Screenplay Writing – Scene Study

138 Topics in Creative Writing, Winter 2017

This workshop concentrates on how to write a scene for a film (or television show). In the first week of class, we will review important elements of standard “Hollywood” feature-length screenplays, notably act structure, plot points, what a beat is, and creating a protagonist. The first writing assignment will be to write, in prose, a rudimentary act structure for a film. After that, we will concentrate entirely on scenes. Students will be expected to write 5-7 page scenes weekly in screenplay format. Students must be willing to have their scenes read and/or acted out and be willing to participate in other writers’ scenes. If time permits and students have basic film editing skills and are interested, we will also have a year-end short film assignment. One or two sessions will involve visits from screenwriter/directors associated with NewFilmmakers Los Angeles (NFMLA) and comedy writers. No previous screenwriting or creative writing class experience is required.

Screenplay Adaptation

118C Studies in Visual Culture, Spring 2016

This class examines the way several screenwriters have adapted works of print literature to “Hollywood”-style, commercial feature length films. There is no set way to adapt a novel to film: what makes a novel successful does not often succeed in movies. Feature-length screenplays have their own rules but also have unique freedoms, such as the close-up, rapid changes of location, the interpretation of the actor, and digital effects. While each adaptation will present its specific problems, there are several features that are common to the final screenplay adaptation, such as the four-act structure, inciting incident, plot points and length limitations. The screenplay will be treated as a literary form in its own right, and though viewing of the films is mandatory, this class will focus on the screenplay itself as a genre of writing. This class will explore five adaptations. Through creative exercises and short critical analyses, we will attempt to trace, and in some cases recreate, the adaptation process. Some brief readings in the theory of genre and the development of the modern novel, as well as “how to” material on screenplay writing, will also be assigned. By the end of this class, students should be able to:

• isolate moments in movies and screenplays that highlight the structure of the film
• be able to identify plot points, the use of props and mise-en-scene, and other tropes of screenplay writing and film
• have a grounded sense of literary genre and how it is transformed in the adaptation
• have rudimentary mastery of the format of screenplay writing. A final paper will present a cumulative description of one of the assigned screenplay adaptations or one of the student’s choosing (with instructor permission).

The Experiment of Asian American Poetry

M191C Topics in Asian American Literature, Spring 2016

The tradition of Asian American poetry extends back to the writings on the walls of Angel Island by Chinese immigrants detained their during the period of 1910-1940. Given their anonymous, impromptu and unofficial nature, these poems, written literally during the transition between cultures, arguably represent the essence of the “experiment” of Asian American poetry, or the “experimental” tradition as it has come to be recognized in writers such as Sadakichi Hartmann, Jose Garcia Villa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lawson Fusao Inada, John Yau, Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge and others. A younger generation including Tan Lin, Yunte Huang, Pamela Lu, Sesshu Foster, Cathy Park Hong and others have extended this exploration of the limits of text into multimedia, new forms of narrative, alternative forms of translation, and engagements with the politics of post-colonialism and feminism. This course requires a final paper along with short weekly writing (often creative) assignments.

How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: Comedy in the Wake of Lenny Bruce

19 Fiat Lux (1-credit Freshman Seminar), Spring 2016

Several controversial comedians emerged in wake of scandal-ridden career of one of icons of American comedy, Lenny Bruce. Examination of some of their careers (including George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, etc.) and how their work brought about sea change in America’s attitudes toward censorship, especially as concerns issues of race, religion, sex, and dirty words. Many of these comedians moved from straight to youth-oriented, counter-cultural comedy as tradition of blue comedy grew to have important social function. Reading includes one book-length study, Comedy at the Edge, with online viewing of routines. Students also engage in some in-class comedy improvisational exercises (instructor studies at Groundlings). Creative writing component (not mandatory) for students who wish to write their own bits and perform them in class. Note: Some early routines use language that might be offensive to listeners today.

