (So Long, See You Tomorrow), Colette (My Mother’s House; Sido), Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life), Paula Fox (Borrowed Finery), Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses), Michael Ondaatje (Running In the Family), Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory) and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Random Family).

Week 1 First class

Week 2 Jane Austen Persuasion

Week 3 Mary McCarthy Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Week 4 Jean Renoir Renoir, My Father (excerpt)

Week 5 Philip Roth Patrimony

Week 6 Colette My Mother’s House; Sido (excerpts)

Vladimir Nabokov “Mademoiselle,” from Speak, Memory

Week 7 William Maxwell So Long, See You Tomorrow

Week 8 Tobias Wolff This Boy’s Life

Week 9 ACADEMIC HOLIDAY

Week 10 Eric Liu The Accidental Asian (excerpt)

Dorothy Gallagher How I Came Into My Inheritance (excerpt)

Week 11 Paula Fox Borrowed Finery

Week 12 Per Petterson Out Stealing Horses

Week 13 Michael Ondaatje Running in the Family

Week 14 Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Random Family

Nellie Hermann

The Language of Pain

“Whatever pain achieves it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.”—Elaine Scarry

Is pain unsharable? How do we communicate our pain? And how do we comprehend the pain of others? Through close reading of works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, this seminar will look at how writers have represented pain and suffering, both physical (such as Fanny Burney’s famous account of her mastectomy without anesthesia) and psychological (such as Styron’s novel of depression, Lie Down in Darkness). We will consider the direct and indirect rendering of suffering, as well as verbal and non-verbal communication, and the dividends of these different forms.

The field of Narrative Medicine trains clinicians to be more careful listeners through acts of close reading, reflective, and creative writing. Through similar in-class and weekly written exercises (some of which will be read and critiqued in class in informal workshops), students in this seminar will explore their own representations of pain and the metaphors used to describe it.

A final piece of 5-10 pages of creative work is required.

Readings will include: The Book of Job, Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, John Williams’s Stoner, Grealey’s Autobiography of a Face, Daudet’s In the Land of Pain, Karinthy’s A Journey Round My Skull, Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, fiction and nonfiction by Andre Dubus, and others. This course is open to MFA students and to students of the MS program in Narrative Medicine. Limited to 18.

Heidi Julavits

Fiction: A Primer (required for and open only to first year fiction students)

In this course, required of incoming fiction students, we will explore a range of provocative ideas, challenges, and strategies for fiction writers. We’ll discuss what matters to people writing fiction today and what the future of fiction writing might look like. Students will hone their critical acumen and emerge with an idea of where they belong, as writers, within the trajectory of fiction and its recent practices.

To this end, we’ll spend the first half of the semester reading and scrutinizing stories and novel excerpts from the early twentieth century through the present day so as to observe, in an historical context, how fictional trends are born, torqued, debunked, revisited. The second half of the class will focus on craft basics such as the manipulation of time, the creation of believable fictional people, the purposeful use of tense and perspective, tricks for handling the past, the deployment of prose as a musical instrument. We will also read aesthetic “position essays” that attempt to define trends or pique/dissolve ongoing fights about realism, postmodernism, etc. Each student will be responsible for helping to compile a collaborative class wiki that can act as an ongoing resource throughout his or her Columbia career.

Phillip Lopate

The Personal Essay

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). 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

The Narrative Art of Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison—winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize, among numerous other national and international awards—is now arguably America’s most celebrated contemporary writer of fiction, and has achieved canonical status. Morrison is revered not only in academia but among common readers as well, even though her novels are regarded as thorny, “hard to read.” Four of her books—The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Paradise—have been selections of the Oprah Book Club.

Yet Morrison has escaped neither controversy nor censure in certain quarters, where her literary works are denounced as productions by a racialist and feminist ideologue, who has reaped the spoils of multiculturalism’s hegemony. To be sure, Morrison has herself fanned the flames by mischievously and provocatively suggesting that her fiction cannot truly be appreciated by anyone who is not a black woman, while remaining skeptical of interpretations of her work informed strictly by race and gender considerations. What is more, her literary achievement, some critics have argued, is shadowed to her disadvantage by that of her presumed precursors: Ralph Ellison, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez for his “magical realism.” These critics argue that her presumed pursuit of the social agendas of blacks and women serves to undermine her achievement as an artist. They have questioned not only her vision but her legacy.

