Course Description: How to re-enact the freshness , poignancy, and relevance of our direct experience of the world….? This is a workshop to re-inspire fiction writers, though it will also be useful to nonfiction writers and to poets. It is for those who are beginning and for those who are beginning anew. At each session, we will combine work on sensory awareness with attention to formal elements of prose. We will discuss Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses and other historical and critical texts with a wide range of fiction and other exemplary texts. In a supportive roundtable atmosphere, we will workshop student writing on a scheduled or ad hoc basis, as desired. All students will receive comprehensive critiques including an overall analysis of content and structure.
Required Texts:
Ackerman, Diane, A Natural History of the Senses. Vintage pb, 1991.
Hand-out Packet, Ed. Patricia Eakins. Available through Campus Course Packs.
Further Reading:
Gass, William. Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston: Nonpareil, 1971.
Liebowitz, Herbert, Ed. Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in Review. U of Michigan, 1994.
Course Outline:
Each session will begin with theatrical improvisation exercises. A writing exercise that is closely related to the reading for each week will be given the week before, so that students may work on it at home. There will also be in-class writing exercises. Please note that there are more reading selections than there will be time for discussion. We will focus on one or two of the selections; the others will become Recommended Reading. All assigned readings will be very short. Please make a note of the weeks when videos will be shown. Class may run a little longer than usual those weeks.
Week 1: Introduction
The Image and All the Senses
Prose poems and minute stories by Merwin, Hawkes and others
In-class writing based on them.
Week 2: Eye I
Exercise: Imaginary Photos
NY Times article on imaginary photos
X by Richard Rodriguez
X by Maxine Hong-Kingston
Excerpts from Paul Auster’s Invention of Solitude and Auster’s In the Country of Last Things
Excerpts from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos. Beacon pb, 1960.
Week 3: Eye II
"The Eye," Ronald Johnson. P/20th
Lawrence Wechsler on Vermeer
Excerpts from The Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Excerpts from "In Terms of the Toenail," William Gass. FIFOL, pp. 55-76.
Week 4: Ear: Hearing the World
"The Ear," Ronald Johnson. P/20th
In-Class exercises: from Sonic Meditations, Pauline Oliveros
Excerpts from Sounds, Wasily Kandinsky, trans. Elizabeth Napier.
Concrete poetry — Dada
"Tympani," from Derrida Reader.
So-called primitive poems
Sound in fairy tales
Week 5: Ear II: Language, Music, Onomatopoeia
Excerpts from "Listening in the Dark," Eudora Welty (NY Times BR)
"Winter Animals," excerpt from Thoreau’s Walden
"Knoxville 1915," excerpt from James Agee’s Death
Excerpts from "Sounds," Luis Bunuel
Week 6: Nose
Excerpts from The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki
Excerpts from Patrick Suskind’s Perfume.
Proust’s madeleine….
Excerpts from Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice
Excerpts from Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano
Week 7: Mouth/Nose: Hunger and Desire
"A Winter Feast," Paul Schmidt, P/20
Excerpts from Eugene Onegin (Pushkin)
Excerpts from "The Kitchen Child," Angela Carter
Video: "Babette’s Feast"
Week 8: Touch: Pain
Excerpts from Elaine Scarry’s. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford pb, 1985.
Two New Yorker stories
Kafka — "Penal Colony"
Week 9: Touch: Desire and Tenderness
Excerpts from "The Stylization of Desire," William Gass. (FIFOL)
Excerpts from Euruduce’s F/32. Boulder/Normal/Brooklyn: 1990.
Excerpts from Kathy Acker
Excerpts from Severo Sarduy’s Written on a Body, trans. Carol Maier. New York, Lumen pb, 1989.
Week 10: Kinesis — guest lecturer, dance/movement specialist
"…there is only one thing to do with the kinetic, and that is, re-enact it." — Charles Olson
Exercise: Feet….
Bruce Chatwin (songlines) cf. Interview with Amos Oz
Navajo poetry
Samuel Beckett
Rosmarie Waldrop
George Chambers
Week 11: Kinesis
"`…[this mind which] has opened onto the belly, and accumulates from below a dark and untranslatable knowledge, full of subterranean tides, hollow structures, a concealed agitation." — from an elegy by Maurice Saillet for Antonin Artaud
Excerpts from The Theater and Its Double, Antonin Artaud
Excerpts from The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, including "The Dialectics of Outside and Inside"
"At the Met with Kiki Smith: Making Metaphors of Art and Bodies," Michael Kimmelman
Excerpts from François Rabelais
"The Metamorphosis," Kafka
Video: Apocalypse and Utopia, Critical Art Ensemble
Week 12: Synesthesia
Excerpts from Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf ("Kew Gardens")
"…art, like everything we do, is sublimation, culture, an homage to death. But it is a sublimation that seeks to incarnate: to return to the body."
— Octavio Paz, "The Metaphor," Conjunctions and Disjunctions, trans. Helen R. Lane