Fall 2024 Courses At a Glance
1 – Fieldwork – Alysia Slocum Laferriere, By Appointment
1B – Berlin Fieldwork – Christian Hawkey – By Appointment
2 – The Graphic Novel – Sofi Thanhauser – Mondays 2:00 – 4:50
2B – The Politics and Poetics of Translation – Uljana Wolf – Mondays 3:00 – 5:50
3 – Art of the Novella – Eric Rosenblum – Mondays 2:00 – 4:50
4 – The Undiscovered Country – Hannah Assadi – Wednesday 2:00 – 4:50
5, 23 – Children’s Book Writing – Peter Catalanotto – Mondays 10:00 – 12:50, Mondays 2:00 – 4:50
6 – Writing with Time – Fulla Abdul-Jabbar – Wednesdays, 10:00am-12:50pm
7, 8 – The Unspeakable – David Gordon – Tuesdays 5:00 – 7:50, Wednesdays 5:00 – 7:50
9 – First Books – Anselm Berrigan – Mondays 5:00 – 7:50
10 – Astropoetics and Other Cosmologies – Jasmine Reid – Mondays 5:30-8:20
11 – Storytelling Lab – Ellery Washington – Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50
12, 13 – Journalism – Gabriel Cohen – Tuesdays, 5:00-7:50, Thursdays 5:00 – 7:50
14 – Screenwriting – Don Andreasen – Wednesday, 2:00 – 4:50
15 – Publishing Laboratory: Ubiquitous – Alysia Slocum Laferriere – Ruesdays 5:00 – 7:50
16 – Tricksterdom – Lucas Baisch – Thursdays 11:00 – 1:50
17 – Stand-up Comedy for Writers – Kath Barbadoro – Mondays 5:00 – 7:50
18 – Writing about Friendship – Jackie Ess -Wednesdays 12:00 – 1:50
19 – The Shape of a Story – Jeff Boyd – thursdays 10-1250
20, 21 – Girlhood – Anika Levy – Tuesdays 10:00 – 12:50, Wednesdays 10:00 – 12:50
22 – Autotheory – Hannah Gold – Tuesdays 10:00 – 12:50
24 – Images In Between Images – Silvina Lopez Medin – Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50
25 – Trauma, Play, Experiment – Maria Damon – Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50
WR 325A – Prattler Workshop I – Mondays 9:30 – 12:20 – Eric Rosenblum
WR-493-01, WR-593-01 – Ecopoetics – Thursdays 10:00 – 12:50 – Laura Elrick
320-01
Fieldwork
Alysia Slocum Laferriere
By Appointment
This course is designed for BFA Writing students who choose to pursue an independent fieldwork project that relates to an area of professional or artistic development that they want to gain new skills and experience in. Fieldwork allows the student to design a semester-length project with the supervising instructor in light of the students’ goals, which otherwise aren’t reflected in an existing course or internship. These projects may range from starting a literary journal, publishing project, podcast, video series, event, community arts workshop, collaboration with a local organization, performance production, specific form of professional development through research and mentoring, and many other possibilities. (All students who wish to register for this course must contact the instructor and declare the specific content and scope of their project for approval).
WR-320-1B
Berlin Fieldwork
Christian Hawkey
By Appointment
Berlin Fieldwork invites students to explore their practice and professional goals by pairing them with an outside organization or cultural institution in Berlin. Berlin is a city with numerous reading series, cultural centers, bookstores, magazines, writers, and activist organizations, many of which operate across numerous languages, including English. This is your chance to get hands-on experience in a chosen literary and/or professional field.
WR-320-02
Graphic Novel
Mondays 2:00-4:50
Sofi Thanhauser
Is a picture worth a thousand words? What is the relationship between prose & pictures? In this course, students will read and dissect some of the best graphic novels of our time, from Art Spiegelman’s biography of his holocaust survivor father, Maus, to Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Students may create their own “script” for a graphic novel drawing upon novels, films and personal experience.
WR-320-02B
The Politics and Poetics of Translation
Mondays 3:00 – 5:50
Uljana Wolf
In this seminar we will study translation as a transcultural tool and process in shaping culture and language, as well as an intimate reading and writing practice. We will read seminal essays which influenced translation theories since the 19th century, focussing on discourse around the „foreign“, as well as feminist, postcolonial and cultural translation. Our goal is to develop a language for the politics and ethics of translation as we begin moving between languages, cultures, texts. The practical part will focus on translation between genres and media, as well as poetry, and will explore translation as a transcultural tool for producing radical exchange and new author/subject relations. We’ll read various translations, imitations, and anti-translations, and we’ll try our hand at multiple translation approaches. Our ultimate goal is to examine how translation – the intimate and productively obsessive engagement with another author’s work, language, and culture – can make us more sophisticated artists and more attentive citizens of our language(s). To this effect, our research will include field trips, where we will visit at least one translation event in Berlin. The students’ projects for this class is to produce a translation (traditional or experimental or transmedial) of a small body of work from a foreign-language (desirably a German language) writer.