Three American Avant-Gardes: The New York School, The Black Arts Movement and Language Poetry

257 Studies in Poetry, Spring 2016 (proposed)

This class traces the progression of formal experimentation in American poetry in relation to aesthetic, social and political concerns from the immediate postwar period to the 1990s. The primary representatives of the first generation of New York School poets, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, were immersed in the art world of New York which included several members of the European avant-gardes (Breton and Duchamp among them), transforming and, in some views, sublimating the radical and utopian aspirations that motivated these movements in favor of a Whitman-inspired idea of liberal “democracy” that came define the New York School in later years. The Black Arts movement, whose most prominent poet was Amiri Baraka, adopted many of the techniques of the New York School (as well as of their contemporaries, the Beat and Projective poets) while emphasizing the relationship of the individual, subjective artist to a collective will, that of the African diaspora, much like their French-language contemporaries the Negritude poets (Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Léopold Senghor from Senegal among others) and Anglophone Caribbean poets such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite, not to mention radical political figures such as Malcom X. Language Poets who emerged in the 1970s such as Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian can be seen as an attempt to realign the formal experimentation of the New York School poets — with their interest in indeterminacy, collage, camp, surrealism, “estranged” language and an attempt to unify the arts in a synaesthetic union (a “poetry of all the senses” in Rimbaud’s phrase) — with radical political thinking that critiqued cultural hegemony and sought to transform social relations. This, of course, is the neat, cartoon version of this progression, if, indeed, there is one; loose ends and aporias abound. Many topics will be considered, such as: can formal experimentation of the sorts investigated by these poets really have transformative effects on society; how is race accounted for in “experimental” poetry that seeks to critique the idea of the “subject,” created by a bourgeois elite and inherited from Romanticism, while many citizens are being denied their right to this very same subjectivity; what new forms of poetry were introduced during this period (in the way that the sonnet was introduced to English by Sir Thomas Wyatt) and are they reproducible on the level of techne; and how have these various formal/political gestures played out, given recent controversies in the poetry world around race and formal practices, in contemporary times?

A Speculative Turn in 21st Century Literature and Film

118B Literature and the Other Arts, Fall 2015

When do works of strange, horrific or “surreal” art and literature transition from being products of heightened, feverish imaginations — mere fancies — to compelling speculations about the nature of being? Can we examine the exceptional occurrence in a work of weird fiction as a window on the normative behavior in an alternate or parallel universe or some unexamined corner of our own? Why do philosophers and cognitive scientists care about zombies? This class will build upon philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s notion worlds “beyond science,” fictions that depict scenarios in which some physical aspect that we are confident exists in the world — causality, the division between animate and inanimate matter, the singularity and unrepeatability of events, or the Pythagorean theorem, for example — has been altered or has disappeared entirely. In novels, short stories, poems, and films, “speculative realist” styles of thinking have been of increased interest to a range of people who are nearly household names, such as the film directors David Lynch and Christopher Nolan, and many who remain relatively obscure, such as the Canadian poet Christian Bök, African American science fiction writers Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, philosophers Vilem Flusser and Nick Land, the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, and British fiction writers Tom McCarthy and China Miéville among many others. Consequently, writers and directors who were once considered “genre” or “cult” artists like H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick and John Carpenter are being reevaluated for insights into these new styles of thinking. This class aims to create a bridge between the philosophies like those of Meillassoux, Flusser and Land and a range of short stories, novels, films and poetry produced since the turn of the century.

Songwriting Workshop

138.1: Topics in Creative Writing, Fall 2015

The workshop will concern the writing of song lyrics from several angles. Assignments will include reading lyrics (and listening to the song of) songwriters from the early to mid-20th century, reading poetry in “fixed” lyric forms, composing lyrics to instrumental tracks provided by the instructor (or chosen by the student), composing lyrics according to prompts, listening to contemporary lyrics and word usage, working in collaboration with partners to compose songs, and, of course, writing original songs oneself.

Students are not expected to be proficient at playing music or even to sing well, but should be able to compose rudimentary accompaniment either with a physical instrument (even if only rhythmical) or electronically. Eventually, students learn how to record demos of their songs to play to the class (sung by you or someone else). Students with no interest in music per se but simply in writing lyric poems with stanzaic “patterns” are also welcome.

The focus will be on refining lyrics to avoid clichés and pretension, create compelling and entertaining statements about the world, tell good stories and good jokes if so desired, and acquire a sort of sophistication and complexity to make them rival poems without alienating listeners. As a class, we will also consider what makes a compelling melody, working out dramatic development and how to tweak conventional song structures to crate elements of surprise. Students are expected to draft one complete song a week, to revise their work, and to complete a recorded portfolio of their best work by the end of the class.

Note: this isn’t a class on performance poetry or spoken word but lyrics with melodies and identifiable structures (hip hop and other musical genres that have spoken or rapped elements are welcome if they include melodic parts).

Rimbaud and the Poetics of the Americas

118 Capstone Seminar, Spring 2015

French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) is known not only for the innovative, often subversive, nature of his poetry, but for a few key facts about his life: a child prodigy, he composed many of his most important poems in his mid-teens and gave up poetry around the age of 20, then becoming a geographer, trader and gun-runner in Africa until he died in Marseille at the age of 37 (having had his leg amputated from what was determined, post-mortem, to be bone cancer). His tumultuous love affair with the older Parnassian poet Paul Verlaine in Paris (richly described in the prose poem “A Season in Hell”), his experiments with drugs and advocation of the “total derangement of the senses” in his epistolary manifesto “Letter of the Seer,” his visceral hatred for anything like 19th-century conventional bourgeois norms (including those of successful poets), not to mention the long “silence” of his career for the last fifteen years of his life, have become part of his legend.

This course traces, through the frame of Charles Bernstein’s conception of the “poetics of the Americas,” Rimbaud’s influence — both in his writing which “wrung the neck of rhetoric” (Aiken) and the vivd “novel” of his life — on poetry and fiction in North America, particularly in the United States. Though his influence on Modernists such as Ezra Pound, Henry Miller and, later, Robert Lowell was substantial, arguably it wasn’t until the Beat writers (Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac), the New York School poets (John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Bernadette Mayer), Black Arts writers (Amiri Baraka, Wanda Coleman, Jayne Cortez) and singular outliers from the “New American” period such as Charles Olson, Jack Spicer and Bob Kaufman that Rimbaud’s poetry made a singular, not merely “French” or “Surrealist,” impact in the States.

The course then moves to work by singer/songwriters who have cited Rimbaud as an influence such as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith and Lou Reed, along with writers animated by the punk moment of the late-70s/early-80s (Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper) and visual artists (David Wojnarowicz) who were inspired by Rimbaud’s narratives of abject queerness (in for example “Le Coeur Supplicié” and the poems of the “Album Zutique”).

Sessions in the second half will be devoted to Rimbaud’s influence (often mediated by the Surrealist movement) on writers in Francophone Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly in the way Rimbaud’s visionary, insolent and, ultimately, political creativity informed Martinique poet Aimé Césaire’s conceptualization (with Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas) of the Négritude, a diasporic, pan-African movement that sought to counter the effects of colonial racism in favor of a new black identity. Finally, we will consider Rimbaud’s relationship to the Paris Commune of 1870 and the continued reference to Rimbaud as an insurrectionary revolutionary by thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, the Situationists (Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem), Alain Badiou and Kristin Ross among others, especially in light our present political climate of riots and uprisings.

Students are not expected to read French or Spanish but those who have these language skills and cultural backgrounds are encouraged to read these works in the original. Students are expected to engage in research projects of their own devising that have some relationship to the framework of this course, along with giving one in-class presentation on their research.

Introduction to Electronic Literature

116B, Spring 2015

Since the rise of the graphical internet in the mid-1990’s, new forms of art have emerged that exploit the rich visual, interactive, databased-driven and communal surface of the networked computer screen. Innovative genres of literature — animated poetry, interactive fiction, “conceptual writing,” hacktivist exploits, digital mash-ups, fan fiction and video games — have exploited the computer’s power not just as an text/image distribution device but as an algorithmically-powered generator of literary experiences, often not based on an “author.” Many of these practices predate the ubiquity of the internet: mail art used the postal system to instantiate distributed, collaborative forms of literature; “happenings” created social spaces in which all participants were part of a liberated form of theater; visual artists like Lawrence Weiner, Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha mixed text and image in their gallery work; and fiction writers like Raymond Queneau and Robert Coover worked with indeterminate, aleatoric and interactive forms of narrative.

This course examines the range of new forms of poetry and fiction that are thriving presently in light of the long tradition of experimentation in the literary arts prior to the advent of the internet. Topics covered include: experimentation with text and typography during the Modernist period (roughly 1890-1945); the origins of “new media theory” (particularly Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s “electronic book,” The Medium is the Massage); “metafiction” and other forms of experimental literature; conceptual art and its influence on literary practices premised on play, process and plagiarism such as “conceptual writing,” the Oulipo and Flarf; video games (particularly the very-slow genre of “first person walkers”); forms of digital literature (Young-Hae Chang’s text movies, for example, or the “word instruments” of Stuart Moulthrop); new narrative strategies in film, particularly “modular cinema” that tweaks narrative conventions (Memento, Eternal Sunshine, etc.); the ludic character of the computer interface; and finally the political implications of digital culture — characterized partly by constant surveillance, speed and hyper-marketing — in the present day.

