Writing

Sarah Lawrence College offers a vibrant community of writers and probably the largest writing faculty available to undergraduates anywhere in the country. We offer courses in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and encourage students to explore an array of perspectives and techniques that will extend their writing ability whatever their preferred genre. In workshops, students share their writing in a supportive atmosphere. In conferences, teachers provide students with close, continual mentoring and guidance. Visits from guest writers, who give public readings and lectures throughout the year, are an important component of the curriculum.

Our writing classes are equitable forums for free and open expression that encourage experimentation, play, and risk-taking in students’ writing and reading. Accordingly, faculty members do not provide trigger or content warnings. We believe that students are invigorated, not harmed, by contact with art and ideas that challenge and disturb. We favor inquiry over censure, discussion over suppression, and understand both to be an important part of a student’s education in the art of writing. We seek to foster a community of writers whose members draw inspiration from their artistic and intellectual differences as much as from their areas of agreement.

Sarah Lawrence College also takes full advantage of its proximity to the New York City literary scene, with its readings, literary agencies, publishing houses, and bookstores, as well as its wealth of arts and culture. The city provides fertile ground for internships in which students can use their writing training in educational programs, schools, publishing houses, small presses, magazines, and nonprofit arts agencies.

Writing 2023-2024 Courses

First-Year Studies: The Short Story: Explorations

FYS—Year | 10 credits

What does it mean to be a writer today? How do we find our subject matter, our voices? The writer Paula Whyman observed, “Art in its many forms can give voice to our concerns, hopes, fears, anxieties—and joys. Art can provide solace. It can spur engagement. It can increase understanding. It can help us feel less alone.” Through weekly reading and writing assignments, we will begin the journey into understanding who we can be as fiction writers. We’ll explore questions of craft: What makes a story a story? How does one go from word to sentence to paragraph to scene? What are the tools of a fiction writer? The workshop will be divided between discussions of student stories and of published fiction writers, including Carmen Maria Machado, George Saunders, Edward P. Jones, Jamil Jan Kochai, Venita Blackburn, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, among others. We will also read from other genres, including essays on craft by authors such as Richard Russo, Roxane Gay, and Robin Hemley. Students are required to do additional conference reading, as well as to attend at least two campus readings per semester; writing time will also be structured into class. Perhaps most importantly, we will work on developing our constructive criticism from the very start. When developed in a supportive atmosphere, our critiques should help us better grasp the workings of our stories and see what those stories can be in the world.

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First-Year Studies: Poetry: The Human Song

FYS—Year | 10 credits

In this FYS class, we will study the art, the mystery, and the power of poetry. In our first semester, we will learn to pay attention. We will become intimate with the skills of the art: with the sounds of sense, the way a word feels in the mouth, the where-it-is in a sentence (diction, syntax). We will wonder: What is a line of poetry? What part does silence play in a poem? How is poetry experienced out loud—or read silently to oneself? Why use a metaphor? How important are forms? How do we know when a poem is “finished”? How do we write into what we don’t know? We will read the work of many published poets. We will read essays, watch films, take field trips, and meet in weekly poetry dates and in conferences. You will write a poem every week and bring it to class to share; then, you will revise each poem that you bring. At the end of the first semester, you will collect your revised poems into a chapbook. Expect to spend a great deal of time every week reading the poems written by other people—both dead and living. Expect to read the poems of your class community. Expect to spend time dwelling with your own writing—without preoccupations. In our second semester, we will concentrate on ecopoetry, poetry that concerns itself with the living world and the current planetary emergency. We will read ecopoems in order to come to an understanding of the possibilities. Each of you will choose a topic to learn about (an animal? a river? a forest?) and write into that knowledge, into a new understanding. At the end of the second semester, you will collect your poems into a chapbook. We will create a community together of trust and care so that every writer feels free to share work. We will delight in each other’s voices, in reading together, in wandering into the power of poetry. And we will have a wonderful time. This course will have biweekly conferences. During conferences, we will check on your well-being, go over your recent poems and revisions, review your responses to your reading of weekly poetry packets, and take a look at your weekly observations.

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First-Year Studies: Literature of Fact: Reading and Writing the Nonfiction Essay

FYS—Year | 10 credits

We are living in an era in which the literature of fact is thriving both online and in print. Writers have found, as the late Tom Wolfe observed, that it is possible to turn out nonfiction as lively as fiction and, in the process, capture the history of one’s own times. The aim of this course is to explore nonfiction in a variety of forms and for students to write nonfiction of their own on a steady basis. Class will be used to go over assigned reading and as a workshop for student writing. Students should be prepared to have their work read both in early drafts and in completed drafts. The course is structured around six sections: basic reporting, memoirs, op-eds, reviews, profiles, and long-form journalism. The writing that we do for class will parallel the writing that we are reading at the time. We will begin with short assignments that emphasize writing techniques and move on to longer assignments in which research, interviews, and legwork play an increasingly important role. The writers we study will be a mix of old and new and range from George Orwell and Joan Didion to James Baldwin and Zadie Smith. We will meet weekly in individual donning and academic conferences until October Study Break, then biweekly for the rest of the year.

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First-Year Studies: Where Was It One First Heard of the Truth?

FYS—Year | 10 credits

In this omnibus nonfiction writing class, we will encounter and examine over the course of a year a range of literary, artistic, social, and historical phenomena—from plays by Shakespeare and poems by Whitman, to selections from autobiographies of Gandhi and Malcolm X and Virginia Woolf, to films and memoirs of identity and gender liberation, to a classic documentary about the terminal ward of a great Northeastern-seaboard hospital, to an oral history of a poor neighborhood in Mexico City, to artwork in New York museums and current art exhibits in Chelsea, to sports events and contemporaneous political conflicts, to masterworks of modernist nonfiction experimentation. In response to this range and overflowing variety of material, students will be asked to write accurately and cogently, in the tradition of various nonfiction genres, designed to capture one aspect or another of these encounters with reality. We will write impersonal work—reportage, reviews, journalistic profiles, editorials; and we will write highly personal pieces involving the life experiences of each of us in relation to what we encounter—personal essays, memoir fragments, hybrid pieces that experiment with form, that create their own genre, that allow us to fully explore our subjectivity and our unique points of view. We will work out the rhetorical and investigative techniques, whereby the truth of experience is represented on the page. We will also look at the many ways in which language can be used to distort, obscure, and evade the truth. We will think practically and will think philosophically about representing reality. We will develop our voices and our control of words, sentences, paragraphs, and larger units. Our biases will tend toward clarity of thought and beauty of expression. In this course, there will be weekly conferences for the first six weeks and biweekly conferences thereafter.

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Fiction

Children’s Literature

Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits

Who doesn’t love Frog and Toad? Have you ever wanted to write something like it—or like Charlotte’s Web or A Snowy Day? Why do our favorites work so well and so (almost) universally? We will begin by reading books we know and books we missed and discuss what makes them so good. We will be looking at read-to books, early readers, instructional books for children, rude books, chapter books, books about friendship, and (possibly) young adult books. We may consider what good children’s history and biography might be like. We will talk about the place of the visual, the careful and conscious use of language, notions of appropriateness, and what works at various age levels. Invariably, we will talk about childhood, our own and as part of an ever-changing set of social theories. We will try our hand at writing picture books, early readers, friendship stories, collections of poems like Mother Goose. Conference work will involve making a children’s book of any kind, on any level. Classes will be in both lecture and conversational mode, and group conferences will involve looking at our writing.

Faculty

The Art of the Short Story

Open, Small Lecture—Spring | 5 credits

In this class, we’ll look at the short story from the mid-19th century to today. Among the writers we’re likely to read are Isaac Babel, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kathleen Collins, Anton Chekhov, Percival Everett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Gaitskill, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Carmen Maria Machado, Katherine Mansfield, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer, Grace Paley, George Saunders, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Virginia Woolf. We’ll also read criticism, letters, and maybe a little bit of theory. In our group conferences, students will share very short stories, written in response to prompts, in a supportive atmosphere. Though formally a lecture, this will heavily be a discussion-based class; so please consider registering for it only if you’re interested in sharing your thoughts about the readings every week.

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The Enemies of Fiction: A Fiction-Writing Workshop

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

The late novelist John Hawkes said that he began writing fiction with the assumption that its “true enemies” were “plot, character, setting, and theme.” This same quartet seems to dominate the conversation in writing workshops. We like to “vote” on the plot’s efficiency, the theme’s effectiveness, the characters’ foibles. If we are not careful, our discussions can descend to the level of a corporate focus group, a highly effective forum for marketing laundry detergents but maybe not for making art. This yearlong workshop will attempt, in its own small way, to see the fiction of both published masters and participating students through a wider lens. In the first semester, we will read across a wide range of styles and aesthetics and will write in response to weekly prompts designed to encourage play. Issues of language, structure, and vision will be honored right alongside Hawkes’ imagined enemies. In the second semester—provided all goes well—each student will workshop two stories. Our reading list will include several short and unorthodox novels (possibilities include Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, and The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector) and weekly short stories by writers both well-known and ignored. These may include Robert Coover, Dawn Raffel, Etgar Keret, Julio Cortazar, Ottessa Moshfegh, Donald Barthelme, Harlan Ellison, and Carmen Maria Machado. We will also regularly read essays that challenge us to think about what art is and why anyone would want to make it. I am looking for generous students interested in fiction-as-play. The model here is counterpoint, so it may help if you have already taken a fiction-writing workshop—though the course is offered (generously) to writers of all backgrounds.

