CREATIVE WRITING
Offered Spring Semester

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
These courses are designed to improve students' writing and ability to critique writing. Class sessions will include discussion of assigned readings and workshopping of individual pieces. The courses will be designed to complement the Cortona program, with a special emphasis on the mutual dependence between writing and the visual arts. The program invites applications juniors and seniors, as well as from sophomores with solid credentials. With your application, please include a writing sample in place of the portfolio.

ENGL3800/4800 Italian Futurism & 20th Century Avant-Gardisms: A Workshop
The first major avant-garde movement of the 20th century, Italian Futurism, whose manifesto (in)famously embraced such odds and ends as youth, speed, technology, amorality, lust, violence, war and “scorn for women,” helped launch what would become a century of radically different art, paving the way particularly for Dadaism and Surrealism, which would alongside Futurism help spawn post-war avant-gardisms in the United States as varied as Abstract Expressionism, l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry and punk. Long considered politically problematic due to its alignment with Mussolini’s Fascist party and its overall departure from democratic values, the literature of Italian Futurism is often overlooked by scholars, who tend to regard it anyway more as a visual art movement, yet the poetics of Italian Futurism provide an essential clue to understanding the cultural revolutions that have shaped not only American visual art, but poetry, music, theater, performance art, even typography in the last century. Essentially a writing workshop, students will be invited to experiment at will with form, content, across both genre and media should the urge arise, in order to develop their own positions as artists and writers in a, perhaps, post-avant world.

ENGL4890 Writing (In/With/Around/Of) Time & Place
For both the narrative writer and the lyrical poet, investigations into time and place can lead to revelatory creative experiences, as well as uniquely expressive literary works. In this workshop, we will experiment with both, drawing examples from poetry, fiction and film that handle one or both of these aspects in an original and thought-provoking manner. Likewise we will let our circumstances inform us, using our present time as fodder for discussions, a time in which we know, thanks to Einstein, that time is relative depending on your location in the universe, and a time in which all places have become “closer”, due to available modes of transportation and communication between them. Above all, we will make use of our displacement from home as well as our actual location, Italy, a place thoroughly permeated by historical and mythical interpretations of itself, as sources of meditation to help us overcome our standard ideas about time and place and their functions and possibilities in art. A course for mind-adventurers, readers and writers of all genres with works by John Ashbery, Stan Brakhage, Roberto Bolaño, Jane Bowles, Federico Fellini, David Lynch, Alice Notley, Andrei Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, Tomaz Salamun, W. G. Sebald, David Foster Wallace and others.