WR-320-03
The Art Of The Novella
Mondays 2:00 – 4:50
Eric Rosenblum
For many of us, the novella is the perfect length for a work of fiction—longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel. Novellas are short enough to focus on a single dramatic incident, but they’re long enough for an author to develop vivid and lasting characters. In this class, students will examine the history of the novella—beginning with Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—and move on to read more contemporary permutations such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Claire Keegan’s Foster. As students study the elements that give this form its power, they will conceptualize, write, and workshop their own novellas.
WR-320-04
The Undiscovered Country
Wednesdays 2:00-4:50
Hannah Assadi
In this seminar, we will examine texts which chart a territory beyond words: the afterlife. Readings will include fiction and nonfiction featuring representations of heaven and hell, ghosts, angels, demons, djinn, and other visions of the world to come. We will study the way authors ranging from Dante Alighieri to Toni Morrison to John Berger imagine the dead and death, as well as read for reference from religious and spiritual texts. Class participation in the discussion of readings is required. There will also be weekly, creative writing exercises.
WR-320-05, WR-320-24
Children’s Book Writing
320-05 Mondays 10:00 – 12:50
320-24 Mondays 2:00 – 4:50
Peter Catalanotto
This course will focus on writing a timeless story that will appeal to children and resonate with adults. Through exercises, in-class assignments, and the workshop method, students will mine their lives and imaginations for a story that will enchant and empower children; a story that will provoke discussion stemming from the adult and child’s shared experience. Students will discover the importance of brevity, pattern and cadence, and how to create writing that inspires, supports, and enhances imagery. This course will also offer avenues for submitting stories to agents and editors for those interested in publishing.
320-06
Writing with Time
Wednesdays 10:00 – 12:50
Fulla Abdul Jabbar
This course will explore the relationship between writing and time-based media. Focusing particularly on experimental film and video, we will study examples of language that is framed within time and that is animated by bodies, graphics, and space. We will ask questions such as: How much time should we spend with writing? How does the frame of time alter your work? How does writing alter perceptions of time? How can writing reflect time—real time and dream time? In this course, we will develop an understanding of time-based writing and initiate time-based projects of our own. We will look at video art, essay films, documentaries, and performances by Basma Alsharif, Naeem Mohaiemen, Derek Jarman, Kevin B. Lee, Sky Hopinka, Agnes Varda, Marguerite Duras, Harun Farocki, Chris Marker, Andrea Fraiser, Frances Stark, Werner Herzog, Cauleen Smith, Martine Syms, and Robin Deacon.
WR-320-07, WR-320-08 The Unspeakable
WR-320-07 Wednesday 5:00 – 7:50
320-08 Thursday 5:00-7:50
David Gordon
Many people feel the presence of feelings, experiences, truths and intuitions that seem beyond the rational and which we are unable to put our finger on directly. Artists and writers in particular often struggle to find ways to articulate these realms of experience or memory that seem to escape or be excluded from conventional discourse. Perhaps it is an otherworldly experience, or an idea that eludes rational thought, or perhaps it is a secret truth that has been repressed. Perhaps it is too disturbing or taboo to be allowed out into the light. This course will focus on literature and other artworks that attempt to articulate experience beyond the threshold of what can be directly apprehended or recounted: the uncanny, the mysterious, the mystical, the unreal, the irrational, the terrifying and the haunting. We will examine work by Rilke, Stein, Lispector, Sebald, Fitzgerald, Beckett, Breton; texts by Freud, Benjamin, Bataille; films from Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Bunuel; visual art and music. Students will be encouraged to explore and experiment with means and methods of uncovering and expressing their own unspeakable truths.
WR-320-09
First Books
Mondays 5:00 – 7:50
Anselm Berrigan
How do very different bodies of work take shape as a thing we might call “book”? How does any body of work go from states variously and temporarily known as “manuscript” or “thesis” or pile of work become a thing? These are questions that often only have variable, multiple, and idiosyncratic answers. And so in this elective we will read around in a handful of books to check out how certain poets took up and answered, so to speak, these questions. Poets to read will include but not be limited to: John Wieners, Layli Long Soldier, Claire Meuschke, Hoa Nguyen, Simone White, Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, Charles Theonia, Solmaz Sharif, CAConrad and various others.
