brown university creative writing mfa application

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Literary Arts

For over 40 years, Literary Arts at Brown University has been a creative and intellectual center for the U.S. literary avant-garde. Along with a handful of other writing programs nationwide, Brown provides a home for innovative writers of fiction, poetry, electronic writing (hypertext) and mixed media.

Established in the mid-1960s by poet, translator and critic Edwin Honig, Literary Arts at Brown continues its tradition of hiring and retaining a faculty comprised of nationally and internationally known authors. Each year, the program offers 60 – 70 classes, awards the M.F.A. degree to approximately 12 graduate student writers, and confers Honors on about 35 talented seniors who will have completed the undergraduate concentration in Literary Arts.

The online MFA application deadline is 15 December. Applicants can expect admission decisions by 15 March.

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Affiliations

Faculty administrative positions.

Shenoda, Matthew Chair of Literary Arts

Faculty Positions

Cayley, John H Professor of Literary Arts

Channer, Colin C D Associate Professor of Literary Arts

Colella, Laura E Assistant Professor of the Practice of Literary Arts

Coover, Robert T.B. Stowell University Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts

Ebeid, Carolina Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice of Literary Arts

Field, Thalia L Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing

Gander, Forrest Adele Kellenberg Seaver '49 Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing, Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts, and Professor Emeritus of Comparitive Literature

Hunt, Laird B Professor of Literary Arts

Ives, Lucy B Bonderman Professor of of the Practice of Literary Arts

Mahajan, Karan Associate Professor of Literary Arts

Mari, Francesca Assistant Professor of the Practice of Literary Arts

Maso, Carole Professor Emerita of Literary Arts

Nakayasu, Sawako Assistant Professor of Literary Arts

Nelson, Peter Gale Senior Lecturer in Literary Arts

Shenoda, Matthew Professor of Literary Arts

Sikelianos, Eleni A Professor of Literary Arts

Steinbach, Meredith Professor Emerita of Literary Arts

Swensen, Cole Professor Emerita of Literary Arts

Townsend, Jacinda Assistant Professor of Literary Arts

Wideman, John Edgar Asa Messer Professor Emeritus of Africana Studies and Literary Arts

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Undergraduate

Since 1968, Literary Arts at Brown University has been a creative and intellectual center for the U.S. literary avant-garde. Along with a handful of other writing programs nationwide, Brown provides a home for innovative writers of fiction, poetry, digital language arts and cross-disciplinary. Established in the mid-1960s by poet, translator and critic Edwin Honig, Literary Arts at Brown continues its tradition of hiring and retaining a faculty comprised of nationally and internationally known authors. Each year, the program offers 60 – 70 classes, awards the M.F.A. degree to approximately 12 graduate student writers, and confers Honors on about 35 talented seniors who will have completed the undergraduate concentration in Literary Arts.

For additional information, please visit the department's website: http://brown.edu/academics/literary-arts/home/literary-arts

LITR 0100A. Introduction to Fiction .

A workshop for first year students, introducing them to the art of writing fiction. This course is reading and writing intensive. Enrollment limited to 17. S/NC required.

LITR 0100B. Introduction to Poetry .

A workshop for first year students, introducing them to the art of writing poetry. This course is reading and writing intensive. Enrollment limited to 17. S/NC required.

LITR 0110A. Fiction I .

A workshop for students who have little or no previous experience in writing fiction. Enrollment limited to 17 per section. This course is limited to undergraduates. S/NC.

LITR 0110B. Poetry I .

A workshop for students who have little or no previous experience in writing poetry. Enrollment limited to 17 per section. This course is limited to undergraduates. S/NC.

LITR 0110C. Playwriting I (TAPS 0100) .

Interested students must register for TAPS 0100 .

LITR 0110D. Digital Language Art I .

Project-oriented workshop for writers, visual/sound artists, filmmakers and programmers who wish to explore digital media techniques. No experience working in this field (or with computer programming) required. You'll learn through doing, reading, talking and collaborating on works in various traditions. Enrollment limited to 17. S/NC.

LITR 0110E. Screenwriting I .

Screenwriting I introduces the fundamentals of short-form screenwriting through viewings, readings, exercises and assignments. Areas of particular focus include the short as a fully developed and distinctive work of art; visual storytelling, pacing and flow; effective screenwriting techniques, optimizing every word; articulating your personal voice and vision; creating structures that best suit your content and intentions. In class, we will review your writing, lookbooks and group presentations; view and discuss short films; discuss readings; and do writing exercises. Assigned readings include theory, essays, treatments and screenplays. Films will also be assigned for viewing outside of class. This course is limited to undergraduates. S/NC. Enrollment limited to 17.

LITR 0110H. Digital & Cross-Disciplinary Language Arts 1 .

Project-oriented workshop for writers and language artists who want to integrate practices from other disciplines as they devise, compose, and make their work. Those with little or no prior interdisciplinary or digital media experience are welcome. Learning is through making, reading, discussion, group projects, collaboration, and research presentations Enrollment limited to 17. S/NC.

LITR 0200Z. Faking It: Literature in the Age of the Hoax .

How is society simultaneously constructed and undermined by the persistence of fakes? With its cousins the hoax and the forgery, the fake plays the straw man in much of political, religious, and philosophical discourse, but the fake’s insistence on re-conceiving notions of originality and purity is more substantial. Pursuing a definition of the fake, we will consider its many forms in contemporary society alongside novels that parody and complicate the history of these particular deceptions. Authors include: Borges, Bolano, Ishiguro, Byatt, and McCarthy. Enrollment limited to 17.

LITR 0210A. Fiction Writing II .

Topics often include stylistic matters related to tone and point of view, and structural matters like controlling switches in time. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all intermediate workshops. Enrollment limited to 17. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 0210B. Poetry Writing II .

Emphasis is placed on verse strategies, meter, rhythm, imagery and rhyme. Writing includes frequent exercises in various poetic traditions. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all intermediate workshops. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 0210C. Playwriting II (TAPS 0200) .

Interested students must register for TAPS 0200 .

LITR 0210D. Digital Language Art II .

Project-oriented workshop for writers, visual/sound artists, filmmakers, and programmers wishing to explore techniques for effective and innovative use of text in digital media. Topics include hypertext narrative, kinetic poetry, and recombinant and computer-generated texts. Collaboration encouraged. Work sample (writing, programming, website) due on first day of semester. Enrollment limited to 17. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 0210E. Screenwriting II .

Emphasis is placed on filmic devices, such as dialogue, voice-over, montage and time. Writing includes frequent exercises. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all intermediate workshops. This course is limited to undergraduates. Enrollment limited to 17. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 0310A. Poetry in Service to Schools and the Community .

We shall be reading, writing and talking about poetry and letting this medium reflect back on other artistic practices -- what it means to live, work & think (in) this way; another key component will be an engagement with community practice through bringing poetry to local schools, a direct personal and enlightening exchange of enlightening ideas and experience. Participants will work independently, in groups, in classes (including this one); you produce, and work with others to produce, art individually as well as communally; you are the gaffer, you are also, and simply, a member of the guild. This feels more like a teacher's enterprise, though I call it, simply, community practice-- what happens when people just put themselves in the position to give their gifts, while allowing, at the same time, others to give equally of themselves. Limited to 17. S/NC. Permission will be granted by the instructor after the first class session.

LITR 0310B. City/Spaces: An Introduction to Psychogeography .

Psychogeography is an artistic discipline concerned with the subconscious ways in which we respond to and interact with the physical environment of the city. This course will focus on the intersection of psychogeography and text-both narrative and non-narrative- and the possibilities for walking to inform text and narrative.

LITR 0310C. Ethnic Writing (ETHN 0300) .

Interested students must register for ETHN 0300 .

LITR 0310D. Imagining the City: Visions from Film and Literature .

This course will look at representations of urban space both in films and fiction, and through the lens of critical writings on the intersections between city space, architecture, film, and narrative. How do cities affect us aesthetically and emotionally? How have film and fiction examined, reinvented and revolutionized urban space in the twentieth century? What is the future of cities? These are some of the questions we'll address through readings, screenings, and discussion. As a class we will do weekly creative writing exercises inspired by the films and designed to explore the ways in which poetic space might be evoked through text.

LITR 0310E. Making the Written Word .

While our primary focus will be on language, we shall explore its relationship to sound, video, and performance. Although no prerequisites are required, students should be competent in visual and language arts — we shall work with equal sensitivity in both. Works created shall interrogate the space between image and text as a single composite medium, therefore illuminating advantages and pitfalls of each. We'll consider works by Linda Montano, Jenny Holzer, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Sontag. Required lab sessions in new technologies (Final Cut Pro, Audacity, Logic, Processing) will provide skills necessary to produce conceptually driven works of digital language art. Enrollment limited to 17.

LITR 0310F. Visual Poetry .

This interdisciplinary workshop explores the visual possibilities of language. Considering the page as a starting point, we'll create new works between writing and visual art. Through researching early writing systems, concrete poetry, asemic writing and contemporary works, students will gain a deeper understanding of their own practices. We'll examine the works of Dieter Roth, Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, Aram Saroyan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Rosmarie Waldrop and more. All visual media welcome. "[Blank space on a page means] freedom. The possibility of anything happening. Every mark on that paper is an interruption, an insertion into a kind of peace." -Susan Howe

LITR 0310G. COMIX: Words + Image .

In this course we will be exploring the expansive genre of comics. You will learn how to read, analyze, compare, and create/write sequential art. This will be done through a variety of readings, in class exercises, discussions, and assignments. We will apply these reading and writing forms to the digital.

LITR 0310H. Art of Film: An Introduction to Filmmaking .

This is a course in the art of film writing, directing, editing picture and sound, and producing, be it narrative or avant-garde. Students will engage the theory and practice of the art of filmmaking via readings, viewings, writings, and making their own films. S/NC required.

LITR 0310I. Exploding the Book: An Introduction to Hybrid + Cross-Disciplinary Poetry .

How might poetry exist in three dimensions? In four? How might it interact with images? With sound? With performance? This course invites students to reimagine the ways in which human beings experience text. Exploding The Book is both an introduction to hybrid/cross-disciplinary poetry—poetry intersected with other media including image, sound, video, etc.—as well as a writing workshop. Students will be introduced to hybrid poets and text-based visual artists challenging the possibilities for where and how text exists. Additionally, students will develop a hybrid and experimental writing practice of their own.

LITR 0310J. The Voice of Text .

The Voice of Text will explore the voice as mediator among text, sound and performance. The vocal instrument will be thoughtfully investigated with examination of extreme and unorthodox iterations of voice/text/sound, including: castrati repertoire, extended technique ranging from Diamanda Galas to black metal, coded shortwave radio transmissions, electronic vocal synthesis and the ecstatic speech of glossolalia. Additionally, voiced text will be given historical context through fiction and poetry, film, theater and music. Through individual and collaborative projects, students will explore a variety of techniques and technologies, harnessing the expressive potential of the voice across a wide variety of disciplines.

LITR 0310K. The Web Video: Narrative Installed in the Screen .

Godard once joked, “I have a secret ambition…to be put in charge of the French newsreel.” He imagined a digestible form of consumption that blended text with pictures, documentation with advertisement, intimacy with objectification. And now we have it. The computer allows access to thousands of newspapers, also television shows, social media sites, email, reddit, first person shooting games, everything really. Looking at artists like Hito Steyerl, Jenny Holzer, Harun Farocki, Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Trinh Minh Ha, Sondra Perry, Angela Washko, Douglas Kearney, Xu Bing and others, we’ll explore narrative in the on screen video format.

LITR 0310L. Coding for Language: An Introduction .

In a time when almost every word and sentence will become digitized by computers, language becomes programmable. In this project centered workshop we are going to explore what possibilities, questions and challenges programming bring to language, especially in reading and writing practices. For students who are interested in language, coding, poetics, and creative writing, you’ll learn through doing, reading, discussing and collaborating on works in programmable media. Some previous experience with programming is desirable. If you have a basic understanding of programming and are willing to spend more time to code for language, this course is for you.

LITR 0310M. Refusing Objecthood: Web-Based Language Art as Site .

This studio course addresses the history and practice of web-based language art, or literature/art made for and inseparable from the web. Web-based language art is space/place/landscape/setting/site; it is not held or beheld, but filled and inhabited. We focus on what this means for web-based language artists, especially those who occupy bodies that have not historically tended to own or control physical sites. Supplementary readings consider other site-building or site-altering language art practices and the materiality of the internet. Final projects will be web-based language artworks, for which participants are encouraged but not required to learn to code for the web.

LITR 0310N. Machine Learning and Language Arts: Approaches to AI Art Practice .

We'll consider the question: what does the rise of so-called artificial intelligence mean for the language and for arts practice in general? Contemporary artists in fields as diverse as music, architecture, cinema, poetry and painting use machine learning tools to support their work. Through technical workshops, project critiques and critical discussions, we'll grapple with the anxiety and catharsis AI tools can bring to the arts. Students will be expected to work on projects using multiple machine learning tools. No coding experience is required for this course. A writing sample will be due in the front hall of the Literary Arts building (located at 68 1/2 Brown Street) by 4 pm on the first day of classes. Interested students should also complete the survey here: https://www.brown.edu/academics/literary-arts/survey-litr-0210-310-and-1010-workshops.

LITR 0310O. Narrative Nonfiction .

This is a class in crafting engrossing and essential stories. True stories need to be told, and deserve to be told well. What’s the difference between story and subject? How can narrative and careful structuring maximize the impact of investigative reporting? How do you properly pace a longform story? How do you pitch, report, outline, and edit one? And, most importantly, why do you write it in the first place? Class meetings will include a magazine-style editorial meeting, discussing weekly pitches and, later, story drafts followed by a discussion of reading that explores various approaches to structure, voice, and genre.

LITR 0310P. WIND in the CANE: Or, poetry in the “black outdoors” .

Are poems set on urban streets landscape poems? Can a poem shot through with mistrust of, and alienation from, the land and other natural bodies constitute a nature poem? How do our notions of dwelling in the body inform our notions of dwelling on land? In this cross-disciplinary workshop, we’ll consider what informs our prevailing views of the natural world; we’ll investigate the language we use to describe the spaces we inhabit, haunt, cross over, and take as refuge; and we’ll attune to the body and its material culture, which shapes our experience and enables our relationship to the land.

LITR 0310Q. Speculative Digital Utopias in a Time of Planetary Crisis .

'Social distancing' has driven us to spend more of our waking life in the virtual world than ever before. In class, we will confront the “reality of the virtual” in our present moment and make active steps to decolonize our imaginations and cultivate new ways of relating to reality, technology and the future. How do our avatars and virtual ecosystems reflect / parallel / interact with our physical reality? How can critical fabulation open portals to possible futures? What roles can language, imagination and art play as guiding forces toward a decolonized utopian future? Students will explore these questions through readings, conversation, experimentation and play. Over the semester, students will create several works of language driven digital art using sound, video, installation + networked media.

LITR 0310R. The Earned First Person .

Writing in the first person is a familiar mode for many of us. But when does it add to a reported, longform story and when does it detract from it? This is emphatically not a memoir class. In fact, at every turn, we will interrogate whether the first-person is merited. The first person can be used to bear witness or take us on a quest or build an argument. Other times, it’s navel-gazing and gratuitous. We’ll focus on how to use the first-person to create engrossing, well-structured narratives with unique perspectives.

LITR 0310S. The Earned First Person .

LITR 0310T. Metaforaging .

To forage is to explore and gather that which supports and sustains you, without depleting the nuanced systems that provide them. In this language art workshop, we will move through multi-disciplinary practices to understand how our worlds interrelate, how our senses extend and entangle each other. We will tune our attention to the abundance around us, drawing materials from personal and natural sources across disciplines into our language art practices. This course will stay within the poetic while moving from the literal – foraging for experiences and objects in our environment – to the speculative. Learning is through writing, noticing, sharing, making, reading, discussion, collaboration, and research presentations. Enrollment limited to 17. S/NC.

LITR 0310U. Hydropoetics: writing with and as water .

This poetry workshop takes its inspiration from the word hydrography. Etymologically, hydrography means water writing. As a science, hydrography concerns itself with surveying bodies of water especially for the purpose of safe navigation. We will consider ourselves as literary hydrographers, surveying a number of hydroscapes and returning the word to its parts. We will think, read, experience, and write about water in many dimensions and scales and we will attempt to write with and as water, as watery bodies. Together we will encounter the work of many theorists of water, including selections from poets, hydrofeminists, ecocritics, urbanists, sound artists and others. We will conduct written and auditory experiments grounded in oceans, rivers, lakes, pools, and ponds of our choosing.

LITR 0310V. Spaces and Places .

Project-oriented workshop for language artists who want to integrate practices from a variety of disciplines as they devise, compose, and make their work. Those with little or no prior interdisciplinary or digital media experience are welcome and encouraged to take this course. Learning may be through making, reading, discussion, group projects, collaboration, and research presentations. Enrollment limited to 17. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 0310W. Digital Utopias In A Dystopian Time Of Planetary Crisis .

What roles can language, imagination and art play as guiding forces toward a decolonized utopian future? In this class, we will confront the reality of our present moment and make steps to decolonize our imaginations and cultivate new ways of relating to technology and the future. How do our avatars and virtual ecosystems reflect / parallel / interact with our physical reality? How can critical fabulation open portals to possible futures? Students will explore these questions in depth, through readings, engaged conversation, experimentation and play. Over the semester, students will produce the digital artifacts of their own speculative utopias by creating language driven digital art using sound, video and new media. Students should expect weekly assignments and readings that will nourish a final project.

LITR 0310X. Experiments in Film and Poetry: An Interdisciplinary Workshop .

