CRW 270 - Advanced Special Topics in Creative Writing

 Advanced Special Topics in Creative Writing. May cover topics in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrid genres, or multiple genres. For Creative Writing minors, this course satisfies the 200-level creative writing course requirement.

S’24 SECTION .01 NEW NARRATIVE: TECHNIQUES IN EXPERIMENTAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

This is an intermediate/advanced creative writing workshop on experimental autobiographical technique. The course will involve the study of works by queer, feminist, and racial minority writers involved in the New Narrative - a radical movement that unfolded in San Francisco, New York City, and Montreal in the 1970s and 1980s around the problem of self-representation during a time of political and epistemic crises. Each week, we will read a short New Narrative text and discuss how experimental writers sought new ways to write about their lives that was true to the multiplicities of their lived experience. We will practice these techniques in our own creative work through weekly writing prompts. Through the semester, students will collect a portfolio of experimental work that they will use to create a final project of experimental autobiography (in the form of a short story or another genre). Prerequisites: at least one creative writing course in fiction or poetry or by the instructor’s permission (jnoh@clarku.edu)

S’24 SECTION .02 TRANSFORMING THE TEXT

In this course we will take received (pre-existent) texts and render them into various new literary and performance forms. Each semester will focus on no more than two texts. Through other related materials, treatments and examinations, we will delve into the social and historical contexts and forces at play in their creation; find contemporary connections; and recreate those texts into new literary and performance forms. Received texts will include plays, speeches, short stories, novellas, songs, paintings and sculpture. Forms may include hip-hop, song, spoken word, narratives, poetry (sonnets, haiku, Homeric simile, ekphrasis, etc..) soliloquy and monologue, etc. 

This class will involve movement and loud noises (including speaking and music). Ideal participants will have some background in creative writing, song writing, music composition (including experience with programs like Garageband and Logic), instrumentation, or theater. 

Students should also know this class will, in all likelihood, touch on (and sometimes render into satire) sensitive subjects such as politics, religion, sexuality, and violence among others, that may be both challenging and triggering. Class will culminate with a recorded staged reading and, if time allows, a public performance.

Prerequisites: Any 100-level CRW or ENG course.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually