Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Departmental approval NOT required.

The beginning workshop in fiction is designed for students with little or no experience writing literary texts in fiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually produce their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. The focus of the course is on the rudiments of voice, character, setting, point of view, plot, and lyrical use of language. Students will begin to develop the critical skills that will allow them to read like writers and understand, on a technical level, how accomplished creative writing is produced. Outside readings of a wide range of fiction supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

Prerequisites: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing

Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. 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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.

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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing

Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. 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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisite required. Department approval NOT needed.

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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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.

Prerequisites: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing

Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. 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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites required. Department approval NOT required.

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: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.

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: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.

Making the familiar strange, making the strange familiar: these are among the most dexterous, variously re-imagined, catholically deployed, and evergreen of literary techniques. From Roman Jakobson and the Russian Formalists, to postmodern appropriations of pop culture references, techniques of defamiliarization and the construction of the uncanny have helped literature succeed in altering the vision of habit, habit being that which Proust so aptly describes as a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first. In this course, we will examine precisely how writers have negotiated and presented the alien and the domestic, the extraordinary and the ordinary. Looking at texts that both intentionally and unintentionally unsettle the reader, the class will pay special attention to the pragmatics of writerly choices made at the levels of vocabulary, sentence structure, narrative structure, perspective, subject matter, and presentations of time. Students will have four creative and interrelated writing assignments, each one modeling techniques discussed in the preceding weeks.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT needed.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT needed.

Despite forever attempting to "make it new", contemporary poetry is still in the process of describing issues of content, intent, style, and prosody already present at the dawning of the thing called poetry. In this course, students will investigate the origins of such traditions, and use the knowledge drawn from those investigations as a basis from which to study a sampling of American poetry of the 20th and 21st century. Students will encounter the "Low" and "High" American Modernisms; the return of the Elizabethan courtly in poets like ee cummings, Hart Crane, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and John Berryman; the stripped-down vulnerability of the Confessional School; the classical urbanitas of James Merrill or Frank O'Hara; the experimental eloquence of post-modern and Language poetry; and finally the New Sincerity, a plain-speaking contemporary movement which positions itself against superfluity, irony, and theory. As background, students can also expect to read selections of Plato's Gorgias and Phaedrus; Aristotle's Rhetoric; Cicero's The Orator; Seneca's Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales; Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria; Horace's Epistles and Ars Poetica; Petrarch's Il Canzoniere; Thomas Wyatt's Complete Poems; George Gascoigne's Hundreth Sundrie Flowers; Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella; Samuel Daniel's Delia; Shakespeare's Sonnets, John Donne's Songs and Sonnets; Ben Jonson's Discoveries and The Forest; and George Herbert's The Temple. Though this course will operate around the usual seminar model (close reading, lecture, and classroom discussion), students will also be asked to keep a commonplace book in which they will engage critically with the readings and/or write their own poems/ imitations/exercises in response.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.

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: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT needed.

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

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: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT needed.
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.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Departmental approval NOT required.

The beginning workshop in fiction is designed for students with little or no experience writing literary texts in fiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually produce their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. The focus of the course is on the rudiments of voice, character, setting, point of view, plot, and lyrical use of language. Students will begin to develop the critical skills that will allow them to read like writers and understand, on a technical level, how accomplished creative writing is produced. Outside readings of a wide range of fiction supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

Prerequisites: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing

Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. 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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.

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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing

Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. 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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisite required. Department approval NOT needed.

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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see 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.

Prerequisites: Department approval required through writing sample. Please go to 617 Kent for submission schedule and guidelines or see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing

Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. 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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites required. Department approval NOT required.

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: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.

Making the familiar strange, making the strange familiar: these are among the most dexterous, variously re-imagined, catholically deployed, and evergreen of literary techniques. From Roman Jakobson and the Russian Formalists, to postmodern appropriations of pop culture references, techniques of defamiliarization and the construction of the uncanny have helped literature succeed in altering the vision of habit, habit being that which Proust so aptly describes as a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first. In this course, we will examine precisely how writers have negotiated and presented the alien and the domestic, the extraordinary and the ordinary. Looking at texts that both intentionally and unintentionally unsettle the reader, the class will pay special attention to the pragmatics of writerly choices made at the levels of vocabulary, sentence structure, narrative structure, perspective, subject matter, and presentations of time. Students will have four creative and interrelated writing assignments, each one modeling techniques discussed in the preceding weeks.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT needed.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT needed.

Despite forever attempting to "make it new", contemporary poetry is still in the process of describing issues of content, intent, style, and prosody already present at the dawning of the thing called poetry. In this course, students will investigate the origins of such traditions, and use the knowledge drawn from those investigations as a basis from which to study a sampling of American poetry of the 20th and 21st century. Students will encounter the "Low" and "High" American Modernisms; the return of the Elizabethan courtly in poets like ee cummings, Hart Crane, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and John Berryman; the stripped-down vulnerability of the Confessional School; the classical urbanitas of James Merrill or Frank O'Hara; the experimental eloquence of post-modern and Language poetry; and finally the New Sincerity, a plain-speaking contemporary movement which positions itself against superfluity, irony, and theory. As background, students can also expect to read selections of Plato's Gorgias and Phaedrus; Aristotle's Rhetoric; Cicero's The Orator; Seneca's Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales; Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria; Horace's Epistles and Ars Poetica; Petrarch's Il Canzoniere; Thomas Wyatt's Complete Poems; George Gascoigne's Hundreth Sundrie Flowers; Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella; Samuel Daniel's Delia; Shakespeare's Sonnets, John Donne's Songs and Sonnets; Ben Jonson's Discoveries and The Forest; and George Herbert's The Temple. Though this course will operate around the usual seminar model (close reading, lecture, and classroom discussion), students will also be asked to keep a commonplace book in which they will engage critically with the readings and/or write their own poems/ imitations/exercises in response.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites required. Department approval NOT required.

This course will examine the lineaments of critical writing. A critic blends the subjective and objective in complex ways. A critic must know the history of an artwork, (its past), while placing it on the contemporary landscape and contemplating its future. A single essay will analyze, argue, descrube, reflect and interpret. And, since examining a work of art also means examining oneself, the task includes a willingness to prjobe one's own assumptions and biases. The best critics are engaged in a conversation -- a dialogue, a debate -- with changing standards of taste, with their audience, with their own convictions and emotions. The best criticism is part if a larger cultural conversation. It spurs readers to ask questions rather than accept answers about art and society. We will read essays that consider six art forms: literature; film; music (classical, jazz and popular); theatre and performance; visual art; and dance. At the term's end, students will consider essays that examine cultural boundaries and divisions: the negotiations between popular and high art; the aesthetic of cruelty; the post-modern blurring of and between artist, critic and fan. The reading list will include such writers as Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Roland Barthes, (literature); James Agee, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, Zadie Smith (film); G.B. Shaw, Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Gerald Early, Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis (music); Eric Bentley, Mary McCarthy, C.L.R. James (theatre); Leo Steinberg, Frank O'Hara, Ada Louise Huxtable, Maggie Nelson (visual art); Edwin Denby, Arlene Croce, Elizabeth Kendall, Mindy Aloff (dance); Susan Sontag, Anthony Heilbut, John Jeremiah Sullivan (cultural criticism).

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.

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

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: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT needed.
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.