A seminar in the writing of prose nonfiction as an art.

One of the ideas behind this course offering is that the personal essay form (including life-writing, creative nonfiction, "essaying," etc.) is a literary vehicle of exploration and documentation; the form values experimental approaches (including hybridity with other forms, such as poetry) and traffics with versions of the incomplete. Another idea is that various wide particulars make up each of us—social class, race, gender, place of birth, etc. These particulars endow us with privileges, deficits, blindnesses, insights, and the like. Prompts in this course will encourage students to document these and explore how they qualify us (and how or if they obligate us) to "speak" from various positions. The purpose of writing in this course is to engage public language on one hand and personal (meaning specific) observations and experiences on the other. The purpose here is to pursue consciousness. The experiment is to attempt to do so in the form of the personal essay. (Poetry is mentioned above because of its similarity to the spirit of the personal essay and in order to encourage those interested to consider the possibility of hybrid forms—works that defy a single categorization or order, works that join rather than exclude.) Some points of departure: "The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference." (Toni Morrison) "There are other betrayals committed so repeatedly, so mundanely, that they leave no memory trace behind, only a growing residue of misery, of dull, accreted self-hatred. Often these take the form not of words but of silence. Silence before the joke at which everyone is laughing; the anti-woman joke, the racist joke, the anti-Semitic joke. Silence and then amnesia. Blocking it out when the oppressor's language starts coming from the lips of one we admire, whose courage and eloquence have touched us. (She didn't really mean that; he didn't really say that....) But the accretions build up out of sight, like steam, inside a kettle. (Adrienne Rich) "The sea cannot be fenced./ el Mar does not stop at borders." (Gloria Anzaldua) Writing and workshopping. Reading. Discussion. Collaborative projects. Class field trip(s). Performance. To apply for this Creative Writing course, please submit an application via the following URL by the April 24, 2023 deadline. https://forms.gle/1L3Pb5yxo1R55ufr7

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Requirements class fulfills