Hybrid Forms: Crossing Genres, Mixing Media

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What if a poem is written in prose, if it makes use of collage, or if it is etched into a block of stone? What if a story eschews language in preference to pictures or if it is only a sentence long? What if something appears like writing, but its swoops and loops across the page belong to no language known? How do we make sense of things that resist our attempts at categorization? In this critical-creative course, which blends the scholarly rigor of the seminar and the expressive possibilities of the writing workshop, we will explore diverse modes of literary intermediality and cross-genre hybridization through the complementary practices of theory, textual analysis, and creative experimentation. By reading exemplary works across historical periods and linguistic traditions and then applying what we learn to our own work, we will gain a comparative understanding of a broad range of aesthetic provocations, including prose poetry, flash fiction, comics, lyric essays, somatics, concrete and visual poetry, graphic fiction and wordless stories, asemic and automatic writing, and more. We will study and draw inspiration from the hybrid forms of such luminaries as Sei Shōnagon, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Guillaume Apollinaire, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Joseph Cornell, Truman Capote, Etel Adnan, William S. Burroughs, Joe Brainard, Yoko Ono, N. H. Pritchard, Lydia Davis, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, C. D. Wright, Patti Smith, Wayne Koestenbaum, Don Mee Choi, Claudia Rankine, CAConrad, Maggie Nelson, Terrance Hayes, Monica Ong Reed, and Layli Long Soldier, among others. Assignments will engage students’ analytical and creative talents, as we dwell in the spaces of possibility that exist between and beyond generic boundaries.