OUR WORD works with faculty in the writing department to incorporate cultural topics in the Writing Division curricula. For Fall 2008, OW helped develop the following masterclass:
The New Black Aesthetic
Thomas Sayers Ellis
This master class will explore the aesthetic exchange between the African American literary tradition and the New Black Aesthetic, examining many of the artistic folkways and escape routes established by black writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude and Black Arts Movements, as well as how black writers, artists, musicians and critics have enlisted other "off the books" technical devices to reconstruct, remix and mongrel the idea of genre, liberating black expression from what Audre Lorde referred to as "the master's tools." We will read a novella, a novel, a play and a collection of poetry (flavored with Spoken Word and the first black Noir Graphic Novel), each with its own unique call and response to the many tricks, traps, briar patches and trope-a-dopes within The African-American literary tradition. But our study will not be limited to writing. Contemporary black painters and photographers have extended the practice of "vernacular" into the visual, engaging literary texts to develop (in their work) an identity-repair iconography that allows us to look within the categories of blackness and to consider the similarities and differences between Colored, Negro, African-American and Black. As a result, the false boundaries within black genre are being reinvigorated with a wink and a nod to the past (Invisibility, the Blues, signifying, etc.) as they create new modes of race fearlessness.
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Past courses inspired by Our Word include:
The Inside of the Outsider
Ada Limón
The very decision to become a writer puts us “outside”—the familiar questions of “What are you going to do with that?” and “Who’s really reading that?” are ultimately questions about an inside and outside. The fear is that we’re leaving the mainstream, with its promises of wealth and recognition, for an outside wasteland where no one lives except perhaps us. English Language poetry and prose has a rich tradition of embracing the outside, of letting the foreign or forgotten reinvent it. As early as the French introduction of rhyme following the Norman Invasion and as late as Agha Shahid Ali’s reintroduction of the “real” ghazal, English poetry has been shifting in response to outside influences. The frequent claim of Whitman and Dickinson’s queer parentage of Contemporary American poetry shows just how much we need and value the outside, but also challenges the very notion of an inside.
In this class we will contemplate the multiple ways in which a voice can come from the outside—from outside of the English language, from outside a specific culture, from outside of the writer’s body, from outside of established communities, from outside of poetic convention, from outside of the city, or from outside of nature. Ultimately I hope that this class will blur the barriers between the very notions of inside and outside as places that can be discreetly held separate. Classes will focus on a particular form of “outside” with a focus on close readings of how chosen works function with their “outside voices” and how we might apply these methods to our own work.
We will read and discuss poetry, fiction and nonfiction. There will be writing assignments based on the work we’re discussing.
A preliminary reading list includes: Jimmy Santiago Baca, Agha Shahid Ali, Octavio Paz, Major Jackson, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Lucille Clifton, Jason Schneiderman, Rigoberto Gonzales, Junot Diaz, Muriel Rukeyser, Ishle Yi Park, and Francisco Aragón.
Reading and Writing the Other
Margo Jefferson
We are all marked by ethnicity and race, by class, by religion, gender and sexuality. All must be made vivid and particular on the page. How do we negotiate our own fluctuations, both as writers and readers? How do we resist proscriptions and expectations about identity? What strategies can help us code such complexity into our work? Reading list included: James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Octavio Paz, Ralph Ellison, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, Barry Lopez, Geoff Dyer and Lois Yamamoto.
Memory and Migration
Meena Alexander
Using selections from both prose and poetry, we will think through questions of place, dislocation, language and memory, given a migratory, diasporic existence.
Mongrel Literature
Margo Jefferson
Explore writing that is a crossbreed of styles and strategies, with the intent to merge and shatter boundaries that are cultural, political, psychic and aesthetic.
The Hispanic Essay
Ilian Stavans
A tour through the multifaceted tradition of the Hispanic essay.
Estrangement
Han Ong
Exploring the voice of the “outsider” (a classic literary type), as someone who comes in and makes people see things askew through cultural/social agitation and comment, which ultimately redefines what readers take for granted.
Queer Sensibilities
Hilton Als
Looking at examples of gay twinning (or mirroring) in works by a gay critic, poet and two novelists, trying to uncover how each author’s “I” is disrupted — or reflected — in the relationships conveyed in the writing and the context of “truth.”