In this interdisciplinary creative workshop, we will explore the interplay of film and poetry. Students will gain insight into a variety of strategies and concerns of artists, writers and filmmakers who work with images and language (be it text or voiced) in tandem. Some topics of exploration will include montage theory and collage, essay films and essay poems, text- based images, image-based texts, experimental documentary poetics, neo-benshi works and collaborative processes. Each week, we will watch and read relevant work and discuss it together in class. Students will also have individual and collaborative creative prompts of their own, and a chance to receive feedback on their work. Students with existing creative practices and video editing skills are encouraged to apply, but no prior experience is required, only a desire to engage, experiment and create in community.

LITR 0310Z. Oblique Strategies: Process, Chance and Play in Cross-Disciplinary Literary Artmaking .

Building on the musician Brian Eno’s concept of “oblique strategies”, this course will introduce students to a variety of tactics to shift the burden of literary and artistic creation away from the conscious ego and towards a constraint and process-based approach. The first part of the course will focus on self-knowledge as a foundation for artistic practice, using generative writing exercises to generate raw material for subsequent projects. In the second part, we will introduce concepts of instructional, constraint and process-based art and experiment with a variety of strategies to decenter the creative ego with the goal of generating first drafts in a free and unselfconscious manner. The final part of the course will focus on constraint-based strategies for importing that same freedom into the editing process.

LITR 0311A. Juicy Carcasses, Abundant Futures: Detritus as Nourishment .

This course challenges students to listen to the wisdom of scavengers, and transform that which is discarded. It explores how those in the margins can reconstruct new worlds from the still active, reeking remains of (post)coloniality. It considers carefully Homi Bhabha’s idea of the Third Space, and Fred Moten’s idea of Noise and fugitive listening, that calls us to cease resisting dominant hegemonies with the tools of their making, and instead find each other outside of the binary of oppression/resistance, within a space of our own invention. This course explores what we can pick at from these juicy carcasses of colonialism and its many forms, and what dreams and futures we can imagine with them, all the while drawing inspiration from non-human detritivores.

LITR 0311B. Image Text Interval: Experiments in Film and Poetry .

Our explorations in this interdisciplinary creative workshop will center around the interplay of image and text in film and video. We will tend to the space between words, between images, the movements from one to another, what’s alive in the cracks. How might poetic devices be transposed to image sequences in film? How can film theory inspire our writing? What are the myriad ways text, voice and the moving image can layer and entwine? This project-based workshop is for students interested in interdisciplinary practices that live and migrate between poetry and the moving image. Together we will consider essay films, cinepoetry, video art, and neo-benshi performance. We will learn about filmmakers, artists and writers who engage creatively with poetics, text and voice in moving image works such as Sky Hopinka, Suneil Sanzgiri, Mona Hatoum, Trinh T Minh-ha, Jordan Lord, Wu Tsang, and Douglas Kearney.

LITR 0311C. Little Landscapes: A Workshop in Very Short Fiction .

Daily writing and weekly reading, to inform and inspire. We’ll practice and reflect on skills necessary to very short fiction, such as, but not limited to, compression, constraint, understatement, particulars over broad strokes. We’ll consider how a very short story can be a trickster: a whole meal dressed as a snack. Great focus will be placed on image, feeling, moments, titles, words, sentences, openings and endings, paragraphs, transitions, voice, style, rhythm, and breath, among other things. We’ll defamiliarize and decenter ourselves in relation to stories. We’ll test what a story can be, what it can hold. Experimentation, fun, and play will be foregrounded. Much of what we’ll practice and explore are necessary to all forms of writing. It’s all the same. It’s all paying attention.

LITR 0311D. Experiments in Storytelling: Essays, Art, and Games .

We tell stories everyday, we construct narratives for events, for our understandings of the people around us, for our own identities. Who are we and how do we fit into the world? Storytelling is at the heart of our human experience and it is unlimited in the forms it can take. This online seminar will explore a selection of storytelling traditions, both in and out of the creative writing space. Students will investigate the strategies employed by writers, artists, playwrights, game designers and will test these strategies out for themselves in their own storytelling. The aim is not for students to prioritize one style or strategy, but to approach the act of creation with a philosophy of radical play and discovery. No prerequisites required.

LITR 0311E. On Photographic Remembrance .

“On Photographic Remembrance” is an introductory course to mixed-media fiction writing. This course will delve into how archival photographs are a medium for experimental storytelling and lost personal histories. Students will develop their analytical skills of historical and “found” photographs from the Prelinger Archives, a public resource containing thousands of film footage and photographs featuring never-before released war documentation, 60’s televised films, and home videos. Students will use this resource as inspiration for their own speculative fiction: how can the interplay of photography and prose represent fragmented time and memory? We will explore how various contemporary authors, multimedia artists, and filmmakers use structural, visual, and literary devices to imbue their works with a sense of both realism and mystery.

LITR 0311F. Geopoetics: reading+writing rocks, geo-glyphs, tectonic gestures .

This workshop engages in cross-disciplinary language arts via geologic matter. How might reading, writing, and making with stone extend what Ursula K. LeGuin calls, “the meter of eternity”? How might fossil, tectonic plate, and planet show us new spatial and temporal scales of inscription, elegy, and literary possibility beyond the Anthropocene? In this course, we will create language art projects both on and off the page, with the options to work with digital media, artist books, and multi-sensory art works. Through reading, journaling, and projects, we will engage geologic and geopolitical themes, beginning with ecopoetics, moving through extractivism, and extending into the politics of territory markers and lines. Students with all amounts of writerly and artistic experience are welcome.

LITR 0311X. Other Ghosts .

From personal and national memory, we mourn, witness and become implicated in its retelling. Is it possible to mold language into the shape of usefulness, as Claudia Rankine attempted, and can we shape a memory, or life, into Albert Murray’s elegant form? We shall consider how genre and medium can augment personal and political stories through weekly reading discussions, workshops. We shall read and discuss interdisciplinary literature (which combines genres of poetry, fiction, criticism, memoir), visual arts (including cinema, sculpture, installation), music and short essays. We’ll make use of the workshop environment to build a practice of constructive feedback and revision as students develop their individual voice. Students will submit a piece for workshopping at least twice in the semester, and submit a final project on the last day of class. Students are encouraged to work in various mediums.

LITR 0311Y. Experiments in Storytelling: Essays, Art, and Games .

LITR 0510A. Masters and Servants .

We will consider the relationship between servants and masters as portrayed in fiction and films. We shall examine the basic relation of servitude to sovereignty, extrapolating to the broader power dynamics of two-person relationships. Beginning with the Hegelian dialect of the master and the servant, and building as well on a philosophical framework provided by Nietzche, Kojeve and Bataille, we shall look at the complexities of the relationship between masters and servants, exploring the psychological, social and ethical dimensions of two-person relationships that value each person differently. We shall focus on issues of class and power and look at literature and film in which there are explorations of several complicated manifestations of servitude and mastery: overlaps into gender power dynamics and fetishism, power dynamic reversals both to comic and tragic effect, and questions of boundaries and violation of social propriety and human communication. Core texts will include work from Ishiguru, Wodehouse, D.H. Lawrence, Miabeau, Richardson, Bronë, and Stanley Crawford, and film texts will include Joseph Losey's The Servant and Luis Bunuel's Diary of a Chambermaid .

LITR 0510B. Into the Machine .

Starting from Turing's work on artificial intelligence, we shall examine the cultural and artistic ramifications of the rise of the machine, using Marx and Walter Benjamin to provide a framework. We will look at how machines generate anxiety, with special emphasis on robots, puppets and automatons; and we shall also consider utopian and dystopian images of machines, and visions of near and distant futures. Finally we will look at authors who utilize machine models of operation to generate artistic work. Authors and filmmakers include: Capek, E.T.A. Hoffman, Asimov, Lem, Breton, Redonet, Fritz Lang, Chaplin, Tati. Enrollment limited to 20 first year students.

LITR 0510C. The Pleasures of the Text .

Enter the radiance of literature, music and film through devotional readings, viewings and listening experiences that will result in a series of weekly creative writing experiments. Dissolve into a narrative or sound or image the way a writer might and return from these experiences inspired and changed. Be prepared for the awe and wonder that only art can afford. Texts may include stories, poems and/or novels by Adler, Baldwin, the Bible, Coetzee, Cortazar, Gluck, Muller, Munro, Morrison, Pancake, Rankine, Schwartz, Wolf and others. Films by Akerman, Anderson, Kurosawa and Herzog. Music by classical, jazz and hip-hop artists.

LITR 0510D. Why Don’t We Fall In Love? .

How do we fall in love? Why? The title of our seminar was inspired by the 2002 summer pop-hit, written and produced by Rich Harrison, and famously performed by Amerie Rogers. Through poetry, film, and music, we will be critical, clinical, and sometimes implicated observers of the dynamics which structure erotic desire, the selfless (or selfish) ambition of love, and its representations.

LITR 0510E. Fiction v. Non-Fiction .

In bookstores, “Fiction” and “Non-Fiction” are separate, even antithetical, categories. In the minds of writers, though, they exist on a continuum. “Fiction” is heavily informed by fact; “Non-Fiction” applies the techniques of fiction. In this course, we will study authors who deftly employ both forms, in order to ask: when does a writer choose to shape his/her/their material as fiction or non-fiction? What are the benefits of each form? How are authors trying to break and merge these categories?

LITR 0610A. Unpublishable Writing .

This workshop explores writing projects which do not fit into conventional avenues of print publication (i.e. books). Through a series of prompted artistic projects we will explore how writing can interweave in new relationships with time, materials, sequence, procedural approaches, performance, and collaboration. Independent research will support your creative projects throughout the semester. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 0610B. Fiction Through Poetry .

This course is designed for poets, fiction writers, and cross-genre enthusiasts interested in looking at narrative as it occurs at the level of the sentence, even the level of the word. We will use a variety of poetic texts as well as other fractured content as a means to think about fiction and the borderlands of storytelling. Students will be given weekly writing exercises. Enrollment limited to 12 first year students. S/NC.

LITR 0610C. Books By Hand .

We shall explore small press publishing and bookmaking from historical, contemporary and hands-on perspectives. Students will be asked to design and carry out small creative projects throughout the semester as well as research particular concerns in the field. Enrollment limited to 12 first year students. S/NC.

LITR 0610D. Four Performance Texts .

Performance studies is a capacious, interdisciplinary field that can traverse theater, visual art, music, literature, and dance, as well as aspects of lived life that are not necessarily considered art: ritual, sporting event, political protest. It is time-based, and thus for the most part, ephemeral. An artist may stage, orchestrate, or frame a set of behaviors, actions, events or even just intentions – they may or may not be the actual performer. Because of the embodied nature of performance, aspects of identity such as race, gender, and sexuality often play a visible role in the dynamics of the work. The documentation of performance can exist in a wide range of formats, and usually endure for much longer than the performance itself. In this course, we will engage a “deep dive” on four distinct books that document performance. We will consider them both as records of the past, as well as a vehicle loaded with possibility for future actions – and we will perform some of those actions ourselves. This course will be a combination of the study of texts, the activation of texts, and the creation of texts. Individual and group work is expected.

LITR 0610E. To Gather, To Sever, To Mix, To Turn .

This highly generative workshop’s goal is to stimulate and provide students with formal tools to develop a chapbook-length series of poems by the term’s end. Students will bring materials to be transformed through processes including but not limited to collage, erasure, and translation. Such materials could be self-generated or found, and may include journal entries, dream logs, letters, text messages, images, archival matter, and much else. As examples of procedural approaches we will read poets such as Jen Bervin, Caroline Bergvall, Lyn Hejinian, Christian Hawkey, Susan Howe, Tyehimba Jess, Tan Lin, Claudia Rankine, and Stacy Szymaszek.

LITR 0610F. Choose Your Own Adventure .

This game is lit. I mean this Lit is a game. How do the design elements of a novel resemble the design elements of a game? And to what extent have interactive [video] games been designed with novelistic conceits? Your adventure begins here, starting with what lies at the dark heart of the literary adventure genre (Defoe, Conrad, Behn). We’ll sojourn at contemporary indie video games (Undertale, Walking Dead, Broken Age, Gone Home), along the way analyzing how “choice” is utilized to build reciprocal fictions. We will also undertake semester-long projects—creating our own “Choose Your Own Adventure”s.

LITR 0710. Writers on Writing Seminar .

Offers students an introduction to the study of literature (including works from more than one genre) with special attention given to a writer's way of reading. This course will include visits to the course by contemporary writers who will read to the class and talk about their work. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

LITR 0710R. Poetry and Science (ENGL 0710R) .

Interested students must register for ENGL 0710R .

LITR 0900A. Classic Short Stories .

This course introduces you to a selection of works by important writers of the short story. We shall explore the richness and diversity of short fiction through close reading and discussion, affording you an appreciation of the short story in general and of our writers' countries and histories in particular. Our focus will be on authorial strategies and themes explored. Artistic and political movements will be introduced as they impact the works. Furthermore, you will learn the appropriate terminology as tools for textual and critical analysis. Finally, this course will to develop your capacity for self-expression.

LITR 0900B. How to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature .

The history of the world’s most famous literary prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of scandal, secrecy, and prestige. Does the Nobel Prize really reward writers who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind"? What might the Nobel Prize teach us about reading and writing in our contemporary moment? In this seminar we will read texts from the most recent Nobel laureates: Kazuo Ishiguro, Olga Tokarczuk, Peter Handke, Louise Glück, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. We will examine how these diverse authors engage in creative writing and world-making through topics like migration, history, myth, culture, and ethnicity. We will also think broadly about the politics and value of literary prizes, world literature, translation, and the global literary marketplace.

LITR 0999. Graphic Novels and Comic Masterworks .

Focused on the influence of graphic novels and comic art, this course examines graphic novels and comic art from seminal texts like Art Spiegleman's Maus through a range of mainstream and independent comics from Marjane Satrapi, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, David B., Lynda Barry, Daniel Clowes, Frank Miller, and many others, including graphic memoir, reportage, and Indie and DIY zines. The course explores image and language in collaboration, seeking a better understanding of this influential genre. Assignments are critical and creative, both individual and collaborative, and will involve daily reading and writing assignments. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1000. The Arts Workshop for Practice and Practice-Oriented Research .

This collaborative course will provide a forum for discussing in-progress creative research and practice. Offered jointly by the Brown Arts Initiative and Brown’s arts departments, the weekly workshop will host an interdisciplinary group of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Each participant will apply with a specific creative practice/research project to be workshopped and developed during the course of the semester. In the semester following the seminar, participants will have access to production assistance from the BAI for further project development. The course requires an online application process, and successful applicants with be provided with instructor permission to enroll.

LITR 1010A. Advanced Fiction .

The writing of short stories or longer works in progress in regular installments, along with appropriate exercises and reading assignments. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all advanced workshops. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1010B. Advanced Poetry .

Course work includes a body of exercises, close reading of poetry, workshop conversations and conferences. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all advanced workshops. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1010C. Advanced Playwriting (TAPS 1500H) .

Interested students must register for TAPS 1500H .

LITR 1010D. Advanced Digital Language Arts .

An advanced writing working for which participants produce, individually or in collaborative arrangements, a significant work of language-driven, digitally-mediated art in networked and programmable media. This work will be given historical and critical context, as participants become more aware of what it is they are doing when they use digital systems to write, or when they create instruments for and of writing. Throughout the course — and especially before final projects become the focus — there will be seminar-style reading and discussion: readings from other works of digital language art and from selected critical writing in the field.

LITR 1010E. Advanced Screenwriting .

Screenwriting for feature-length and episodic works. Participants should already have experience writing short screenplays and be prepared to develop a longer piece. See the Literary Arts Department website for course entry procedures for all advanced workshops. Work sample and instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1010F. Advanced Translation .

Translation draws from many fields including linguistics, comparative literature, literary studies, anthropology, cultural studies, cognitive science, and creative writing. While we consider different theories and approaches to translation, students will embark on a semester-length translation project. Expect to read and energetically discuss readings, to give a presentation on your ongoing translation, and to write a critical essay and numerous translation exercises on your way toward completing a manuscript in translation (the length of which will be determined by the work itself and an agreement between professor and student). Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1010G. Writing3D .

An advanced experimental workshop for writing in immersive 3D, introducing text, sound, spatial poetics, and narrative movement into Brown's Legacy Cave (now house in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts) with links to the YURT (Yurt Ultimate Reality Theater in the Center for Computation and Vixualization). An easy-to-learn and easy-to-use application allows non-programmers to create projects on laptops and then to run them in immersive 3D audiovisuality without the necessity for specialist support. Broadly interdisciplinary, the course encourages collaboration between students with different skills in different media, who work together to discover a literary aesthetic in artificially rendered space.

LITR 1010H. Advanced Digital & Cross-Disciplinary Language Arts .

Project-oriented workshop for writers and language artists working to integrate practices from other disciplines as they devise, compose, and make their work. Recommended for students with some prior interdisciplinary practice or digital media experience. Learning is through making, reading, discussion, group projects, collaboration, and research presentations. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1110B. American Political Drama .

What exactly is an American political play? We'll examine issues of personal freedom, community rights, and the positioning of public power. Are we different from the myths of America? Political theater enables us to see our moral choices and aspirations. From Aristophanes to Suzan-Lori Parks, we will look at various political texts while we attempt to create new approaches to the writing of American Political Theater.

LITR 1110E. Innovative Narrative .

Stereotexts: a project-driven writing workshop focused on innovative multidimensional approaches to narrative. Projects using two or more media such as print and digital formats or texts and sound, filmed text, hyperfictions, narratives with multiple voices or even multiple spaces, text installations, fictions that put contraries into play, etc., are all welcome. Writing samples and project descriptions required.

LITR 1110F. Narrative Strategies .

A course essentially geared to the creative and critical writer interested in experimenting with some of the narrative structures suggested by the great films. To include films of Akerman, Antonioni, Eisenstein, Hou Hsiao, Hsien, Goddard, marker, Tarkovsky and others and texts by Duras, Sebald and Vittorini. Instructor permission required.