This course aims to identify and examine Toni Morrison’s singularity and achievement as a writer of fiction. The better to appreciate Morrison’s originality and authority, we will read her complete body of works within the context of nonfiction and fiction by the authors cited above. While the course is chiefly concerned to analyze, for rising writers, a multiplicity of narrative structures, syntactical and imagistic strategies, modes for evoking time and place and developing character, it will also focus on issues of race, gender, and class; arguments for and against a feminist aesthetics; realism versus magical realism; and aspects of literary modernism and post-modernism.

The requirements of the course are: a three- to five-page paper on a topic developed in consultation with the instructor, which paper will be orally presented to the class as part of our weekly seminar; and a fifteen- to twenty-page term paper—either a critical effort or an imitation of the style of any of the writers considered during the semester. Class participation is mandatory.

Ben Metcalf

The Future of the Essay

In this seminar we will examine that most versatile and yet most elusive of literary forms: the essay. By way of asking after its ever uncertain future, we will delve necessarily into its past, and we will endeavor to isolate and discuss certain essayistic techniques—narrative, rhetorical, self-presentational, and otherwise—whose mastery might benefit writers of fiction, journalism, memoir, and poetry alike. The course may even be of some use to essayists.

With readings from Seneca, Suetonius, Petrarch, Montaigne, Jonathan Edwards, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, G. K. Chesterton, W.E.B. Du Bois, Willa Cather, James Agee, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, Joan Didion, Donald Barthelme, Veronica Geng, Annie Dillard, Guy Davenport, Jamaica Kincaid, Arthur Danto, Arthur Miller, Lewis Lapham, Paul Ford, and many others.

Idra Novey

Translation Workshop

This course will introduce students to the craft of literary translation and how it can enrich the way they approach and revise their own writing. Through essays by leading writer-translators such as Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, and Lydia Davis, students will become familiar with a range of perspectives on translation and its relationship to the act of writing. Students will be encouraged to translate authors not yet known in English whose work strikes them as innovative and distinctive. We’ll discuss the challenges of translating those innovations into English while reading the students’ translations together with short pieces of their own writing to see what that writing may reveal about their translations and vice versa. Basic reading knowledge of a second language is necessary for this course.

Simon Schama

The Essay: From Montaigne to the Blog

A workshop in the art and craft of the long form non-fiction story, primarily written, but the course will also consider, and offer opportunities to create, essays in other media: video documentary and web essays, (in the latter case integrating images into the text). Discussion sessions will deal with the formal demands of the essay, its origins and enrichment from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, but also with issues of tone, language and "plot" in different genres like sports writing, music (including pop and rock), food writing and business. At some point or other the class will look at the work of Hazlitt, Ruskin, Orwell, Ring Lardner, M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, Hunter Thompson, Lester Bangs, Charles Dantzig, David Foster Wallace and the filmmaker Adam Curtis.

This course is by application only. Students will be selected from the Writing Program, and from the English, History, and Art History Departments. At least six students from the Writing Program will be admitted to the course.

Patricia O’Toole

Thickening the Plot

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.

Readings will include Tobias Wolff, “Bullet in the Brain”; selections from E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, and Robert Caro, Master of the Senate, and Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes; Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge; Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost; Michael Arlen, A Passage to Ararat; and other works.

Alan Ziegler

The Writer as Teacher

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 Wednesday, 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.

Lectures

Richard Howard

Over the Top: Explorations in the Literature of Excess

A look at works of English and American literature animated by energies of “frivolity”: the eccentric, the virtuosic, the farcical, the giddy, the silly; paradox, flamboyance, parody, camp, etc.

Week 1 September 6 (Introduction) Wallace Stevens: early poems

Week 2 September 13 William Shakespeare: Love's Labors Lost

Week 3 September 20 William Congreve: The Way of the World

Week 4 September 27 Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock

Week 5 October 4 Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey

Week 6 October 11 Lewis Carroll: The Hunting of the Snark

Week 7 October 18 W.S. Gilbert: Patience

Week 8 October 25 Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

Week 9 November 1 Virginia Woolf: Orlando

Week 10 November 8 NO CLASS - UNIVERSITY HOLIDAY

Week 11 November 15 Ivy Compton-Burnett: More Women Than Men

Week 12 November 22 Ronald Firbank: Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli

Week 13 November 29 James McCourt: Mawrdew Czgowchwz

Week 14 December 6 (Conclusion) Ogden Nash: poems and lyrics

Richard Locke

Twentieth-Century Literary Nonfiction

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:

Edmund Wilson selections from The Edmund Wilson Reader

Virginia Woolf selections from The Common Reader: First Series

Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own

George Orwell selections from Essays by George Orwell

George Orwell Homage to Catalonia

Christopher Isherwood Goodbye to Berlin in The Berlin Stories

Primo Levi Survival in Auschwitz

Vladimir Nabokov Speak, Memory

E.B. White Essays of E.B. White

Joseph Mitchell selections from Up in the Old Hotel

Joan Didion selections from We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

W.G. Sebald The Rings of Saturn

Supplementary Syllabus:

ESSAYS BY EDMUND WILSON

(page numbers refer to The Edmund Wilson Reader, ed. Dabney)

Mr. Hemingway’s Dry-Points (1924)

The Follies as an Institution (1923; p.183)

Burlesque Shows (1925-26)

The Lexicon of Prohibition (1927; p.185)

A Weekend at Ellerslie (remembering 1928 in 1952; p.187)

Houdini (1925)

A Great Magician (1928)

A Preface to Persius (1927)

Dos Passos and the Social Revolution (1929; p. 140))

T.S. Eliot and the Church of England (1929; p. 146)

Signs of Life: Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1929)

James Joyce’s Ulysses (1931; p. 150)

Frank Keeney’s Coal Diggers (1932; p. 195)

The Jumping-Off Place (1932; p. 220)

On First Reading Genesis (1952; p. 611)

The Author at Sixty (1956; p. 20)

IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S THE COMMON READER: FIRST SERIES (1925)

The Common Reader (p. 1)

The Pastons and Chaucer (p. 3)

On Not Knowing Greek (p. 23)

Montaigne (p. 58)

Defoe (p. 86)

Jane Austen (p. 134)

Modern Fiction (p. 146)

“Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” (p. 155)

George Eliot (p. 162)

The Russian Point of View (p. 173)

Joseph Conrad (p. 223)

How It Strikes a Contemporary (p. 231)

IN A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS BY GEORGE ORWELL

Marrakech (1939; p. 180)

Shooting an Elephant (1936; p. 148)

Inside the Whale (1940; p. 210)

The Art of Donald McGill (1941; p. 104)

Politics and the English Language (1946; p. 156)

Why I Write (1946; p. 309)

Such, Such Were the Joys (1947; p. 1)

IN ESSAYS OF E.B. WHITE

The World of Tomorrow (1939; p. 111)

Here is New York (1948; p. 118)

Goodbye to Forty-eighth Street (1957; p. 3)

Homecoming (1955; p. 7)

A Report in Spring (1957; p. 14)

The Eye of Edna (1954; p. 25)

The Ring of Time (1956; 142)

Death of a Pig (1947; p. 17)

Once More to the Lake (1941; p. 197)

IN JOSEPH MITCHELL’S UP IN THE OLD HOTEL

Mazie (1940, p. 23)

The Rats on the Waterfront (1944, p. 489)

Up in the Old Hotel (1952, p. 439)

IN JOAN DIDION’S WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE

John Wayne: A Love Song (1965, p. 30)

Where the Kissing Never Stops (1966, p. 39)

7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38 (1967, p. 56)

Marrying Absurd (1967, p. 64)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967, p. 67 )

On Going Home (1967, p. 125)

Goodbye to All That (1967, p. 168)

Sentimental Journeys (1990, p. 685)

Benjamin Taylor

Craft and Art of the Story

The elements of craft—voice, point of view, style, setting, exposition, psychological development, unfolding of action, handling of time—are explored with a view to the student’s own ambitions. Our chief question is: How do stories work? Our focus will be the particular demands story-writing places on imagination. What Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote 25 years ago remains true: “Although the short story is not in vogue nowadays, I still believe it constitutes the utmost challenge to the creative writer. Unlike the novel, which can absorb and even forgive lengthy digressions, flashbacks, and loose construction, the short story must aim directly at its climax. It must possess uninterrupted tension and suspense. Also, brevity is its very essence. The short story must have a definite plan; it cannot be what in literary jargon is called ‘a slice of life.’” We will study and attempt to understand this unforgiving rigor that story writing imposes, focusing on the following nineteenth- and twentieth-century American masterworks:

Nathaniel Hawthorne:

