| Gen Sem: Waste, Surplus, Reuse |
Writing |
4001 (003) |
Fall 2025 |
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Description
What do writers and artists do with surplus, with extras, leftovers, and other excesses of production? Is there a creative use to put them to? When viewed in the context of ecology and economy, what are the ethical dimensions of working with surplus? Are there also ethics and aesthetics of the ¿useless¿? With these guiding questions, this course will explore creative approaches to waste, and develop revision practices that draw on the reuse of material surplus. We will consider forms of excess (literary, artistic, economic, material, etc.), and examine diverse types of waste and things that ¿waste¿, including literal trash, ruins, the body, time, the dream, and everyday texts (such as emails, text messages, rough drafts, conversations, and ephemeral media).
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Class Number
1903
Credits
3
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| Wksp: Writing As Desecration |
Writing |
5001 (003) |
Fall 2025 |
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Description
To write in any genre is a gesture that puts one in a relationship with predecessors and precursors. While this relationship if often constructed as a dialogue, it can also be a conflict, full of clatter, disagreement and intentional offensiveness. In this sense, the writer's mark crosses out the predecessors' work, and functions as an act of desecration. Furthermore, writing itself might internalize this structure, making a text that turns back on itself via contradiction and negation. In this workshop, we will try out various exercises of textual desecration on both our own and others' writing (for example, cutups, collages, erasures, etc.). We will draw comparisons with tendencies in the visual arts and read widely in modern and contemporary writing, likely including work by Tristan Tzara, Leonora Carrington, Ted Berrigan, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and Alice Notley.
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Class Number
2120
Credits
3
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| Workshop: Intertext |
Writing |
5001 (005) |
Spring 2025 |
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Description
Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts or weaves together various discourses. We'll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating...) and test out these methods in our own writing. While the focus of the readings and exercises will mainly be on poetry, students writing prose, fiction, or hybrid genres are invited to join and work in their own genres. Afterall, the theoretical concept of intertextuality comes from Bakhtin's critical texts on Rablais and Dostoyevsky! Readings will likely sample older intertextual models (such as ballads), as well as modern and contemporary explorations, such as work by Ted Berrigan, Terrance Hayes, Rosmarie Waldrop, Jack Spicer, Maggie Nelson, and others.
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Class Number
2063
Credits
3
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| Graduate Projects: Writing |
Masters in Fine Arts |
6009 (150) |
Spring 2025 |
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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
1953
Credits
3 - 6
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