LITR 1110G. Narrative Voice: Fact and Fiction .

No description available.

LITR 1110J. The Short Story .

Experiments in writing; extensive reading in traditional and experimental collections of fiction in shorter forms. Writing samples of no more than ten pages should be left at 68 1/2 Brown Street on the first day of the semester. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1110L. Aspects of Contemporary Prose Practice .

Using Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus , Tayeb Saleh's The Weddingof Zein and Other Stories , Luis Bernard Honwana's We Killed Mangy Dog , and Our Sister Killjoy , this course will look at prose narrative in contemporary African Literature, for a background to general narrative practice. Among areas of special interest, the course will examine the contents and structure of the short story, not as an abbreviated novel, but as an autonomous genre. We shall also look at literature in translation, and discuss what the reader loses in the process if anything, and how much that matters, if at all. Students will be expected to work on short stories and novel chapters. Instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1110M. Stereotexts: Experimental Multidimensional Fiction Workshop .

A project-driven writing workshop focused on innovative multidimensional approaches to narrative. Projects using two or more media such as print and digital formats or text and sound, filmed text, hyperfictions, narratives with multiple voices or even multiple spaces, text installations, fictions that put contraries into play, etc., all are welcome submissions.

LITR 1110N. Workshop for Potential Literature .

A novel without the letter "E", 100,000-billion sonnets by permutation and texts that take the shape of a Mobius-Strip-- all this time and more, as workshop participants try their hands in writing in response to problems created by and inspired by a group of writers engaged in strange constraints and procedures. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1110O. Hybrid Texts, Hybrid Thinking .

In neither being fiction, poetry, memoir, theory, nor art writing but a crossing of these genres, the hybrid text proffers an open and complexly layered environment for engaging questions of perception, knowledge and articulation. In this course, we will study exemplary works of literature and venture briefly into visual art. Both critical and creative responses will be required.

LITR 1110P. Alternative Scriptwriting: Writing Beyond the Rules .

This course will consider various screenwriting genres and how to write against genre or extend the traditional screenwriting forms. Students applying must have already completed either a 90+ page screenplay or have taken Advanced Playwriting ( LITR 1010C ) or Advanced Screenwriting ( LITR 1010E ) at Brown. S/NC.

LITR 1110R. Performance Dimensions of Text .

Poets Theater is an online seminar/workshop in which students will read and “rehearse”/perform the poems, scripts and scores by writers who extend the possibilities of dramatic language. Modeled as an "atelier," students will explore the relationships between the performative and the printed/textual, asking how the page serves as a blueprint for sound, video, movement, and theatrical practice. Students will write “in conversation” with assigned readings by innovators such as Augusto Boal, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Richard Foreman, Douglass Kearney, Tracie Morris, Cecilia Vicuna, August Wilson, Fiona Templeton, Kevin Killian, and others. As an interdisciplinary workshop, this course invites students from all backgrounds. S/NC. Instructor's permission required. Enrollment limited to 12.

LITR 1110S. Fiction into Film .

A study of various directors' attempts to transfer masterpieces of fiction into film. Concerning both genres we will ask Gertrude Stein's question: What are masterpieces, and why are there so few of them? Includes fiction by Austen, Bierce, Carter, Cowley, Doyle, Faulkner, Forster, Fowles, Kesey, Joyce, McCullers, Morrison, Nabokov, O'Connor, Thompson, Walker, Spielberg, Woolf, Yamamoto as directed by Burton, Forman, Felini, Gilliam, Huston, Jordan, Kurasawa, Lee, Potter, and others. Class and weekly screenings. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1110T. Script to Screen .

Script to Screen is an intensive production course designed for students with some proficiency in screenwriting and little to no directing or filmmaking experience. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening writing students up to possibilities for production, while also investigating how production experiences can inform future writing. Activities include shooting and editing video exercises, working with actors, and filming practice scenes. A local casting director will conduct a workshop and bring in actors for scene work. A highly acclaimed guest director will work with students over three classes, conducting an acting workshop and critiquing scene work.

LITR 1110U. Script to Screen: Fundamentals of Filmmaking .

This intensive production course is designed for students who have some proficiency in screenwriting or poetry and little to no filmmaking experience. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening screenwriting and poetry students up to the possibility of making films, while also investigating how production experiences can inform future writing projects. We will experiment with a variety of filmmaking techniques and tools to investigate the symbiotic relationships between writing and visual language. The equal importance of sound in the film viewing experience will also be explored, with students learning techniques for recording and editing multitrack soundtracks. Guest filmmakers will join us and respond to student work.

LITR 1110V. Script to Screen: Scene Work .

This intensive script development and directing workshop is designed for students who have some proficiency in screenwriting, and little to no directing experience. Basic shooting and editing skills are helpful, or will be learned in the first half of the semester. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening screenwriting students up to the possibility of directing their work, while also investigating how acting and directing experiences, and workshopping material with actors, can inform future screenwriting. Activities include learning acting and directing techniques, scene analysis, writing and revising scenes, casting and working with actors, creating a scene through improvisation, and filming practice versions of scenes. Guests will join us for workshops and final reviews.

LITR 1110W. Losing Record .

These past few years have forced us all to confront some harsh truths about our place on this planet. In this creative non-fiction course we will grapple with what it means to lose. More than just the agony of defeat, loss is a universal condition of entropic grief or enlightening relief, often as a result of forces beyond our control. We will examine first what it means to lose things, then people, and finally our place(s). We'll also explore the ways melancholy, grief, and non-attachment have been variously treated—all in effort to archive our own losing records. What can we do to keep from forgetting? And is it possible to forgive without forgetting (injury, trauma, theft)? When is it appropriate, or even desirable, to forget? In-class prompts will include transcendental meditations, journaling, and object histories.

LITR 1150A. Ecopoetics in Practice .

What we have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet's means and material, thinking and life. Can poetry embody values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between human and non-human realms? How might poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world, moving beyond theme and reference? In this class, we will think-with ecoscapes, ecotones, and Animalia (ourselves included, along with our humanimal contexts), and other life and nonlife forms, via the lapping possibilities of poetic language. We will write, read, discuss, create, think, experience. Do be prepared for some “field work”. S/NC

LITR 1150B. The Foreign Home: Interdisciplinary Arts .

Project-centered workshop for exploration beyond one's "home" genre, whether in video, poetry, fiction, music, performance or visual arts. Contemporary and art-historical interdisciplinary works will ground our investigation into the tension between expertise and "beginner's mind". Collaborative and individual work expected. See general course description above for entry procedures for all special topics workshops/seminars. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150C. Unpublishable Writing .

Before becoming the dominant form of book-marking, "the codex" meant a tree stump where criminals were tied. After examining conventions of western print culture, we will explore literary practices which are performative, sculptural, multimedia, or out-scale. Through the course is primarily for creative projects, critical research will also be expected.

LITR 1150E. Strange Attractors: Adaptations/Translations .

A workshop for students from all genres and disciplines to explore adaptation as creative process. Adaptation can be between any genres and from any source. See general course description above for entry procedures for all special topics workshops/seminars. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150F. Home and Abroad .

This course combines seminar and workshop sessions for students with special interest in the writing of novels and short fiction. Attention will be given to the ways certain English and American writers - Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene - have interpreted the lives of people in other and foreign cultures. These are classic examples of the meeting of insiders and outsiders in the house of fiction. Instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 12.

LITR 1150G. Books by Hand .

As both a seminar and workshop, this course will explore small press publishing and bookmaking from historical, contemporary and hands-on perspectives. Students will be asked to design and carry out small creative projects throughout the semester as well as research particular concerns in the field. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all special topics workshop/seminars. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150H. Latin American Poetry Live .

We focus on 18 essential poets from Latin America. If you do not weep and run naked shouting through the streets of Providence you will not have read the poems closely. Bilingualism is not a prerequisite, but all the texts are bilingual and we will consider translation issues in a way that is accessible to and engaging for everyone. Several of the poems we consider are book length magisterial works. The poems are political, erotic, domestic, colloquial, innovative, or incendiary, and sometimes all at once. This section does not require permission from instructor.

LITR 1150I. The Lyric Essay .

Advanced level workshop for graduates and undergraduates to explore the possibilities of creative nonfiction in a radical or hybrid mode. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all special topics workshop/seminars. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150J. The Cinematic Essay .

A creative writing seminar in which we take the Essay Film as the primary inspiration for weekly writing exercises. Works by Marker, Godard, Ivens, Resnais, Varda, Akerman, Herzog, Morris, Su Friedrich, Sadie Benning and Trihn Mon-Ha to be included. Also writing by Cannetti, Gass, Handke, Cha, Hong Kingston and more. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all special topics workshop/seminars. Written permission required. S/NC. Students MUST register for the lecture section and the screening.

LITR 1150M. Short Fiction Experiments .

A course in fiction which pushes against the very definitions of stories and fictions. Using short forms, we will examine our habits and assumptions of story telling and engage in willful adventures of mind, spirit, and language. Prerequisites include a passion for trying everything and anything once. No prior writing experience needed. Written permission required.

LITR 1150N. The Novella: An Adventure in Writing .

In this workshop/seminar, we will explore the ever elusive world of the novella - how to think of this work, what the rules are, where the boundaries lay. Alongside their reading of writers such as Marguerite Dumas and Michael Ondaatje, students will embark on their own novella-writing journeys. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150P. John Cage and Meditative Poetics .

Primarily an interdisciplinary literature course, we will experience the writing and thinking of John Cage in the context of a wider exploration of creative process with a basis in american and european interpretations of Buddhist practice and thought. We will explore the work of contemporary artists such as Bill Viola, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, as well as Samuel Beckett and others. Students in the course will be expected to write in both creative and critical modes. Instruction in basic meditation practice is recommended but optional throughout the semester. Written permission required.

LITR 1150Q. Reading, Writing and Thinking for the Stage .

Composed of contemporary dramatic literature for playwrights. Contemporary texts are studied. Use of each author's dramatic techniques, the influence of the times on his drama, his themes, the demands of market driven theater and popular art considered. Simultaneously students will write an original 60-page manuscript. Students applying must have already completed plays of 60 pages or have advanced playwriting experience. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150R. Exemplary Ancient Fictions .

We shall discuss and examine a selection of pre-Gutenberg narratives from Gilgamesh and Genesis through Ovid and fairytales and medieval romance, with a focus on the ancient art of narrative. We shall also try our hands at exercises in the alternative fictional strategies these works suggest. Course entry based on the submission of a writing sample (and in-class writing in response to an assignment) at the first class session.

LITR 1150S. What Moves at the Margins .

A multi-genre seminar/workshop based on fiction, non-fiction and dramatic literature that has been banned or otherwise marginalized because it is critical, interrogative and alternative. Weekly writing exercises based on readings and discussions in class. A term project is required. For students who love literature. For admission, students may submit fiction, non-fiction or drama. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1150T. Foreign Home .

LITR 1150U. Prose City: The Making of Spatial Texts .

In this workshop/seminar, we will explore, through selected reading and writing exercises, some basic questions of "writing city": how is place captured, encompassed; how can the city emerge in language as a character, an event, as reflective space; how do we enter the city; how do we recognize its borders? Students will be asked to create a portfolio of texts for an imagined city, as well as to think through concepts such as "structure," "location," "encounter," and "identity" as they occur in the paragraph. Instructor's permission required.

LITR 1150V. The Novel in Brief .

This workshop/seminar takes the novel form on a wild ride as it investigates concepts such as compression, fragmentation, miniaturization, and sequencing in the construction of narratives. Students will be required to write their own brief novel over the course of the semester. Writing sample due at first class session. Instructor permission given after review of manuscripts. Enrollment limited to 12.

LITR 1150W. Clown Aesthetics .

Clown as literary structure and trope as well as character will be our focus. We will ask if this "clown aesthetic" exists, could exist, should or might continue to exist -- in fiction, performance, and film in particular. Clowning of all kinds considered from history, theory, literary and performing arts. Graduate and undergraduate students from all disciplines invited. This workshop course includes individual research as well as collaborative projects. Come to first class for permission. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1150X. Reading, Writing and Thinking .

We will explore various ways to engage with a work of art in order to fuel one's imagination and projects. Close textual reading of several books with writing assignments based on the readings. Writers will include Woolf, Stein, Beckett, Coetze, Kertesz and others. Writing samples due at first class session. Instructor permission given after review of manuscripts. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1150Y. Fiction Through Poetry .

This course is designed for poets, fiction writers, and cross-genre enthusiasts interested in looking at narrative as it occurs at the level of the sentence, even the level of the word. We will use a variety of poetic texts as well as other fractured content as means to think about fiction, and the borderlands of storytelling. Instructor permission required (bring a writing sample to the first class meeting). Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC

LITR 1150Z. Reading for Writers .

We will look closely and deeply and with a writer's passion and agenda to the various formal decisions used in a variety of astonishing and evocative texts with the objective of utilizing some of these strategies in weekly compositions of our own. Writers include: Aria, Berssenbrugge, Coetzee, Kertesz, Kincaid, Lispector, Mueller.

LITR 1151B. Figures of Thought .

What can you say about what can’t be said, and what form does such a saying take? From the gnostic gospels to Agamben, Yeats to Yves Bonnefoy, we'll follow these fleeting figures of thought and their messages. We will read a variety of writings from the deep past to the present. These writings will come in a variety of forms but illuminate a path ahead of the one we daily follow. Students will keep journals that respond to the world and writing and bring these as material for discussion in class. Each one will give a presentation during the term.

LITR 1151C. Virginia Woolf: Four Novels .

This is a class for writers and will entail close devotional readings of the texts and weekly writing experiments based on methods, motions, patterns, rhythms, abstractions and other narrative strategies employed by the novels. We'll read the following books by Woolf: Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts. S/NC required. Writing samples due at first class meeting.

LITR 1151D. Art of Film .

LITR 1151E. Latin American Death Trip .

Death is the subject of many of the greatest (most moving, innovative, funny, haunting, political, oneiric) Latin American poems of the 20th century, from Gorostiza’s Death without End to Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death to Saenz’ The Night. What particularities of culture, gender, age, faith or experience might account for the visionary clarity of death as constant companion or permeable border, etc.? What makes the poems great? Our class will read classic Latin American books in bilingual editions (so Spanish literacy is not a requirement, but we will talk about translation issues).

LITR 1151F. Choose Your Own Adventure .

LITR 1151G. Everything Emily .

This is a course that wallows in Emily Dickinson—one of the most important poets at the foundations of American poetry and, still today, one of our most exacting and most experimental practitioners. No one in the ensuing 150 years has surpassed her radical modes of expression, invention, and vision. We will engage with her poetry, her letters, her biography, and many of the works of criticism, visual art, film, and poetry that her work has inspired, as well as exploring the Dickinson collections in Brown’s Hay Library and visiting her Amherst home.

LITR 1151H. Discomfort .

Comfort is overrated! This course is an invitation to leave our comfort zones and dive into texts that invite us to rethink the way we view history, the world, fiction, writing, race relations etc. We will read recommended texts and discuss them in class. Discussions will include but not be limited to the narrative techniques employed by the writers and our response to the texts, both as readers and as writers.

LITR 1151I. Remaster + Remix .

This workshop/seminar will use the intuition, logic and esthetics of popular music forms such as punk, house, dub step, reggae and blues to delve into the complex connections between a selection of classic novels and versions of these novels retold. What tensions get reset when writers on an empire’s margin write back? What assumptions get shifted when women refocus a novel’s concerns? What are the possibilities and dangers in reconstructing classics while trying to mash them up? And why are we breathless when a stylist riffs? French Antillean notions of creolité will offer guidance. Main guide—the books.

LITR 1151J. Bob Marley: Lyrics and Legend .

Bob Marley is one of the most accomplished songwriters of all time. We're going to engage with the lyrics of this postcolonial Caribbean writer; contemplate him as a subject of memoirs, biographies and documentaries; and explore him as a figure in the creative imaginations of novelists and poets such as Marlon James and Lorna Goodison. We're also going to look at reggae as an important literary esthetic. And of course listen to a lot of his music. Special attention will be paid to the albums and singles produced under the guidance of Lee "Scratch" Perry.

LITR 1151K. Art of Assemblage: Collage, Reportage + Re-Appropriation .

In this class we will examine works of literature that challenge and re-imagine the poetic form using re-purposed text, research, fragment and image to enter into conversation with history and contemporary culture, and illuminate the every day realities of life. We’ll explore the use and effect of collage in visual work and music, and investigate how the form operates when transformed for the page through reading, class discussion, and creative writing exercises.

LITR 1151L. World Tour: Recent Poetry in Translation .

This is a reading, writing, translation, and discussion class. Commit to a vigorous combination of all four. Some translation theory will be reviewed, but the emphasis of the course is upon models of translations. Texts will include translations of books by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Jean Fremon, Yoshimasu Gozo, Kim Hysoon, Anja Utler, Adonis, and others. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC

LITR 1151M. Cross-Fertilizations: Text-Based Performance .

Gabrielle Civil is a conceptual and performance artists whose stated aim is to "open up space." With that in mind, the aim of this course is to open up -- and engage -- multiple spaces of language as it operates in the interstices of poetry, visual art, music, performance, shamanism, documentation, and activism. Among the texts we shall read are those by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Yoko Ono, LaTasha N. Nevada-Diggs -- through them, we shall consider how performed language can activate various forms of engagement, perception, dissemination and understanding.

LITR 1151N. Zoologic: Wild Animals in the Surveillance State .

This interdisciplinary course asks students to research and deeply engage with the current status of wild animals in various states of surveillance (either through conservation and preservation, or for entertainment), trafficked for the pet trade, or living essentially as "refugees" in the human world. Original critical research will result in creative and collaborative projects. Site visits to animal sanctuaries, and lectures from people working with animals in a number of disciplines will be featured. Selection will prioritize seniority and relevant experience (any discipline.)

