Scott Saul
This small seminar teaches writing of prose nonfiction as an art.
Students learn to write about many different types of art and culture, from TV to music and other forms of performance, while also developing their own voices and sensibility. Students end the course with a working knowledge of how to write reviews, profiles, and autobiographically-shaded essays that engage with a cultural figure, flashpoint, workplace, or landscape.
Our semester is guided by a few basic questions: What can we demand from culture? What does it mean to love or hate a song, fashion style, TV show, actor, director, performer, artist, athlete, celebrity? How are we changed by our encounters with specific works of art, specific people, specific places? And how do our arguments about a particular work of art, particular artist, particular place, or particular cultural phenomenon connect to broader dreams about politics, freedom, community, and our sense of the possible?
Two special features of the course bear specific mention. First, we are guided by the understanding that the art of writing is, in large part, the art of re-writing. Students are expected to engage in substantial revision, with both first and revised versions submitted in end-of- term portfolios.
Second, there is a digital publication attached to this course: “The Annex.” Everyone in the class should consider contributing at least one of their pieces to The Annex (though students are free to publish pieces elsewhere too, of course—on the Medium platform all rights are retained by the author). It’s anticipated that, before publication on The Annex, each piece undergoes a process of editing and revision.