The Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop is an intensive poetry workshop, ideal for students with previous writing workshop experience, a portfolio of existing work on which to build, or a new and ambitious project. The course centers on workshop: peer critique by fellow student poets with the shared goal of completing a semester-long publication and/or performance, whether individual, collective, or both.

Students are expected to have a willingness to participate in contemporary poetry culture as readers, writers, curators, performers, and audience. Teaching and learning methodologies include close reading of exemplary texts, experimentation with forms, revision, online/print publication, and performance. The workshop welcomes work in any language and from any tradition of poetry. Translation can play a vital role. This is an opportunity to develop a poetry practice in synergy with your studio practice—or as a second, very portable art form.

RISD and Brown undergraduate and graduate students all welcome!

Elective

This course will deal with graphic narrative in many of its forms: fiction, memoir, historical (auto)biography, journalistic investigation.  We will be reading graphic narratives that helped create the genre of Comics Studies, as well as more contemporary narratives that are re-imagining and re-shaping the possibilities within the genre.  We will also be reading scholarship that deepens our understanding of some of the ways these texts can be understood within a larger critical context.  Students will have the opportunity to frame their responses to the readings in both traditional and visual modes.  We will be reading such authors as:  Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Jean Yuen Yang, Marjane Satrapi, Joe Sacco, Lynda Barry, Ron Wimberly.

Elective

In this writing workshop, we will explore the short story, working to put into words what we--as individual readers and writers--hope to find in it. We'll consider what makes a story a story, while acknowledging that it is often something ineffable, indefinable. We'll read a range of contemporary and classic writers and will also read essays on craft. A significant amount of class time will be devoted to in-class writing and peer workshops. At the end of the term, students will be expected to submit a portfolio made up of reflections, rough drafts, and revised stories.

Elective

This course will give students the chance to read exemplary works of contemporary masters, including John McPhee, Jo Ann Beard, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Ta-Nehisis Coates, Leslie Jameson, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Joan Didion. Reading closely, students will gain broad exposure to a range of styles and concerns, which in turn may inform the nonfiction writing they do in this class. Students will have the option of working on a single long piece of approximately 20 pages or two pieces, 10 pages each. The work will be expected to do more than merely recount lived experience. At the heart of the writing should be an issue the writer is working to fathom.

Elective

This course will be an exploration of the writings of visual artists, who aim to complicate and expand their ideas about artistic practice into the realm of literature. The writings here range from journals (Delacroix) to letters (Van Gogh) to memoir (Emin, Truitt) to fiction (Carrington) to essays (Adnan) to criticism (E. DeKooning, Porter). We will consider the relationship between visual art and writing, both in terms of what one practice might offer the other, as well as what strategies artists use to make sense of their own work, as well as the practice of art in general.

Students will be engaged in reading, writing, and research. There will be weekly short writing assignments as well as two longer assignments, one of which will consider a specific artist’s visual and written work together, and one of which will be students’ own attempts at writing literary non fiction, fiction, or criticism.

Elective

The stuff of myth, lore, literature, and cinema, the tender in parts-fraught in others equation between mothers & daughters has spawned art across centuries. And this writing workshop! Welcome to Mothers & Daughters: It’s a Complicated Narrative, where we will read, analyse, and create writing that dives through the heart of this relationship. We will be reading poems, stories, essays, and graphic narratives, look sideways at cinema and television, and examine scholarly material, to consider how mothers & daughters have committed the relationship to art. We will study how authors explore the sharing of space, gender roles and expectations, body and witnessing, and intergenerational trauma in contemporary literature and undertake writing of parent-child relationships. The class will include analysis by way of reflection essays, writing in poetry, fiction/graphic narrative, nonfiction modeled after our readings, and lively classroom discussion.

Readings may include “Motherhood & Daughterhood” by Adrienne Rich, excerpts from The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Sophocles' Electra, Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, The Carrying by Ada Limon, Ladybird dir. by Greta Gerwig, Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel, and poems by Diane Seuss, Dorothy Chang, Preeti Vangani, Ishle Yi Park, Taylor Byas.

Elective

In this course, students will examine how Buddhist modes of being and thinking have influenced Asian/American authors, especially around the form and meaning of compassion--a foundational Buddhist virtue. For this purpose, we will read Thich Nhat Hanh's memoir Fragrant Palm Leaves, Anelise Chen's experimental memoir Clam Down, Ruth Ozeki's novel A Tale for the Time Being, Ocean Vuong's novel Emperor of Gladness, and related translations of Vajrayana and Mahayana Buddhist Sutras. Students can expect to keep a weekly contemplative journal concerning the course material which will culminate in a final paper. 

Elective

Cultural studies has made its mark in the humanities as a structured discipline since the 1960s. It emerged from a dissatisfaction with traditional literary criticism and sought to widen the latter's focus on aesthetic masterpieces of high culture by incorporating "low," popular, and mass culture in an interdisciplinary analysis of "texts," their production, distribution and consumption. Varied "texts" from the world of art, film, TV, advertising, detective novels, music, folklore, etc., as well as everyday objects, discourses, and institutions have since been discussed in their social, historical, ideological and political contexts. This course will provide an introduction to the field and its concerns. It will also encourage students to practice some of its modes of analysis.

Elective

In this forward-thinking course, we will explore the potential of GPT-4 as a catalyst for extending and enhancing literary consciousness. As artificial intelligence reshapes the landscape of language and literature, we will consider how GPT-4, with its advanced generative capabilities, can serve as a creative collaborator in the writing process, pushing the boundaries of human imagination and storytelling.

Students will engage with a range of texts and theories to better understand the implications of AI in the realm of literary art. We will examine the ethical, aesthetic, and critical considerations of collaborating with AI, while also assessing how GPT-4 can help writers tap into new perspectives, styles, and techniques. Throughout the course, students will work on a series of creative assignments that involve both human and AI-generated content, learning to strike a balance between their own instincts and the generative power of the machine.