LITR 1151O. Ideas of Narration Before Don Quixote .

We shall read fictional narratives (and some narrative poetry) from the first moments of preserved literature up to Don Quixote, for clues about how earlier writers thought about form and narration. Of what was narrative fashioned before “omniscience” was a relevant term? Before there was a science of psychology that could speak to the protagonists? What can we say about the diversity and unpredictability of early narrative writing, and how does that contrast with the more consistent look and feel of the nineteenth century? How can these “ancient fictions” inform an interest in narrative innovation and formal ingenuity today?

LITR 1151P. Documentary Poetics .

This course will explore 20th and 21st century documentary poetic texts to provide points of discussion and inspiration for our own investigative poetry. We’ll look at a range of works, from those confronting the legal record to those creating their own record of the infraordinary quotidian (Perec’s term), and discuss the various aesthetic, ethical, social, and procedural questions raised. Participants will be asked to develop and create their own final documentary poetry projects. Readings will include works by Reznikoff, Niedecker, Williams, M. NourbeSe Philip, C.D. Wright, Bernadette Mayer, Cole Swensen, Raúl Zurita, Anne Carson, Cristina Rivera-Garza, and many others.

LITR 1151Q. Great Adventure .

This hybrid seminar/prose workshop will take you to Antarctica, Japan, France, Cambodia, outer space—and to other places too. But much of your writing will be about yourself. Your cross-genre wandering through novels, essays, and indefinable hybrid works by a fascinating list of thinkers and stylists, will lead to questions about your own sense of place, belonging, contextual otherness, and the pleasures, powers and implications of your gaze. You'll search for answers through the medium of your own creative work—lyric essays, fictional vignettes, pictures.

LITR 1151R. Ecstatic Alphabets: Poetry by Other Means .

How to do things with words? How to do words with things? The latter is a question whose answers might prove as—if not more—compelling than its familiar inverse. Both are at the core of this course focusing on interdisciplinary works for which notions intrinsic to poetry serve as either springboard or endpoint. We will study contemporary examples as well as historical antecedents, and will experiment with producing genre-defying works that animate the written word. Among the strategies we will cover are verbivocovisual works, cut-ups and collage, sound poetry and concrete poetry, happenings, agitprop, poets theater, and dance.

LITR 1151S. Fan_Fic .

Fan fiction is a thing, right? And, let's be honest, we all secretly love this kinda thing! O, to relive those Microsoft '95 nights spent reading semi-romantic Legend of Zelda fan fiction... What compels us to reinvent the stories we're already attached to? The texts we might consider fan fiction exist on a spectrum somewhere between high literary and kitsch, between Milton and My Immortal. If not a proper genre, let's imagine that fan fiction is a particular (perhaps ancient) practice of literary mimesis. The question is whether it's possible to create a wholly original derivative.

LITR 1151T. Poetry for Healing Territories .

The texts we’ll be reading in this seminar/workshop address the will to heal and recuperate after loss. These are poets with courage enough to reclaim lost territory—and from their reclamations, we too are given permission to claim that which we’ve lost, that which has been taken, and that which is constantly pursued and harassed in us. How are these poets able to write through dissolution in a way that substantiates healing? What is gained in every/any instance of loss?

LITR 1151U. Literatura Puertorriqueña: Cruce-Ficctiones y Contra-Poemas .

The purpose of this course is to analyze the myriad ways Puerto Rico and the United States have influenced each other through literature, music, and art. In 1898, the island was ceded to the U.S. by Spain following the Spanish American war. Since then, an ongoing exchange (often one-sided) regarding the political status of the island and its people has informed a wealth of literary materials, musical hybridity, and radically avant-garde arts.

LITR 1151V. Black Box Poetics .

We live in an age when most of the language we read and write runs through proprietary digital systems we do not understand. Accordingly, this course approaches poetry in terms of code[s], data collection, overflow, opacity, and one-way mirrors. We will consider ununderstandability itself as an aesthetic property, discuss compositional strategies of selective clarity and obscurity, and use poetics to probe the unknowable. We will look closely at source code, but our purposes will be more conceptual than technical. No coding experience is required.

LITR 1151W. The Restless Desk: Hybrid Writing, Performance, Collaboration .

Immersion in a range of writing possibilities linked to performance and collaboration. Assigned readings will explore multiple genres, theory, and engage writing prompts that are ”experiments of attention”, working with voice, instrumentation, movement, visuals, improvisation. We will invoke “documentary poetics” as a method that engages inquiry and research and consider historical and contemporary literary performance practices. Students will design semester-long creative projects out of these multiple trajectories. Several guest musicians, performers, writers will be visiting. We will have use of the University’s recording studio and prepare a final class performance.

LITR 1151X. Interdisciplinary Arts Workshop: Translation of Concept .

Art-making is an act of translation – a thought, process, question, object, declaration, desire, system, or intention is filtered through the artist and subsequently finds new existence in the form of art. This project-centered workshop is a cross-genre exploration of that filter, where participants working in differing genres will be asked to engage a wide range of materials to “translate” into their art-making process. Please be prepared to write, dance, sing, mix, draw, ask, reach, and fail, in and out of your comfort zone. Individual and collaborative work expected. For writers, dancers, architects, musicians, painters, digital artists, “non-artists.” Written permission required.

LITR 1151Y. Against Genre .

An experimental workshop in creative writing hybridized with other forms--not only literary work that does not adhere to traditional genres, like prose-poetry, but writing that includes video, or music, or collage, and which includes practices like appropriation and non-traditional distribution. Including weekly reading assignments (Gabrielle Civil, Yoko Ono, Jack Halberstam, Claudia Rankine, Kate Durbin, Rick Moody, Mary-Kim Arnold, Shelly Jackson, and others), weekly writing prompts, one oral presentation.

LITR 1151Z. Paysagisme and the Art of Eco-Responsibility .

Though the French word paysagisme is usually translated as "landscaping," "landscape design," or "landscape architecture," the field also incorporates many land-based issues, including urban planning, public space use, sustainable agriculture, land reclamation, botany, ecology; also, it has provided a pronounced aesthetic element in garden and park design, and overlaps with late 20th-century and contemporary art movement known as land art. This course seeks to make this alternative way of viewing the environment available to students at Brown, emphasizing the way that paysagisme and its inclusive gesture of bringing art, aesthetics, and land use together, fosters new modes of ecological responsibility. This intensive half-credit course begins half-way through the semester, starting on October 25. Students MUST register by the deadline for adding a class; the course still operates within the academic calendar and students will not be able to attend class prior to registering for the course. Contact the instructor with any questions.

LITR 1152A. Survey of the Historic Avant-Garde .

The avant-garde is a famously slippery category; the definition we'll be working from, more or less, is the series of movements and individuals from 1900 to 1940, based mostly in Europe, that led culture and the arts in directions that talked back to power, pushed aesthetic limits outward, and explored ways to give the arts social and political weight. While largely focused on writers, we'll also spend a lot of time with visual artists and other media and will address questions such the line between Modernism and the Avant-Garde and the roles of women in these movements.

LITR 1152B. Ekphrasis in Action .

Ekphrasis, according to its most basic definition, is simply poetry that addresses art; we'll be stretching that definition, making it into a way of interacting with art, of living with art, and even of looking at things in ways that make them into art. We'll be both reading texts in which others stretch the definition of ekphrasis and visiting sites on or quite near the Brown campus to engage in on-site exploration and writing. It’s a course about discovering and exploring the ways that we represent and therefore create and recreate the world.

LITR 1152C. Writers-in-the-Community Training & Residencies .

This course will operate mostly “in the field.” We will spend some weeks discussing pedagogical approaches to teaching creative writing in community settings. We will thereafter train in residence, observing a poetry residency at a local elementary school, with visits to other community settings as well (sites to be determined). We will continue to discuss pedagogy, classroom practices and management, administrator-writer relations, and all other necessary logistical planning throughout the semester. By week 7, students will engage in their own writing residencies in pairs or small teams, working in a community setting of their choosing (K-12 school, shelter, library, etc.).

LITR 1152E. Between the Seams: Hybrid Works .

Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid is part novel, poetry sequence, and visual collage; Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is novel and poem. If, as Georges Bataille has put it, literature is a series of dislocations rather than a continuum, these “hybrid” works and others mark important breaks in the literary status quo. We will take inspiration from writing in which structures rub up against each other. Using poetry and prose, we’ll seek intuitive logics in juxtaposition of text and image, and look at writers using hybrid forms as models for documenting ways of knowing and unknowing.

LITR 1152F. The Shape of Longing .

What are some of the formal shapes longing takes in poetry and fiction, film and music? Through a devotional experience with great works of art, creative pieces will be generated by the students and shared in class. Texts shall include Wagner, Sappho, Tagore, Rumi, St John of the Cross, Desnos, Kawabata, Woolf, Frisch, Valentine, Howe, Pessoa, Vuong, Angelopoulus, Weerasethakul, Kieslowski, Chacon, Jenkins, Coltrane and West.

LITR 1152G. Rebuilding the Book .

In the face of digital and other emergent technologies, where is the book today—what are its limits? Conversely, what is its essence? We'll blend the history of the book and its relationship to the visual arts with the creation of inventive book structures. Slide lectures and discussions will cover the emergence of writing and its gradual incorporation into book structures from tablet through scroll to codex, focusing on the development of the relationship between text and image, with a focus on late 19th century livre d’artiste, the “democratic multiple” (1960s); and two contemporary developments: the sculptural book and the altered book.

LITR 1152H. Writing from the Archives/In the Subjunctive Mood .

Memory, history, and trace haunt the present, perception, and the cultural contexts in which we live. When we turn to the archival record, we note its focus on the powerful, and its critical exclusion of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and LGTBQ people, people with disabilities, and “wild” women. A growing number of writers employ new means to open the lens to render the present more clearly through counter-narrative, critical fabulation, and reparative technique. We will read and write in this vein toward a new poetics of archive and study methods that give attention to the “unrecorded” incident, emotion, image, and music.

LITR 1152I. Poets' Tour of the Essay .

In this advanced workshop seminar, we will read essays that draw us into the question of art and evidence, surveying prose forms that fall across the spectrum. A sub-genre of nonfiction with the ability to shapeshift across forms, essays’ elastic, bridging and blurring qualities span memoir, epistle, catalog, argument, observation, travelogue and more. We will read essays written in the past that demonstrate as much ingenuity as the post-modern, and contemporary essays that straddle genre. We will discuss the “poetics” of the essay as we look for innovation within the form to examine what new insight is gained through experiment. Interested students should bring a literary writing sample to the first class meeting. The instructor will announce at the first class the date/time that a class list and waitlist will be posted (typically a few days after the first class meeting).

LITR 1152J. Hybrid Writing Workshop: The Long Engagement .

In this course we will explore the tradition and possibilities of open-form hybrid writing via extended engagement with other works of literature and artworks, as well as with the writing practice itself. We will read a range of writers’ such engagements and class time will largely be devoted to reading discussion, workshop, and occasional in-class writing exercises. In weekly writing assignments we will work across genres, with chance procedures and exploratory modes designed to extend, deepen and complicate our writing practices. Students’ final project will be a long engagement with the work of another writer of their choosing.

LITR 1152K. The Shape of Longing .

This class will examine a variety of formal strategies that artists, writers, composers and mystics have used to render longing palpable, present and felt in works of art. Through a series of writing assignments, students will make their own explorations into this charged, expansive, and elusive terrain. A rigorous class of risk and experimentation.

LITR 1152L. I’m Feeling Myself: The Black Female Body as Its Own Utopia .

Audre Lorde described sensuality as an immense, untapped power within each of us “that lies in a deeply female plane.” What would that power, generated by a Black woman’s body, look like? By focusing solely on the poetry, art, and music of Black women, we explore the Black female body as its own utopia. Weekly readings include Lorde, Jordan, hooks, Morrison, and Dove, alongside the artwork of Mickalene Thomas and Wangechi Mutu, and the music videos of Rihanna, Janet Jackson, and Beyoncé. By re-centering the western gaze on the Black feminine erotic, we discover a poetics of the impolite body.

LITR 1152M. Speculative Fiction and the Literature of Imagination .

Speculative Fiction and the Literature of Imagination is a seminar in the development of speculative fiction as a form over the last generation, its role in articulating political counternarratives, especially in the case of Afrofuturism, its reliance on imagination as a creative strategy, and its position as a particularly uncompromising outpost of experimental writing. The class will consist of weekly readings, as well as frequent creative assignments on issues raised by particular texts, and will include one presentation on a speculative work by each participant. Readings will include Mary Shelley, Sun Ra, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, N. K. Jemisin, and Ted Chiang, etc.

LITR 1152N. Ecopoetics in Action .

LITR 1152O. G-d Dream .

What, historically and aesthetically, constitutes an oracular vision, a clairvoyant revelation, a sign from another dimension? In this class we will explore a variety of ecstatic visions, from the Revelations of John of Patmos and Dream of the Rood, to Timothy Leary and L. Ron Hubbard, all in an effort to hone our own innervisions of what exists beyond. In this multimedia workshop we shall be free to experiment with language, sound, light, pigment. Can our own creative endeavors become expressions of "...the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."?

LITR 1152P. Structuring and Revising Reported Narrative Nonfiction .

This is a class in crafting and structuring essential, reported stories for maximum impact. How do you properly pace a longform story? How do you pitch, report, outline, and edit one? With the collapse of newspapers and magazines around the country, how can we still beautifully tell some of the critical stories that are going untold? The first half of class will run like a magazine editorial meeting, discussing weekly pitches grounded in a particular region—and, later, drafts, which will workshop. The second half of class, we will discuss reading that explores various approaches to structure, voice, and genre.

LITR 1152Q. Land Arts .

This ekphrastic workshop/seminar overflows the traditional definition of Land Art to encompass a much greater range, including contemporary modes of ecologically-oriented art. The class will be broken down into five thematic sections: 1) interventional land art, in which the earth is sculpted, excavated, or augmented; 2) ephemeral land art; in which elements from the landscape are worked into impermanent works; 3) kinetic land art, in which artists participate in the land, rather than making an object of or from it; 4) growing land art, in which plants and trees are grown into constantly changing and yet permanent forms; and 5) ecologically-oriented art, in which a variety of materials and practices are engaged to underscore contemporary issues of ecological importance.

LITR 1152R. Money! .

“Money, it’s a crime/Share it fairly, but don’t take a slice of my pie…” So begins the end verse of Pink Floyd’s dad-rock classic “Money”. We'll explore financial literacy, class and identity, market trends, consumer demands, and alternative forms of currency—all by way of literary realism. At the beginning of the semester, you will be randomly assigned a character with their own income, assets, and debts. From week to week you will tell their story in real time, tracking their investments (if any) in state-sanctioned markets (and/or other channels). What will your single mother do with an inheritance after the untimely passing of her father? Whether coming from a hyper-capitalist or Marxist-Lacanian perspective, we'll reckon with the many ways (implicit and explicit) that money has come to define our lives—and perhaps, how and where it should never come between us.

LITR 1152S. Race and the Making of Art (ARTS 1004). .

Interested students must register for ARTS 1004 .

LITR 1152T. Memory’s Imagination .

Taking inspiration from the autobiographical work of newly minted Nobel Laureate, Annie Ernaux, we will examine and produce works of fiction, creative narrative non-fiction and hybrid texts that cleave, in that good old double-sense, to personal experience and/or personal passions. Works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Michael Ondaatje, John Keene, Jessica Au and Svetlana Alexeivich will be on the menu to inform and inspire. Students can expect a substantial weekly reading load and should come to each class prepared to discuss the assigned texts and linked creative assignments.

LITR 1152V. The Space Crone and Her Children: Queer Reproductions in Science Fiction .

Rockets and Martian terraforming are frequent themes in the news. Less mentioned is human reproduction. Given humans must reproduce in space to actualize grand narratives of extraterrestrial exploration, this is a curious omission. Fortunately, science fiction does not neglect these matters. Sexuality, gender, and birth are of great interest to speculative writers; the future is an exciting place to live erotic lives. This is a course about possible genders, possible sexualities, possible ecologies. Reading queer feminist science fiction—e.g., Octavia Butler, Irene Clyde, Samuel Delany, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ—we will consider how cycles of life might (already) be otherwise and interrogate current events re: reproductive and LGBTQIA+ rights, thinking both analytically and imaginatively. Participants will develop their own speculative prose.

LITR 1152W. Cinema Poetics .

We shall study the poetics of cinema and how the video-poem can expand, deepen, rescue, extend our writing and writing practices. We'll watch a panoply of poem-films, video art, and "poetic" feature length films to discern their basic components of sound + text + motion, their principles of composition and editing techniques. Our texts will explore concepts of diaspora and memory, documentary poetics, footage and sound recordings from which students will assemble video poems or essays of their own. Students will need access to a video editing application such as iMovie, Adobe Premiere, Premiere Rush, Stop Motion Studios, DaVinci Resolve, Canva, for instance.

LITR 1152X. Writing with the Family Archives .

VHS tapes, recipes, birth and immunization records, letters, heirlooms, passports, a shoebox of photographs, old laptops — these are among the tangible artifacts that make up the family archive. Amid the tangible, we recognize the intangible and ephemeral matter, such as oral histories, songs, missing records, objects lost in migration now only filed in memory. how do we open a creative space for these often undervalued inventories? In this class we shall read several texts of poetry and hybrid nonfiction that grapple with familial documents & materials, while, at the same time, beginning our own archival projects. We shall raise questions about the kind of research this project entails, the ethics of writing about kin, how to work creatively with photographs, audio, objects and documents, and how to write into that empty gap of what's missing from the archive.

LITR 1152Z. Creative Process Workshop .

