Creative Writing
The Creative Writing Department offers writing workshops in fiction writing, poetry, and nonfiction writing. Courses are also offered in film writing, structure and style, translation, and the short story.
Program Administrator: Dorla McIntosh, 612 Lewisohn
212-854-3774
Department Office: 612 Lewisohn
212-854-3774
writingprogram@columbia.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Thursday, 11:00 AM-6:00 PM, while school is in session
Web: www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Registration Procedures and Course Approval
All creative writing classes have limited enrollments and require instructor or departmental approval prior to registration.
Students should visit the Writing Department's Web site (click on Registration Procedures) for details and instructions.
NOTE
Course scheduling is subject to change. Days, times, instructors, class locations, and call numbers are available on the Directory of Classes.
Fall course information begins posting to the Directory of Classes in February; Summer course information begins posting in March; Spring course information begins posting in June. For course information missing from the Directory of Classes after these general dates, please contact the department or program.
Click on course title to see course description and schedule.
Fall 2009
Creative Writing
Fiction Workshops
Credit Courses
The beginning workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with little
or no experience in writing literary nonfiction. Students are introduced
to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and
discussions, and they eventually submit their own writing for the critical
analysis of the class. Outside readings supplement and inform the
exercises and longer written projects.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Intermediate workshops are for students with some experience with creative
writing, and whose prior work merits admission to the class (as judged by
the professor). Intermediate workshops present a higher creative standard
than beginning workshops, and increased expectations to produce finished
work. By the end of the semester, each student will have produced at least
seventy pages of original fiction. Students are additionally expected to
write extensive critiques of the work of their peers.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Building on the work of the Intermediate Workshop, Advanced Workshops are
reserved for the most accomplished creative writing students. A
significant body of writing must be produced and revised. Particular
attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective,
characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several
short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing.
The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and
formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest
for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama
in the work.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
This course is restricted to seniors who are majors in creative writing.
Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior
workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with
classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major.
Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and
substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the
professor will be tailored to needs of each student.
Poetry Workshops
Credit Courses
The beginning poetry workshop is designed for students who have a serious
interest in poetry writing but who lack a significant background in the
rudiments of the craft and/or have had little or no previous poetry
workshop experience. Students will be assigned weekly writing exercises
emphasizing such aspects of verse composition as the poetic line, the
image, rhyme and other sound devices, verse forms, repetition, tone, irony,
and others. Students will also read an extensive variety of exemplary work
in verse, submit brief critical analyses of poems, and critique each
other's original work.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Intermediate poetry workshops are for students with some prior instruction
in the rudiments of poetry writing and prior poetry workshop experience.
Intermediate poetry workshops pose greater challenges to students and
maintain higher critical standards than beginning workshops. Students will
be instructed in more complex aspects of the craft, including the poetic
persona, the prose poem, the collage, open-field composition, and others.
They will also be assigned more challenging verse forms such as the
villanelle and also non-European verse forms such as the pantoum. They
will read extensively, submit brief critical analyses, and put their
instruction into regular practice by composing original work that will be
critiqued by their peers. By the end of the semester each student will
have assembled a substantial portfolio of finished work.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
This poetry workshop is reserved for accomplished poetry writers and
maintains the highest level of creative and critical expectations.
Students will be encouraged to develop their strengths and to cultivate a
distinctive poetic vision and voice but must also demonstrate a willingness
to broaden their range and experiment with new forms and notions of the
poem. A portfolio of poetry will be written and revised with the critical
input of the instructor and the workshop.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
This course is restricted to seniors who are majors in creative writing.
Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior
workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with
classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major.
Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and
substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the
professor will be tailored to needs of each student.
Nonfiction Workshops
Credit Courses
The beginning workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with little
or no experience in writing literary nonfiction. Students are introduced to
a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and
discussions, and they eventually submit their own writing for the critical
analysis of the class. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises
and longer written projects.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
The intermediate workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with some
experience in writing literary nonfiction. Intermediate workshops present
a higher creative standard than beginning workshops and an expectation that
students will produce finished work. Outside readings supplement and
inform the exercises and longer written projects. By the end of the
semester, students will have produced thirty to forty pages of original
work in at least two traditions of literary nonfiction.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Advanced Nonfiction Workshop is for students with significant narrative
and/or critical experience. Students will produce original literary
nonfiction for the workshop, with an added focus on developing a
distinctive voice and approach.
Fiction Seminars
Credit Courses
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
The modern short story has gone through many transformations, and the
innovations of its practitioners have often pointed the way for prose
fiction as a whole. The short story has been seized upon and refreshed by
diverse cultures and aesthetic affiliations, so that perhaps the only
stable definition of the form remains the famous one advanced by Poe, one
of its early masters, as a work of fiction that can be read in one sitting.
Still, common elements of the form have emerged over the last century and
this course will study them, including Point of View, Plot, Character,
Setting and Theme. John Hawkes once famously called these last four
elements the "enemies of the novel," and many short story writers have seen
them as hindrances as well. Hawkes later recanted, though some writers
would still agree with his earlier assessment, and this course will examine
the successful strategies of great writers across the spectrum of short
story practice, from traditional approaches to more radical solutions,
keeping in mind how one period's revolution -Hemingway, for example -
becomes a later era's mainstream or "common-sense" storytelling mode. By
reading the work of major writers from a writer's perspective, we will
examine the myriad techniques employed for what is finally a common goal:
to make readers feel. Short writing exercises will help us explore the
exhilarating subtleties of these elements and how the effects created by
their manipulation or even outright absence power our most compelling
fictions.
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Today, in the age of memoir, we don't need to apologize for speaking in the
first person, but we still need to find a way to make a first person,
fictional narrative forceful and focused. The logic is different, the
danger the same: we must find a form that will shape an "I" account and
render it rhetorically compelling, giving it the substance and complexity
of literary art. In this seminar, we will begin by reading critical
background about the early uses of first-person in fiction. We will study
how these functioned in the societies they commented on, and chart the
changing use of first person in western literature from the eighteenth
century to today. Through reading contemporary novels, stories and
novellas, we will analyze first person in its various guises: the "I" as
witness (reliable or not), as elegist, outsider, interpreter, diarist,
apologist, and portraitist. Towards the end of the semester we will study
more unusual forms: first-person plural, first-person omniscient,
first-person rotating. We will supplement our reading with craft-oriented
observations by master-writers. Students will complete four to five
fiction pieces of their own in which they will implement specific
approaches to first-person. At least two of these will be complete
stories; others may be the beginning of a novel or novella or floating
scenes. Students will conference several times with the instructor to
discuss their work.
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Some of the greatest works of fiction are narrated by characters who have
become unhinged from the norms of society. They may stand apart from the
mainstream because of willful eccentricity, madness, even social disgrace,
but in each case their alienation provides them with a unique perspective,
one that allows the reader to see the world they describe without the
dulling lens of convention. We will explore what authors might gain by
narrating their works from an "outsider" viewpoint, and we will study how
the peculiar form and structure of these books reflects the modernist
impulse in literature. This is a seminar designed for fiction writers, so
we will spend time talking about not only the artistic merits of these
books, but also about how the authors, who include Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun,
Jean Rhys, Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Samuel Beckett and Amos Tutuola,
achieve their specific effects. Over the course of the semester, we will
use these texts as a springboard for writing original fiction.
Poetry Seminars
Credit Courses
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
One advantage of writing poetry within a rich and crowded literary
tradition is that there are many poetic tools available out there, stranded
where their last practitioners dropped them, some of them perhaps clichéd
and overused, yet others all but forgotten or ignored. In this class,
students will isolate, describe, analyze, and put to use these many tools,
while attempting to refurbish and contemporize them for the new century.
Students can expect to imitate and/or subvert various poetic styles,
voices, and forms, to invent their own poetic forms and rules, to think in
terms of not only specific poetic forms and metrics, but of overall poetic
architecture (lineation and diction, repetition and surprise, irony and
sincerity, rhyme and soundscape), and finally, to leave those traditions
behind and learn to strike out in their own direction, to write -- as poet
Frank O'Hara said -- on their own nerve.
Nonfiction Seminars
Credit Courses
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
The seminar provides exposure to the varieties of nonfiction with readings
in its principal genres: reportage, criticism and commentary, biography and
history, and memoir and the personal essay. A highly plastic medium,
nonfiction allows authors to portray real events and experiences through
narrative, analysis, polemic or any combination thereof. Free to invent
everything but the facts, great practitioners of nonfiction are faithful to
reality while writing with a voice and a vision distinctively their own.
To show how nonfiction is conceived and constructed, class discussions will
emphasize the relationship of content to form and style, techniques for
creating plot and character under the factual constraints imposed by
nonfiction, the defining characteristics of each author's voice, the
author's subjectivity and presence, the role of imagination and emotion,
the uses of humor, and the importance of speculation and attitude. Written
assignments will be opportunities to experiment in several nonfiction
genres and styles.
