Graduate Course Catalog

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Course Catalog (Graduate)

GRADUATE POETRY WORKSHOP (CW5000)

In this course, students will spend a semester devoted to the poetic arts. Each week students will create and present a new work of poetry which they will turn in for feedback from the professor and their peers. This could take the form of small group workshops, individual meetings with professors and visiting writers, online critiques, and presentations in front of the whole classroom. Since the act of writing is inseparable from that of reading, each week students will read the work of a particular writer (along with essays, interviews, and reviews) and write a poem based on a principle, form, technique, or theme they have identified in the work of the poet they read. Readings in class will be both historic and contemporary, often bringing into the discussion the many literary movements which of our writers have been associated with. While working on individual poems, students will also learn to pay particular attention to the book as an unit of thought and develop ideas about sequence, structure, and seriality. The semester will conclude with a presentation of a poetry chapbook.

TRANSLATION WORKSHOP (CW5001)

Translation as a practice spans the work of rendering a faithful English version of a source text, which requires competency in at least one foreign language, and the use of a source text as a springboard for creative adaptation, giving rise to a new poem or work of prose. Translation in this course will span both senses of the practice, so that students with developing competencies in foreign languages can work alongside students who are translating in a looser, more experimental mode, availing themselves of dictionaries and the imagination to render freer translations and explore lesser-known languages. The course therefore encourages, but does not require, competency in a language other than English. Students may work on experimental translations and traditional translations or alternate between them; they may build their intimacy with one source language or translate from different languages over the course of the semester. The practice of translation will be facilitated by close readings of experimental translations as well as essays on the theory of translation. Class visits by contemporary translators, translation workshops, and work with the Center for Writers and Translators (and their cahier series featuring writers writing about translation) will be important components of the course.

GRADUATE FICTION WORKSHOP (CW5002)

This graduate-level fiction workshop is dedicated to the discussion and critique of student work. Students submit two to three times per semester and compose written critiques in advance of workshop. Student work is supplemented with a range of published writing to deepen our creative practice and expand our sense of what it is possible to do on the page.

GRADUATE NONFICTION WORKSHOP: CRAFTING PERSONAL NARRATIVES (CW5003)

How to capture - and convey - the immediacy of one's own experience? This is the central question explored by this graduate workshop. Students will work on the question of what "personal" means exactly, and how far memoir and autobiography are distinct from fiction. This course explores narrative structure, description, characterisation, dialogue, atmosphere, under- and over-statement, and context. It draws on the experience of AUP's Center for Writers & Translators and its Cahier Series which specialises in personal narrative.

THE PARIS SEMINAR (CW5004)

The Paris Seminar serves as both an introduction to graduate studies in creative writing and provides a framework through which students engage The Paris Seminar serves as both an introduction to graduate studies in creative writing and provides a framework through which students engage with the city of Paris, its history, its creative communities, and its archives,libraries, exhibition spaces, and bookstores. Presentations by faculty members from the department of English and Comparative Literature will be complemented by talks by a range of Paris-based writers.