The Art of Reading/Writing: Contemporary Literature from the Inside Out

The Art of Reading/Writing: Contemporary Literature from the Inside Out (EL918-2B)

A story happens, a poem occurs, an essay unfolds: literature is an event. In this introductory "art appreciation" course for contemporary literature, we will approach the literary work not only or primarily as a recounting of experience, but as an experience in and of itself. Taught by an award-winning poet, it will foster a better understanding of how to read literature from a "writerly" perspective that is more attuned to the terms of the text itself, from the "inside out," as it were.

Students will read poetry fiction, essay, cross-genre and utterly unclassifiable works by a number of contemporary writers, some of whom might include Rosmarie Waldrop, Samuel Beckett, Jorie Graham, Alain Robbe-Grillet, John Ashbery, Jamaica Kincaid, John D'Agata, and Anne Carson. Students will engage these works through both critical/analytic and creative modes of writing alike - and in modes that challenge the difference between the two. The main goal of this course is to open the boundaries of the literary text for the student and thereby expand the student's own intellectual limits. Past assignments have included a research-based lyric essay, collage writing, and explorations of the possibilities and impurities of "pure" observation.

The course will foster a better understanding of how to read literature from a perspective that is more faithful to the text than much of the literary criticism that currently teaches students mainly to appropriate literature into a pre-given framework of technical terms. Though these interpretive methods have their value, many use literature only as the means to a pre-determined ideological end. We will focus, rather, on how to think with and through the literary art form in its own terms, from the "inside out," as it were.

To this end, students will be given both creative and critical writing assignments. They will further develop their skills as sensitive and engaged readers, learn to more clearly and precisely articulate their experiences and interpretations of literature, and to think creatively and critically while using language in both an expository and literary manner. We will be looking at a variety of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction to learn how they "think" and "act," and how they engage the world differently than journalism, history, or the conventional essay. How, for example, does Toni Morrison's work speak to the legacy of slavery and racism in a way that an historian's account cannot? How does Gertrude Stein's or John Ashbery's writing embody a different experience of time and perception than the traditional linear notion of it? How does literature constitute an experience and a mode of thinking in a way that "normal" language use, which is only able to tell us about an experience, cannot? What is the nature of "poetic" or "literary" language?

In exploring these questions, we will write response papers in clear, analytic prose, learning to more precisely express our experiences of the works, as well as creative responses that engage literary language on its own terms. This is not a creative writing workshop per se, however, and though peer reviews will be employed to help improve your reading and writing skills, there will be no group critique of creative responses on the basis of "good" or "bad" writing, and no previous experience with either creative writing or contemporary literature is necessary, though young writers interested in enriching their writing with a rigorous study of contemporary literature are certainly welcome.