In addition to occasional blog postings and creative exercises, students are expected to complete a short mid-term paper on an assigned topic and either a longer research paper or creative project of their own devising (with approval by the instructor) at the end of the quarter. No prior experience with programming or software is required.

American Poetry Since 1945

173B, Spring 2014

The course starts with the first major generation of poets to follow the American Modernists (Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stein) who are usually classed under the title of “Confessional” poets due to their tendency to reveal in their writing intimate aspects of their personal lives that would not have been considered suitable material for poetry a mere decades earlier: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton and John Berryman. Other important poets, notably Elizabeth Bishop, were rarely were so candid in their work, but maintained ties with this group. The course then moves on to various other groupings—such as the New York School Poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler), Beat Poets (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso), Projective Verse Poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Hilda Morley), and Black Arts (Amiri Baraka) all of whom first reached a wider audience through publication in Donald Allen’s seminal anthology The New American Poetry in 1960. These poets challenged not only the ways that poetry could be written, but also the types of content—non-conformist, sexually liberated, anti-academic, at times vulgar and often very funny—that could be included, setting the stage for what would become the widespread cultural revolution of the Sixties. The course moves to poets in the spirit (though often actively contradicting the tenets) of the New Americans, such as the Language School (Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, etc.) and poets of color who, inspired both by the Civil Rights movement and various more revolutionary strands in culture, sought a politicized poetry that disturbed the normality of standard American English. Finally, the course ends with a study of two full-length books by mid-career writers including visits by some local poets.

Los Angeles Poetry: Past, Present and Future

173C Contemporary American Poetry, Fall 2014

The first weeks of the class will be a survey of very early Los Angeles poetry starting with the Spanish language period largely published in newspapers, moving through the early English-language period as epitomized by three women poets, Nora May French, Olive Percival and Julia Boynton Clark. We’ll then move to the McCarthy Era and read poets of the political left – many of whom moved to L.A. to take advantage of job opportunities in the film industry – whose lives were impacted by HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), notably Thomas McGrath. We’ll then consider the radical “Beat” poets who congregated in Venice as well as the first stirrings of African American poetry in the Watts district. Three major Los Angeles poets who don’t seem to fit neatly anywhere – Charles Bukowski, famous for his novels of dissolute life, Henri Coulette, a very accomplished “formalist” poet, and the late Wanda Coleman who bridged the African American and “experimental” communities – will then be considered before moving on to the “punk” era centered around Beyond Baroque and including poets such as Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan and Amy Gerstler. The second half of the course will be concerned with major living poets of Los Angeles and will include several class visits by the poets we will be reading representing contemporary trends such as “Language” poetry, Chicano poetry, performance or “spoken word” poetry, “conceptual writing,” and other less definable tendencies. Some essays in the history of Los Angeles – its geography and economics, ethnic communities, literary institutions, etc. – will also be assigned. (No Spanish is required for this course though, of course, knowledge of Spanish and the Latin American poetry tradition would be useful.)

Game, Chance and Narrative

184 Capstone Seminar, Spring 2013

The increasing complexity of video game narratives, along with the rise in acceptance as cultural objects that video games have enjoyed, has encouraged creators in other genres (most notably film) to rethink the possibilities for non-linear, “playful” narrative forms. This course will examine, through readings of novels, poems, and plays, as well as the viewing of films, the presence of “ludic” (play- or game-related) strategies in the writing and reading of texts. We will also look at examples of literary production that predated video games, mostly from the period of experimentation in the wake of Modernism. Finally, we will look at narratives in electronic environments—interactive fictions, and the PS3 game Heavy Rain—to discern how sophisticated, even psychologically astute, narratives have enabled games to become unique storytelling vehicles. Students are expected to engage in original research (with professor approval) concerning any of the genres or media listed above and to make a presentation at quarter’s end. The class will also complete a series of exercises in programming and will be required to create a multimedia website that includes original scholarship as well as experimental, creative elements (a video game, a short movie, etc.).