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Fiction Workshop: The Short Story

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

Frank O’Connor claims that the short story is a form characterized not by its length but by its subject matter—by its habitual interest in what he calls “submerged population groups,” people for whom a “normal society” is the “exception” rather than the “rule”—in short, outsiders, losers, the marginalized, the dispossessed. In this yearlong course, we will begin with O’Connor’s description and then move on to examine canonical, as well as contemporary, examples of the form in hopes of generating a portfolio of stories about a “submerged population group” of our own. Our readings may include Edward P. Jones, Raymond Carver, James Alan Macpherson, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson, Junot Diaz, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Sherman Alexie, and Charles Baxter, among many others. We will divide our time between reading published works and examining each other’s efforts through workshops, critical and generative writing exercises, and one-on-one conferences. The fall semester’s reading will be taken from an anthology, so as to give students a survey of the form’s depth and breadth; in the spring semester, we will examine single-author short-story collections. Throughout, we will ask questions not only about craft and technique in short-story writing but also larger questions about the form itself and the traditions in which short-story writers are all necessarily enmeshed.

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Writing and Reading Fiction

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

A novelist once began a lecture by asking how many people in the audience wanted to be writers. When almost everyone raised a hand, he said, “So, why the hell aren’t you home writing?” The novelist was asking the right question. The only way to improve as a writer is to write a lot. You might have all the talent in the world; you might have had a thousand fascinating experiences; but talent and experience won’t get you very far unless you have the ability to sit down, day after day, and write. Accordingly, my main goal is to encourage you to develop or sustain the habit of steady writing. You’ll be sharing a very short story with the class every week in response to prompts that I’ll provide, and you’ll be producing an additional longer story for conference every two weeks. We’ll also be learning from writers who have come before us, reading a mix of classic and contemporary writers that include Anton Chekhov, Jennifer Egan, Percival Everett, ZZ Packer, Philip Roth, and Virginia Woolf.

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Fiction Workshop

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

All great stories are built with good sentences. In this workshop, students will create short stories or continue works-in-progress that will be read and discussed by their peers. Class sessions will focus on constructive criticism of the writer’s work, and students will be encouraged to ask the questions with which all writers grapple: What makes a good story? Have I fully developed my characters? And does my language convey the ideas that I want? We will talk about the writer’s craft in this class—how people tell stories to each other, how to find a plot, and how to make a sentence come to life. This workshop should be seen as a place where students can share their thoughts and ideas in order to then return to their pages and create a completed imaginary work. There will also be some short stories and essays on the art of writing that will set the tone and provide literary fodder for the class.

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Fiction Workshop

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

You write. I read. We talk. Honestly, that’s all there is. But I’m expected to say more, so here goes. Each week, two students distribute copies of their work. The next week, that work is discussed in class. Everyone in the room addresses every story on the table. The aim, using practice and analysis, is to help students move toward becoming the kind of writer they want to be.

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Episodes

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

The use of the episode is both ancient and modern and is central to storytelling in everything from The Arabian Nights to telenovelas, from The Canterbury Tales to Netflix, from comics to true-crime podcasts. Episodes differ from chapters in a novel and from short stories and can have many changing characters and plot lines. Episodes are disinclined toward resolution but love time, hunks of it, and do well depicting both the daily, including work, and the historical. We will be reading, looking at, discussing, and writing episodes in several forms and, for conference work, writing or rewriting six or so related episodes supported by small brainstorming conference groups as we go forward.

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Fiction Workshop: Asian American Writing

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

This fiction workshop seeks to draw inspiration in both our reading and writing from the work of Asian American writers. In addition to coming together to support one another in a writing workshop environment—discussing matters of “craft,” “technique,” and the like—we’ll also spend our time discussing questions about race, immigration, nationality, and storytelling (in addition to any other questions) as they arise through the fiction of Asian American writers. We’ll begin with Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) and work our way “forward” to a reading list that may include Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, Hisaye Yamamoto, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Jessica Hagedorn, R Zamora Linmark, Amy Tan, Don Lee, Anthony Veasna So, Ocean Vuong, Julie Otsuka, David Wong Louie, K-Ming Chang, Nam Le, Chang-rae Lee, Gish Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Akhil Sharma, Paul Yoon, Jenny Zhang, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Ayad Akhtar, among others. To be clear, this is a writing class and not a critical survey of Asian American literature and literary history—at least not in the manner that my colleagues in the literature program might be able to provide. Nevertheless, Asian American fiction will constitute the common source material from which, I hope, students might derive their pleasures (and lessons) as aspiring fiction writers regardless of their chosen subjects. In addition to actively participating in class discussions and providing their peers with constructive feedback for their work, students will be expected by the end of the semester to develop and produce—through the conference system—a portfolio of short fiction.

Faculty

The Voice

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

This workshop will focus on the process of finding and deepening voice as the vernacular of your imagination. We will build stories and their inhabitants using source material that is meaningful to each of us: literature, of course, but also music, film and video, visual art, semiotics, fashion, architecture, games, urban myths, family lore and history, our ever-shifting identities, and more. We will work toward writing the voices that feel most true to us and shaping stories based on our own visions for narrative itself. We will read work by writers such as Samuel Beckett, Deb Olin Unferth, Etgar Keret, Clarice Lispector, James Hannaham, Garielle Lutz, Carmen Maria Machado, Robert Lopez, D. Foy, and Shelly Oria. We will also listen to music, watch videos and excerpted films, look at art, and examine popular culture and our own families as if we were anthropologists. We will work to shed ideas of what we should be writing and discover what’s already inside us ready to be written.

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Speculative Fiction Workshop

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

Speculative fiction is a blanket term for writing that speculates on a world unlike our own. Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are a few of the best-known categories; but speculative fiction also encompasses the uncategorizable—work that challenges our understanding of causality, time, the self, the mind, and the cosmos…or that just barely cracks the surface of the familiar, allowing the weird to seep through. At its best, speculative fiction uses imagination and metaphor to explore ideas and facets of the human experience that would otherwise remain unexpressed. In this course, we will read short stories and novels by mostly contemporary speculative-fiction authors, with a writerly eye for technique. We will also workshop fiction by students; discuss process and goals; and form a supportive, constructive community where even the wildest visions can flourish.

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Memory and Fiction

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

Prerequisite: prior fiction seminar

The poet Ranier Maria Rilke wrote about shaping art: “You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood, whose mystery is still unexplained; to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy, and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely, with so many profound and difficult transformations; to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea; to the sea itself; to seas, but it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.” In this class, we will explore the uses of childhood and memory as springboards for fiction. How do fiction writers move from the kernel of lived experience to the making of fiction? How do we use our past to develop stories that are not a retelling of “that’s what happened” but, rather, an opportunity to develop characters with their own stories, their own integrity and truth? How do we switch from our personal perspective to empathic observations of others and other narratives. How do we work with what we have half-known or half-observed to shape rich stories and rounded characters? And having created characters, what is their relationship to memory? In this class, we will develop short stories from writing experiments and an intensive study of craft as we read short fictions, novels, and essays.

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Forms and Fictions

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

Whatever short form you are interested in— episode, story, reflection, memoir, essay, tale—you will find in this course, both for reading and writing. We will talk about how different forms open the door to different takes on experience and how content or change can become more or less accessible in different forms. We will write 100-word pieces each week to learn to edit ourselves and to search through our minds for what’s there. We will practice pacing, dialogue, scene, portraiture. We will discuss what our favored forms say about our lives and the people in them. We will be writing and reading short pieces all semester, then editing, redrafting, and arranging them for conference work.

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Words and Pictures

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

This is a course with writing at its center and other arts—mainly, but not exclusively, visual—around it. We will read all kinds of narratives, children’s books, folk tales, fairy tales, graphic novels...and try our hand at many of them. Class reading will include everything from ancient Egyptian love poems to contemporary Latin American literature. For conference work, students have created graphic novels, animations, quilts, a scientifically accurate fantasy involving bugs, rock operas, items of clothing with text attached, nonfiction narratives, and dystopian fictions with pictures. There will be weekly assignments that involve making something. This course is especially suited to students with an interest in another art or a body of knowledge that they’d like to make accessible to nonspecialists.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Writing and Producing Audio Fiction Podcasts

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

The goal of this class is to start a revolution. We are currently in a robust audio industry, one that surprisingly thrived during COVID-19. Even as podcasting continues to grow into the stratosphere, there is a problem: The field is dominated by nonfiction. Our goal is to change that. In this class, students will learn to write and produce groundbreaking contemporary audio dramas and, eventually, attempt to sell them to a network. We will listen to works from venerable podcasts, such as Welcome to Night Vale, The Truth, Homecoming, Black Tapes, and Bright Sessions. We will also listen to audio fiction from collectives like Mermaid Palace that explicitly address identity and sexuality to challenge the status quo. And we will create our own critical discourse for contemporary audio drama—analyzing writings and essays from the fields of screenwriting, sound art, contemporary music, and literature—to help understand and analyze the works that we are creating. Creators from Welcome to Night Vale, Mermaid Palace, and Audible will join our discussions to talk about their stories and production processes. Throughout the semester, students will make works and create their own podcasts. At the end of the semester, students will pitch their fiction ideas to audio executives at Audible—and, who knows, maybe land a development deal.

