Fragments and Ephemera: Writing Workshop [6-weeks, $200 Suggested]
Instructor: Andrews | Tuesdays November 9-December 14 | 6:30-8:30 PM ET
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. Our lives feel fragmented, and as we age, we worry that we ourselves are becoming obsolete. The very ideas of the ephemeral and fragmentary suggest a longing for permanence and wholeness, a desire to return to a past or create a future that can remain solid and real in the world.
But cultural anxieties about fragmentation and obsolescence are also deeply inflected by our ideas about race and gender, from the association of non-white people with “primitivism” to the assumed partial reality of the female hysteric. At the same time, for marginalized folks the ephemeral and fragmentary have also served as conditions for life and survival, like coded love notes or forged freedom papers, as well as for knowledge, as in the split subject of DuBoisian “double consciousness” or the unconscious revelations of dreams.
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. A millennium later in 1813, the editor of The Edinburgh Review noted that Romantic society had a “taste” for the fragment. In the early 20th century, modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf imagined the lost objects of the past ages while creating literary styles that perform the fragmentation of thought. And, indeed, 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 four weeks reading theories and works that engage the ephemeral and fragmentary in both content and form. 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: Sappho, Heraclitus, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Anne Boyer, and Ocean Vuong.
We depend on a mix of direct student donations and supplemental donations to make all classes pay-what-you-can. Please pick the pricing tier that corresponds with your needs and that you are able to pay now. If you would like to pay in installments, make your first payment now and make a note on your check-out form. If you would like to donate more later in the term, you can always come back and use the “Make a One Time Donation” button! To use a full scholarship, just pick the $3 tier to cover site/processor fees.
If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, we will work with you to reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After classes begin, we are only able to make partial refunds and adjustments.