L.A. Post-Punk

19 Fiat Lux (1-credit Freshman Seminar), Spring 2013

This course will examine punk/post-punk bands in the Los Ang!:!les area, ranging from the
1977-1983. We11 start by looking briefly at the UK and NYC versions of punk/D.I.Y. culture, both in music and politics, then move to SoCal’s unique contribution. Bands include likely candidates such as The Germs, X, The Adolescents, The Screamers, The Weirdos and The Plugz, then move on to relatively obscure acts such as Suburban Lawns, The Fibonaccis, The Urinals, Monitor, Savage Republic and Outer Circle. We’ll brush on famous New Wave (Oingo Boingo, The Go-Go’s) and hardcore (Black Flag, Agent Orange) acts, but the focus will be on bands that seem to have disappeared from the narrative of post-punk U.S. culture. In the last sessions of the class, students will work on their own D.I.Y. compositions (no musical ability required!) and record them with “lo-tech” equipment, i.e. laptops and phones.

Theater of Images Workshop

19 Fiat Lux (1-credit Freshman Seminar), Spring 2013

Bonnie Marranca coined phrase “theater of images” to describe exciting work of New York downtown scene of the 70s, which included now-canonical figures such as Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Mac Wellman, and Wooster Group. These writers, directors, and performers “broke down traditional parameters of theatrical experience by introducing new approaches to acting, playwriting, and creation of theatrical environments; they reorganized audience and performing space relationships and eliminated dialogue from drama. Collaborative creation became the rule.” This theater eschewed trappings of realism–drama familiar to most moviegoers–and opted instead for a total, environmental, even magical theater in which visual, aural, bodily, and conceptual presences dominate over commonplace notions of plot, setting, and character. Students read and view a few classic examples of theater of images, then work in groups to write, cast, and stage their own productions. Writers, performers, musicians, and media creators encouraged.

Poets Among the Painters: The New York School and the “Other Traditions”

118B Literature and Other Arts, Winter 2013

Poets associated with what has come to be called the “New York School,”  most of whom lived and worked in the city during the 50s and 60s, sought to integrate modernist techniques of creating poetry (collage, Surrealist free association, the “intimate yell” of Mayakovsky, Williams’ Jersey vernacular, Stein’s cubist syntax, etc.) with playful, urbane wit and more recent American explorations in the arts, primarily jazz, the music of John Cage and Morton Feldman, Beat poetry, Projective Verse, underground film, abstract expressionism and, eventually, Pop Art. This class seeks to read these poets as at the nexus of several arts, particularly painting, music and film, while pointing to what can only be called their more “traditional” aspects, i.e. the craft of the lyric. The primary poets will be Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and James Schuyler, though significant attention will be paid to “second generation” figures like the painter Joe Brainard, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci who himself reached greater fame as a performance artist. Discussion of major trends in painting and sculpture of the modernist era, reading of art criticism by poets, and experiencing works in film, music, and dance that informed their aesthetics.

“Weird Realism” in 20th-Century Literature and Film

184 Capstone Seminar, Winter 2013

“Realism” in novels and films involves, generally, the promise to present the world “as it is” outside of interference from the mythical, magical or supernatural, the overtly symbolic or ideological, the obvious trappings of narrative or genre conventions, stylistic indulgences, and/or the blatantly editorializing eye/voice of the director/writer. But of course, no artifact that presents itself as either a “novel” or a “film” can ever truly present the “real” — at most, these works can present
“reality effects,” moments when frame of the novel or film seems to fall away and something becomes recognized by the reader/viewer as “real” (or “so real” or even “really real,” a subjective claim at best).

This course proceeds on a counter-intuitive premise: that the greatest hindrances to the “real” are those elements we seem to have turned to storytelling for: setting, plot and character. (“Facts” themselves will also come under some scrutiny.) Instead, we will attempt to find the “real” elsewhere, in works traditionally held to be “fantasy/science fiction,” “experimental,” “schizophrenic,” “speculative” or “poetic” and treat them as a truer form of realism, if not in what they “say” than in the presentations themselves. Though the primary focus of the course is on fiction, we will attempt to understand these texts and films as approximating an ontology — a theory or philosophy of being — and therefore as depictions of a mind as it perceives prior to, even in place
of, “understanding.” (If this sounds confusing, that’s because it is — it’s “weird.”)

Our authors and filmmakers will not be those commonly associated with realism (or even with sanity): Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany and the poet Alice Notley. Cameo appearances by Blake, Rimbaud and Gertrude Stein are guaranteed. The American philosopher Graham Harman’s short book “Towards a Speculative Realism” forms the philosophical backbone of the course, but additional short readings in philosophy, cognitive science, aesthetics and linguistics will supplement our discussions. The last quarter of the class will focus on several of these concepts as they pertain to films such as The Man Who Fell To Earth (Nicholas Roeg, starring David Bowie), Mulholland Drive (David Lynch), Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, screenplay by Charlie Kaufman) and the video work of Ryan Trecartin.