Faculty

The Rules—and How to Break Them

Open, Large seminar—Spring | 5 credits

In this class, we will interrogate and test the rules for writing fiction. We’ll look at how some writers explode those rules—and we’ll see how we can do the same in our own writing by asking questions. What does it mean when we ask what’s at stake in a story? What makes dialogue believable? How do we create embodied characters? What makes an ending resonate? How do we build cohesive worlds? What is a beginning? An end? With an eye toward playfully disrupting the rules of fiction, we’ll use lists, footnotes, erasures, numbering, and omissions; we’ll study verb mood, unexpected points of view, and tense; and we’ll collaborate on other formulae that can help us and our readers find new paths to our imaginations. Students will work with writing assignments, play writing games, and do in-class exercises to generate narratives. Most conferences will be small-group meetings, with time set aside for individual conferences as well. Conference work will focus on expanding and fine-tuning what we have written. Each student will finish the semester with several complete pieces of fiction. We will read work by authors such as Maurice Kilwein Guevara, Uchido Hyakken, Edouard Leve, Garielle Lutz, Anton Chekhov, Elizabeth Crane, Padgett Powell, Katherine Anne Porter, Octavia Butler, Robert Lopez, Renee Gladman, D. Foy, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and members of the Oulipo movement.

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Speculative Fiction Workshop

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

Speculative fiction is a blanket term for writing that speculates on a world unlike our own. Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are a few of the best-known categories; but speculative fiction also encompasses the uncategorizable—work that challenges our understanding of causality, time, the self, the mind, the cosmos…or that just barely cracks the surface of the familiar, allowing the weird to seep through. At its best, speculative fiction uses imagination and metaphor to explore ideas and facets of the human experience that would otherwise remain unexpressed. In this course, we will read short stories and novels by mostly contemporary speculative-fiction authors, with a writerly eye for technique. We will also workshop fiction by students; discuss process and goals; and form a supportive, constructive community where even the wildest visions can flourish.

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Nonfiction

Wrongfully Accused

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

Long-form investigative journalism has opened many doors, perhaps most literally in America’s penal system where journalists have regularly revealed—and freed—the wrongfully convicted. This class will set out to expose the innocence (or confirm the guilt) of a man or woman convicted of a controversial murder or other serious felony. Working collectively and using all of the tools and traditions of investigative journalism, the class will attempt to pull out all known and unknown threads of the story to reveal the truth. Was our subject wrongfully accused? Or are his or her claims of innocence an attempt to game the system? The class will interview police, prosecutors, and witnesses, as well as friends and family of the victim and of the accused. The case file will be examined in depth. A long-form investigative piece will be produced, complete with multimedia accompaniment.

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Writing Environments

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

This yearlong writing seminar will radically revise tropes of nature writing; i.e., the literature of the solitary white European male enraptured by his landscape, as well what constitutes writing the “outdoors,” “landscape,” and “nature.” As opposed to focusing entirely on the solitary, we will also think through the collective and collaborative, kinships with the nonhuman, the histories and ghosts of place. The first semester, we will be thinking and writing through radical acts of attention, as an ethics of life and art—sitting in a place and listening, including together outside, taking walks, meditating on the rhythms of the seasons, and thinking about fieldwork, history, and research when writing through place (including cities and suburbs). In the fall, we will read together poetic notebooks and collections, crossing genres—Etel Adnan’s Surge, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis, Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses, Lydia Davis’s The Cows, W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. In the spring, we will continue to write through the problem of the person in time and space, reading prose that meditates on the ordinary and the daily, as well as concepts of carework and community—Marlen Haushofer’s speculative novel The Wall, Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue, T. Fleischmann’s Time is a Thing a Body Moves Through, Renee Gladman’s Calamities, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. This course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

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Narrative Podcasting and Production

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

We are living in “The Golden Age of Narrative Audio.” Shows like This American Life, Radiolab, and numerous other story-driven shows not only dominate podcasts and airwaves but also have created the paradigm for shows like 99% Invisible, Love + Radio, and many others. We’ve also entered the age of the serialized podcast, with limited-run series and others put out by podcast companies like Audible, Spotify, Gimlet, First Look Media, WNYC Studios, and so many others. This class will teach students the practicalities of how narrative audio podcasting works, while we explore what this narrative movement means. Students will learn practicalities; e.g., pitching both multipart and narrative stories, using the actual “call for stories” from studios and shows like This American Life and Radiolab and from audio companies like Audible and Spotify; the fundamentals of how to record and mix stories, using the latest digital-editing technology; what narrative editors expect in a series; and the skills necessary for a podcast internship. We will also reflect on the theoretical and ethical considerations for this “Golden Age of Narrative Audio.” We will ask questions, such as: How does imposing narrative structures affect nonfiction storytelling? How do narrative shows deal with ethical missteps? What does it mean to have “a voice”? Does it matter who gets to tell the story? (Answer on the last question is “yes.” We’ll discuss why.) Producers, editors, and freelancers for This American Life, Audible, Radiolab, and others will visit the class to provide insight into their shows and answer student questions—and students will pitch audio executives their ideas at the end of the course.

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Edgy Memoirs

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

People write memoirs when they’ve had a great acting career or been president of a large country. We read these for their historic/cultural value; our interest is in the story of their lives. But another kind of memoir is trying to tell another kind of truth. These are more personal stories of dysfunction, addiction, social injustice, overcoming the odds. They take us on alcoholic journeys and into scary families and scarier societies and souls. In this workshop, we attempt to uncover this kind of truth. But this isn't a class in autobiography. It is a class in telling a story. What differentiates these stories from other tales of grief and woe is that they are, quite simply, well-told. We will read memoirs by authors such as James Baldwin, Kathryn Harrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Nick Flynn, Maggie Nelson, Michael Ondaatje, and Jeanette Taylor—and attempt to write one of our own. The emphasis will be on how to tell our stories. This workshop is best for those who have had some experience in creative nonfiction, but that is not required.

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Nonfiction Workshop: Writing the Reflective Essay

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

This course is for students interested in writing essays set on the borderland where the personal essay and the essay of cultural opinion meet. Each week in class, in addition to talking about your work, we’ll discuss two or three published pieces that look at social questions from widely different points of view. Our aim will not be to arrive at a consensus as to which ideas have greater merit; rather, we’ll be examining the rhetorical strategies by which different writers seek to persuade. Writers we’re likely to read include James Baldwin, G. K. Chesterton, Joan Didion, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Vivian Gornick, bell hooks, Irving Howe, Laura Kipnis, John McWhorter, George Orwell, Zadie Smith, and Virginia Woolf. Given the range of writers and opinions that we’ll be reading, it’s safe to say that everyone in the class will be encountering many ideas that they consider objectionable over the course of the semester. So if you believe you can be harmed by exposure to points of view that differ starkly from your own, it would be best not to register for this class. Otherwise, it’s open to all interested students.

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Nonfiction Laboratory

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

This course is for students who want to break free from the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss examples of formally innovative nonfiction by writers such as Claudia Rankine, Nathalie Sarraute and George W. S. Trow. These readings will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments that will be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces that they will have written in consultation with the instructor as a part of their conference work. Required texts: The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, and Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra. All other readings are in the PDF packet.

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Nonfiction Workshop: Reading and Writing Personal Essays

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. In the first unit, People You Know, students will write personal narratives involving people in their lives and read, as models, published examples of such works; for instance, Phillip Lopate’s portrait of his family in the essay “Willy.” In the second unit, called Place, we will read and write essays about authors’ relationships to particular places—less travelogues than investigations of the dynamic between the person and the place; examples of published essays we will read for this unit are “Stranger in the Village,” by James Baldwin, and Annie Dillard’s essay “Aces and Eights.” The third unit is called The Personal in the Critical/Journalistic (PCJ); a work in that genre combines personal reflection with consideration of an outside subject—for example, a favorite movie or an event like 9/11. The interaction of the personal and the outside subject yields a third element, an insight that would not be possible without the first two elements; an example: Jonathan Lethem’s personal essay about the movie, The Searchers.

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Creative Nonfiction

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

Prerequisite: one or more creative writing courses

This is a course for creative writers who are interested in exploring nonfiction as an art form. We will focus on reading and interpreting outside work—essays, articles, and journalism by some of our best writers—in order to understand what good nonfiction is and how it is created. During the first part of the semester, writing will be comprised mostly of exercises and short pieces aimed at putting into practice what is being illuminated in the readings; in the second half of the semester, students will create longer, formal essays to be presented in workshop.

