How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
Creative Writing Courses
Creative Writing
Practice in the original composition of poetry supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works.
The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers a perspective on the place of literature among the liberal arts.
This studio course introduces students to graphic design with a particular emphasis on typography. Students learn typographic history through lectures that highlight major shifts in print technologies and through their engagement in studio design projects.
Through a series of screenings, we will analyze the narrative structure and grammar of films' visuals to spur on an in-depth understanding of story, character, style and theme.
This is a course in factual writing and what has become known as literary non-fiction, emphasizing writing and including several reading assignments from the work of John McPhee and others. Enrollment is limited to 16 second-year students, by application only.
Advanced practice in the original composition of poetry for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings.
Advanced practice in the original composition of fiction for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings.
What compels us to write about ourselves? And what drives us to read about the lives of others? In this workshop we will examine different approaches to writing about the people, places and events that have made us who and how we are.
This course explores encounters with awe and terror via the "sublime" experience. How are these inner states generated and represented in a variety of cultural, political, emotive and artistic contexts?
All literature is short — compared to our lives, anyway — but we'll be concentrating on poetry and prose at their very shortest. The reading will include proverbs, aphorisms, greguerias, one-line poems, riddles, jokes, fragments, haiku, epigrams and microlyrics.
This course explores works in which poets of color have treated racial identity as a means to destabilize literary ideals of beauty, mastery and the autonomy of the poetic text while at the same time engaging in groundbreaking poetic practices that subvert externally or internally constructed conceptions of identity or authenticity.
In traditional workshops content and context come second to craft. Here we will explore writing political fiction, the politics of fiction and writing as political engagement.
How can screenwriters prepare for the evolving challenges of our global media world? What types of content, as well as form, will emerging technologies make possible? This class will use fairytales, films, games and new media to illustrate universal script principles while creating a rich interdisciplinary lens to explore the innovative intersection of narrative screenwriting, science and technology.
In this course, which is both a creative writing course and a literature course, students will study canonical French-language essays and newer forms of essayistic production (the essay film, photo essay, blog, and podcast) and will use these texts as models for their own writing.
This advanced screenwriting course will introduce students to the complexity and thought process behind creating a first season for a dramatic TV series.