Global Arc

Practice in the translation of literary works from another language into English supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Each student is expected to prepare a manuscript each week. There will be a weekly workshop meeting and occasional individual conferences.

Modern queer writers have long written about the rich and complicated relationship straight cis women have had with queer men. And yet, outside of queer literary circles, little attention has been paid to how these relationships challenge or replicate traditional family structures, and form a community outside of the status quo. We will examine the stories male writers constructed and analyze women writers who held a mirror up to those straight and queer men who were drawn to lesbian culture. By examining photography and painting, we will further look at the artist's relationship to and identification with queerness, or straight female power.

Poems are weird, wild, ancient machines from the future. Form is but one way to harness their power, another tool to add in your kit. In this space, together, we'll be formalist, inventors, rule-breakers, and dreamers in the name of poems. Be prepared for a generous amount generative work journaling, discussion, presentation and journaling, some poet-led workshopping in the later part of the semester. All the gorgeous restriction and possible chaos of form awaits us. Let's write. (Content Warning: Some of the work read in this course addresses violence that is at times sexual, colonial, racial, or gendered in nature.)

This interdisciplinary seminar will focus on Leonora Carrington. Students will be asked to respond to Carrington's oeuvre both critically and creatively, writing essays, responses, and imaginative texts inspired by a close reading of Carrington's idiosyncratic fiction and by studying her prints, drawings and paintings, which are part of the Princeton Art Museum's permanent collection. Knowledge of French and/or Spanish is recommended but not required, as we will also look at some of Carrington's writing in the original languages of composition, and consider questions of linguistic migration and experimentation.

An introduction to the art of writing words for music, an art at the core of almost every literary tradition from Homer through Beowulf to W.B Yeats and beyond. Composers and writers will have the opportunity to work in small songwriting teams to respond to such emotionally charged themes as Contempt, Gratitude, Revenge, Desire, Disgust, Joyousness, Remorse, Loneliness, Despair and Defiance. Assignments are based on the study of a range of works in the popular song tradition. The final exercise will be a public showcase of work from the semester.

This course is an introduction to the reading and writing of "the lyric essay," a variety of non-fiction prose that refuses to obey the truth-telling, reality-capturing and argumentative priorities often associated with the essay. We will look at and produce essayistic writing that exists at the borders and intersections of traditionally separate forms, including poetry, fiction and journalism, and that integrates obsession, fragmentation, meditation, idiosyncrasy and hallucination into the creation of new prose shapes.

A beginning fiction workshop designed to introduce students to the craft of imitation as a point of creative departure. Reading the works of a series of contemporary Italian masters¿Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedeusa, Natalia Ginzburg, Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, Giorgio Bassani, among others--we will experiment with a range of techniques, styles, and themes. Echoing the voices of these authors, composing weekly exercises, we will strive to locate and articulate our own. All readings will be in translation.

We will read published literary short stories by contemporary Latinx writers and explore the vast range of Latinx experience in the United States as well as the vast range of fictional techniques employed by these writers. In discussing these published works, we will analyze how the formal elements of story--structure, plot, character, point of view, etc.--function in these pieces, so that students can apply these principles of craft to their own work. Students will write two complete short stories, which will be discussed in a traditional workshop format, and then submit a revision of one of those stories.

In this course we will write and interrogate poetry across many avenues. From written work to spoken word to instagram, traditional lineated verse to poems that see the blank page as more canvas than paper, we ask ourselves how this ancient holder for prayer, confession, and our wild strangeness performs across different manifestations of text and body. Analyzing works of contemporary American masters will be our foundation, adding our own experiments to the canon will be our goal reached through reading, watching, discussing, playing, writing, ritual making, and performing. Come prepared to write and play hard.

This fiction workshop will look at the ways writers learn from and pay tribute to one another - sometimes intentionally and explicitly, other times tacitly, perhaps even unconsciously. Reading across a range of genres and voices, each week we will discuss a pair of stories revealing writers' artistic heritage, in some cases clearly identifiable as literary tribute to (or subtle critique of) enduring stories, in other cases, less overt in acknowledgment. Throughout, we will explore fundamental elements of fiction through analysis and discussion of these works and through peer critique of student writing (your own original works).