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CS92PROD
Writing on and as Performance

THEA 235
Fall 2023
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: ENGL 278, FGSS 235
Course Cluster and Certificates: Queer Studies

This course focuses on developing descriptive critical and creative writing skills in relation to both witnessing and staging live performance. Through close readings of texts by authors including José Esteban Muñoz, Jennifer Doyle, Eileen Myles, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, Lidia Yuknavitch, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Glenn Ligon, Eve Sedgwick, Fred Moten, and Billy Ray Belcourt, this course will challenge students to craft ideas and arguments by enhancing critical and creative writing skills. We will experiment with style and form from academic arguments, to performance lectures, artist interviews, and free-form creative prose essays. Students will complete in-class writing assignments and exercises in response to written, recorded, and live performances by a range of contemporary artists. Students will also be asked to complete hybrid creative writing assignments in response to prompts that imagine writing as always in conversation with performance. More specifically, students will write pieces about embodiment, sound, and the visual. This class is particularly interested in ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are shaped by language, and how language as a performative tool can be a site for "insurrection" (Moten) and "listening in detail" (Vazquez).

This course encourages students to experiment with their writing practices. Over the course of the semester students will be asked to write four separate creative/critical pieces, all of which will be workshopped in the space of the classroom.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA THEA
Course Format: DiscussionGrading Mode: Student Option
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: (ENGL)(ENGL-Creative W)(ENGL-Literature)(THEA)
Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74%

Last Updated on NOV-11-2024
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