Creative Writing can be understood as a method of turning ideas, sounds, images, snippets, fragments, dreams, research -- and any and all of life's materials -- into fully realized literary works. The "work" of these works is hidden when we read books and published authors, and thus our sense of how excellent work is achieved can be underdeveloped or perfectionistic. When we rely on only a reader's perspective to guide us as artists, it provides little to no sense of artistic path. The path that an artist takes to develop a work is one that is non-linear, messy, and full of wonderful byways. It doesn't easily fit into an editorial perspective, and thus the way in which work is discussed will be different from literature courses. This workshop is for writers of all levels to explore in more depth their

LITR 1200. Writers on Writing .

Offers students an introduction to the study of literature (including works from more than one genre) with special attention given to a writer's way of reading. This course will include visits to the course by contemporary writers, who will read to the class and talk about their work. Enrollment is limited to 30 students.

LITR 1220A. History and Practice of English Versification .

An opportunity to study through reading and imitating poems that represent a variety of poetic eras and traditions. S/NC.

LITR 1220B. Samuel Beckett .

This course will mark the centenary of the author by reading and discussing a range of works from Samuel Beckett's substantial output of fiction, poetry, drama and translation.

LITR 1220C. The Cantos in their Environment .

A reading of Pound's Cantos, with attention to their origin and developments, their background and their influence.

LITR 1220D. The Bible as Literary Source .

A survey of the English Bible and its presence in English and American literature. Students will learn to notice and account for Biblical echoes in a wide variety of writings from several cultures.

LITR 1220E. Dada and Surrealism .

Two of the most famous modernist movements, studied through their writings, their visual arts, their performances, and their manifestoes; their origins and influence; their place in history. S/NC.

LITR 1220F. Restoration Drama .

A survey of English drama and theatrical practice from the reopening of the theaters at the Restoration to the early eighteenth century. Works of the major playwrights, including Dryden, Congreve, Wycherly, Gay. S/NC.

LITR 1220G. The Waste Land and After .

We shall examine Eliot's poem, and then deal with early poems by W.H. Auden and the work of Charles Williams and David Jones. S/NC

LITR 1220H. Gertrude Stein and What Comes After (ENGL 1711M) .

Interested students must register for ENGL 1711M.

LITR 1220I. Zoopoetics (ENGL 1900J) .

Interested students must register for ENGL 1900J .

LITR 1230C. Poetry Newly in Translation in English .

This is a reading, writing. translation, and discussion class. Commit to a vigorous combination of all four. Some translation theory will be reviewed, but the emphasis of the course is upon models of translations. Texts will include works by Iva Blatny, Inger Christensen, Luljeta Lleshanaku, David Huerta, Takashi Hiraide; new translations of Rimbaud and Baudelaire and others. Enrollment limited to 20. S/NC

LITR 1230D. Poetry, Mind, World .

How does the poetic mind negotiate between an account of itself and an account of the world? How have poets used landscape as a model of mind, as an erotics, as elegy? Merleau-Ponty, Hardy, Houle, Alexander, Dewdney, Hass, D'Aquino, Audubon and others. Presentation, several short essays, a poem, and one final essay.

LITR 1230E. Form and Theory of Fiction .

"Form and Theory of Fiction" offers an exploration of narrative theories directed particularly at creative writers, in conjunction with a hands-on examination of contemporary fictional narrative practices. Theoretical readings include historical essays on fiction and work by Gaston Bachelard, Mieke Bal, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230F. Writing, Reading City .

In this course, we will explore correlations, points of convergence, and possible mimesis between city and text. Students will be expected to keep a weekly journal, to have a city in question, and to write both imaginatively and critically in response to readings and class discussion.

LITR 1230G. Master Poets of Apartheid Streets: Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks .

With the theme of "Slavery and Justice" in recent Brown University review, [4] "Master Poets of Apartheid Streets: Perpetual Resistance against de jure and de facto Segregation" is the formal and precise embouchure as Critical Realism which legislates as antidote to pernicious social, economic and educational racism: the aesthetic stance of this seminar is "An Integer Is a Whole Number." Through close attention to the conventions of poetry as praxis by these four master poets, in social context, the modality of this study is poetic discourse (what Frederick Douglass called "a sacred effort" in Douglass' description of President A. Lincoln's 'Second Inaugural.' Peripheral insights will be provided by Brown University researchers of the past: Charles H. Nichols, Winthrop Jordan, Richard Slotkin, in their three dissertations, and James R. Patterson's most recent book on "Brown v. Board of Education." Written permission required. Enrollment limited to 20. S/NC.

LITR 1230H. Being in Time .

In this discussion-based course, we will examine the many roles time plays in the building of narratives as well as its impact on contemporary concepts of self. We will use both literary and philosophical texts to explore the spaces between time and perception, time and memory, time and experience, and time and grammar. Written permission required.

LITR 1230I. The Documentary Vision in New Literature of the Americas .

A study of genre-defiant works, lyric treatments, atypical narratives, film poems, etc., including works by Anne Carson, Elena Poniatowska, W.S. Merwin, Maggie Nelson, Raoul Zurita and others. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230J. Writing: Material Differences .

An exploration of practices that make a material difference to writing, that may change what writing is in specific cultural circumstance and locations. We will look for such differences through transcultural and translingual experiments with writing, beginning "West" and moving "East." We will engage with a selection of widely divergent writers and genres, with emphases on poetics - particularly a translated rendition of Chinese poetics (such as was taken up by Pound and became influential in English literature) - and on theories that we can use for our practice, from: Fenollosa, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230K. Latin American Death Trip .

Death is the subject of many of the greatest (most moving, innovative, funny, haunting, political, oneiric) Latin American poems of the 20th century, from Gorostiza's Death without End to Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death to Saenz' The Night . What is up with Latin Americans and death? What particularities of culture, gender, age, faith or experience might account for the visionary clarity of death as constant companion or permeable border, etc.? What makes the poems great? We shall read classic Latin American books in bilingual editions (so Spanish literacy is not a requirement, but we'll talk about translation issues). Students will be expected to participate in literary discussions, to write essays and a death poem. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230L. Eros: Hot and Sour .

Literature, early and late, distant and near, at the intersection of love and loathing. A seminar on selected texts deriving their blood from poetry, their flesh from fiction, their anatomy from form and theory. Including works by Rikki Ducornet, Anne Carson, Roland Barthes, Helen Cixous, Gertrude Stein, Catullus, Henry Miller, et al. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230M. Poetry and Ethics (COLT 1812J) .

Interested students must register for COLT 1812J .

LITR 1230N. Robert Coover -- Foremost Storyteller .

We shall examine the works of contemporary American fiction writer, Robert Coover. During his long, celebrated career, Coover has imaginatively responded to writers and forms that have come before him. We'll investigate how Coover appropriates earlier traditions and think about how he simultaneously preserves and subverts literary traditions. We shall consider such concepts as myth, religion, and history, and determine how Coover applies these. We'll focus on authorial strategies and themes explored. Furthermore, we'll define literary terminology as a tools for textual and critical analysis. Finally, through this experience you can develop or refine the capacity for self-expression and communication. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230O. Suppression and Invention in Modern Persian Literature .

This course begins with symbolic elements from classical mystic Persian literature and journeys into pre- and post-revolution Persian short fiction and poetry. We shall analyze creative responses to restricted expression, study efforts to modernize in a variety of genres, and finish with the rise of the woman writer in Iran. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230P. The New Wave in Iranian Cinema .

We shall explore this movement that produced remarkable award-winning films in Iran. Applying author (auteur) theory, we will study new Iranian movies, analyzing "signs and meaning" in their cinematic language, also investigating effects of Iranian culture on this new artistic wave. Enrollment limited to 20. S/NC

LITR 1230Q. London Consequences .

This course focuses upon a selection of British prose from the 1960s and 1970s, and gives particular attention to post-war literary history in Britain, autobiographical fiction and the legacy of neo-modernism. We'll consider the work of, among others, Anna Kavan, J.G. Ballar, Nicholas Mosley, Muriel Spark, Christine Brooke-Rose, Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin and B.S. Johnson, along with (if available) London Consequences, a collaborative novel co-edited by Johnson.

LITR 1230T. The Origins of the Detective Story .

This class will explore the development of the Detective genre, focusing on its roots in the 19th century and considering more broadly how genres develop and change. Readings include E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Mademoiselle de Scudery", Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin stories, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Martin Hewett, and selections from Detection by Gaslight and The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime. We will also look at theoretical texts, including Franco Moretti's "Clues". This course fulfills Literary Arts' pre-20th century literature requirement. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230U. Samuel Beckett .

This course will examine the works of Samuel Beckett--novels, plays and stories--from the beginning of his career to his death. We will read the majority of Beckett's work, with a major focus on his novel trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) and on the other work Beckett published between 1948 and 1961 (especially Endgame and How It Is).

LITR 1230V. Why Don't We Fall in Love? .

We focus here on intersections of the erotic and poetry. How do we fall in love? Why? We will explore joy and happiness, love and lust, devotion and seduction. We will also, unfortunately, explore longing, heartbreak, jealousy, unrequited love. We will explore, through literature and film, the ageless enigma that prompted Ruth Stone to proclaim, "there is no choice among the voices / of love..."

LITR 1230W. Spectroscopy: [Identifying] Black Bodies in Narrative .

We shall focus on character development and narrative structure through the formation and presence of textual and cinematic black bodies. Our discussions will focus on the identification of that which is not allowed to speak -- the prototypical foil (Caliban), the other (Man Friday), the black body (Jim). How are narratives (how are we) shaped by that which cannot be acknowledged?

LITR 1230X. The New Long Poem .

An energetic study of powerful, book-length poems recently published in English, including texts as core to 20th c. literature as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo to books as archly exacting as John Ashbery's Flow Chart, as affably innovative as Lyn Hejinian's My Life, as ingeniously formal as Inger Christiansen's alphabet and as unruly as Frank Stanford's The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Also: Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, Evan S. Connell’s Notes Found in a Bottle on a Beach at Carmel, W.S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs, and the intra-genre Cecilia Vicuna’s Spit Temple.

LITR 1230Y. Structuring (and De-Structuring) Novels: Special Topics Literature Seminar .

How to structure a novel? This is a question most novelists approach with dread, because, a) all the good plots and structures have been used up; b) plots can feel annoying anyway, like a capitulation to cinema or theater; and c) nevertheless, it is impossible to write in total darkness. We’ll dispel this darkness by reading works by a range of novelists. How do these authors strike a balance between complex thought and elegant/unusual structure? And how can we, as writers, maintain narrative coherence over the course of hundreds of pages?

LITR 1230Z. Syncretic Gods .

Is it possible to kill a God? What happens within a generation to change the face of a God? To change the nature of a God itself? In this course we will research the various transformations of the myths of Yoruba deities as they too traverse middle passage in the suffocating holds of merchant ships. We will commit to the (subversive) task of imagining and re-imagining the myths of the Orishas. Using as a foundation the seventeen drawings in Cuban artist Alberto del Pozo’s Orichas series, we will cover the storied lives of these our immortal and syncretic Gods.

LITR 1231A. Time Mechanics: Poetry as Translation .

This seminar focuses on experimental translations and transcreations in the spirit of Spicer’s claim in After Lorca: “A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer.” Various approaches to leading a text across the time and space divide will be studied. If for Pound to “make new” is to look elsewhere, for Zukofsky it’s to listen closely. If Hawkey’s Ventrakl posits the poem’s decomposition over time, Bang gives us a current, self-obsolescing version of Dante’s hell. And while Hsia Yü’s poems stage the clash of analogue and digital transmission technologies, Brandon Brown offers contemporary readers Fleur du mal version 2.0.

LITR 1231B. The Enchantment of Re-Imagining .

The author, Sam Leith, likened the recent Jane Austen project (in which six authors are tasked with rewriting Jane Austen for a modern audience) to “writing fiction as literary criticism.” In this course, we are invited to think more speculatively about the role of re-imagination in literature and society by reading texts which do not only re-imagine the past by reframing history but which also re-imagine life and the present to offer us an alternate view. In some cases, these texts re-write existing classics. We will engage closely with the texts and relevant works of criticism.

LITR 1231C. Experimental Poets of Color .

In this course we'll read and critically engage with contemporary experimental poets of color writing in English in the US and Canada. Exploring the intersection of poetics, aesthetics, critical race (and mixed race) theory, and social justice activism in the arts, we will question the modernist and post-modernist assumptions that experimentation and innovation are exclusively the domain of whiteness. We will explore how racism, colonialism, and other contemporary systems of oppression condition responses to poets of color, and consider how poets of color respond to and engage with these systems both overtly and through their aesthetic experimentation.

LITR 1231D. Narrative Possession: spirits, shamans and the walking dead .

Narrative Possession offers a creative and critical investigation of the nature of possession as it manifests in film, fiction, and theory, exploring narrative depictions of possession across a wide range of international cultural practices including shamanism, voodoo, Spiritualism and séance. We will explore the theoretical and political ramifications of possession as it pertains to embodiment, sovereignty, private property and personal identity. Texts include works by Toni Morrison, Muriel Spark, Antoine Volodine, Zora Neal Hurston, Lafcadio Hearn, Ishmael Reed, Cesar Aira, kobo Abe, Derrida, Sartre, and De Certeau. Films include works by Cocteau, Camus, Tourneur, and Russell.

LITR 1231E. Rereading Writing .

We will study writing and, more generally, language art in terms of reading, both reexamining theories and practices of writing — in linguistics, the philosophy of language, and in the actual making of literature — and also by proposing that reading is constitutive of language regardless of its medium. What is reading, historically, theoretically, and in the digitally mediated future of culture? If reading brings language into being, then how should we read and what should we compose to be read? Readings from Saussure and Ong to Hayles, Derrida, and beyond. Optional critical-creative project.

LITR 1231F. Listening/Voicing .

“How you sound??” the poet Amiri Baraka once asked. This seminar is concerned with acts of communication as pertains to voicing and listening. How do poets sound out in the world, and to whom? We will explore notions of voice as more than a site of identity production, looking at, for example, the various fractures possible in Sappho’s “voice” and what is carried to us through history, while also considering forms of singular and collective sounding via a range of poets and writers. On the other side of voice, we’ll read into and experiment with acts of deep listening.

LITR 1231G. Traditions of Rupture: the Latin American Avant-Garde .

We will read and write creative responses to poetry and hybrid works by the generation of early 20th-century Latin American writers who shaped a distinct corpus owing as much to the European tradition as to the region’s postcolonial history and vernacular: Huidobro, Vallejo, Neruda, Borges, and Guillén, and the Brazilian Modernists. We will also study postwar innovators—Berenguer, di Giorgio, Paz, Pizarnik, Parra, and the Brazilian Concrete Poets—as well as contemporary writers’ contributions to the expansion of the field. Special focus will be devoted to translation matters, indigenous writing, and ecopoetics. Knowledge of Spanish and/or Portuguese is not necessary.

LITR 1231H. New York City 1965-2001 .

NYC's a city constantly in crisis. It's a city in protest, turning over its own history, its fatal oversights. A place where missteps made in the blink of an eye might mean death—or sliding into the dark groove between princes(ses) and peasants. We’re looking for NYC's story from 1965 to 2001. Why these years as bookends? Why this city made of boroughs held together by a sticky substance of uncertain origin we might call pride or ideology…? More importantly, what does it take to write historical fiction? To write about the places most important to us?

LITR 1231I. The Sacred & Profane: Dante, Milton, Rushdie .

We will explore a variety of sacred texts in the Abrahamic tradition to better understand the major works of four radical makers (in chronologic order): Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Charles Mingus, and Salman Rushdie. We will read supplementary texts by Durkheim, Eliade Mircea, Simone Weil, Carl Jung, and Edward Said.

LITR 1231J. Histories .

Historical figures like Herodotus, Hannibal, Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane have all served as energy nodes around which writers have built significant works of prose. In this seminar we will examine texts like Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants as part of an exploration of that prose which, if we can kick awake that poor overworked pearl, posits the historical as its grain of sand. Students can expect a substantial weekly reading load of primary and secondary source material and should come to each class prepared to discuss the assigned texts.

LITR 1231K. Innovations in Indian Literature .

Modern Indian literature developed in the shadow of colonialism and the birth of the nation state. Indian writers working in English and vernacular languages were forced to confront a sudden—and fragmented—modernity. What innovative narrative and literary strategies did they embrace in response to this historical and cultural pressure? Do these techniques have application beyond the Indian context? In general, how do cultural and political forces precipitate formal innovation?

LITR 1300. Independent Study in Reading, Research, and Writing About Literature .

Provides advanced students with an opportunity to pursue tutorial instruction oriented toward a literary research topic.

LITR 1310. Independent Study in Creative Writing .

Offers tutorial instruction oriented toward some significant work in progress by the student. Typically taken by honors or capstone candidates in the antepenultimate or penultimate semester. See instructor to seek permission during the semester before undertaking the course of study. One advanced-level workshop is prerequisite. S/NC.

LITR 1410A. Fiction Honors .

A workshop setting for the completion of theses by advanced writers of fiction. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all honors workshops. Instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 12 senior Literary Arts concentrators. S/NC.

LITR 1410C. Playwriting Honors .

A workshop setting for the completion of theses or capstone projects by advanced writers of dramatic literature. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all honors/capstone workshops. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1510. Honors Independent Study in Creative Writing .

Provides tutorial instruction for students completing their theses or capstone projects. Typically taken by honors or capstone candidates in their final semester. See instructor to seek permission during the semester before undertaking the course of study. S/NC.

LITR 2010A. Graduate Fiction .

Advanced practice of the art: a writing seminar, limited to graduate students in Literary Arts. Emphasis is placed on developing a better understanding of the creative process, strategies and forms. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 2010B. Graduate Poetry .

LITR 2010C. Graduate Playwriting .

LITR 2110A. Theatrical Styles on Stage and Page .

