Fragments and Ephemera: An Experimental Writing Workshop [Durham, NC]
CLASS HAS REACHED CAPACITY. PLEASE EMAIL NIGHTSCHOOLBAR@GMAIL.COM TO BE ADDED TO THE WAITLIST.
**This course is in-person only. There is no virtual component. Participants must be age 21+
Full Tuition: $320 — Scholarship options are available in the drop-down enrollment menu for you to self-select.
Instructor: Andrews | 5 Weeks | Wednesdays | February 21 - March 20 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM ET | IN-PERSON: 719 N. Mangum St., Durham, NC
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.
Sliding Scale: Night School Bar pays instructors and staff a living wage, and your tuition goes toward supporting this practice. Please pick the payment tier that corresponds to your needs, and consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. We will never request or require proof of need, and do not use an income-based sliding scale; we trust you to decide what payment tier is right for you. If you would like additional support deciding or would like to learn more about the practice of using a sliding scale, we recommend this resource from Embracing Equity.
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.
CLASS HAS REACHED CAPACITY. PLEASE EMAIL NIGHTSCHOOLBAR@GMAIL.COM TO BE ADDED TO THE WAITLIST.
**This course is in-person only. There is no virtual component. Participants must be age 21+
Full Tuition: $320 — Scholarship options are available in the drop-down enrollment menu for you to self-select.
Instructor: Andrews | 5 Weeks | Wednesdays | February 21 - March 20 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM ET | IN-PERSON: 719 N. Mangum St., Durham, NC
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.
—
Recordings may be provided upon request for missed classes.
Sliding Scale: Night School Bar pays instructors and staff a living wage, and your tuition goes toward supporting this practice. Please pick the payment tier that corresponds to your needs, and consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. We will never request or require proof of need, and do not use an income-based sliding scale; we trust you to decide what payment tier is right for you. If you would like additional support deciding or would like to learn more about the practice of using a sliding scale, we recommend this resource from Embracing Equity.
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.
CLASS HAS REACHED CAPACITY. PLEASE EMAIL NIGHTSCHOOLBAR@GMAIL.COM TO BE ADDED TO THE WAITLIST.
**This course is in-person only. There is no virtual component. Participants must be age 21+
Full Tuition: $320 — Scholarship options are available in the drop-down enrollment menu for you to self-select.
Instructor: Andrews | 5 Weeks | Wednesdays | February 21 - March 20 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM ET | IN-PERSON: 719 N. Mangum St., Durham, NC
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.
—
Recordings may be provided upon request for missed classes.
Sliding Scale: Night School Bar pays instructors and staff a living wage, and your tuition goes toward supporting this practice. Please pick the payment tier that corresponds to your needs, and consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. We will never request or require proof of need, and do not use an income-based sliding scale; we trust you to decide what payment tier is right for you. If you would like additional support deciding or would like to learn more about the practice of using a sliding scale, we recommend this resource from Embracing Equity.
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.