Critic as Writer

3 units

This course's premise is that critical writing--about fiction, poetry, visual art, and culture generally--is a genre capable of as full a range of expression as any, as potentially artful as any; that at its best, criticism is art. The course will be part survey, part workshop. The workshop aspect will entail writing two different works within the genre, chosen from among the various types of critical writing we survey. For the survey aspect, we'll read book reviews to manifestos to book-length poetic-critical hybrids. The goal is not really compare-and-contrasting but rather considering each form within its rhetorical context and seeing what we can learn. We might look at how a single writer handles various subjects, and at how various writers handle a single subject. Writers we have read in past years, and are likely to read this semester, include Susan Howe, James Baldwin, Dave Hickey, Anne Carson, William Carlos Williams, Carl Phillips, Susan Sontag, James Wood, Maggie Nelson, Oscar Wilde, Maureen N. McLane, and Renee Gladman. We will definitely read Roland Barthes. This course counts toward the Creative Writing Concentration.