Reading and Writing: Archival Work
LIT4589.01) (cancelled 10/8/2024
Course Description
Summary
The archive--and using archival materials as the generative basis for creative output--is having a moment. The visionary scholar-writer Saidiya Hartman has popularized once unknown terms like "critical fabulation" and "documentary poetics" through genre bending works like "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments"; erasure projects like poet Nicole Sealey's "The Ferguson Report: an Erasure" are transforming leaky government records into poetry; the influence of the late German wanderer W.G. Sebald has proven to remarkably durable in contemporary writing of all kinds. In this class, we'll read a wide range of creative non-fiction that involves archival work, and students will undertake their own adventures in the archive to help them generate personal essays, hybrid works, and other forms of creative nonfiction, which they'll refine in regular workshops.Prerequisites
Interested students should submit either a critical or creative writing sample (5 pp.) via this form by XXXX. Admitted students will be notified by email on XXXX. All students may apply for multiple 4000-level Reading and Writing Courses in the same term, but, once accepted, may only enroll in one 4000-level Reading and Writing course per term.
Please contact the faculty member : banastas@bennington.edu
Corequisites
Students are required to attend all Literature Evenings and Poetry at Bennington events this term, commonly held at 7pm on most Wednesday evenings.