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
While nonfiction is perhaps known for its allegiance to facts and logic in
the stalwart essay form, the genre conducts its own experiments, often
grouped under the term "lyric essays." Lyric essays are sometimes
fragmentary, suggestive, meditative, inconclusive; they may glance only
sidelong at their subject, employ the compression of poetry, and perform
magic tricks in which stories slip down blind alleys, discursive arguments
dissolve into ellipses, and narrators disappear altogether. Lyric
essayists blend a passion for the actual with innovative forms, listening
deeply to the demands of each new subject. In this course, students will
map the terrain of the lyric essay, work in which writers revise nonfiction
traditions such as: coherent narrative or rhetorical arcs; an identifiable,
transparent, or stable narrator; and the familiar categories of memoir,
personal essay, travel writing, and argument. Students will read work that
challenges these familiar contours, including selections from Halls of Fame
by John D'Agata, Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, Plainwater by
Anne Carson, Letters to Wendy by Joe Wenderoth, The Body and One Love
Affair by Jenny Boully, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Running in the
Family by Michael Ondaatje, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments by Ander
Monson. They can expect to read essays selected from The Next American
Essay edited by John D'Agata and In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative
Nonfiction edited by Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones, as well as
essays by Paul Metcalf, David Foster Wallace, Sherman Alexie, Michael
Martone, and Sei Shonagon. The course will be conducted seminar style,
with close reading, lecture, and classroom discussion. The students will
be expected to prepare a written study and comments for class on a
particular book/author/issue. They will also complete writing exercises
and their own lyric essay(s), one of which we will discuss as a class.
Their final project will be a collection of their creative work accompanied
by an essay discussing their choices.
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing.
Corequisites: You don't have to be bilingual to take this course. Several years of study of another language is enough. This course is open to Undergraduate & Graduate students.
In this introductory course to literary translation, students will learn
about the art of translating prose and poetry. We will read essays on
translation by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and
Anne Carson, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches
to the craft. Students will present their own translations for discussion
and become familiar with a range of perspectives on literary translation
that will inform their revision process. We'll also discuss the way works
in translation are reviewed and each student will review a recent
translation for the end of the semester.
Cross-Genre
Credit Courses
NOTE: This seminar has a workshop component.
CREA W3308y. Seminar: Short Prose Forms. 3 pts.Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
The prose poem and its siblings the short short story and the brief personal essay are the wild cards in the writer�s deck; their identities change according to the dealer. We will consider a wide range of forms, approaches, and styles, spanning centuries. In addition to works in English, we will read translations from the French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. Seminar discussions will be complemented by frequent writing exercises (inside and outside of class) and some abbreviated workshopping of student pieces. Each student will make one brief classroom presentation.
Authors include: Matsuo Basho, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Bernhard,
Aloysius Bertrand, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Gianni Celati, Luis
Cernuda, Bernard Cooper, Lydia Davis, Russell Edson, David Ignatow, Max
Jacob, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Joseph Joubert, Franz Kafka, Yasunari Kawabata,
Etgar Keret, Stephane Mallarme, Czeslaw Milosz, Harryette Mullen, Edgar
Allan Poe, Francis Ponge, Arthur Rimbaud, Nathalie Sarraute, Sei Shonagon,
Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Luisa Valenzuela, Diane Williams, James Wright,
Mikhail Zoshchenko.
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Creative writers are faced with dizzying options. We know we want to write,
but what should we write, and how? To what degree should we study the
accomplished writing of the past in order to produce writing for today and
the future? What are some enticing strategies for making art out of
language, and what are some striking examples from history that can guide
us? This craft seminar�a course in the techniques of creative writing�will
explore the fundamentals of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and
dramatic writing, as well as hybrid forms that are harder to name. Students
will learn to read as writers; they will study literary forms and styles,
they will become familiar with accomplished work from a range of genres,
and they will compose creative work of their own.
Spring 2010
Creative Writing
Fiction Workshops
Credit Courses
The beginning workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with little
or no experience in writing literary nonfiction. Students are introduced
to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and
discussions, and they eventually submit their own writing for the critical
analysis of the class. Outside readings supplement and inform the
exercises and longer written projects.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Intermediate workshops are for students with some experience with creative
writing, and whose prior work merits admission to the class (as judged by
the professor). Intermediate workshops present a higher creative standard
than beginning workshops, and increased expectations to produce finished
work. By the end of the semester, each student will have produced at least
seventy pages of original fiction. Students are additionally expected to
write extensive critiques of the work of their peers.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Building on the work of the Intermediate Workshop, Advanced Workshops are
reserved for the most accomplished creative writing students. A
significant body of writing must be produced and revised. Particular
attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective,
characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several
short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing.