The New Black Aesthetic
Thomas Sayers Ellis
This master class will explore the aesthetic exchange between the African American literary tradition and the New Black Aesthetic, examining many of the artistic folkways and escape routes established by black writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude and Black Arts Movements, as well as how black writers, artists, musicians and critics have enlisted other "off the books" technical devices to reconstruct, remix and mongrel the idea of genre, liberating black expression from what Audre Lorde referred to as "the master's tools." We will read a novella, a novel, a play and a collection of poetry (flavored with Spoken Word and the first black Noir Graphic Novel), each with its own unique call and response to the many tricks, traps, briar patches and trope-a-dopes within The African-American literary tradition. But our study will not be limited to writing. Contemporary black painters and photographers have extended the practice of "vernacular" into the visual, engaging literary texts to develop (in their work) an identity-repair iconography that allows us to look within the categories of blackness and to consider the similarities and differences between Colored, Negro, African-American and Black. As a result, the false boundaries within black genre are being reinvigorated with a wink and a nod to the past (Invisibility, the Blues, signifying, etc.) as they create new modes of race fearlessness.
**************************************************************************
Past courses inspired by Our Word include:
The Inside of the Outsider
Ada Limón
The very decision to become a writer puts us “outside”—the familiar questions of “What are you going to do with that?” and “Who’s really reading that?” are ultimately questions about an inside and outside. The fear is that we’re leaving the mainstream, with its promises of wealth and recognition, for an outside wasteland where no one lives except perhaps us. English Language poetry and prose has a rich tradition of embracing the outside, of letting the foreign or forgotten reinvent it. As early as the French introduction of rhyme following the Norman Invasion and as late as Agha Shahid Ali’s reintroduction of the “real” ghazal, English poetry has been shifting in response to outside influences. The frequent claim of Whitman and Dickinson’s queer parentage of Contemporary American poetry shows just how much we need and value the outside, but also challenges the very notion of an inside.
In this class we will contemplate the multiple ways in which a voice can come from the outside—from outside of the English language, from outside a specific culture, from outside of the writer’s body, from outside of established communities, from outside of poetic convention, from outside of the city, or from outside of nature. Ultimately I hope that this class will blur the barriers between the very notions of inside and outside as places that can be discreetly held separate. Classes will focus on a particular form of “outside” with a focus on close readings of how chosen works function with their “outside voices” and how we might apply these methods to our own work.
We will read and discuss poetry, fiction and nonfiction. There will be writing assignments based on the work we’re discussing.
A preliminary reading list includes: Jimmy Santiago Baca, Agha Shahid Ali, Octavio Paz, Major Jackson, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Lucille Clifton, Jason Schneiderman, Rigoberto Gonzales, Junot Diaz, Muriel Rukeyser, Ishle Yi Park, and Francisco Aragón.
Reading and Writing the Other
Margo Jefferson
We are all marked by ethnicity and race, by class, by religion, gender and sexuality. All must be made vivid and particular on the page. How do we negotiate our own fluctuations, both as writers and readers? How do we resist proscriptions and expectations about identity? What strategies can help us code such complexity into our work? Reading list included: James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Octavio Paz, Ralph Ellison, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, Barry Lopez, Geoff Dyer and Lois Yamamoto.
Memory and Migration
Meena Alexander
Using selections from both prose and poetry, we will think through questions of place, dislocation, language and memory, given a migratory, diasporic existence.
Mongrel Literature
Margo Jefferson
Explore writing that is a crossbreed of styles and strategies, with the intent to merge and shatter boundaries that are cultural, political, psychic and aesthetic.
The Hispanic Essay
Ilian Stavans
A tour through the multifaceted tradition of the Hispanic essay.
Estrangement
Han Ong
Exploring the voice of the “outsider” (a classic literary type), as someone who comes in and makes people see things askew through cultural/social agitation and comment, which ultimately redefines what readers take for granted.
Queer Sensibilities
Hilton Als
Looking at examples of gay twinning (or mirroring) in works by a gay critic, poet and two novelists, trying to uncover how each author’s “I” is disrupted — or reflected — in the relationships conveyed in the writing and the context of “truth.”
