EIGHT PRISON-BREAKS (BEYOND TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE)

COURSE DESCRIPTION

In this course, we’ll investigate the following topics through a combination of  lectures, handouts, and class discussions, exploring the myriad ways in which you might deploy similar strategies in your own work.

WEEKS 1+ 2
Brevity and Journal
 
We’ll read and discuss flash nonfiction, mini-essays, prose-poems, poeticized journals, and thematized diaries. All these forms are a way to try to embrace the velocity and interconnectedness of contemporary existence without, in any way, sacrificing depth, rigor, complexity, nuance, or sophistication.
 
WEEKS 3, 4 + 5
Collage, Remix, Appropriation
 
We’ll think about how to take fragments/crystallized moments (see above) and build them into an entire book. We’ll also explore how these fragments might be yours, but they might also—when transformed—come from the culture at large.
 
WEEK 6, 7 + 8
Photo, Film, and Collaboration
 
These fractal elements (see above) need not be written. They might be still images or cinematic montages. And they might arise from your collaboration with someone else. The point of the eight gestures adumbrated here is to free yourself up from seeing a book or essay or story or novel as a dutifully linear operation. Maybe it could be a liberatingly open-ended text.

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ABOUT DAVID SHIELDS

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-two books, including Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Black Planet, and Other People: Takes & Mistakes. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

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