WR-320-10
Astro Poetics & Other Cosmologies
Mondays 5:30-8:20
Jasmine Reid
Whereas colonial descriptions of who we are wed us to the non-material of capital & national identity, the field of archaeo-astronomy teaches us that all human collectives have, at some point, understood themselves by way of the sky. In this course, we will constellate poetic practice with such indigenous ways of being. In collaboration with Patricio Guzmán’s film Nostalgia for the Light, Raúl Zurita’s “Sky Writing,” & Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s RR Lyrae Sonnets, among others, we will wed the astro to the poetic, following sky lines of inquiry beyond coloniality toward who we are & how we come to be, for now, for the future. To say, what responsibilities & possibilities are mapped onto us by the knowledge that we are made of the same material as stars? What if we understand our heaven to be made thusly, of our efforts & energies, near-everlasting, nearly always there above our ambient knowings, seen above & fleshed in our flesh? Light we cast forward far beyond what we can see, at “the speed / Of belief”–Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars.
320-11
Storytelling Lab
Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50
Ellery Washington
The Storytelling Lab is an interdisciplinary, project-based course in which students engage in “building” the narrative structures within a visual, literary, poetic, design, film, multiple-form or other type of piece. The course combines narrative theory and practice in a studio environment where the emphasis is on the exploratory, pushing beyond the original forms of inquiry in a setting where the development of varied projects can benefit from both individual and collective feedback.
WR-320-12, WR 320-13
Journalism
WR-320-12 Tuesdays 5:00 – 7:50
WR-320-13 Thursdays 5:00 – 7:50
Gabriel Cohen
Do you want your writing to have a positive effect in the world? These days, good journalists are more important than ever: they help defend our democracy, preserve the environment, champion the oppressed, and give readers a deeper understanding of what’s going on in our volatile world. In this course we’ll read powerful examples of journalistic writing, and you’ll get a chance to practice essential skills, including how to come up with interesting topics for articles—we’ll find them in Pratt, our local neighborhoods, and our fascinating city. Students will also learn how to do research, conduct interviews, write lively prose, and make strong arguments. Last but not least, you’ll find out how to pick appropriate venues for your story ideas and how to pitch them to editors. Who knows: you might even get published!
Gabriel Cohen is the author of a literary novel, four crime novels, and a nonfiction book, and was a finalist for an Edgar award. He has written for the New York Times, Poets & Writers, TimeOut New York, Gourmet. com, and many other publications. Now in his 14th year of teaching at Pratt, he has also taught writing at New York University, the Center for Fiction, and Long Island University; worked as a staff writer at the New Haven Advocate weekly newspaper; and was profiled in the New York Times for publishing three different kinds of books in one year.
WR-320-14
Screenwriting
Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50
Don Andreasen
This course will introduce students to the fundamental techniques of screenwriting. We will study formatting, the use of setting, location, narrative structure, conflict, character development and dialogue. In the first half each student will write short scenes in order to explore and develop various aspects of screenwriting. In the second half students choose one scene to develop into a script for a short film approximately 7-15 minutes in length. Throughout the semester, students will read and discuss their work in class as well as view and discuss various films and topics. The class will be divided into 2 groups who submit their work on alternating weeks. Each script is read aloud by fellow classmates who are assigned their characters by the writer of the script. A discussion and critique immediately follows each reading.
WR-320-15
Tuesdays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
Publishing Laboratory: Ubiquitous
Alysia Slocum Laferriere
Publishing Laboratory: Ubiquitous will introduce each student to the creative and editorial process of generating Ubiquitous, a literary and arts magazine with an over 30 year history at Pratt Institute. The literary magazine’s aim is to publish original works from the Pratt Institute community in areas of poetry, prose, visual arts, and design. The course will culminate with one published issue, with each student serving an editorial role.
WR-320-16
Thursdays 11:00 – 1:50 pm
Tricksterdom: Mischief as Literary Practice
Lucas Baisch
From early cultural mythology to contemporary film and television, the “trickster” archetype has surfaced across narrative media welcoming deviance/formal transgression as a plot device, a political reinforcement, a measure of identity, a tool for invention. Launching from Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World, this class will look to a history of literary figures and forms prompted by speed, theft, gluttony, the charismatic, the crossing of the threshold, etc. This course will draw materials from art, theatre, film, literature, and performance studies as an interdisciplinary inquiry into tricksterdom. Beyond a base of indigenous folklore and classic mythology, texts investigated may include writing by Jean Genet, María Irene Fornés, Kathy Acker, Fred Moten, and Italo Calvino amongst others.
