Literature MFA Course Descriptions WI22
Pre-authorization is required for students not enrolled in the Literature Department's MFA Program in Creative Writing. Please submit any pre-authorization request through the Enrollment Authorization System.
LTWR 215 - CROSS-GENRE WORKSHOP
Instructor: Amy Sara Carroll
What does cross-genre or inter-genre work and practice look, sound, feel, taste, smell like in the third decade of the twenty-first century? Assigned texts for this generative workshop will be determined by course participants. On a rotating basis, each student will submit for workshop an excerpt from a work-in-process. Each student will also assign and teach other course participants a significant influence or set of influences on their current work and/or larger practice.
LTWR 220 - TOPICS IN WRITING
Prosimetric Texts
Instructor: Brandon Som
In this course will read contemporary literary texts that work in both verse and prose forms within a single collection. We will consider literary traditions, strategies, and methods such as the notebook, the zuihitsu, serial poetics, (un)documentary poetics, autoethnography, and the poetics of erasure. Looking at what Fred Moten describes as the “little edges” between lyric and discourse, our conversations will focus on the intersections of critical theory, non-fiction, and poetry, as we engage both with the lyric essay and essaying in verse. Speaking of such hybrid forms, Cole Swenson writes, “any mixing of forms presumes that the interaction of disparities is a positive thing—that unalikes ignite, that they create sparks that illuminate all their parts…” We will attend to these frictions, these sparks, these provocations, in hopes of lighting fires within our own work. Seminar participants will have the opportunity to write critical and/or creative responses to readings, to present on a specific book from the syllabus, to share and workshop developing writing, and to submit a final seminar paper or extended creative project. Some of the writers we will read include, Kimiko Hahn, Akilah Oliver, Fred Moten, Jena Osman, Edgar Garcia, Layli Long Soldier, and John-Michael Rivera.