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Dream Logic

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

Dream logic stories are immensely complex mechanisms. When we talk about how they work, we often confine our discussion to their most straightforward elements: the relationship between conflict and suspense, for example, or between verisimilitude and believability. But stories also derive a substantial proportion of their meaning and force from elements not so easily pinned down: from the potency of their images, from their surprising and suggestive juxtapositions, or from other qualities apprehended more easily by the unconscious rather than the conscious mind. The villagers in Kafka’s A Country Doctor strip the doctor naked and place him in bed with his grotesquely wounded patient—an action with little clear connection to the conflicts established in the story and little to recommend it in regard to verisimilitude. And yet, it is precisely weird, suggestive, and not entirely interpretable images such as this that make Kafka’s writing so feverishly compelling and that grant it its measure of beauty and truth. During the first half of the semester, students will read, discuss, and write two- to three-page imitations of folk tales and myths, as well as short stories by some of the great fabulists of the modern era—including Gogol, Kafka, Garcia-Marquez, George Saunders, Jeanette Winterson, Helen Oyeyemi, and Karen Russell. The second half of the semester will be devoted to workshopping students’ own stories.

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Workshop in Personal Essay

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

We write personal essays to learn about ourselves, to face our demons, to understand what entangles us, to expose the lies that we have allowed ourselves to believe, to recognize what we are running away from, to find insight, and/or to tell the truth. This workshop is designed for students interested in doing that work and learning to craft what they have written so that their readers can share in that learning. We will learn to read as writers, write as readers, and, where relevant, draw connections between writing and other creative fields such as music and film.

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Nonfiction Workshop: The World and You

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. The first unit, Demons, will focus on writers’ personal challenges—from mental illness (as in Suzanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted) to migraines (the subject of Joan Didion’s essay “In Bed”). The second unit focuses on braided essays; the class will read essays whose authors juxtapose seemingly disparate topics in forming coherent works, such as Melissa Febos’s “All of Me,” which reveals how writing, singing, tattoos, and heroin addiction all relate to the need to deal with pain. For the final unit, Critical Survey, we will read and write critical takes on works or figures in particular fields; for example, James Agee’s essay, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” about silent-film comedians and Toni Morrison’s (very) short book, Playing in the Dark, about race as it pertains to Early American literature.

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A Question of Character: The Art of the Profile

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

Any writer who tries to capture the likeness of another—whether in biography, history, journalism, or art criticism—must face certain questions. What makes a good profile? What is the power dynamic between subject and writer? How does a subject’s place in the world determine the parameters of what may be written about him/her/them? To what extent is any portrait also a self-portrait? And how can the complexities of a personality be captured in several thousand—or even several hundred—words? In this course, we will tackle the various challenges of profile writing, such as choosing a good subject, interviewing, plotting, obtaining and telescoping biographical information, and defining the role of place in the portrait. Students will be expected to share their own work, identify what they admire or despise in other writers’ characterizations, and learn to read closely many recognized practitioners of the genre. We will also turn to shorter forms of writing—personal sketches, brief reported pieces, physical descriptions—to further illuminate what we mean when we talk about “identity” and “character.” The goal of this course is less to teach the art of profile writing than to become better readers and writers generally.

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Poetry

Details Useful to the State: Writers and the Shaping of US Empire

Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits

Are you going to ask where I am? I'll tell you—giving only details useful to the State... —Pablo Naruda, Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, 1948.

What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what they may write? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? In this class, we’ll discuss an array of choices that writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. You’ll be asking to read excerpts from four books: Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War; Peter Dale Scott’s long poem, Coming to Jakarta; and Dionne Brand’s Inventory. This is not a history or literature class: Our lens will be that of a writer, using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present. Although this is a lecture class, with a limit of 30 students, you’ll be asked to participate, improvise, and do some class reading and writing, work with a partner, as well as participate in one group conference a week often focused on in-class writing exercises. The only prerequisite is the courage to think out loud with other people; aka, the courage required to learn.

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Yearlong Poetry Workshop: The Zuihitsu

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

There is nothing like a zuihitsu, and its definition slips through our fingers. It is a classical Japanese genre that allows a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way. —Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Following Millenium

The name zuihitsu is derived from two Kanji: “at will” and “pen.” In this class, we’ll explore the Japanese poetic form of the zuihitsu via six required texts—The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon; Kenko’s Essays in Idleness; Chomei’s The Ten-Foot-Square Hut; two versions of Narrow Road to the Interior, one by Bashō and one by Kimiko Hahn; and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee—and, as writers, using the materials of haiku, lists, interviews, dialogues, travelogues, monologues, letters, maps, orts, scraps, fragments, and poems of all varieties. Participants will be required to make an individual zuihitsu and to contribute to the making of a collective one. The only prerequisites are a desire to be challenged, a thirst for reading that equals your thirst for writing, the courage to give up spectatorhood for active participation, a willingness to do in-class writing exercises, a willingness to work with a partner, and a willingness to undertake whatever labors might be necessary to read and write better on our last day of class than on our first.

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Hybrids of Poetry and Prose

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

One of the exciting literary developments in recent years is the plethora of work that disrupts the notion of genre—writers such as Eula Biss, Jenny Offill, and Ben Lerner. In this workshop, we will read a book each week and consider architecture, diction, association, metaphor, and other issues of craft. Students will be required to bring in a new piece of writing each week and to occasionally write critical responses to the reading. This class will be a good fit for students who are comfortable reading 100-200 pages a week, in addition to generating their own creative writing. For workshop, students may submit poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or anything in between. We will aim to locate a piece’s heat—its linguistic, figurative, and musical energy—and consider how that energy might be developed, or maximized, in subsequent drafts. Half of each class will be devoted to discussing the weekly reading; the other half will be spent discussing student work. Occasionally, we will do in-class writing exercises. There will be some take-home writing prompts. For conference, students will work on their own hybrid projects. At the end of each semester, students will turn in a revised, final portfolio with at least two earlier drafts for each piece, as well as their hybrid project.

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Kitchen Sink: A Poetry Writing Workshop

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

“Lacks one, lacks both,” Whitman says. “Just throw in the kitchen sink, why don’t ya,” my mother used to say. This is a poetry-writing wonder romp through a series of polar tensions that pervade modern and contemporary poetry. Through exercises, readings, and your own work, we will explore a variety of dichotomies that might enable us to engage our poems with a greater sense of presence and emotional possession. Occasion and directionality, intensity and intimacy, figure and ground, speech and writing, line and syntax, structure and body, eye and I...there are plenty of concepts and mechanics, concerns of craft and art, to throw into this course. Primarily, we will be investigating and claiming the best ways that serve our poems—our sense of belonging with poetry—that either narrow our concern or expand our vision, or both.

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Funny Ha-Ha

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

We will look at a wide range of mostly American poets who employ humor in their work. We will focus on post-World War II to the present. Poets to be read include Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Charles Simic, Bernadette Mayer, Etheridge Knight, Billy Collins, David Berman, Sommer Browning, Chessy Normile, Nicanor Parra, and others. Students will read the equivalent of 100 pages of poetry each week and write weekly critical responses. Roughly half of each class will be spent discussing published work, and the other half will be spent discussing student work. There will be weekly writing prompts, and the semester will culminate with each student turning in a portfolio of at least seven poems—three drafts for each poem.

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Poetry Workshop: The Zuihitsu

Open, Seminar—Spring | 10 credits

This class combines Sarah Lawrence students and students from the Bedford Correctional Facility and takes place at Bedford one night a week. Acceptance into this class is via interview only. Interviews will be held during the fall term of 2023. In order to interview, you must be 21 years old on or before January 20, 2024.

“There is nothing like a zuihitsu, and its definition slips through our fingers. It is a classical Japanese genre that allows a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way,” according to Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Following Millenium. (The name zuihitsu is derived from two Kanji: “at will” and “pen.”) In this class, we’ll explore the poetic form of the zuihitsu as readers via three required texts—The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon and two versions of Narrow Road to the Interior, one by Bashō and one by Kimiko Hahn—and, as writers, using the materials of haiku, lists, interviews, dialogues, travelogues, monologues, letters, maps, orts, scraps, fragments, and poems of all varieties. You’ll be expected to attend class, engage with assigned and suggested readings, and participate in discussions. Participants will also be required to make an individual zuihitsu and to contribute to the making of a collective one. In conference, we’ll discuss your reading, which may or may not overlap or coincide with class readings, and your drafts. In class, we’ll discuss readings as a way of guiding our own makings. The only prerequisites are to be 21 or older, as indicated above; have a desire to be challenged and a thirst for reading that equals your thirst for writing; have the courage to give up spectatorhood for active participation; and have a willingness to undertake whatever labors might be necessary to read and write better on our last day of class than on our first.

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Contemporary American Poetry

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

In this one-semester class, we will look at contemporary American poetry (1980 to the present) through the lens of the Pitt Poetry Series, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. We will read a book each week. Students will write a critical response to each book and also have weekly writing prompts. Authors to be read include: Etheridge Knight, Sharon Olds, and Larry Levis from the 1980s and ’90s and David Hernandez, Ross Gay, and Quan Barry from the last few years. Roughly half of each class will be spent discussing published work, and the other half will be spent discussing student work. The semester will culminate with each student turning in a portfolio of at least seven poems—three drafts for each poem.