The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and
formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest
for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama
in the work.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
This course is restricted to seniors who are majors in creative writing.
Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior
workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with
classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major.
Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and
substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the
professor will be tailored to needs of each student.
Poetry Workshops
Credit Courses
The beginning poetry workshop is designed for students who have a serious
interest in poetry writing but who lack a significant background in the
rudiments of the craft and/or have had little or no previous poetry
workshop experience. Students will be assigned weekly writing exercises
emphasizing such aspects of verse composition as the poetic line, the
image, rhyme and other sound devices, verse forms, repetition, tone, irony,
and others. Students will also read an extensive variety of exemplary work
in verse, submit brief critical analyses of poems, and critique each
other's original work.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Intermediate poetry workshops are for students with some prior instruction
in the rudiments of poetry writing and prior poetry workshop experience.
Intermediate poetry workshops pose greater challenges to students and
maintain higher critical standards than beginning workshops. Students will
be instructed in more complex aspects of the craft, including the poetic
persona, the prose poem, the collage, open-field composition, and others.
They will also be assigned more challenging verse forms such as the
villanelle and also non-European verse forms such as the pantoum. They
will read extensively, submit brief critical analyses, and put their
instruction into regular practice by composing original work that will be
critiqued by their peers. By the end of the semester each student will
have assembled a substantial portfolio of finished work.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
This poetry workshop is reserved for accomplished poetry writers and
maintains the highest level of creative and critical expectations.
Students will be encouraged to develop their strengths and to cultivate a
distinctive poetic vision and voice but must also demonstrate a willingness
to broaden their range and experiment with new forms and notions of the
poem. A portfolio of poetry will be written and revised with the critical
input of the instructor and the workshop.
Nonfiction Workshops
Credit Courses
The beginning workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with little
or no experience in writing literary nonfiction. Students are introduced to
a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and
discussions, and they eventually submit their own writing for the critical
analysis of the class. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises
and longer written projects.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
The intermediate workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with some
experience in writing literary nonfiction. Intermediate workshops present
a higher creative standard than beginning workshops and an expectation that
students will produce finished work. Outside readings supplement and
inform the exercises and longer written projects. By the end of the
semester, students will have produced thirty to forty pages of original
work in at least two traditions of literary nonfiction.
Prerequisites: Professor approval required through writing sample. Please see 612 Lewisohn for submission schedule and guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
This course is restricted to seniors who are majors in creative writing.
Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior
workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with
classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major.
Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and
substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the
professor will be tailored to needs of each student.
Fiction Seminars
Credit Courses
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
The modern short story has gone through many transformations, and the
innovations of its practitioners have often pointed the way for prose
fiction as a whole. The short story has been seized upon and refreshed by
diverse cultures and aesthetic affiliations, so that perhaps the only
stable definition of the form remains the famous one advanced by Poe, one
of its early masters, as a work of fiction that can be read in one sitting.
Still, common elements of the form have emerged over the last century and
this course will study them, including Point of View, Plot, Character,
Setting and Theme. John Hawkes once famously called these last four
elements the "enemies of the novel," and many short story writers have seen
them as hindrances as well. Hawkes later recanted, though some writers
would still agree with his earlier assessment, and this course will examine
the successful strategies of great writers across the spectrum of short
story practice, from traditional approaches to more radical solutions,
keeping in mind how one period's revolution -Hemingway, for example -
becomes a later era's mainstream or "common-sense" storytelling mode. By
reading the work of major writers from a writer's perspective, we will
examine the myriad techniques employed for what is finally a common goal:
to make readers feel. Short writing exercises will help us explore the
exhilarating subtleties of these elements and how the effects created by
their manipulation or even outright absence power our most compelling
fictions.
