51��������

Course Description

Summary

This Scriptorium, a “place for writing,” functions as a class for writers interested in improving their critical essay-writing skills. We will read to write and write to read. Much of our time will be occupied with discussion, writing, and revising—essai means “trial” or “attempt”—as we create new habits and strategies for our analytical writing. We will write in various essay structures with the aim of developing a well-supported thesis; in addition, we will revise collaboratively, improve our research and citation skills, and study grammar and style. Our learning goals include practicing to write with complexity, imagination, and clarity, as we read model examples in the genre of Ekphrasis, which can be defined as a literary description of a work of art or as a rhetorical device in which one medium of art responds to another. We will study classical and modern examples of ekphrasis and read critical theory about representation, influence, surveillance, the gaze, beauty, and truth. We will ask ourselves these pressing questions: How can a writer accurately and imaginatively describe a work of art? How can writing capture or reveal a work’s meaning, form, and effect on the audience? What are the tensions and possibilities between literature and the visual arts?

Our readings may include the following authors: Homer, Sei Shōnagon, Plato, Philostratus, Callistratus, Ovid, William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Honoré de Balzac, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Walter Benjamin, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Robert Hayden, John Berger, Lucille Clifton, Barbara Guest, Charles Simic, Audre Lorde, W. J. T. Mitchell, bell hooks, Elaine Scarry, Michael Dumanis, B.K. Fischer, Sianne Ngai, and Kevin Young.