Fragments and Ephemera: An Experimental Writing Workshop [Online]
Full Tuition: $320 — Scholarship options are available in the drop-down enrollment menu for you to self-select.
***NOTE NEW DAYS & TIME***
Instructor: Andrews | 5 Weeks | Sundays | February 18 - March 17 | 7:00 - 9:00 PM ET | ONLINE
Fragmentary and ephemeral name the conditions of everyday life in the modern world. Our objects are built for obsolescence; our attention partial and distracted at best. Even printed paper—once the hallmark of ephemera (plane tickets, movie stubs, coat-check tickets)—gives way to the never-ending scroll of digital pages and social media feeds. But these aren’t just technological anxieties, they are also deeply inflected by our cultural ideas about race, class, and gender, and they aren’t new!
It’s a truism today that postmodernity brought about the fracturing of identity and the rise of planned obsolescence as central features of our material world and psychological life. But an interest in the fragmentary and ephemeral has a long history. There are perhaps no fragments more famous than Sappho’s Archaic Greek poetry. At the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois theorized fractured identity through his concept of “double consciousness.” And only a few decades later, modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf imagined the lost objects of past ages while creating literary styles that perform the fragmentation of thought. The last 20 years have seen a surge in writing on loss and longing in short, fragmentary form, like the numbered propositions of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Kate Zambreno’s “drifts,” or Claudia Rankine’s paratactical image-essays.
In this course, we’ll spend three weeks reading theories and works that engage the ephemeral and fragmentary in both content and form and responding to related writing prompts. We’ll also do our own writing inspired by these texts, and spend the last two weeks workshopping them. Works will include a range of theory, fiction, poetry, and essays by authors such as: Heraclitus, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Anne Boyer, and Ocean Vuong.
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Recordings may be provided upon request for missed classes.
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Scholarships: We are currently able to offer three full scholarships per class. Our full scholarship tier is a nonrefundable offering, limited to one per student per month. Because our scholarship funding is limited, selecting multiple full scholarships in a single month will result in disenrollment from all classes. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out please email us directly, and we will add you to a waitlist and notify you if additional scholarships become available. Please see our FAQ for more information, including installment plans and refund policy.
Asynchronous Auditing: Classes are discussion-based and designed to be taken synchronously. However, we do offer an asynchronous audit option for most online classes if you need to follow along at your own pace. You must choose the audit option to receive all course recordings; please do not register using a scholarship if you do not plan to attend the majority of class sessions as you will not receive the recording materials to follow along. We do not automatically offer scholarships for auditors, but if you need one, you may request one by filling out this form.