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
Raymond Queneau, in his book Exercises in Style, demonstrated that a single
story, however unassuming, could be told at least ninety-nine different
ways. Even though the content never changed, the mood always did:
aggressive, mild, indifferent, lyrical, sensitive, technical, indirect,
deceitful. If, as fiction writers, one of our pursuits is to stylize
various forms of information, and to call the result a story or novel, it
is also tempting, and easy, to adopt trends of style without realizing it,
and to possibly presume we operate outside of stylistic restrictions and
conventions. Some styles become so commonplace that they no longer seem
stylistic. V.S. Naipaul remarked in an interview that he was �opposed to
style,� yet we can�t exactly summarize his work based on its content. His
manner of telling is sophisticated, subtle, shrewdly indirect, and elegant.
He is, in short, a stylist. His brilliance might be to presume that this is
the only way to �tell� a story, and to consider all other ways �styles.�
This course for writers will look at a wide range of prose styles, from
conspicuous to subtle ones. We will not only read examples of obviously
stylistic prose, but consider as well how the reigning prose norms are
themselves stylistic bulwarks, entrenched in the culture for various
reasons that might interest us. One project we will undertake, in order to
deepen our understanding and approach to style, will be to restylize
certain of the passages we read. These short fiction exercises will
supplement our weekly readings and will allow us to practice rhetorical
tactics, to assess our own deep stylistic instincts, and to possibly dilate
the range of locutions available to us as we work.
Poetry Seminars
Credit Courses
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
One advantage of writing poetry within a rich and crowded literary
tradition is that there are many poetic tools available out there, stranded
where their last practitioners dropped them, some of them perhaps clichéd
and overused, yet others all but forgotten or ignored. In this class,
students will isolate, describe, analyze, and put to use these many tools,
while attempting to refurbish and contemporize them for the new century.
Students can expect to imitate and/or subvert various poetic styles,
voices, and forms, to invent their own poetic forms and rules, to think in
terms of not only specific poetic forms and metrics, but of overall poetic
architecture (lineation and diction, repetition and surprise, irony and
sincerity, rhyme and soundscape), and finally, to leave those traditions
behind and learn to strike out in their own direction, to write -- as poet
Frank O'Hara said -- on their own nerve.
Nonfiction Seminars
Credit Courses
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
The seminar provides exposure to the varieties of nonfiction with readings
in its principal genres: reportage, criticism and commentary, biography and
history, and memoir and the personal essay. A highly plastic medium,
nonfiction allows authors to portray real events and experiences through
narrative, analysis, polemic or any combination thereof. Free to invent
everything but the facts, great practitioners of nonfiction are faithful to
reality while writing with a voice and a vision distinctively their own.
To show how nonfiction is conceived and constructed, class discussions will
emphasize the relationship of content to form and style, techniques for
creating plot and character under the factual constraints imposed by
nonfiction, the defining characteristics of each author's voice, the
author's subjectivity and presence, the role of imagination and emotion,
the uses of humor, and the importance of speculation and attitude. Written
assignments will be opportunities to experiment in several nonfiction
genres and styles.
Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing.
Corequisites: You don't have to be bilingual to take this course. Several years of study of another language is enough. This course is open to Undergraduate & Graduate students.
In this introductory course to literary translation, students will learn
about the art of translating prose and poetry. We will read essays on
translation by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and
Anne Carson, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches
to the craft. Students will present their own translations for discussion
and become familiar with a range of perspectives on literary translation
that will inform their revision process. We'll also discuss the way works
in translation are reviewed and each student will review a recent
translation for the end of the semester.
Cross-Genre
Credit Courses
NOTE: This seminar has a workshop component.
CREA W3308y. Seminar: Short Prose Forms. 3 pts.Prerequisites: Please see 612 Lewisohn for registration guidelines or go to http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing
The prose poem and its siblings the short short story and the brief personal essay are the wild cards in the writer�s deck; their identities change according to the dealer. We will consider a wide range of forms, approaches, and styles, spanning centuries. In addition to works in English, we will read translations from the French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. Seminar discussions will be complemented by frequent writing exercises (inside and outside of class) and some abbreviated workshopping of student pieces. Each student will make one brief classroom presentation.
Authors include: Matsuo Basho, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Bernhard,
Aloysius Bertrand, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Gianni Celati, Luis
Cernuda, Bernard Cooper, Lydia Davis, Russell Edson, David Ignatow, Max
Jacob, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Joseph Joubert, Franz Kafka, Yasunari Kawabata,
Etgar Keret, Stephane Mallarme, Czeslaw Milosz, Harryette Mullen, Edgar
Allan Poe, Francis Ponge, Arthur Rimbaud, Nathalie Sarraute, Sei Shonagon,
Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Luisa Valenzuela, Diane Williams, James Wright,
Mikhail Zoshchenko.
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