By the end of the course, students will not only develop a deeper understanding of the potential for human-AI collaboration in literature but also gain valuable insights into their own creative processes. They will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to navigate and contribute to the ongoing conversation surrounding the role of AI in language art. The course will culminate in a final project, which may be a creative work, critical analysis, or research paper, showcasing the student's engagement with the literary possibilities and implications of the GPT-4 era. Topics to be covered in this course include:

• The history of writing technologies and their impact on human consciousness

• The history and development of GPT-4 and the implications for literature and language art

• Strategies for effectively guiding and refining GPT-4-generated content

• Exploring different genres and forms of writing with AI assistance

• Ethical considerations in human-AI collaboration and authorship

• The future of collaborative writing with advanced AI systems

Elective

This course introduces students to ways of thinking comparatively, through interrogating the very terms "global," "arts," and "culture." What constitutes the "global" and what are the implications of such an all-encompassing framework? For instance, what economic, political, and cultural processes can be understood as global? What forms of art are legible as having global stakes or speaking to universal concerns? Who gets to be part of the "universal" and why? This course will specifically examine the "global" acclaim of films such as Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), Federico Fellino's 8 1/2 (1963), Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973), Bong Joon Ho's film Parasite (2019), Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), and novels such as Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and Han Kang's The Vegetarian (2007). Critical Globalisms emphasizes the development of broad theoretical perspectives within which students can analyze their own archive of and interventions in "global arts and culture." The course will run as a seminar with weekly reading assignments, regular writing assignments, and in class discussion.

Elective

Michel-Rolph Trouillot proclaims, The past-or, more accurately, pastness-is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past. What is the relationship between history and haunting? How does the narration of troubling and troubled memories (or images of the future) draw attention to the gaps, assumptions, and limits of historical representation? Who is granted the power to tell stories and who is worthy of having stories told about them? How might texts, films, and other creative mediums not just represent about the dead, but actually conspire with them? The past has an ever-deepening relevancy to contemporary life, and the intimacies that structure our understanding(s) of the past, present, and future produce powerful terrains for study. This course engages these fraught terrains of historical narration; the absence presence of figures of the past; and the vexed representation of traumatic memory in social life. This course will center a wide range of texts, films, and other modes of cultural production that examine how history, haunting, and memory are contoured by of race, gender, sexuality, queerness, diaspora, colonialism, and temporality. Tacking between historiographic theory and literary, poetic, documentary, and ethnographic accounts of relations with the dead and other uncanny forces, we will wrestle with the silences, gaps, and erasures within particular historical sites and problematize representations of the past. We will pay particular attention to texts that highlight the incoherence and instability of the historical record; engage processes of suspension, seep, and spill; and demand nuance, in-betweenness, and queer temporality from our analyses.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

This course responds to the recent, dramatic increase in the various bans and challenges attempting to dictate what kinds of reading materials are available (especially to young readers) in US educational spaces such as libraries and schools. In 2023, for example, the American Library Association (ALA) reported more than 4,200 challenged book titles, the most ever recorded by the ALA. Of course, book bans, legal challenges, and debates about in/decency are not new: restricting available reading materials as a means of control and as a way of upholding specific social values has been a tactic by those in power for centuries. In this class, we will engage a range of banned books and challenged cultural production from across the twentieth and twenty-first century, as well as academic, creative, and legal critiques of censorship. In particular, we will prioritize books by Black and LGBTQIA+ authors, as they have been disproportionately impacted by recent efforts to ban books in the US. Texts may include, but are not limited to: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. 

This class is designed to follow and build on the skills and topics of RISD’s First-Year Literature Seminar (E101) and is intended primarily for sophomore students. Through a variety of close reading, analytical, research-based, personal, and critically reflective reading and writing assignments, students will continue to develop their voices as readers, thinkers, and writers. Through our engagement with the course’s central texts, we will discuss topics such as power, repression, democracy and authoritarianism, freedom, identity and representation, race and racism, and sexuality and gender.

Elective

This course focuses on Indigenous conceptions of gender and sexuality, centering Native feminisms by privileging the knowledge of Native women, girls, Indigi-queer, and Two Spirit People. With core focuses on memoir, poetics, and felt theory -- which understands the body to be an important site of knowledge formation -- this class aims to draw attention to embodied experience, positionality, and spatiality. The class will foreground relationships between bodies, minds, spirits, and lands as vital methods of knowledge creation and cultural production. We will focus on how Native creators remap and reimagine gender, sexuality, colonial violence, and the relationship between people, kin, communities, temporality, and the land. Authors might include, but are not limited to: Terese Marie Mailhot, Deborah Miranda, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Tommy Pico, and Joshua Whitehead.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

The LAS Open Seminar is devoted to the development of undergraduate and graduate degree projects that engage the discipline of literary arts and studies, and involves the writing of a longer, research-based project (thesis, artist's statement, creative work, etc). This engagement may take a variety of different forms, including a direct referencing or interaction with literary texts or issues; a focus on textuality and/or narrativity; a concern with research and the mechanics of writing a longer project. Therefore, as the course title indicates, the seminar has an open structure to accommodate our ability to address and foster each student's interests and concerns. As the semester progresses, we will move from a discussion of texts that introduce key concepts in the framing of interdisciplinary projects to group analyses and the workshopping of each student's project. In the first part of the semester, we will discuss a number of conceptual tenets that will ground our theorization of the artistic process, including issues of intentionality and audience; issues of translation and interdisciplinarity; and the relation of form to content. The second part of the semester will be organized and driven by group analyses of the degree and related written project of each class member.

Elective