An investigation of theatrical forms and for collaborations among actors, directors and playwrights. This course is limited to participants in the MFA programs in acting, directing and playwriting. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 2110C. Reading, Writing and Thinking .

A course for graduate prose writers. We will explore various ways to engage with a work of art in order to fuel one¿s imagination and projects. Close textual reading of several books with writing assignments based on the readings. Writers will include Woolf, Stein, Beckett, Coetze, Kertesz and others. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 2110E. The Foreign Home: Interdisciplinary Arts .

LITR 2110F. Essays Without Borders .

A workshop for writing, performing, or media artists exploring essay or non-fiction forms in any genre. No project too strange, no essay too fanciful. Readings and research into experimental non-fiction. Individual and group work as well as critical and artistic projects. Literary Arts MFAs will be given priority. Come to first meeting for permission. Enrollment limited to 12. Permission required. S/NC.

LITR 2110G. Writing The Novel .

For advanced fiction writers who wish to work in long form. Through this course, participants will read a selection of novels and investigate the form; the primary emphasis will be placed on the work being undertaken by the members of the workshop itself. S/NC.

LITR 2110H. Embodying the Book .

What are the limits of the book? How far can it go? Alternatively, what is its essence? What is absolutely essential to it? This collaborative class brings writers together with RISD industrial designers and graphics artists to consider these questions and to create inventive book structures. Focus will be on collaboration itself, with texts addressing various aspects, such as the ethics of cooperation and group dynamics, as well as on the history and nature of the book as a cultural tool and force. Working in teams of three, students will invent their own structures and work together to embody them.

LITR 2110K. Deep Rivers, Lost Roads, Bent Symbols: Poets and Poetry Outside the Frame .

Geographically and/or aesthetically suspect, often shelved under the wrong rubric. Word-works by hermits and wanderers, sots and sot nots, whose language confirm, as Sister Rosetta Tharpe sang: Strange Things Happening Every Day. Including work by Besmilr Brigham, Wong May, Bernadette Mayer, Mary Reufle, Frank Stanford, David Fisher, a new translation of Beowulf (by an American! A Woman!), and others. There may also be music.

LITR 2110M. Challenging the Single Story: Reading Africa .

In recent years, there has been an explosion of new writing from Africa on the international scene, even as the single narrative of the continent persists. In this course, we will engage with fiction published in the last 15 years as well as critical texts and essays. Students will read fiction written in different genres. We will examine, among other things, how these writers negotiate their themes without compromising the integrity of their craft with a view to excelling in our own writing.

LITR 2110O. Dialogue, Monologue, & Dialect .

This hybrid workshop/seminar for graduate students will use works of fiction, cinema, theater, and narrative poetry as beginning points for experiments and discussions centered on a wide range of concepts and practices designed to widen how they hear and see the possibilities of voice and body language in their work. Special attention will be paid to regional and international, especially hybrid, forms of English.

LITR 2110P. World of Echoes: The Poet as Translator .

How is a poet’s translation different from other translations? What factors determine a poet’s choice to translate a specific author? For this seminar we will read innovative poetry recently translated by a diverse group of poets. Examples include Jennifer Scapettone’s rendering of Amelia Rosselli’s Locomotrix, Sawako Nakayasu’s translations of Chika Sagawa, and Daniel Borzutzky’s version of Raúl Zurita’s The Book of Planks. Besides the translated materials, we will consider their relationship to the translator/poets’ own works and the politics of cultural transmission. Students may engage in translation projects themselves or respond creatively to the materials, thereby also engaging in translation.

LITR 2210A. House Language .

We shall explore the house and its adjacent places and categories, with a focus upon narrative mannerism, terror and the grotesque, and the creation of literary form. We'll discuss stories, essays, household artifacts and etiquette, architectural plans and dangerous parlor games. Works by, among others: Georges Perec, H.G. Wells, Shirley Jackson, Isabella Beeton, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rube Goldberg and Edith Wharton.

LITR 2230. Graduate Independent Study in Reading, Research, and Writing About Literature .

Provides graduate students with an opportunity to pursue tutorial instruction oriented toward a literary research topic.

LITR 2310. Graduate Independent Studies in Literary Writing .

Offers tutorial instruction oriented toward some significant work in progress by the graduate student. S/NC.

LITR 2402C. Reading the Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence, Language, and Literary Art (HMAN 2402C). .

Interested students must register for HMAN 2402C

LITR 2410. Graduate Thesis Independent Study in Literary Writing .

Provides tutorial instruction for graduate students completing their graduate creative theses. Typically taken in the final semester. See instructor to seek permission during the semester before undertaking the course of study. S/NC.

LITR 2450. Exchange Scholar Program .

LITR 2600. Seminar in Teaching Creative Writing .

A course focused on how to design and lead a creative writing workshop. Reading, writing and laboratory workshop sessions. Designed for first-year Literary Arts graduate students. S/NC.

LITR 2700. Pedagogy Seminar .

The Pedagogy Seminar examines ideas about teaching in a literary arts/creative writing environment. The pros and cons of the “workshop”-style will be discussed alongside alternative models, and general topics of exploration will include: creative process pedagogy, writing-to-learn, multi-genre approaches, uses of readings/research, and general classroom management. Designing an inclusive classroom and syllabus as well as exploring generative and innovative practices will be covered as well. A special emphasis will be on preparing students to feel confident and to explore a range of creative process issues. Personal writing as well as syllabus design will be expected.

LITR 2710. Literary Arts Pedagogy in Practice .

The Pedagogy in Practice Seminar examines ideas about teaching in a literary arts/creative writing environment. The pros and cons of the “workshop”-style will be discussed alongside alternative models, and general topics of exploration will include: creative process pedagogy, writing-to-learn, multi-genre approaches, uses of readings/research, and general classroom management. This is a hands-on forum to provide guidance on how to build an inclusive, pedagogically effective meeting space. A special emphasis will be on preparing instructors to feel confident and explore a range of creative process issues. There will be opportunities to develop personal writing, especially in response to student work.

LITR 2780. Graduate Independent Study in Professional Development .

This half-credit course is for a Literary Arts graduate student not enrolled in a pedagogy seminar. Through this independent study, the graduate student will work with a faculty advisor to prepare for the post-MFA experience. This may include a focus on aspects of teaching, but may also focus on related professional pursuits, such as working in literary agency, publishing and professional writing.

Brown’s Department in Literary Arts provides a home for innovative writers of fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, literary translation, digital/cross-disciplonary and mixed media. The concentration allows student writers to develop their skills in one or more genres while deepening their understanding of the craft of writing. Many courses in this concentration require a writing sample; students should consult a concentration advisor or the concentration website for strategies on getting into the appropriate course(s).

Candidates for the Bachelor of Arts degree with concentration in Literary Arts will be expected to complete the following course work:

1. At least four writing workshops from among the following series: LITR 0100A , LITR 0100B , LITR 0110A , LITR 0110B , LITR 0110D , LITR 0110E , LITR 011oH the various courses under LITR 0210, LITR 0310/0311, LITR 0610, LITR 1010, LITR 1110, LITR 1150/1151/1152 and LITR 1410 . At least two genres must be covered within the four workshops taken. An independent study in literary arts ( LITR 1310 and LITR 1510) may count toward the workshop requirement. Other writing-intensive courses may also count, at the discretion of the advisor.

2. Six elective reading and research in literary arts courses, which must include:

a course in literary theory or the history of literary criticism
a course that primarily covers readings and research in literary arts created before 1800
a course that primarily covers readings and research in literary arts created before 1900
a course that primarily covers readings and research in literary arts created after 1900

These courses, selected in consultation with a concentration advisor, may come from (but are not limited to) the following departments: Africana Studies, American Civilization, Classics, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, Egyptology, French Studies, German Studies, Hispanic Studies, Italian Studies, Judaic Studies, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures in English, Middle East Studies, Modern Culture and Media, Music, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Slavic Studies, South Asian Studies, Theatre, Speech and Dance, Visual Arts. With approval from the concentration advisor, courses covering pre-20th century time periods may be distributed in a variant manner, so long as they cover two distinct literary time periods that precede the 20th century

3. Among the ten required courses, at least four must be at the 1000-level or above. At least six classes (workshops and reading/research courses) that shall count toward the concentration must be taken at Brown through the Literary Arts Department; up to one of the six LITR courses may be a course taken in another department but cross-listed by Literary Arts. No more than two of the ten required courses for the concentration may also count toward fulfilling a second concentration.

4. During the senior year, all students must take at least one course within the Literary Arts course offerings (courses with LITR designation by the Registrar, or courses approved by the concentration advisor).

Honors in Creative Writing: Course requirements are the same as those for the regular concentration (four workshops, six elective literature-reading courses), with the following changes and additions: honors candidates must include two 1000-level workshops or independent studies among their courses; and complete a thesis. Students in their seventh semester who are enrolled in or have completed at least one 1000-level workshop (or independent study) may submit honors applications to the Literary Arts Department from the first day of the fall semester to 25 September; and from 1 through 25 February in the spring. Interested students should obtain information from the office of the Literary Arts Department.

Honors in Literary Arts Production: Course requirements are the same as those for the regular concentration (four workshop, six literature-reading courses), with the following changes and additions: honors candidates must include two 1000-level workshops, production courses or related independent studies among their courses; and complete a production capstone project. Students in their seventh semester who are enrolled in or have completed at least one 1000-level workshop, production course or independent study, may submit honors applications to the Literary Arts Department from the first day of the fall semester to 25 September; and from 1 through 25 February in the spring. Interested students should obtain information form the Literary Arts Department.

The Graduate Program in Literary Arts offers a Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A) degree with courses in fiction, poetry and digital/cross-disciplinary practices.

For more information on admission and program requirements, please visit the following website:

http://www.brown.edu/academics/gradschool/programs/literary-arts

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Literary Arts

Financial information.

Over the last two decades, all incoming MFA students received full funding.

Packages for Literary Arts students generally take the following form. Stipends are paid monthly, in equal installments.

In the first year, all graduate students receive a fellowship; in addition to providing tuition remission, the health fee, and health insurance, Brown will also pay a monthly stipend. Fellowships do not require employment or teaching. The stipend for the 2023-2024 academic year is projected at no less than $31,809 (roughly $3,000 per month for nine months).

Between the first and second academic year, students in good standing receive a summer stipend of $4,712 (roughly $1,500 per month for three months).

In the second year, all graduate students in good standing who are qualified will be awarded teaching assistantships. Teaching assistants teach one undergraduate writing workshop per semester, and receive a full stipend, tuition remission, health fee, and health insurance. The stipend for the 2023-2024 academic year is projected to be no less than $31,809 (roughly $3,000 per month for nine months).

ALL U.S. applicants must complete a FAFSA in order to receive departmental funding, whether or not you plan to take out a supplementary student loan. You should file your FAFSA during the months of November, December or January*. Please list Brown University's graduate Federal School code of E00058.

*The government rolled out a new FAFSA form in late 2023; candidates have reported difficulties gaining access to and negotiating the form. Brown recognizes the situation and will monitor the progress made on the site. For now, we ask that you make a reasonable effort to complete the process by the end of January – but if the process remains challenged, late arriving FAFSA submissions will be accepted during the 2023-24 application window.

Additional Funds

U.S. students who wish to supplement their stipends with additional funds may apply for a Guaranteed Student Loan. To research loan borrowing options and other financing alternatives, including an Installment Payment plan, go to the Financing & Support page on the Graduate School website.

International Students

While not eligible for federally-supported student loans or federally-supported work study positions, international students are eligible for the same financial aid package as offered to all other students -- tuition scholarships, fellowships, teaching assistantships, summer stipends, health fee coverage and health insurance.

Application Fee Waivers

Some applicants may wish to seek a waiver of the application fee; in order to do so, you must submit a completed application no later than 30 November – two weeks in advance of the program’s application deadline. Please choose the “Request a fee waiver” option as your method of payment when submitting the application.

For more information on waivers see Application Fee Waiver on the Graduate School website.

Advice for MFA applicants, from Brown University’s Brian Evenson

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MFA applicants, I feel your pain. It was not so long ago that I was one of you, sweating the math section of the GRE, trying to figure out the perfect submission length (22.25 pages?), wondering what on Earth I was doing. If only there had been one professor from a respected MFA program to tell me exactly what they were looking for, it would have been so much easier.

There is: If you’re applying now, or in the future, this is for you.

Brian Evenson , whose books include “Fugue State” and “The Open Curtain,” is a professor of literary arts at Brown . He has recently been posting on Facebook while reviewing students’ creative writing MFA applications. After getting to the end of them, he put together this definitive 11-point list, Advice for Future MFA Applicants . “Please feel free to steal, revise, mutilate, or dispute,” he writes. Why argue? We’re reposting here in the original form.

1. Turn in your very best piece of fiction. This really, really matters to me, more than anything else. If I love a piece of writing, I will fight for it, and am willing to overlook a multitude of other sins.

2. Better to turn in one shorter excellent piece than a good piece and one bad one. Don’t turn in work just to max out the page limit. And if you’re finding yourself trying to cram all sorts of things into the page limit by changing the font and single-spacing, then step back and take a deep breath and think again.

3. Don’t try to pretend you’re something you’re not . Most of you don’t, and those of you who do don’t do it maliciously, but just kind of slowly convince yourself into it as you write and rewrite your application. Look, it’s easy to tell if you’re faking. So don’t fake.

4. Be honest, but “We’re dating and getting serious” honest rather than either “First date honest” or “Now that you’ve proposed, here’s all the stuff you need to know about me (like the fact that I killed my first wife)” honest. You can and should talk about your struggles and successes and trials and etc., but in moderation.

5. In the personal statement, write about yourself in a way that allows us to get a real sense of you and the way you are now, right now, and where you’re going. If you feel you have to go back to childhood to do that, that’s okay, but if I go away with a better sense of how you were when you were in 2nd grade (or whatever) than how you are now, that’s not good.

6. Read interesting things and learn how to talk about them in interesting ways. Read, read, read. And read eccentrically. Take chances. There’s no reason, no matter what your job or your circumstances, that you shouldn’t be reading an interesting book every week or two, and that’ll do a great deal for your development as a writer and as a person. It’s okay to let us know what books led you to writing, but better if we find out what books you continue to go back to and who you’re interested in now.

7. Don’t pretend to have read something that you haven’t read. Don’t google the faculty at a program and then try to include a line in your personal statement that suggests what their book is about. This rarely works, and as a result usually does more harm than good.

8. We’re interested in knowing what makes you unique, but within reason. And even if you have a great set of experiences and are incredibly interesting and we’d love to have an 8-hour long coffee with you to learn about your experiences running Substance D. from the American camp to the Norwegian camp in Antarctica, if your writing sample isn’t good enough you won’t get in. There comes a time when you need to choose to work on the writing instead of getting life experience as a carny.

9. If you already have an advanced degree, you have to explain convincingly why you want to get another , and why we should give this opportunity to you rather than to someone else. If you already have a PhD, we need to be convinced that this is the right thing for you and for us, and that you’re not just collecting degrees. But, honestly, the default acceptances for MFAs is usually (but not always) someone who doesn’t yet have an advanced degree. We’ve taken people with advanced degrees in our program, but it’s very much the exception rather than the rule.

10. If you already have a book out, same thing. Are you serious about improving your writing or do you want to treat this as a sort of an artist colony? If the latter, well, I’d suggest an artist colony: they’ll feed you, and we usually won’t. If I get the impression that you want to get the MFA mainly to have a teaching credential, that can be one or more strikes against you.

11. MFA programs make mistakes. We don’t always see the potential of people, which may be partly our fault and partly your own. Do everything you can when you put together your application to make sure that the fault is on our side rather than yours. But also remember: any really good program ends up with many more people they’d like to admit than they actually can admit. When it comes down to that final cut, it’s very very hard, and we’ll have to let people go who, ideally, we’d love to have come. So, if you don’t get in, don’t take it as a judgment. To our shame, we’ve turned down many great writers before, and probably will again. But fingers crossed that it won’t be you... Good luck!

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brown university creative writing mfa application

Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. She joined the L.A. Times in 2010 as staff writer in Books and left in 2018. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California.

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Graduate Programs

Theatre arts and performance studies: playwriting.

The MFA in Playwriting is a three-year funded program. We are looking for students who define themselves as writers, and whose writing resists definition—but involves a keen, tireless attention to live performance.

This program is a place to study what writing for theater has been, while honing a creative practice that also feeds voraciously on the nontheatrical: all kinds of literature, art, rebellion, and thought. Above all it is a place—and time—to write like you've never written before.

Application Information

Application requirements, gre subject:.

Not required

GRE General:

Toefl/ielts:.

Required for applicants from non-English speaking countries only; see the Graduate School website for details.

Letters of Recommendations:

Three Recommendations: At least one must speak directly to your work as a theater artist.

Writing Sample:

(2) The first should be a complete full-length script for live performance (a.k.a. a play). The second may be a part of a whole, and in any medium; if writing, no more than 15 pages, if visual no more than 15 images, if sound/video, no more than 15 minutes.

Personal Statement:

What are your writing goals over the next few years, and how can Brown's program serve them?

Dates/Deadlines

Application deadline, tuition and funding.

The program provides a financial aid package that covers tuition, health fee and health insurance for three years of full-time enrollment. In addition, the program provides stipends for fall and spring semesters for each year of full-time enrollment as well as a stipend for two summers (following first and second years). Funding is contingent on students remaining in good standing.

Alumni Careers

Contact and Location

Department of theatre arts and performance studies, mailing address.

Program Faculty
Program Handbook
Graduate School Handbook

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2023 Creative Writing MFA Applicants Forum

By MDP March 17, 2022 in Literary

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Feb 21 2023

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ArthurDentJr

March 12, 2023

I've now received CNF decisions on all of my schools: UPittsburgh, UMinnesota, UIowa, Louisiana State, and UArizona were all rejections...But! I was accepted at Ohio State (my top preference)! I am ve

February 16, 2023

Received an acceptance email from BU this morning for poetry. Insane relief after getting a couple rejections in a row this last week.