“My Kinsman, Major Molineux”

“Wakefield”

“The Birthmark”

“Rappacini’s Daughter”

Herman Melville:

“Benito Cereno”

“Bartleby the Scrivener”

Henry James:

“The Aspern Papers”

“The Pupil”

“The Middle Years”

“The Jolly Corner”

Sherwood Anderson:

“The Man Who Became a Woman”

“The Egg”

“Out of Nowhere into Nothing”

“Death in the Woods”

Ernest Hemingway:

selections from The First Forty-Nine

William Faulkner:

“Old Man”

“Barn Burning”

“Two Soldiers”

Katherine Anne Porter:

“Old Mortality”

“Pale Horse, Pale Rider”

“Noon Wine”

“Holiday”

F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“The Rich Boy”

“Babylon Revisited”

John Cheever:

“Goodbye, My Brother”

“The Sorrows of Gin”

“The Wrysons”

“The Scarlet Moving Van”

“Torch Song”

“The Swimmer”

“The World of Apples”

Jean Stafford:

“Caveat Emptor”

“Bad Characters”

“A Reading Problem”

“Beatrice Trueblood’s Story”

“Children Are Bored on Sundays”

“In the Zoo”

Flannery O’Connor:

“Good Country People”

“Greenleaf”

“The Enduring Chill”

“Revelation”

Prior to our first meeting, students are asked to read:

“My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Wakefield,” “The Birthmark,” “Rappacini’s Daughter,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

At the end of the term each student will be asked to submit a story or essay.

Master Classes

Thomas Beller

The Density Drug and the Combustion Engine: A Primer on the Urban Sketch

To live in New York is to expose yourself to two almost diametrically opposing forces: You are simultaneously riveted by stimuli and wishing to escape inward to a private place. Every minute is spent with an awareness that you are surrounded by other people. Their presence can be diverting, comic, fascinating, or horrifying. This is most true in the street and in public places, but not only in public places. It exerts a subtle pressure on your imagination.

The class will focus on witnessing, the self as character, the city's landscape as a framework for consciousness, and how all these can be put to use in the pliant, abruptly blooming form of writing called "The Urban Sketch." This form draws on the personal essay, journalism, the diary, the short story, the novel, and the postcard. The Urban Sketch can be applied to almost any location, even the pastoral, but it seems to thrive in cities. In New York it almost forces itself upon you. We will be reading examples of many variations of the form, and thinking about how the mechanics of the Urban Sketch are used in other kinds of writing. There will be some in-class writing, and a final writing project.

Reading will include selections from:

This Place on Third Avenue, by John McNulty

Selected Stories andSelected Essays, by Leonard Michaels

Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill

Mr. Samler's Planet, by Saul Bellow

What I Saw, by Joseph Roth

Lost and Found: Stories From New York, edited by Thomas Beller

They're At It Again: Stories From 20 Years of Open City, edited by Thomas Beller

Eric Chinski

Novels of the Now

In this six-week seminar, we’ll be looking at Novels of the Now—novels whose explicit ambition is to capture and understand the spirit of a specific historical-cultural moment, to show us the way we live now. This project raises all kinds of important technical and stylistic, and even ethical, questions for the writer. Is the goal to hold up a mirror to the moment, revealing us as we are, or to cast a more transformative, ironic light on an age so that we can gain a more critical perspective? What are the risks of a novel engaging in social criticism? Should the narrative voice take on the specific, perhaps degraded, language of the time, or adopt a more Olympian, diagnostic tone? What are the possible strategies for telescoping an era--mapping the systemic forces that define a moment, dramatizing how the ethos of an age is crystallized in our most intimate relationships, or adopting a style and form that mimic the spirit of the time? How does a writer balance characterization, voice, plot, setting, and thematic exposition in a novel that aims to explain who we are now? And, finally, when setting out to capture the pulse of generational moment, how does one navigate the pressure to write in a way that is both timely—through references to contemporary pop culture, technologies, slang, etc.—and timeless?

We will read closely four novels--published over the last forty years--that adopt very different technical, aesthetic, and ethical approaches to capturing “the now”: Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, Don DeLillo’s Mao II, Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, and Jess Walter’sThe Financial Lives of the Poets. We will also read short supplementary pieces by David Foster Wallace, Benjamin Kunkel, Susan Sontag, S. Yizhar, and others.

There will be student presentations and one short assignment.

