Faune Albert 02F

This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We will analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays across the curriculum and for varied audiences and purposes. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion. Students will also meet individually with the instructors. Frequent, enthusiastic revision is an expectation. Limited to Division I Students. Keywords:writing, process, critical analysis, reading, creative

Audre Lorde argues that all knowledge is mediated through the body. We all have bodies, but what does it actually mean to exist in a body? Is the body a vessel, a discursive construction, our essential self? And how can we capture this complexity in our writing? This course will explore writing about the body as a means of critical reflection on the self and the world. We will read and discuss published work-history, critical theory, personal essays, fiction, poetry (maybe even some science!)-that engages the complexities of inhabiting a body marked by discourses of race, class, gender, age, ability, ethnicity, etc., in our modern world. And we will explore, through a variety of different types of writing, how bodies as political sites both enable and limit our ability to navigate public and private spaces; how they function as sources of pain as well as pleasure; and how they can serve as contradictory sites of oppression and liberation. This Writing Program course is open to both new and experienced writers in all genres.

How do we shape the places we inhabit and move through, and how do they shape us? Why is place so connected to memory and sense of self? How can we capture the essence of a place or space in our writing, or narrate the complicated, sometimes ambivalent feelings that place evokes? In this course, we'll explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers writing about the nuances of place, identity, and belonging, and we'll use these as grounds for our own writing. Students will complete a series of essays-a personal essay, critical essay, and research essay-taking each piece through an extensive drafting process designed to strengthen foundational skills in college writing and develop strategies to approach different types of writing. Students will be required to complete a final presentation and to submit their work for peer review and discussion. This is an ideal course for Division I students or upper-level students seeking to build their writing skills

From James Baldwin's recounting of being in prison in Paris to Joan Didion's recollections of 1960s Hollywood to Alexander Chee's meditations on the tarot, many great writers have used the personal essay to illuminate universal or cultural truths, moving from the minutiae of daily life to insights and observations about the human condition. This course will explore this dynamic literary genre, considering how different forms and structures (i.e., the braided essay, the lyric essay, the hermit crab, etc.) shape the stories we tell about our lives and experiences, and the world we live in. Students will read a range of personal essays of varying lengths, looking at how writers use form and narrative to examine the nature of truth, time, and memory, and raise questions about power, location, and identity. As we engage with published work and write, workshop, and revise our own short essays, we'll think critically about what stories and histories get told and what gets silenced, and how we can use writing to open up spaces for connection, reflection, resistance, and joy

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This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We will analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays across the curriculum and for varied audiences and purposes. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion. Students will also meet individually with the instructors. Frequent, enthusiastic revision is an expectation. Limited to Division I Students.

Ambiguity. A meeting of past and future selves. Visions of a different world. Our daily lives are suffused with magic, the unknown, infinite potentialities. We just have to know how to see. Nonfiction writing is generally considered as writing about the actual or verifiable. But what happens when we bring a consciousness of the possible, even impossible, into this writing? How might it expand and enrich, rather than negate, our notions of truth? Through readings and a variety of our own short pieces, this course will explore why and how nonfiction writers use speculation. And we'll consider the implications and politics of mixing the 'real' with what exists beyond, in our dreams and imaginations Keywords:writing, creative, imagination, nonfiction, seminar

Creative Nonfiction magazine describes the genre as "true stories, well told." As Lee Gutkind writes, "creative non?ction is like jazz-it's a rich mix of ?avors, ideas, and techniques, some newly invented and others as old as writing itself." In this course, we'll take a broad look at creative nonfiction, exploring its many possibilities and the questions it raises-about truth and facts, memory and its malleability. Moving from personal essays to food writing, travel writing, multimedia journalism, and more, we'll experiment with language and form as we find new ways to tell compelling stories about the world around us and our place within it. Keywords:Writing, creative, nonfiction, journalism, essay

How can we translate the lived experiences of difference, disability, and illness, variously defined, to the page, rendering in language what necessarily exceeds it? What are our ethical imperatives when writing about these topics? In this course, we will think, write, and talk about what it means to inhabit the world in ways that situate one outside of an imagined norm. Together we'll explore the complex connections between the body and mind and the relationship of trauma to difference, disability, and illness. We'll consider the place of science in these conversations: what does it illuminate and what are its limitations? And we'll approach the challenges, and the pain, of writing about difference, disability, and illness while also opening ourselves to the possibilities of transformation and joy that these experiences give to us, not only on the personal but on the societal level, too. This is a workshop course and a Race & Power-affiliated course; as such, we will spend time exploring the intersections between the movements for disability justice and racial justice and the ways in which issues of race, gender, and power inflect lived experiences of difference. Keywords:Disability, illness, writing, workshop, body The content of this course deals with issues of race and power.