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annachristine

Hi! I'm really considering applying to Brown University's Cross-Discplinary/Digital Writing concentration in the Literary Arts MFA. I already have a studio MFA but I get so excited thinking about that school/program, lmfao.

Anyway, just wondering if anyone here went to Brown in their undergrad?

Hey! Excited to be applying for fiction MFAs this upcoming fall. Was wondering if anyone happens to know what the application fee is for University of Miami and if they have fee waivers available? I can't seem to find the information on their website. Much obliged :)

5 weeks later...

lenagator1997

Hey Everyone!

I am still at UNH, so if anyone has questions about what it's like as a first year creative nonfiction student or a MFA student in general let me know!

If I am being honest I had a real rough first semester, but the second semester made up for it. In Fall 2022 I am still working at Research and Development, the Writing Center and TA-ing with a professor of mine, as well as writing my Masters Thesis. This is the advice stemming from my own experience only I would give to someone now being one year into my program:

1. The first semester is when you begin to transition into the grad-school writing life and into your writing community, but it may not be easy. Putting out my first essay (to a mostly second year cohort!) was rather scary because it was the first impression of my writing I gave to my peers and professor. This is where the rose colored glasses come off and the real work begins. Just be patient with others and yourself.

2. Look out for professional development opportunities outside of the classroom. Try for that Writing Center job you saw in that email or even grant writing. Even if down the line you realize you don't want to do it for a career, the experience will get you far and even help you make a little money. Yes the rumors are true, everyone is kinda looking out for the same careers post graduation. Everyone is looking to have that cushy tenure track job "teaching," (even if they've never done it in their entire lives or admit to hating undergraduates) or are looking to be the Editor and Chief of Penguin Random House. People will most likely brag and use every political tool they have to get ahead, but don't let it get you down. Think outside the lines, be yourself and keep on your own path. I personally thought I would be a terrible editor for the Writing Center, but it ended up becoming a passion of mine.

3. Find that one professor in your corner. You won't like every single person on the faculty, but you just need one who sees you and your writing for what it really is.

4. Even if you don't become extremely close with your cohort, if they respect you within the classroom as a writer, that's all that matters. In my experience, that whole "you will find friends for life," thing was an inflated unrealistic myth. (But if that aspect is important to you in an MFA program, then that's fine too.)

5. You might not all graduate together. I personally had no idea about this until recently. Everyone except for me extended their time in our two year program to 2.5 years and I am apparently the only one graduating in May 2023. Just don't be shocked.

6. Take that literature class your advisor warned you about. I took 2 master's level literature classes and not only did I get to know some awesome people outside of the MFA classroom, studying literature also helped my creative writing! I am also admittedly not an MFA purist. I describe myself as a academic/artist hybrid so I believe in cross-departmental study.

7. Take advantage of alumni from your program. One published alumni subbed for my nonfiction class once last semester and he is now helping me out with some aspects of my Masters Thesis!

8. In the end, it's your writing. Just because they are your professors or second/ third years doesn't mean they have greater authority then you about your voice, style, POV ect. In the end, you get to call the play.

Again, this is small sage advice from one person, but I hope it helps!

koechophe , jjooeeyy and RosA-R

1 yr Warelin pinned this topic

Heya folks. I've been a reader for my college's literary magazine over the summer. The vast, vast majority of pieces I read are from MFA graduates or MFA candidates. Being in that seat where I have to say yes or no to incoming pieces has taught me a lot about what the difference between a "yes" piece is and a "no" piece is (and for reference, there have been dozens of "no" pieces and only like 2 "yes" ones... which I think is a lot like MFA applications lol).

Here's some advice if you're still working on your writing sample:

-Good, solid prose is an entry requirement. I honestly thought literary magazine submissions would be filled with a lot of really mediocre writers, but they aren't. The writers are, for the most part, fabulous, and have very solid prose. You can tell these people know the craft and know the basics and principals. The writing is clean and polished from a prose standpoint. A lot of people feel like that's not important, but from my experience, it's more like it goes without saying that you already know your stuff.

-... but good, solid prose isn't enough to get you noticed. This actually sort of threw me, since I always thought the person with the best prose, mechanically speaking, would be the "winner." But as I'm reading, that's not the case, and in fact, one of my "yes" recommendations wasn't actually quite as solid on prose (it was still good, but it wasn't as amazing as some of the other ones I've seen.) Basically, prose seems to be a "you must be this tall to enter" line, not the end-all be-all for good writing.

-Your writing needs to feel like it is contributing to the literary conversation. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what made me say "yes" to the few I've said yes to. At the end of the day, it comes down to whether the piece felt like it had something interesting to say. I read a lot of pieces about popular topics which treated those popular topics... pretty much like everyone else does. They were well-written, and they were genuine, but it felt like a lot of them were saying things the same way everyone else has said them.

I doubt everyone says yes for the same reasons, but the reasons I find myself saying yes are based mostly on:

Does this feel like a new insight? Does it feel like they're approaching the topic from a new angle/perspective? Does the work appropriately embrace complexity and nuance? Is there enough ambiguity in the piece to allow it to be analyzed, while also having enough specificity to feel intentional? The pieces I read which got a yes just went a hair further than the rejected ones. They were just a bit more unique, enough to make me think after reading them. I hope some of this helps. I also highly recommend looking for opportunities to volunteer for a literary magazine. It's been one of the single best experiences for making me look at my writing in a harsher light.

Best of luck!

ElfieG , 1badgloop , feralgrad and 2 others

Hey all. Application season is right around the corner... Anyone starting to feel the pressure? (And/or frantically trying to write the best short story they've ever written ? )

2 weeks later...

strawberrybaldwin

just out of a simple curiosity, what's the consensus on switching programs? like if one was admitted somewhere but decided that maybe they wanted to go elsewhere after all? is that frowned upon?

4 weeks later...

On 8/30/2022 at 12:31 PM, strawberrybaldwin said: just out of a simple curiosity, what's the consensus on switching programs? like if one was admitted somewhere but decided that maybe they wanted to go elsewhere after all? is that frowned upon?

I did it and now I'm at Iowa. If a program isn't right for you that's okay. Anyone who doesn't think so can go suck rocks.

Hope everyone is having a decent time putting together their portfolios and applications! This is my first time applying to programs, so I'm fairly nervous. I'm applying to 8 schools, all fully funded, with 4 being "higher ranked" programs and the other 4 being smaller/"underrated" programs.

I have my poems completed, but I need to really tidy up my SOP and get another letter of recommendation, (been out of school for 7 years eeep!)

On 10/23/2022 at 9:00 PM, jjooeeyy said: Hey all, Hope everyone is having a decent time putting together their portfolios and applications! This is my first time applying to programs, so I'm fairly nervous. I'm applying to 8 schools, all fully funded, with 4 being "higher ranked" programs and the other 4 being smaller/"underrated" programs. I have my poems completed, but I need to really tidy up my SOP and get another letter of recommendation, (been out of school for 7 years eeep!)

Hi! Fellow poet here. I was in the thread a little last year but didn’t end up applying due to health reasons. Now, I am back to try again. One thing that is helping me with my SOP is printing out my manuscript. Then I read it as if I have never seen it before (or try to). It helped me see some common themes or topics in the poems.

How are applications going for everyone? Anyone else have a Dec 1 deadline? I am worried about the program processing all my documents and transcripts in time.

Hi everyone! I just finished my applications to 16 different schools (mostly in poetry, a few for poetry and fiction) and am waiting on fee waivers for my last 3 applications. This has been such an incredibly stressful, daunting and nerve-wracking process so far and we are only just beginning! I endlessly workshopped my SOP and writing sample with two professors and I am still double-checking every so often to make sure I didn't make a mess of anything. How does everyone survive the waiting process!?

I also wanted to say that I was able to secure fee waivers for every program so far (other than the final 3) and if anyone would like help with the language to use when asking for waivers or what I had to use as proof of financial hardship, I am more than happy to help!

On 11/20/2022 at 9:08 PM, Veneralia said: Hi everyone! I just finished my applications to 16 different schools (mostly in poetry, a few for poetry and fiction) and am waiting on fee waivers for my last 3 applications. This has been such an incredibly stressful, daunting and nerve-wracking process so far and we are only just beginning! I endlessly workshopped my SOP and writing sample with two professors and I am still double-checking every so often to make sure I didn't make a mess of anything. How does everyone survive the waiting process!? I also wanted to say that I was able to secure fee waivers for every program so far (other than the final 3) and if anyone would like help with the language to use when asking for waivers or what I had to use as proof of financial hardship, I am more than happy to help!

Congrats on finishing 16 applications already!! The waiting sure is difficult but at least you don’t have to worry about sending apps in during the holidays. Is this your first round of apps?

5 hours ago, Leeannitha said: Congrats on finishing 16 applications already!! The waiting sure is difficult but at least you don’t have to worry about sending apps in during the holidays. Is this your first round of apps?

Yes! I am just finishing my first undergraduate degree this semester, as a non-traditional student, and I focused on English and Creative Writing. I will definitely apply again next round if I don't end up anywhere this time--I know people often get in on subsequent rounds, but hey, fingers crossed and all that.

On 11/23/2022 at 11:00 PM, Veneralia said:

Best of luck to you!! With apps and the rest of your undergrad classes. Which programs are you applying to? Maybe we have some in common.

I’m applying to:

Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Umass Amherst

Helen Zell program

& maybe Northwestern?? All for poetry ?

22 hours ago, Leeannitha said: Best of luck to you!! With apps and the rest of your undergrad classes. Which programs are you applying to? Maybe we have some in common. I’m applying to: Michener NWP Iowa Writers’ Workshop NYU Umass Amherst Syracuse Helen Zell program & maybe Northwestern?? All for poetry ?

I'm applying to all of those except for NYU, Umass and Syracuse! I live like twenty minutes from Amherst though and it's lovely here! I just want to move to a new place. I'm also applying in poetry. Would be so rad to cross paths!

alligator mississippiensis

Hi friends! Happy holidays and happy application cycle!

I am applying to Michener and I'm a little confused about the process. I submitted my ApplyTexas online application and got an email from UT, Austin telling me they received my app. I set up my MyStatus account but now I cant figure out how to upload my additional materials (personal statement and manuscript ext.) Can anyone help me? Thank you in advance!

On 11/28/2022 at 12:34 AM, alligator mississippiensis said: Hi friends! Happy holidays and happy application cycle! I am applying to Michener and I'm a little confused about the process. I submitted my ApplyTexas online application and got an email from UT, Austin telling me they received my app. I set up my MyStatus account but now I cant figure out how to upload my additional materials (personal statement and manuscript ext.) Can anyone help me? Thank you in advance!

Hi sorry just saw this!!! I know the deadline is approaching. Go to your my status page and click the “admissions” tab. It should have sections to upload each part. This is what mine looks like. (I am on mobile so I hope this picture shows up)

I think you have to click “details” first on the right, then it will take you to a separate page to upload.

writinggrad

I had a hard time figuring out underrated programs. Which ones did you apply to?

I got an email from FSU about an 'application update' and jumped out of my skin (as if I didn't just apply last week). it was only letting me know the app is now under department review. It's gonna be a longggg three months until decisions come out, lol

just wanted to jump into this forum and note my presence. in addition to PhD programs in English, i am applying this cycle to Michener, New Writer's Project, UC Irvine, Litowitz @ Northwestern, Brown, and UVA. all are for poetry. wishing everyone a jolly and warm december!

6 hours ago, issys134 said: hi y'all, just wanted to jump into this forum and note my presence. in addition to PhD programs in English, i am applying this cycle to Michener, New Writer's Project, UC Irvine, Litowitz @ Northwestern, Brown, and UVA. all are for poetry. wishing everyone a jolly and warm december!

Good luck to you!

23 hours ago, notebook said: I got an email from FSU about an 'application update' and jumped out of my skin (as if I didn't just apply last week). it was only letting me know the app is now under department review. It's gonna be a longggg three months until decisions come out, lol

Do you think this means that programs are already meeting and going over applications? Was the deadline last week? The whole process is very mysterious…

steins rose

hi everyone! i just discovered this forum and i'm so happy to find some community!

i applied to brown, syracuse, ucsd, u of o, and uw this year. it's my first time applying so very scary!!

wishing you all luck as you get those apps in. looking forward to tons of acceptances for everyone <3

stannecarson

Hi y'all! Here to offer well wishes as the December 15th deadline is looming... I'm frantically revising (and essentially rewriting) my SOP for each school, which is maybe the worst part of this whole process, IMO. Each school wants a different length, different questions answered, and then I feel the need to research each school's resources and opportunities to oh-so subtly mention them. At least it'll be (mostly) over soon! Best of luck! ?

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Brown | Trinity Rep M.F.A. Programs in Acting and Directing

Application information & fees, application information & fees.

The Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Programs are not accepting applications for the 2024-2025 academic year. Please check this page for updates.

Applications

Application deadline: January 3, 2023

Admission to the M.F.A Program in Acting is based on a private audition and submission of the following materials:

completed application to the Brown Graduate School
college transcripts (unofficial student copies are acceptable)
three letters of recommendation (must be submitted by the person writing the letter)
one-page written personal statement
photo and resume
$75 non-refundable application fee

GRE and writing samples are not required.

Responses to questions regarding published articles or books, and fluency in a foreign language are not required.

Apply with the Gradate School's Online Application .

For questions about Brown/ Trinity's application requirements , audition process, or the program , please contact: Jill Jann, Brown/Trinity Rep Academic Coordinator, at [email protected].

For questions about navigating the Graduate School's online application , please contact Lisa Tillson, Graduate School Admission Coordinator, at [email protected].

Information regarding application fee waivers can be found here . You must submit your fee waiver request & application 14 days prior the application deadline.

Applicants should present two contrasting monologues - one contemporary piece and one classical and/or heightened language piece. Monologues should not exceed a combined total of two and a half minutes.
Applicants should prepare with a minimum of two additional monologues, not to exceed one minute each.
All applicants are required to view the one-hour information session. You will be sent a link closer to the audition dates after your application has been submitted.
Some actors may be asked to attend a group callback session on the day of their audition if the faculty feel the need to see how they work in a group. You will be informed during your audition if this is requested of you .
In addition, there will be a round of virtual callbacks on Sunday, February 19, 2023. Not being asked to participate in these callbacks does not necessarily indicate you are no longer under consideration for the program.

Acting applicants who are offered admission to the program are required to visit Brown/Trinity Rep for a visit at our Welcome Weekend Friday, March 3 - Sunday, March 5, 2023.

https://www.applyweb.com/browng/index.ftl

Theatre Arts & Performance Studies

Staged Reading by Dhari Noel '25 MFA Ashamu Dance Studio

Performances & Events
Writing is Live 2024

by Dhari Noel '25 MFA directed by Josephine Miller '24 Thursday, May 2: 5:00 PM Saturday, May 4: 5:00 PM Sunday, May 5: 8:30 PM CLICK HERE FOR TICKET INFORMATION

Ashamu Dance Studio 83 Waterman Street Providence RI 02912

Maximus and Rex could be porn stars if they could just time their orgasms. Aura’s figured it all out and is finally about to win best female performer of the year. Unaware of each other but locked in the same American house of desire and power, all are haunted by Sambo, star of the old stag film we all pretend to not know. Can two teen activists get us out of this mess? Or is a haint doomed to keep fucking its hauntees?

Dhari Noel (he/him/they/them/Dhari) is a Queer Black-Caribbean-Harlemite playwright/performer/educator. Dhari’s writing often explores the incoherence of race, the failures of gender, and inherited ways of being. As a teacher, Dhari uses storytelling, social justice, and interdisciplinary studies, all in an effort to examine systems of power. Readings and performances of Dhari’s work have been lucky to find generous support at several artistic homes. Recent plays include: Penguin Sex With Mr. Morgan (ANTfest @ Ars Nova, Brown University); Man Made, Spirit Junkie ( Cherry Picking / The Wild Project); Sweet Mess, Exorcism for The DEI Practitioner, The Women Who Dance… ( Cherry Picking ); Introduce Yourself, and Keep The Orange (ECFS). Dhari performs in Dhari’s own pieces and has had the pleasure of collaborating with many dear friends. Recent performances include Penguin Sex With Mr. Morgan (ANTfest @ Ars Nova, Brown University); Man Made, Spirit Junkie ( Cherry Picking , The Wild Project); Black Exhibition (Bushwick Starr); In The Penal Colony (Next Door @NYTW); The Essential Ella Maythorne (Dixon Place); Telegraph Bois (ANTfest @Ars Nova). In the summer of 2023, Dhari was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers Conference and an Emerging LGBTQ Voices fellow at Lambda Literary’s writing retreat. Dhari’s graduate studies are supported by an Adele Kellenberg Seaver 1949 Fellowship in Creative Writing. Dhari received a BA in Sociology from Columbia University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Playwriting at Brown University. Dhari is adjusting but misses the Harlem noises. www.dharinoel.com

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University writing center, university writing center blog, mfa applications and writing sessions panic.

By Zoe Hanquier

a picture of illustrated flowers that highlights text in the blog post. The text says, "The most helpful part of the session was feeling like I was not alone in the process."

I have been a consultant at the Writing Center since January 2020, and now I am on the cusp of graduation and have been stressing the past few months over my applications to MFA programs in creative writing. I wasn’t sure where to begin with the process and the looming portfolio I have to submit for each application; in my uncertainty, I turned to my place of work. So far, I have had three appointments working on my portfolio, and they have been invaluable in finding direction, de-stressing, and building confidence. It has also been an interesting experience to see my coworkers in a different circumstance and notice how they hold sessions versus what I do as a consultant.