320-17
Stand Up Comedy for Writers
Mondays 5:00 – 7:50
Kath Barbadoro
What makes a joke a joke? This class aims to provide a supportive environment to learn and practice the fundamentals of joke writing and comedic storytelling. Through analyzing the work of comedians like Wanda Sykes, Mitch Hedberg and John Mulaney, as well as that of comedians working in New York City today, we’ll learn to identify and use comedic devices like repetition, incongruity, and character-based perspective in our own work. Through structured and unstructured writing and performance exercises, we’ll learn to use the linguistic and performative structures of comedy to help us express our own unique perspectives. In performing our material for each other in class, we’ll get more comfortable speaking in front of others, and the satisfaction of making each other laugh.
WR-320-18
Writing about Friendship
Wednesdays 12:00 – 1:50
Jackie Ess
This course looks at what it might mean to write about friendship. We’ll look at everything from stories about friendship to writing for friends, to dedications and inscriptions, to writing about what friendship is. We’ll look at writing which idealizes friendship, writing which casts it aside, and we’ll look beyond writing: to films and music. Along the way we will generate and share our own writing on this topic, following a writing-in-response model. Some possible readings include Ron Padgett, André Gide, Éric Rohmer, Toni Morrison, Bruce Boone, and Sally Rooney.
320-19
The Shape of a Story
Thursdays 10:00 – 12:50
Jeff Boyd
“I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape …”
– Anne Carson
As writers we tend to use soaring language to describe the work we admire (beautiful sentences, lyrical prose). Whereas discussions of the story itself are often earthbound, banal, and begrudging. Yet a story’s shape can be every bit as elegant and enthralling as the language that conveys it. In this seminar we will read novels and stories with an eye toward elements of structure, action, architecture, suspense, withholding and—believe it or not—plot. The idea, which originally comes from Kurt Vonnegut, is that most stories can be drawn on a graph by following the good and ill fortune of the main character(s) from beginning to end. As a class, we will study the fiction we read by considering our notes and the graphs we create, engaging in deep discussion and analysis through the lens of the work’s shape, leading us to a more nuanced understanding, approach, and appreciation of story structure. There will be writing exercises in support of what we are learning. The hope is that developing a keener eye into the peaks and valleys of published work will help us as writers figure out how to best manipulate our own work into the shape that tells the most impactful story.
WR-320-20
WR-320-21
Writing Girlhood
320-20 Tuesdays 10:00 – 12:50
320-21 Wednesdays 10:00 – 12:50
Anika Levy
“Everyone is female and everyone hates it.” — Andrea Long Chu
Much ink has been spilled about the aestheticization and commercialization of girlhood — grown women adorning themselves in bows and ribbons while preteens beg their parents for Drunk Elephant retinol cream. But what is it about our contemporary condition that’s made girl the permanent prefix for everything? Are women really in retrograde or is the digital age dragging everyone into a state of extended adolescence? This course will examine various strategies for reading and writing both hyper-contemporary and classical conditions of girlhood. Reading materials will include Jean Rhys, Andrea Long Chu, Cookie Mueller, Shelia Heti, and Fleur Jaeggy.
WR-320-22
Autotheory
Tuesdays 10:00 – 12:50
Hannah Gold
This course will survey autotheory, a genre in which first person writing and critical analysis converge and compound. We’ll read foundational and contemporary texts, with potential inclusions from Gloria Anzaldúa, Roland Barthes, Lauren Fournier, Andrea Long Chu, Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson, Paul Preciado, Chris Kraus, and Kate Zambreno. Adjacent genres, including autofiction and essay films will be considered. Students will write their own autotheory exercises, merging personal, conceptual, researched, and analytic writing. These pieces will be workshopped in class, and will culminate in revised final essays.
320-23
Images In Between Images: writing poetry with photos as points of departure, arrival, or orbit.
Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50
Silvina Lopez Medin
This workshop aims to build a shared space for discussing and writing poetry in conversation with photographs. We will consider the space of the page and what effects and affects are set in motion by bringing together image and text. We will look at excerpts from books by authors whose work is connected with photography, like Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Don Mee Choi, Reina María Rodríguez, and Robin Coste Lewis. The students will share their own photos in conjunction with the poems they generate.