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On Collecting/Collections

Sophomore and Above, Small seminar—Spring | 5 credits

Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and reattaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting. —Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

I’m always looking for new lenses to use with the writing and reading of poetry. As poets, we are natural collectors—collecting images, bits of dialogue, phrases, titles. In this poetry workshop, we will discuss and write about our collections (collections of facts, objects, memories) while looking at how collections of poems and prose are constructed/corralled/arranged. Books discussed will include, among others, The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, Obit by Victoria Chang, Frank Sonnets by Diane Seuss, Hoarders by Kate Durbin, The Octopus Museum by Brenda Shaughnessy, and various essays and handouts on collecting and artists who use collection as part of their practice. This semester, you might collect dreams or facts or an object that you regularly encounter on the street. How this informs your writing can be organic. You might become obsessed with a collector’s collection and write about it. You might use your collected delights to add a new color to your emotional palette. You might start looking at the objects in your poems in a different way, writing about them with greater specificity. Most weeks, there will be a collecting or poem prompt. Each student will give a 10- to 15-minute presentation on one of their collections.

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Anthropology and Images

Open, Seminar—Fall

Images wavered in the sunlit trim of appliances, something always moving, a brightness flying, so much to know in the world.—Don Delillo, Libra

A few cartoons lead to cataclysmic events in Europe. A photograph printed in a newspaper moves a solitary reader. A snapshot posted on the internet leads to dreams of fanciful places. Memories of a past year haunt us like ghosts. What each of these occurrences has in common is that they all entail the force of images in our lives, whether these images are visual or acoustic in nature, made by hand or machine, circulated by word of mouth, or simply imagined. In this seminar, we will consider the role that images play in the lives of people in various settings throughout the world. In delving into terrains at once actual and virtual, we will develop an understanding of how people throughout the world create, use, circulate, and perceive images and how such efforts tie into ideas and practices of sensory perception, time, memory, affect, imagination, sociality, history, politics, and personal and collective imaginings. Through these engagements, we will reflect on the fundamental human need for images, the complicated politics and ethics of images, aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, dynamics of time and memory, the intricate play between the actual and the imagined, and the circulation of digital images in an age of globalization. Readings will include a number of writings in anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and critical theory. Images will be drawn from photographs, paintings, sculptures, drawings, films, videos, graffiti, religion, rituals, tattoos, inscriptions, novels, poems, road signs, advertisements, dreams, fantasies, phantasms, and any number of fabulations in the worlds in which we live and imagine.

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Ethnographic Writing

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Transnational migration, human-animal relations, and American community life are but a few of the cultural realities that anthropologists have effectively studied and written about. This is no easy task, given the substantial difficulties involved in understanding and portraying the concerns, activities, and lifeworlds other than one’s own. Despite these challenges, ethnographic writing is generally considered one of the best ways to convey a nuanced and contextually rich understanding of people’s experiences in life. To gain an informed sense of the methods, challenges, and benefits of ethnographic writing, students in this course will try their hands at a concerted work of ethnographic writing. Along with undertaking a series of ethnographic writing exercises, students will be encouraged to craft a fully-realized piece of ethnographic writing that conveys something of the features and dynamics of a particular world in lively, accurate, and comprehensive terms. Along the way, and with the help of anthropological writings that are either exceptional or experimental in nature, we will collectively think through some of the most important features of the craft of ethnographic writing from the use of field notes and interviews, the interlacing of theory and data, the author’s voice in ethnographic prose, and the ethical and political responsibilities that come with any attempt to understand and portray the lives of others. This seminar will work best for students who already have a rich body of ethnographic research materials to work with, such that they can quickly delve into the intricacies of writing about their chosen subject.

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First-Year Studies in Dance

FYS—Year

Students will enroll in a combination of component classes in dance, including an academic study in dance, improvisation, and a selection of movement practice classes at the appropriate level and with various instructors throughout the week. Together, these studies will make up the First-Year Studies in Dance. (Please refer to the component class descriptions.) The Improvisation course, taught by John Jasperse in the fall, is a required component for all FYS in Dance students. This course will include other students at the College and the entire FYS cohort; it is the heart of FYS in Dance. Here, we will explore making dance, starting with real-time composition in improvisation and progressing through the year to create short pieces of choreography in the spring. Students will be dancing in the studio every day. Throughout the fall semester, we’ll meet occasionally in sessions that bring us into exchanges with other creative arts-based FYS cohorts. Students will also meet in individual conferences with John Jasperse each week throughout the fall semester and in biweekly conferences in the spring semester to develop individual conference projects based on their particular interests and the materials explored in their classes.

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Live Time-Based Art

Component—Year

In this class, graduates and upper-class undergraduates with a special interest and experience in the creation of time-based artworks that include live performance will design and direct individual projects. Students and faculty will meet weekly to view works-in-progress and discuss relevant artistic and practical problems, both in class on Tuesday evenings and in conferences taking place on Thursday afternoons. Attributes of the work across multiple disciplines of artistic endeavor will be discussed as integral and interdependent elements in the work. Participation in mentored, critical-response feedback sessions with your peers is a key aspect of the course. The engagement with the medium of time in live performance, the constraints of presentation of the works, both in works-in-progress and in a shared program of events, and the need to respect the classroom and presentation space of the dance studio will be the constraints imposed on the students’ artistic proposals. Students working within any number of live performance traditions are as welcome in this course as those seeking to transgress orthodox conventions. While all of the works will engage in some way with embodied action, student proposals need not fall neatly into a traditional notion of what constitutes dance. The cultivation of open discourse across traditional disciplinary artistic boundaries, both in the process of developing the works and in the context of presentation to the public, is a central goal of the course. The faculty members leading this course have roots in dance practice but also have practiced expansive definitions of dance within their own creative work. This course will culminate in performances of the works toward the end of the semester in a shared program with all enrolled students and within the context of winter and spring time-based art events. Performances of the works will take place in the Bessie Schönberg Dance Theatre or elsewhere on campus in the case of site-specific work.

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First-Year Studies: Hollywood From the Margins

FYS—Year

In the last 10 years, a wave of online movements, sexual harassment cases, and studio worker strikes have exposed the systemic forces of exclusion and exploitation that shaped and still shape the US film industry. But how do we grapple critically with the ongoing material impact of Hollywood’s aura? What do we do with leftover myths and “beloved,” but horrifying, classics? Do we suppress them? Contextualize and critique them? Or disrupt their coherence and dismantle their authors by reappropriating them for art and other uses? This FYS seminar pairs 1930s-60s Hollywood films with novels, memoirs, essays, and experimental films about Hollywood to interrogate dominant narratives of film history and explore alternative modes to critique and reactivate classical Hollywood cinema. Course sessions will include a highly interdisciplinary introduction to the tools of film analysis, academic writing, and research, drawing on scholarship from across the humanities and a range of media—from films and texts to studio maps and fan magazines. During the first semester, we will reframe the history of the dream factory by deflating the romance of the male auteur and highlighting the role of marginalized labor on the studio lot. Starting with singular individuals with exceptional careers— like Dorothy Arzner, the studio system’s lone female director, and Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star—we will move on to culturally invisible studio workers: cutter girls, leader ladies, secretaries, extras, stunt doubles, custodians, and voice actors. During the second semester, our focus will shift from workers to spectator perspectives and experiences marginalized by the film industry, highlighting film criticism and experimental films by female, POC, and queer scholars and artists that propose subversive tools to change how we view and interpret classical Hollywood films. Topics to be discussed during the second semester include fan studies, gossip as film history, segregated storytelling, queer Hollywood “dream texts,” and “oppositional” Black looks. During the fall semester, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alternating with small group conferences dedicated to writing, hands-on research, and fieldwork: We will learn how to use the library, analyze media ephemera, explore SLC’s 16mm film collection, and take field trips to local film archives and museums. In the spring, conferences will continue to take place biweekly without the alternating group conferences.

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Feminist Film History

Open, Seminar—Fall

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? Why are there so few female voiceovers and so many plucky secretaries in classical Hollywood films? Should dead starlets be revived as feminist icons? Can dominant aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” or feminist filmmaking techniques? How do you uncover invisible or suppressed histories? This seminar offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film studies by retracing film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. While our focus will be on US and European films and scholarship from the Silent Era to the end of the 20th century, students are encouraged to pursue conference projects on feminist movements, films, and film theory from any era or any part of the world. Screenings will highlight a mixture of obscure and canonical films, and readings will cover a multidisciplinary range of feminist film scholarship—from psychoanalytic film theory to media archaeology and cyberfeminism. Topics to be discussed include women at the origins of film, women’s work onscreen and on the studio lot, the male gaze and spectacular female stars of classical cinema, fan culture and gendered genres, second-wave feminism and the French New Wave, race and Technicolor, lesbian representability, and feminist authorship as political practice.