Visual Literacy in the Digital Age

118C Studies in Visual Culture, Fall 2012

How has the ubiquity of digitally conceived, enhanced, edited and/or distributed visual imagery transformed our relationship to visual art in the past fifty years? Basic readings and viewings in art and literature from the modernist era (roughly 1890-1945) will set the stage, but we’ll move quickly to changing uses and theories of visual imagery in the age of new media. Topics include the changing nature of feature film narrative, the transition of film conventions (visual and narrative) to long-form video games, the appropriated image in digital art (and, concurrently, the “appropriated” text in literature), the rise of the “mash-up” and the meme on the internet, the “society of the spectacle” and visual subversion, interactively generated art and text, and the crisis of ontology since the challenge to the photograph to represent “truth.” This eclectic, wide-ranging course will always keep in view the dynamic tension between the word and image, high and low.

New Genres in Postwar Fiction

116A Experimental Fiction, Fall 2012

This course examines works of fiction that are emblematic of specific aesthetic movements and styles in literature since 1945. Works associated with the nouveau roman (“new novel”), the Oulipo, metafiction, visual literature, speculative fiction, punk, collage and hypertext will be discussed along with the ideas that either generated them or followed in their wake. While the majority of the texts with be English and American, a few works will be in translation from French. Authors include Ishmael Reed, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Georges Perec, Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, Kathy Acker, Jonathan Safrom Foer, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Marc Saporta and others. By the end of the quarter students should have some sense of these works can be grouped together to form a single set of ideas and techniques. We can call this period of works “postmodernism,” but what does that really mean? Do any of these works point to a future type of literary expression which we just haven’t seen yet?

Contemporary American Poetry: The Ludic Turn

173C, Fall 2011

Ludology is the study of play and games, and is becoming increasingly important as a discourse in contemporary aesthetics, especially as computer technology has brought the play of algorithm – chains of mathematical computer functions – deep into our cultural and linguistic life. Main-stream filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan, Michel Gondry and the The Wachowski brothers, novelists such as Karen Tei Yamashita, Jonathan Safran Foer and Shelley Jackson, and the crea-tors of video games such as Grand Theft Auto, Heavy Rain and Mass Effect (among countless others), have all injected elements of the “ludic” in their telling of stories. A similar phenomenon is occurring in American poetry: poets are gravitating toward a more “formal” style of writing poetry – forsaking some of the freedoms that the Modernists and New American poetics purpor-tedly granted (free verse, the page as “open field,” collage, concrete poetics, oral poetries, etc.) – and opting instead for highly rhetorical, procedural, decidedly _unnatural_ mode, characterized by the uses of arbitrary constraints, word lists, syllabics and exhaustive re-workings of precedent texts. The first seven weeks of this course will be devoted to books consisting of shorter lyrical works – some authors include Matthea Harvey, Harryette Mullen, Susan Wheeler, Christian Bok (a Canadian, but highly influential on poetry in the States), Ben Lerner and K. Silem Mo-hammed – while the final weeks will be devoted to reading two longer works, the first part of James Merrill‟s epic ouija board narrative The Changing Light at Sandover, titled “The Book of Ephraim,” published in 1976, and Mark Z. Danielewski‟s most recent “novel,” Only Revolutions (his follow-up to the widely-acclaimed House of Leaves), published in 2006. Supplementary readings will include theories of the ludic (Huizinga, Caillois, Suits, Manovich, etc.) as well as passing glances at predecessor texts such as Browning‟s Ring and the Book, Carroll‟s Alice in Wonderland, poems by Marianne Moore, and some works by the French writing group The Ou-lipo.

Screenplay Workshop

138 Creative Writing, Fall 2011

This class involves some readings in theory of genre the screenplay. Students gain ability to isolate critical moments in screenplays that illuminate structure of the narrative; gain ability to identify plot points, use of objects/props and mise-en-scene, and other narrative vehicles in film; have grounded sense of literary genre; and have basic mastery of format of screenplay writing. Grading will be based on evaluation of students’ participation in class, writing assignments, revisions, and a portfolio of work at quarter’s end. Most sessions will be classic writing workshops, for which the student is expected to bring in pieces of writing he or she would like to submit to peer evaluation. Some sessions will be devoted to creative assignments that respond to the material in the required reading. For the final grade, students will have to submit a well developed 10-page treatment of a film with clearly articulated plot points and the first 15 pages of the screenplay itself.