WR-320-25
Trauma, Play, Experiment
Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50
Maria Damon
Trauma and play, two important bases for experimentation, share the characteristic of defamiliarizing the ordinary, the habitual, what we thought we knew. And “defamiliarization” is a classic description of how art changes the everyday. In this class we will explore some of the connections between trauma, play, and experimental writing/art practice: we will read some “experimental” writers, we will experiment with language through frequent writing, and we will share/air these fragments, or other bits of your work reflective of this class.
WR-325A
Prattler Workshop I
Mondays 9:30 – 12:20
Eric Rosenblum
This unique journalism workshop gives students the chance to think broadly about the art of newspaper and magazine writing and to develop their own articles for Pratt’s nearly century-old publication, The Prattler. Most classes take the form of editorial meetings in which the group discusses the upcoming Prattler issue and workshops student contributions, often consisting of personal essays, opinion pieces, news stories, and art, music and film criticism. Assigned readings from publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and Vice, as well as visiting journalists, help students to understand the ethics and process of writing for publication.
WR-493-01, WR-593-01
Ecopoetics: Terra Forms
Thursdays 10:00-12:50pm
Laura Elrick
Make a planet habitable. Collaboratively imagine systems and processes of earthly entanglement. Writing with, against, in, and on the field (both literally and figuratively), this course seeks to develop a critical interspecies relational practice in present-day Lenapehoking. Readings from a wide array of “fields” (including but not limited to poetry and poetics, economy, philosophy, critical theory, ecology, history, art writing, ornithology, botany) will buoy in-person site-specific encounters with bacterial processes, rogue plants, migrating birds, urban infrastructures, and social ecologies. In collaboration with these terra/ins we will investigate and develop new artforms of attention, opening our writing to the influence of life-worlds around us, in whose ongoing stories we become conscious participants. Key terms: experimental, process-based, somatic, conceptual.
Practice
2 – The Graphic Novel – Sofi Thanhauser – Mondays 2:00 – 4:50
3 – Art of the Novella – Eric Rosenblum – Mondays 2:00 – 4:50
5, 23 – Children’s Book Writing – Peter Catalanotto – Mondays 10:00 – 12:50, Mondays 2:00 – 4:50
9 – First Books – Anselm Berrigan – Mondays 5:00 – 7:50
11 – Storytelling Lab – Ellery Washington – Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50
12, 13 – Journalism – Gabriel Cohen – Tuesdays, 5:00-7:50, Thursdays 5:00 – 7:50
14 – Screenwriting – Don Andreasen – Wednesday, 2:00 – 4:50
17 – Stand-up Comedy for Writers – Kath Barbadoro – Mondays 5:00 – 7:50
19 – The Shape of a Story – Jeff Boyd – thursdays 10-1250
WR-325A – Prattler Workshop I – Eric Rosenblum – Mondays 9:30 – 12:20
Inquiry
2 – The Graphic Novel – Sofi Thanhauser – Mondays 2:00 – 4:50
2B – The Politics and Poetics of Translation – Uljana Wolf – Mondays 3:00 – 5:50
3 – Art of the Novella – Eric Rosenblum – Mondays 2:00 – 4:50 \\
4 – The Undiscovered Country – Hannah Assadi – Wednesday 2:00 – 4:50
6 – Writing with Time – Fulla Abdul-Jabbar – Wednesdays, 10:00am-12:50pm
7, 8 – The Unspeakable – David Gordon – Tuesdays 5:00 – 7:50, Wednesdays 5:00 – 7:50
9 – First Books – Anselm Berrigan – Mondays 5:00 – 7:50
10 – Astropoetics and Other Cosmologies – Jasmine Reid – Mondays 5:30-8:20
16 – Tricksterdom – Lucas Baisch – Thursdays 11:00 – 1:50
17 – Stand-up Comedy for Writers – Kath Barbadoro – Mondays 5:00 – 7:50
18 – Writing about Friendship – Jackie Ess -Wednesdays 12:00 – 1:50
20, 21 – Girlhood – Anika Levy – Wednesdays 10:00 – 12:50
22 – Autotheory – Hannah Gold – Tuesdays 10:00 – 12:50
24 – Images In Between Images – Silvina Lopez Medin – Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50
25 – Trauma, Play, Experiment – Maria Damon – Wednesdays 2:00 – 4:50
Writing Lives
1 – Fieldwork – Alysia Slocum Laferriere, By Appointment
1B – Berlin Fieldwork – Christian Hawkey – By Appointment
15 – Publishing Laboratory: Ubiquitous – Alysia Slocum Laferriere – Tuesdays 5:00 – 7:50
20 – Literary Criticism and the American Magazine – Anika Levy – Tuesdays 10:00 – 12:50