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Not for Children

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

This seminar course will take the form of a screening and small-lecture discussion, designed to provide an overview of auteur animation based on alternative writing and the relationship of form and style to content. We will examine various forms of animated films produced between 1960 and the present, with some time spent on the history and cultural crosscurrents that this work was produced within. The class will survey a wide range of work from a diverse selection of artists, including Oscar Fischinger, Lotte Reiniger, Renske Mijnheer, Stacey Steers, Karen Yasinsky, Adam Beckett, Christine Panushka, Chris Sullivan, William Kindridge, Lius Cook, and many others. The focus of the class is on animated film forms alternative to commercial animation; hand-drawn, cell-painted, cutout, stop-motion, pixilated, puppet, and more recently, CGI independents. In most cases, artists retaining control of their own work—unlike the battery of decision makers in commercial studio systems—will be the guiding factor in selecting work for review. As a class, we will look for aesthetic consequences and structural differences within the auteur system vs. an animation studio’s divisions of labor. All students are expected to fully participate in discussions during class and in conference meetings. Animation production will not be taught in this class; however, a creative conference project in studio arts, creative writing, film, animation, theatre, dance, or music—made at each student’s discretion and on their own—will be required. In addition, students will be expected to complete assigned readings outside of class, to attend biweekly group conferences, and to keep a weekly creative journal.

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Digital 3D Animation: Character and Environment Building

Open, Seminar—Year

At a time when digital, three-dimensional space has saturated our visual vocabulary in everything from design and entertainment to gaming, now more than ever it is important to explore the interface of this space and find methods for unlocking its potential. This is an introductory course for Maya, the industry-standard 3D modeling and animation software. Over two semesters, we will learn the fundamental approaches to environment building, 3D modeling, character creation, character rigging, and keyframe animation. This course will also provide a comprehensive understanding of the important process of rendering, using texturing, lighting, and staging. We will explore how all of these processes may culminate in narrative-based animations, alongside how 3D constructions can be exported into everything from film projects to physical media. Great emphasis will be placed on experimentation in navigating between digital and physical processes. Exercises and assignments will be contextualized through lectures and with readings of both historical and contemporary creators in the field.

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Beginning French

Open, Large seminar—Year

This class is designed primarily for students who haven’t had any exposure to French and will allow them to develop, over the course of the year, an active command of the fundamentals of spoken and written French. We will use grammar lessons to learn how to speak, read, and write in French. In-class dialogue will center on the study of theatre, cinema, and short texts, including poems, newspaper articles, and short stories from French and francophone cultures. During the spring semester, students will be able to conduct a small-scale project in French on a topic of their choice. There are no individual conference meetings for this level. The class meets three times a week, and a weekly conversation session with a French language tutor is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. Students who successfully complete a beginning and an intermediate-level French course are eligible to study in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

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Public Humanities in Practice: The Yonkers Public Library

Intermediate/Advanced, Small seminar—Spring

In this small workshop meeting at the Yonkers Public Library (YPL), we’ll plan a series of writing workshops for Yonkers-area community members and a final event celebrating SLC’s yearlong collaboration with the YPL. We’ll work directly with Yonkers-area community members and YPL staff to develop workshops themed around topics like oral history, autobiographic performance, family heirlooms, and grassroots archives. The final live event will share work from these writing workshops and the fall 2023 class, Feminist and Queer Waves. You’ll develop a theme, co-author a curatorial statement, develop a small exhibit of archival materials from YPL and SLC, and invite members of our overlapping communities. This small class welcomes former students from Feminist and Queer Waves, as well as those who are invested in publicly- engaged pedagogy, community organizing, and museum and archival curation.

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Intermediate Italian: Modern Italian Culture and Literature

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course aims at improving and perfecting the students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, as well as their knowledge of Italy’s contemporary culture and literature. In order to acquire the necessary knowledge of Italian grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary, a review of all grammar will be carried out throughout the year. As an introduction to modern Italian culture and literature, students will be introduced to a selection of short stories, poems, and passages from novels, as well as specific newspaper articles, music, and films in the original language. Some of the literary works will include selections from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Marcello D’Orta, Clara Sereni, Dino Buzzati, Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi, Alberto Moravia, Achille Campanile, and Elena Ferrante. In order to address the students’ writing skills, written compositions will be required as an integral part of the course. All material is accessible on MySLC. Conferences are held on a biweekly basis; topics might include the study of a particular author, literary text, film, or any other aspect of Italian society and culture that might be of interest to the student. Conversation classes (in small groups) will be held twice a week with the language assistant, during which students will have the opportunity to reinforce what they have learned in class and hone their ability to communicate in Italian. When appropriate, students will be directed to specific internship opportunities, in the New York City area, centered on Italian language and culture.

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High Romantic Poetry: Blake to Keats

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

This course focuses on the interpretation and appreciation of the most influential poems written in English in the tumultuous decades between the French Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. Over the course of two generations, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats invented a new mode of autobiographical verse that largely internalized the myths they inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inward, subjective experience became the inescapable subject of the poem (a legacy that continues to this day). We will be exploring ways in which the English Romantic poets responded to the political and spiritual impasse of their historical moment and created poems out of their arguments with themselves, as well as their arguments with one another.

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Elective Affinities in Contemporary Poetry

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

The canonical status of contemporary literature is always up for grabs. In this seminar, we will spend roughly two-thirds of the academic year reading a sequence of eight of my “elective affinities”—my favorites—among poets whose lives have overlapped with my own: Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Jay Wright, Mark Strand, and Anne Carson. The coincidences of another reader’s taste and judgment—yours, for instance—might generate a very different list of contemporary poets. Generating such a list will also be our task: in conference, students will be asked to focus on a contemporary poet or group of poets not included in the syllabus. From their work, an ad hoc syllabus will be culled for the final sequence of class readings, commencing after Spring Break.

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Ancient Eros: Love in Classical Literature

Open, Seminar—Fall

The theme of love in classical literature is a profoundly influential topic, appearing in genres as diverse as epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, philosophy, and even the earliest novels. The attitudes toward love expressed in these texts vary considerably: Sometimes, it is personified as a beautiful and playful god; often, too, it appears as a powerful, destructive force that can lead to irrational behavior and life-changing disaster. The literary motif of love is a catalyst, as well as a resolution of many narrative and poetic arcs; its transformative nature is deeply engaged with aspects of gender, sexuality, and identity throughout the Classical era. In this course, we will read a wide-ranging selection of ancient texts, as well as look ahead to the reception of the theme of Classical Eros in later art and literature. Along with readings, assignments will include regular low-stakes writing practice, a presentation to the class, and a major conference project. Conference work may take the form of a paper or a creative writing project. The reading list will be selected from the following works in English translation, sometimes comprising the entire work and sometimes parts TBD): Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Sappho; Euripides, Hippolytus, Euripedes; Symposium, Phaedrus, Plato; Argonautica, Apollonius of Rhodes; Idylls, Theocritus; Eclogues, Catullus, Vergil; Amores, Ovid; Golden Ass, Apuleius; Apology, Apollonius; late antique era love spells, letters, and curse tablets.

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Emersonian Quartet: Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, and Stevens

Open, Seminar—Spring

In an 1842 lecture, Emerson lamented that no American poet had yet emerged who could answer the rich legacy of European literary tradition with an originality and genius commensurate to a new civilization. Whitman would later remark that he had been “simmering, simmering, simmering” until Emerson’s injunctions brought him “to a boil.” The outcome was his sublime, democratic, discontinuous, homoerotic national epic, “Song of Myself” (the “greatest piece of wit and wisdom yet produced by an American,” Emerson immediately judged it). In unique but related ways, Dickinson, Frost, and Stevens also set out to answer Emerson’s call. Like Whitman at the end of “Song of Myself,” their most inventive poems seem always out in front of us, waiting for us to arrive. We will do our best to catch up—to conceptualize and paraphrase their rhetorical tropes, while acknowledging the inevitable failure of merely discursive language to transmit a poem. Our central task will be to interpret and appreciate the poetry we encounter through close, imaginative reading,; informed speculation, and an understanding of historical contexts.

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Mirrors, Labyrinths, and Paradoxes: Mathematics and Jorge Luis Borges

Open, Seminar—Spring

Many of the works of Jorge Luis Borges—the highly influential, 20th-century Argentine writer and oft-cited founder of the magic realism literary genre—mirror mathematical concepts in profoundly intelligent and strikingly imaginative ways. Borges’ writings—primarily short fictions but also essays and poetry—often introduce alternate realities that warp standard notions of time, space, and even existence. Borges' works serve to uncover intriguing frictions between competing notions in the foundations of mathematics: the sensible vs. the paradoxical (logic), the infinite vs. the infinitesimal (set theory), the discrete vs. the continuous (analysis), the symmetric vs. the distorted (fractals and chaos), the convergent vs. the divergent (limits), and the likely vs. the impossible (probability). Not restricting itself to mathematics, this course will also explore themes and images in Borges’ works from philosophical, mythological, historical, scientific, psychological, and literary perspectives. Student conference work may focus upon other explorations at the intersection of literature, magic realism, mathematics, philosophy, etc. This course is intended for the student who is curious and open-minded though had never planned to study mathematics at the college level.