The most helpful part of the session was feeling like I was not alone in the process. I have been daunted by the task at hand—I need to create a portfolio of 10-15 of my best poems—and the prestige and competition that accompanies applying for MFA programs. Knowing that I had someone also looking at my writing and working to improve it was comforting. I could be honest about what parts of my work I was unhappy with, even if I wasn’t sure how to make it better in the moment. I have also struggled to revise my work, both because it is hard to view objectively and I have been working on my confidence with writing throughout my college career, so having a space to be supported and not need at the answers was infinitely helpful in just starting the process.

I have always been a fiercely independent writer. I think I internalized the warnings about plagiarism a bit more than intended; at the beginning of college, I was hesitant to even consider peer feedback, especially if they suggested specific changes or phrases. Academia tends to emphasize the idea of “earning” success and work, and I have always wanted to earn my writing.

Working at the Writing Center has greatly helped me deconstruct this idea and realize that writing is often a collaborative process. Scheduling sessions at the Writing Center was proof of my changes, but I found myself so much more receptive to the feedback of the consultant that expected. A large factor of my acceptance was I felt guided to suggestions—a lot of the “feedback” was questions that allowed me to think about my piece in a new way. For instance, I was working with a consultant on my poem “Love in the Times of War,” which I knew was a bit aimless. The consultant asked me what I wanted to accomplish with this piece, which gave me the space to think about purpose and common themes without the consultant telling me what I should focus on as I revise.

As I went through my sessions, I opened versions of my poems and noted the various comments and things I noticed through the session with Track Changes and comments. Each poem I shared was marked with various colors and many, many comments. This process was a bit hard to swallow—some of what I considered as my best work had moments of uncertainty or awkwardness that I had not noticed beforehand. However, I also noticed moments of precision in other work I was not confident in. As I have begun my personal revision, I have looked at the mass of comments and adjusted as I see fit, often disregarding some of the comments and radically changing other parts we had not even discussed but always keeping the thoughts from my session in mind.

My experience at the Writing Center working on this portfolio was overwhelmingly positive. I have worked as a consultant for a while and have not experienced the Center as a writer as much as I should have. The consultants are kind, thoughtful, and knowledgeable in their comments and interactions, and the dedicated time to work on my writing helped me focus and find the motivation to revise. Most important though was the sense of community these sessions

brought me. I recognize that not everyone is applying to an MFA program or even focusing on writing in their studies; however, there is still value in the support from the Writing Center. I know that I am applying to my schools as an individual and will be accepted/rejected as myself, but working with the consultants made me feel like others will cry with me when I get my results (either in joy or sadness). As an applicant, writer, and person, I am not alone in this experience.

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Information Session: MFA Programs in Creative Writing

Post author By 46797344
Post date April 5, 2024

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NYU's Kristoffer Diaz makes his Broadway debut with 'Hell’s Kitchen'

Playwright and NYU arts professor Kristoffer Diaz remembers the first time he met with Alicia Keys, the multiple Grammy winner and musical powerhouse. It was 2012, and she was talking to playwrights and writers about working on a musical loosely based on her early life in New York City.

Keys and Diaz immediately connected over hip-hop fashion and the music they listened to growing up as city kids. “We shared a lot of cultural references,” he says. “We talked a lot about mid- to late-90s hip-hop music and other music.”

More than a decade later, the musical Hell’s Kitchen received its world premiere at the Public Theater. Before the fall run ended, it was announced that it would move to Broadway. With a creative team that includes director Michael Greif ( Rent , Dear Evan Hansen ), choreographer Camille A. Brown, and music including “Girl on Fire” and “Empire State of Mind,” the show began preview performances at the Shubert Theatre March 28 and officially opens April 20. It marks Diaz’s Broadway debut.

“There’s work to be done, but there’s always work to be done,” Diaz said during an interview in his Gallatin office a few weeks before rehearsals for the Broadway production began. “It’s a rare opportunity to know you’re going to Broadway while the show is still running. That makes it so much easier.”

Raised in Yonkers, Diaz first came to NYU in 1995, to study at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He returned for an MFA in dramatic writing, which he earned from the Tisch School of the Arts in 2002. (He has a second MFA, in arts administration, from Brooklyn College.) He began teaching at NYU in 2015.

Kristoffer Diaz in front of the musical's poster. Photo by Tracey Friedman

These boots are our cultural markers, like Nas and Wu-Tang Clan and all those cultural references. You don’t find a ton of people in theater who speak that language. We connected on that vibe.

The playwright, screenwriter, and educator gained national acclaim in 2010, when his play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was produced in Chicago and New York and then named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. His work has been developed and performed at the Goodman Theatre, Dallas Theater Center, Geffen Playhouse, Second Stage, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and New York Shakespeare Festival’s Delacorte Theater. He adapted Rent for television and wrote for the Netflix series GLOW . His newest play, Reggie Hoops, is about a female executive in the NBA. It will receive its world premiere in August at Profile Theatre in Portland, Oregon.

NYU News sat down with Diaz to talk about Hell’s Kitchen, the significance of Timberland boots, and how he juggles playwriting while teaching the next generation of dramatic artists.

How did you come to join the Hell’s Kitchen creative team?

Alicia had an idea that she wanted to develop, a story that used her music, but it wasn't a biopic kind of musical. She didn't want to do the story of her life. She wanted the story inspired by a particular moment in her life when she was a 17-year-old kid. She was meeting with a few people, and I went and met with her and we hit it off.

I’m wearing the Timberland boots that I bought for opening night [he puts his foot on the desk to show them off]. These are so essential to 1990s hip-hop. Part of how I got the job was that we had those kinds of conversations quickly. The boots are our cultural markers, like Nas and Wu-Tang Clan and all those cultural references. You don’t find a ton of people in theater who speak that language. We connected on that vibe.

So from the beginning, the idea was not to write her life story, but to use her experiences as the foundation for a fictional work?

Yeah, basically she said this is a time period in my life that feels really fertile. She said we don’t have to stick to the facts, it was the emotional part we were after. So, for example, we decided to have our character discover the piano as a teenager, rather than as a young child. We could play with these facts because we were not trying to tell a documentary-style story. Our fictional Ali could learn to play at whatever age worked best for us.

'Hell's Kitchen' opens April 20 at the Shubert Theatre. Photo by Marc J. Franklin.

The score includes some of her biggest hits, as well as new material she created for the production. How did the team work together to decide which songs to use and how to use them?

It was kind of like I was collaborating with a person and also with her catalog, which has some of the greatest songs ever written. You know at some point someone is going to stop what they’re doing and sing “Fallin’,” which is legitimately one of the greatest songs ever written.

In addition to writing your own plays, you’ve worked on adaptations—including a theatrical version of Disney’s "Hercules," and the TV version of "Rent"—and you wrote the Netflix series "GLOW." This project seems like a hybrid of those, a combination of original and adaptation.

When I adapted the Disney film Hercules , it was really clear from Disney's point of view that there was no messing around with the story. So we went moment to moment to moment to moment. You could change things inside, but the story was the story, which is its own freeing kind of thing. The difference with this project was the markers could go anywhere. It’s like you’re doing a puzzle and you look for the borders first, and then fill in. And the collaboration was not just with Alicia but with Michael Greif, the director, and Camille A. Brown, the choreographer, and the cast. We all had a sort of permission to play. I think it ended up being more liberating than limiting.

I have to ask: What was it like collaborating with an artist of this level of renown? She has written so many big hits, has won 16 Grammy Awards, and has been named to every list of cultural giants .

Eighty percent of the time, she’s my buddy, and when we get together, we sit in a room and talk about kids or whatever. And then 20 percent of the time I’m like, "Oh, right, you are the most famous person I know by an order of magnitude that’s not comparable." And the other thing is, she‘s not just famous—she’s a genius. In addition to writing songs, she would come into rehearsal and teach the songs, teach the harmonies there on the spot. She would sit down and write things in front of us, create harmonies. That collaboration was incredible.

"Hell's Kitchen" has been described as a love letter to the city and its creative community. How important is setting the story in the housing complex known for its artists?

Alicia grew up in Manhattan Plaza, and she wanted it to be part of this moment in her life, when she was surrounded by music, by artists. That was central to the idea, that the building and its community were a character. It was foundational to who she became.

Kristoffer Diaz outside the Shubert Theatre, where 'Hell's Kitchen' opens April 20. Photo by Tracey Friedman.

You chose NYU for college, earning your undergraduate degree from Gallatin, where you now teach. What’s that like?

Oh my God, I say "You’re such a Gallatin student" all the time. Because they’re like, "I want to do this, I want to do this, and I also want to do this." They are thinking about so many things. The exciting part is getting a student like that when they’re 18, and then over time they figure out what the connective tissue is. You just have to ask the right questions, and they find their path.

There’s an assumption sometimes at NYU that Gallatin students just can't decide but it's not that. It’s a very driven, very focused, very self interrogating process, which is very similar to the artistic process.

Your joint appointment means you teach at Gallatin and in the Dramatic Writing department at the Tisch School of the Arts, where you earned your MFA. Why is it important to have a professional writing career?

The dramatic writing program is really built around that idea of a working artist. Theater is this three dimensional collaborative art form to begin with, and one of the hardest things to get across to undergraduates especially is the idea that you are not writing the finished product. It's not a novel where you write the thing and then the audience consumes the thing. In theater, you write a thing, and you bring it to interpretive artists who make it into the thing. We can teach some of that in the classroom, but you really learn that by doing it and you learn it by being around people or by sitting and watching other people do it.

Does your writing career benefit at all from your teaching? And if so, how?

I think younger people—college students, even grad students—they're just so different. Technology moves so fast, social awareness moves really fast, and the way that they talk about gender and politics and all those kinds of things—it's good to be around it. That’s a big part of it. There’s also something about how you have to slow down to teach. So many of my processes are automatic in my head, in terms of thinking about why I need to make this change, or would this line work better if I put it two lines earlier? I don't have to ask myself that question if I'm doing it myself, but I have to understand it if I'm going to give that note to a student. As a dramatic writer, you have to interact with your actors and your director, so there are similar things you need to be able to say. If an actor says, ‘I can't get from this moment to this moment.’ How do you go back and break that down? The creative process is all muscle. So the more you're exercising in different ways, the better.

Tisch Acting Professor Miriam Silverman on her Tony Award

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Graduate students in Brown's Literary Arts MFA program may choose to focus in one of three tracks - Fiction, Poetry, or Digital/Cross Disciplinary Writing. The Graduate School has notified candidates regarding admission decisions for Fall 2024 in all three tracks: Cross-Disciplinary, Fiction and Poetry. Tracks. Admission.
Application Requirements
The online MFA application is available from mid-September through 15 December each year. Applications must be finalized and submitted electronically by 11:59 pm EST on the 15 December deadline. ... Applicants who have previously completed all or part of an advanced degree in creative writing at another university should include a separate ...
Literary Arts
The writing sample is the most important part of the application. Dates/Deadlines. Application Deadline ... Three courses in creative writing workshops, four graduate-level electives, and a thesis. ... Literary Arts Program Mailing Address. Brown University Box 1923. [email protected]. 401-863-3260. Visit the Literary Arts Program. Resources ...
Admission
Admission is highly selective, and is based primarily on the quality of the applicant's literary writing. Your writing sample, therefore, is the most important part of your application. In putting your sample together, you should emphasize quality rather than length. Your writing sample should be in a single genre.
MFA Students
Lindsey Pannor. Lindsey Pannor is an artist and poet whose praxis often engages language as material. Current and forthcoming work can be found in bæst: a journal of queer forms & affects, DIAGRAM, FENCE Digital , Tagvverk, 240p by 1080press and elsewhere. They are currently an MFA Candidate in Literary Arts at Brown University.
MFA in Playwriting
MFA in Playwriting. Brown's MFA in Playwriting seeks students who define themselves as writers, and whose writing resists definition—but involves a keen, tireless attention to live performance. The MFA in Playwriting program is a place to study what writing for theater has been, while honing a creative practice that also feeds voraciously on ...
Graduate Program Handbook
MFA Students; Graduate Program Handbook ... As long as you feel your courses will help you in your writing, the department will support your choice. ... For this kind of information, you should consult the guide provided by the Brown University Graduate Student Council, along with web sites found through Brown's A to Z guide. Brown University ...
Literary Arts
Literary Arts. For fifty years, Literary Arts at Brown University has been a creative and intellectual center for a diverse and innovative literary community. Along with a handful of other writing programs nationwide, Brown provides a home for writers who are envisioning new paths in fiction, poetry, digital language arts, and mixed media.
Literary Arts
For over 40 years, Literary Arts at Brown University has been a creative and intellectual center for the U.S. literary avant-garde. Along with a handful of other writing programs nationwide, Brown provides a home for innovative writers of fiction, poetry, electronic writing (hypertext) and mixed media. Established in the mid-1960s by poet ...
Literary Arts < Brown University
Courses. Since 1968, Literary Arts at Brown University has been a creative and intellectual center for the U.S. literary avant-garde. Along with a handful of other writing programs nationwide, Brown provides a home for innovative writers of fiction, poetry, digital language arts and cross-disciplinary. Established in the mid-1960s by poet ...
Financial Information
Please choose the "Request a fee waiver" option as your method of payment when submitting the application. For more information on waivers see Application Fee Waiver on the Graduate School website. Brown University. Providence RI 02912 401-863-1000. Over the last two decades, all incoming MFA students received full funding.
Advice for MFA applicants, from Brown University's Brian Evenson
1. Turn in your very best piece of fiction. This really, really matters to me, more than anything else. If I love a piece of writing, I will fight for it, and am willing to overlook a multitude of ...
Theatre Arts and Performance Studies: Playwriting
The MFA in Playwriting is a three-year funded program. We are looking for students who define themselves as writers, and whose writing resists definition—but involves a keen, tireless attention to live performance. ... This program is a place to study what writing for theater has been, while honing a creative practice that also feeds ...
2023 Creative Writing MFA Applicants Forum
Members. 188. Program:Fiction MFAs 2022. Posted March 17, 2022. For those of us who plan to apply for a Creative Writing MFA in 2022 (start date 2023)! I saw that last year's thread was created around this time, so I thought I would drum one up. opuhala, cherrypi, 1badgloop and 2 others.
PDF MFA PLAYWRITING HANDBOOK 2020
Brown's MFA in playwriting is a three-year program. We are looking for students who define themselves as writers, and whose writing resists definition—but involves a keen, tireless attention to live performance. This program is a place to study what writing for theater has been, while honing a creative practice that also feeds voraciously ...
Graduate
Graduate programs are unique in their equal commitment to creative practice and theory. MFA and PhD students collaborate on performance projects formally and informally throughout their graduate careers, on projects such as Writing is Live.MFA playwrights and directors attend courses on the Brown campus and join in critical theoretical discussions about theatre and performance on a regular basis.
Brown Creative Writing Mfa Application Personal Statement
Kyle G. Dargan is the director of the MFA program in creative writing at AU. and he has read stacks of personal statements over the years. Below. he offers his top four tips for crafting a personal statement that stands out. Advice from Kyle G. Dargan: Tip #1: Tell us what or who you are currently reading or have read in the past.
Application Information & Fees
The Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Programs are not accepting applications for the 2024-2025 academic year. Please check this page for updates. Applications. Application deadline: January 3, 2023 Admission to the M.F.A Program in Acting is based on a private audition and submission of the following materials:
MFA in Acting and Directing
Deadline. The Brown Trinity MFA Programs are not accepting applications for the 2024-25 academic year. Please check back for updates. Contact. For questions about the MFA programs in Acting and Directing, contact the Academic Coordinator, Jill Jann: [email protected]. For questions about the application process (including GRE/TOEFL submission, LORs, and other technical questions), please ...
Fully Funded MFA Programs in Creative Writing
Here is the list of 53 universities that offer fully-funded MFA programs (Master's of Fine Arts) in Creative Writing. University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL): Students admitted to the MFA Program are guaranteed full financial support for up to 4-years. Assistantships include a stipend paid over nine months (currently $14,125), and full payment ...
Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing
Creative Writing Program Details. Our Masters of Creative Writing degree program offers comprehensive online courses in literary arts, encompassing advanced writing studies in various genres such as fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and more. Students benefit from one-on-one mentorship with renowned and published writers in their respective genres ...
Money Shot
Dhari's graduate studies are supported by an Adele Kellenberg Seaver 1949 Fellowship in Creative Writing. Dhari received a BA in Sociology from Columbia University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Playwriting at Brown University. Dhari is adjusting but misses the Harlem noises. www.dharinoel.com
MFA Applications and Writing Sessions Panic
The most helpful part of the session was feeling like I was not alone in the process. I have been daunted by the task at hand—I need to create a portfolio of 10-15 of my best poems—and the prestige and competition that accompanies applying for MFA programs. Knowing that I had someone also looking at my writing and working to improve it was ...
Information Session: MFA Programs in Creative Writing
2024-2025 Dedman College Departmental Merit Scholarship Application. 2024-2025 Dedman College Faculty Recommendation. Welcome. News. ... MFA Programs in Creative Writing. ... ← Hughes Creative Writing Fellows' Craft Conversation ...
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The history of the university is unique: long-time mergers of universities of technological, humanitarian and creative orientation culminated in the creation of Moscow Information Technology University - Moscow Institute of Architecture and Civil Engineering (MITU-MASI). The university has been proudly bearing this name since October 11, 2016.
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NYU's Kristoffer Diaz makes his Broadway debut with 'Hell's Kitchen'
Raised in Yonkers, Diaz first came to NYU in 1995, to study at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He returned for an MFA in dramatic writing, which he earned from the Tisch School of the Arts in 2002. (He has a second MFA, in arts administration, from Brooklyn College.) He began teaching at NYU in 2015.

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NYU's Kristoffer Diaz makes his Broadway debut with 'Hell’s Kitchen'

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