Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Archival Work
Course Description
Summary
The archive––and using archival materials as the generative basis for creative output––is having a moment. The visionary scholar-writer Saidiya Hartman has popularized once unknown terms like “critical fabulation” and “documentary poetics” through genre bending works like Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and erasure projects like poet Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: an Erasure are transforming leaky government records into poetry. Archival work of this nature provides a good foundation from which to engage one's cultural and ethnic identities, as well as personal, familial, legal, and geographic histories. In this class, we’ll read a wide range of creative nonfiction that involves archival work, and students will undertake their own adventures in the archive to help them generate personal essays, hybrid works, and other forms of creative nonfiction, which they’ll refine in regular workshops. Early in the semester, the class will also visit the archives at The Clark, allowing students to generate new projects in response. Please note: All students may apply for multiple 4000-level Reading and Writing Courses in the same term, but, once accepted, may only enroll in one 4000-level Reading and Writing course per term.Prerequisites
Interested students should submit 2-3 single spaced pages of a relevant nonfiction project via this form, by November 15, 2024. Students will be notified of acceptance into this class by November 19, 2024. Possibilities include work that directly engages archival material, artwork, photographs, sound/music, or another medium.
In addition, interested students should write a minimum 500-word (maximum 1,000 words) response to this prompt, and submit it via this form.
Listen to the artist Sadie Barnette describe her work, My Father’s FBI File (2017):
What strikes you about this project? Consider Barnette's visual approach to working with her father's 500-page FBI file––how she uses color, for example, to interrupt the space of the page. How might your approach to incorporating FBI files differ from Barnette's? What approach would you take to writing a piece of nonfiction that drew from a 500-page FBI file on one of your family members?
Please contact the faculty member : anduplan@bennington.edu
Corequisites
Students are required to attend all Literature Evenings and Poetry at Ź events this term, commonly held at 7pm on most Wednesday evenings.