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SLCeeds: Passion Project Launch Pad

Open, Large seminar—Spring

In this course, you are going to take an idea for a passion project and take the first step in bringing it to life. You will design, execute, and publish a minimum viable project that validates your area of interest, develops your reputation in your interest area, and gives you valuable experience from which to continue moving forward. This type of project will help you to: clearly and concisely communicate your ideas, reflections, and insights; practice pitching your work to new audiences and potential partners and collaborators; build influence in a field or space that is new to you; develop your professional network in a meaningful and intentional way; engage with and activate rockstar mentors on a tangible projec; learn more about yourself, including your values, passions, and purpose; and gain valuable perspective and experience on what it takes to bring ideas to life. You are an ideal fit for this course if you have one or more of the following: an idea for a passion project that you want to bring to life; a business idea that you would like to explore and test; a particular problem that you would like to solve for a specific group of people; an initiative that you want to launch; a personal brand that you want to launch into the world; a specific job for which you want to competitively position yourself.

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Perspectives on the Creative Process

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

The creative process is paradoxical. It involves freedom and spontaneity yet requires expertise and hard work. The creative process is self-expressive yet tends to unfold most easily when the creator forgets about self. The creative process brings joy yet is fraught with fear, frustration, and even terror.The creative process is its own reward yet depends on social support and encouragement. In this class, we look at how various thinkers conceptualize the creative process—chiefly in the arts but in other domains, as well. We see how various psychological theorists describe the process, its source, its motivation, its roots in a particular domain or skill, its cultural context, and its developmental history in the life of the individual. Among the thinkers that we will consider are Freud, Jung, Arnheim, Franklin, and Gardner. Different theorists emphasize different aspects of the process. In particular, we see how some thinkers emphasize persistent work and expert knowledge as essential features, while others emphasize the need for the psychic freedom to “let it happen” and speculate on what emerges when the creative person “lets go.” Still others identify cultural context or biological factors as critical. To concretize theoretical approaches, we look at how various ideas can contribute to understanding specific creative people and their work. In particular, we will consider works written by or about Picasso, Woolf, Welty, Darwin, and some contemporary artists and writers. Though creativity is most frequently explored in individuals, we also consider group improvisation in music and theatre. Some past conference projects have involved interviewing people engaged in creative work. Others consisted of library studies centering on the life and work of a particular creative person. And some students chose to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center and focus on an aspect of creative activity in young children.

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The Stories We Could Tell: Theatre Through Memory

Open, Small seminar—Spring

All stories can enlighten us, all can transform the listener, and all can allow the storyteller to see and experience things that they have forgotten. The stories we could tell are limitless. In this course, 8-10 students will be trained in improvisational exercises used for building community and narrative storytelling. They will begin the course practicing and learning the varied theories connected to the work of community and social practice programs and Theatre of the Oppressed. Once the students feel comfortable using the exercises, we will spend one afternoon a week visiting and discovering the stories of the residents of the senior low-income housing and assisted-living communities at Wartburg Rehabilitation Center in Yonkers. We will listen to, invest in, and develop the stories from the lives of the residents. Some stories will be dramatic reflections of their life events; others will be simple adventures of everyday existence. Students do not need any background in theatre, just a desire to connect to the Wartburg culture and explore memory through storytelling. As we gather these stories, we will develop a theatre project with and for the residents. The goal of the collaboration is to motivate, expand, and create more vivid memories in us all.

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Children’s Literature: Psychological and Literary Perspectives

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

Children’s books are an important bridge between adults and the world of children. What makes a children’s book attractive and developmentally appropriate for a child of a particular age? What is important to children as they read or listen? How do children become readers? How do picture-book illustrations complement the words? How can children’s books portray the uniqueness of a particular culture or subculture, allowing those within to see their experience reflected in books and those outside to gain insight into the lives of others? To what extent can books transcend the particularities of a given period and place? Course readings include writings about child development, works about children’s literature, and, most centrally, children’s books themselves—picture books, fairy tales, and novels for children. Class emphasis will be on books for children up to the age of about 12. Among our children’s book authors will be Margaret Wise Brown, C. S. Lewis, Katherine Paterson, Maurice Sendak, Matt de la Pena, Christopher Paul Curtis, E. B. White, and Vera B. Williams. Many different kinds of conference projects are appropriate for this course. In past years, for example, students have written original work for children (sometimes illustrating it, as well), traced a theme in children’s books, worked with children (and their books) in fieldwork and service-learning settings, explored children’s books that illuminate particular racial or ethnic experiences, or examined books that capture the challenge of various disabilities. At the end of each class session, we will have storytime, during which two students will share childhood favorites.

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Sociology of the Body

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

How are bodies produced in the contemporary world? To what degree are our bodies truly our own? Using Michel Foucault’s term “biopower” and his related work as its point of departure, this course will address the above questions as well as others related to the body in order to analyze and better understand how modern social institutions and relations regulate and attempt to control our bodies. Our examination and analysis will include the various modalities through which power is enacted at the macro level—including, for example, state surveillance, violence, and policy formation. We will also explore the relation between such forces and micro-level, everyday experiences throughout, deploying the concept of “embodiment” to understand how social power not only acts upon us but also becomes internalized within our very beings. This framework will help us better understand how social power is carried through the body and shapes our physicality, as well as the ways in which we move through the social world and interact with each other. Our analysis will enable us to examine biopower more critically with respect to constructions and interpretations of sex/gender, race, class, and sexuality at multiple social scales. For conference, students are expected to select a social context of their preference through which to examine the relationship between biopolitical forces and the embodied experiences of the individual(s). Students might also explore strategies of resistance—both individual and collective—to establish bodily autonomy and resist domination. In addition to social scientific studies, students may deploy ethnographic research, media analysis, and/or turn to personal (auto)biographies as bases of their research and analysis.

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Bad Neighbors: Sociology of Difference and Diversity in the City

Open, Seminar—Spring

The focus of the seminar will be on questions of diversity, difference, and cosmopolitanism as it pertains to urban life in a contemporary American city such as Yonkers or New York City, as well as in urban societies around the world. We will take a sociological look at how urban communities experience, navigate, and transform social structures, relationships, and institutions in their everyday lives, as they deal with problems such as inequality, hate, and exclusion while coexisting with different and diverse populations. We will read books and essays by Arlie Hochschild, Asef Bayat, Yuval Noah Harari, Dina Neyeri, Robert Putnam, and others, as we explore ways in which cities embody histories as central while marginalizing others—and how communities and people in their everyday lives resist, alter, and decenter those histories and hierarchies. Through engaged field research, we will try to learn and understand how diverse communities of people work and live together; build and provide for the wider community; and rely on informal and formal opportunities, resources, and networks to make life in the city possible. This course aims to train students on the basics of fieldwork research and ethnography in urban settings, using a wide variety of transnationally oriented theoretical and methodological approaches. Our key thematic questions will revolve around issues of difference, diversity, and cosmopolitanism as understood through sociological lenses. By using in-depth, grounded, and deeply engaged approaches to fieldwork in the city of Yonkers and other urban areas where students live, work, or visit, we will seek to understand how communities of hyperdiversity and intense differences manage to cohabit and live together in cities and how communities deal with hate, prejudice, and structural marginalization in their everyday lives. Through grounded fieldwork, we will be able to gain a better picture of how local communities improvise and use informal means to make their everyday lives work in these spaces.

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First-Year Studies: The Art of Comic Performance

FYS—Year

Life is a tragedy when seen close up, a comedy when a long shot. To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it. —Charlie Chaplin

What makes something funny? What does it take to make an audience laugh? An exploration of the evolution of modern comedy, we will uncover the roots of comedy in our culture through improvisation and the analysis of early texts. We will study the political comedies of Aristophanes, the characters of commedia dell’arte, the language of high British comedy, and the sources of African American humor in vaudeville. How are these historical constructs realized in modern-day comedies? “Laughter connects you to people. It’s impossible to maintain a kind of distance when you are howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy,” accordng to John Cleese. The students will use the forms of the past to create their own material. The work will include exercises to discover your clown, the comical partnering of vaudeville, timing exercises for heightened language, and character creations of the commedia dell’arte. As we investigate these classic comic structures, our goal will be to discover our own unique comic perspective as writers, actors, and theatre artists. Conferences will be weekly for the first six weeks and then biweekly thereafter. As Wanda Sykes says, “What drives the creative person is that we see it all.”

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The Stories We Could Tell: Theatre Through Memory

Open, Small seminar—Spring

All stories can enlighten us, all can transform the listener, and all can allow the storyteller to see and experience things they have forgotten. The stories we could tell are limitless. In this course, eight-to-10 students would be trained in improvisational exercises used for building community and narrative storytelling. The students would begin the course practicing and learning the varied theories connected to the work of Community and Social Practice Programs and Theatre of the Oppressed. Once the students feel comfortable using the exercises, we will spend one afternoon a week visiting and discovering the stories of the residents of the senior low-income housing and assisted-living communities at Wartburg Rehabilitation Center in Yonkers. We would listen to, invest in, and develop the stories from the lives of the residents. Some will be dramatic reflections of their life events; others will be simple adventures of everyday existence. Students do not need any background in theatre, just a desire to connect to the Wartburg culture and explore memory through storytelling. As we gather these stories, we will develop a theatre project with and for the residents. The goal of the collaboration is to motivate, expand, and create more vivid memories in us all.