Nicola Gardini

Translating the Classics

Translation is at the core of numerous writers’ practices. In particular, translation from the classical languages represents for some—both novelists and poets—a most radical attempt at absorbing the art of writing and the fundamentals of human psychology from the very sources of western literature. In this course, we will look at an array of translations from the classical languages by 20th-century Anglo-American and Irish writers and explore how translation functions both as stylistic training and as a form of literary achievement in itself. We will discuss, among other things, verbal exactitude, image-making, self-fashioning, syntax and rhythm.

This course is intended to address questions that concern both prose-writers and poets. No knowledge of Latin and Greek is required. Students are expected to produce a short written work and participate in class discussion.

The reading list will include translations from: Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Sappho, Sophocles, Euripides, Suetonius, Thucydides. The translators are: Ezra Pound, T. E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Rex Warner, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Anne Carson.

Short written work will be required.

Richard Howard

Performing Poetry

(Open to Poetry students only)

Since poetry is the only literary art invariably sought to be publicly performed, it is vital for students to learn to perform their work as well as possible. Richard Howard will be teaching an “outlaw master class” (for no credit) that will offer an opportunity to the students enrolled to improve the public vocal performance of their own poems.

The course is open to poetry students only, with a maximum enrollment of 10. It will meet twice a week for one hour, on Mondays and Thursdays from 12 pm to 1 pm. Students enrolled must commit to attending class regularly, in spite of the fact that it will not be taken for credit.

Lorin Stein

Imitations

In this course we will read and then imitate one classic American short story writer each week. We will aim to understand the writer's particular prose style and his or her idea of what makes a story. There will be weekly short written assignments.

James Wood

Fictional Technique in Novellas and Short Stories

In this class we will examine fictional technique in four short texts by Saul Bellow, Muriel Spark, Thomas Bernhard, and Leo Tolstoy. We shall be examining characterization, realism, style, and form, and reflecting on a century of fictional experiment-in order to find out what has changed since Tolstoy's day, and what has not. Texts: Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich; Saul Bellow, Seize the Day; Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Thomas Bernhard, The Loser.

William Wadsworth

Mot Juste

(Open to Fiction & Nonfiction students only)

“Le mot juste” in French means “the right word”. This is a seminar for fiction and non-fiction 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, Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, Zbigniew Herbert, Wislawa Szymborska, Vasko Popa, Derek Walcott, Ted Hughes, Mark Strand, Seamus Heaney, James Fenton, Anne Carson, Paul Muldoon, and Mary Jo Bang. Students will be asked to write a poem each week employing the techniques we have discussed in class. The class is scheduled to run longer than two hours to ensure that each student will have at least one poem discussed by the full class.

Writing Program Courses: Fall 2011

Seminars

Mark Bibbins

Thirteen Ways of Making a First Book

Alexander Chee

The Graphic Novel

Nicholas Christopher

Travellers’ Tales: Poets & Novelists on the Road

Sonya Chung

(Re)Imagining True Lives

Stacey D’Erasmo

The Double, and Other Alternate Selves

Timothy Donnelly

Meter, Rhythm, and Form

Deborah Eisenberg

Studies in Short Fiction

Paul Elie

The First Book

James Fenton

Hardy, Yeats, and Auden

John Freeman

Suburbia and American (Un)Happiness

Rivka Galchen

Mystery

Lis Harris

Family Matters

Nellie Hermann

The Language of Pain

Heidi Julavits

Fiction: A Primer (required for and open only to first year fiction students)

Phillip Lopate

The Personal Essay

Erroll McDonald

The Narrative Art of Toni Morrison

Ben Metcalf

The Future of the Essay

Idra Novey

Translation Workshop

Simon Schama

Patricia O’Toole

Thickening the Plot

Alan Ziegler

The Writer as Teacher

Lectures

Richard Howard

Over the Top: Explorations in the Literature of Excess

Richard Locke

Twentieth-Century Literary Nonfiction

Benjamin Taylor

Craft and Art of the Story

Master Classes

Thomas Beller

The Density Drug and the Combustion Engine: A Primer on the Urban Sketch

Eric Chinski

Novels of the Now

Nicola Gardini

Translating the Classics

Richard Howard

Performing Poetry

Lorin Stein

Imitations

James Wood

Fictional Technique in Novellas and Short Stories

William Wadsworth

Mot Juste

Programs

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