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The Face Is a Clock: Drawing Portraits

Open, Seminar—Fall

Portraiture has a rich and complex history. Drawing a face is an ideally challenging way for students to learn how to render realistically, through line, light, shadow, volume, and space. Intentionally manipulating this same graphic language can embed portraits with the complex emotional and psychological states that lie beyond visual representation. Politically, socially, and historically, portraits have been a means to establish class and gender, provide immortality, and document the human condition. In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of drawing through the subject of the portrait. The act of looking will be primary for us, as seeing the face accurately—as it truly exists—is a constant challenge for artists. As the semester progresses, we’ll move from observational portraits into interpreted, experimental drawings that challenge traditions and norms of portraiture. As you learn to draw what you see, you’ll simultaneously begin to reveal qualities not visible—those psychological, political, symbolic, and personal aspects of portraits that make them individual and unique. Students will work on daily drawing exercises both inside and outside of the studio in order to build a disciplined drawing practice. For context, we will look at a range of historical and contemporary examples of portraiture and will visit New York City exhibitions to see art works. A visiting artist working in portraiture will visit class, as well.

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1,001 Drawings

Open, Seminar—Spring

This will be a highly rigorous drawing class that pushes young artists to develop a disciplined, sustainable, and experimental drawing practice with which to explore new ways of thinking, seeing, and making art. Each week, you will make 50 to 100 small works on paper based on varied, open-ended, unpredictable prompts. These prompts are meant to destabilize your practice and encourage you to interrogate the relationship between a work’s subject and its material process. You will learn to work quickly and flexibly, continually experimenting with mediums and processes as you probe the many possible solutions to problems posed by each prompt. As you create these daily drawings, you will simultaneously work on one large, ambitious, labor-intensive drawing that you revisit over the entire semester. That piece will evolve slowly, change incrementally, and reflect the passage of time in vastly different ways from your daily works. This dynamic exchange will allow you to develop different rhythms in your creative practice, bridging the space between an idea’s generation and its final aesthetic on paper. This course will challenge you to ambitiously redefine drawing and, in doing so, will dramatically transform your art-making practice.

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Senior Studio

Advanced, Seminar—Year

This course is intended for seniors interested in pursuing their own art-making practice more deeply and for a prolonged period of time. Students will maintain their own studio spaces and will be expected to work independently and creatively and to challenge themselves and their peers to explore new ways of thinking and making. The course will incorporate prompts that encourage students to make art across disciplines and will culminate in a solo gallery exhibition during the spring semester, accompanied by a printed book that documents the exhibition. We will have regular critiques with visiting artists and our faculty, discuss readings and myriad artists, take trips to galleries and artist’s studios, and participate in the Visual Arts Lecture Series. Your art-making practice will be supplemented with other aspects of presenting your work—writing an artist statement, writing exhibition proposals, interviewing artists, and documenting your art—along with a series of professional-practices workshops. This is an immersive studio course meant for disciplined art students interested in making work in an interdisciplinary environment. 

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Visual Arts Fundamentals: Materials and Play

Open, Seminar—Fall

This class is open to all students of any experience level, including those currently enrolled in a creative arts FYS, and serves as an introduction to fundamental areas of the visual arts, including drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, collage, and related mixed-media processes. We’ll discuss these mediums through image presentations, videos, and a gallery/museum visit. Students will then make art in each of those areas via open-ended prompts, experimenting with new materials, processes, techniques, and ideas. Materials will be provided, and you’ll be encouraged to discover through play. Emphasis will focus on developing your creative imagination and building visual literacy. This class culminates in an end-of-semester exhibition.

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New Genres: Abstract Video

Open, Seminar—Spring

Although amateurs often confuse the two terms, abstract video is a new art form that is very different from the experimental film movement of the 1970s and ’80s. Often drawing from the digital worlds of games, signal processing, 3D modeling, and computational media, abstract video has become an important new aspect of art installation, site-specific sculpture, and gallery presentations. This small-project class is an introduction to the use of video as a material for visual artists. Using open-source software and digital techniques, students will create several small works of video abstraction intended for gallery installation, ambient surrounds, and new-media screens. Artists studied include Refik Anendol, Light Surgeons, Ryoji Ikeda, and others.

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New Genres: Drawing Machines

Open, Seminar—Spring

In 2016, So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi used skateboards and pendulums to create “The Senseless Drawing Bot,” a self-propelling device that sprays abstract lines on walls. Meanwhile, François Xavier Saint Georges used power tools to create “The Roto,” a small, circular machine that prints orbital graphite patterns on flat surfaces. In 2011, Eske Rex, a designer in Copenhagen, built two nine-foot towers to stage a double harmonograph for Milan Design Week. Joseph Griffiths uses exercise bikes. Alex Kiessling uses robot arms. Olafur Eliasson simply vibrates balls, covered in ink, across paper. For centuries, artists have been obsessed with machines that make pictures; today, their ongoing experiments with mechanics, scanners, plotters, and bizarro contraptions have become a core aspect of the studio’s relationship to technology. Part art studio, part history, and part mad-scientist lab with a bit of eBay salvage thrown in, this class is devoted to the exploration of drawing machines and the intent of turning ordinary objects into marvelous machines—goofy gadgets that know how to draw, hopefully, in a way all their own.

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New Genres: Graphic Novel

Open, Concept—Spring

This course explores the graphic novel as a creative medium, from the intricacies of page layout to panel-to-panel transitions, text-to-image relationships, time mapping, and other innovations of the form. Designed for both beginning and advanced creators from all disciplines, students may work on creative projects or written analysis—but everyone will try the visual form. You will need a notebook, journal, or sketchbook of some sort for ongoing short assignments. Artists surveyed include Auster, Barry, Bechtel, Kuper, Madden, McCloud, Pekar, Ware, and others. No prior drawing experience is necessary.

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Painting Pop

Open, Concept—Fall

In this experimental studio class, we will explore how to digest, appropriate, reconfigure, and rewrite popular media using mostly, but not limited to, painting, drawing, and collage and open to video, animation, sculpture, and performance. We will examine how artists operate as consumers, catalysts, motors, and destroyers of TV, film, music, social media, and advertisement. Slideshows, readings, and presentations will exemplify the tight relationship between art and popular media throughout history and contemporary art and will serve as inspiration for students to create their own works. Students will be encouraged to deconstruct their own spectacles of adoration and critique and celebrate images that are impactful to them. We will promote generative group conversations, studio time, experimentation, collaboration, creativity, and improvisation.

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Performance-Art Tactics

Open, Seminar—Fall

Experiment and explore contemporary performance art. Through surveying a range of important artworks and movements, we will review the histories, concepts, and practices of performance art. Born from anti-art, performance art challenges the boundaries of artistic expression through implementing as material the concepts of space, time, and the body. Examples of artists that we will review are John Cage, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Pope.L, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Janine Antoni, Suzanne Lacy, Aki Sasamoto, and Anna Halprin, to name a few. Reviewing dialogues and movements introducing performance art—such as sculpture, installation art, protest art, social media, video art, happenings, dada, comedy, sound art, graphic notation, scores, collaboration, and movement—students will be able to relate the form and function of performance art through research, workshopping ideas, experimentation, improvisation, and movement, thereby developing the ability to confidently implement any method of the performance-art genre.

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Performance Art

Open, Seminar—Spring

Since the early 20th century, artists have explored performance art as a radical means of expression. In both form and function, performance pushes the boundaries of contemporary art. Artists use the medium for institutional critique, social activism, and to address the personal politics of gender, sexuality, and race. This course approaches performance art as a porous, transdisciplinary medium open to students from all disciplines, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, video, filmmaking, theatre, dance, music, creative writing, and digital art. Students learn about the legacy of performance art from the 1970s to the present and explore some of the concepts and aesthetic strategies used to create works of performance. Through texts, artists’ writings, video screenings, and slide lectures, students are introduced to a range of performance-based artists and art movements.

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What Remains: Presenting Absence

Open, Concept—Spring

How do we notice the traces of what’s no longer here? How do surfaces and forms bear the lingering presence of human use? This course will consider the artistic and philosophical concept of absence in its many forms: vanishing, dematerialization, disappearance, nothingness, forgetting, loss, and grief. Through lectures, readings, and studio exercises, we will experiment with multiple artistic and conceptual frameworks for bearing witness to acts of removal, erasure, and temporality. The class will explore how these strategies can, in fact, bring more visibility to suppressed bodies, histories, and ecologies. Some of the artists whose works we will consider include Gordon Matta-Clark, Félix González-Torres, Ana Mendieta, David Hammonds, Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread, Walid Raad, Do Hoh Suh, Danh Võ, Janine Antoni, and Stephanie Syujuco, among others.

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Activating Art in Public Places

Open, Seminar—Spring

The course will guide students in navigating the complexity of working in the public realm. The class explores methodologies and precedents for how artists translate their concepts, research, materials, processes, and scale into proposals for public works that respond to the needs of place and community. How can your work be in direct dialogue with its surroundings—physically, historically, and metaphorically—to activate the site? How can art mobilize the public into civic engagement, social change, and ecological repair? Through intentionality, projects engage audiences in participation, collaboration, or even disruption. Students will propose and develop a conference project with regular feedback, critique, and support from faculty and peers.

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