Kate Zambreno

This yearlong writing seminar will radically revise tropes of nature writing; i.e., the literature of the solitary white European male enraptured by his landscape, as well what constitutes writing the “outdoors,” “landscape,” and “nature.” As opposed to focusing entirely on the solitary, we will also think through the collective and collaborative, kinships with the nonhuman, the histories and ghosts of place. The first semester, we will be thinking and writing through radical acts of attention, as an ethics of life and art—sitting in a place and listening, including together outside, taking walks, meditating on the rhythms of the seasons, and thinking about fieldwork, history, and research when writing through place (including cities and suburbs). In the fall, we will read together poetic notebooks and collections, crossing genres—Etel Adnan’s Surge, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis, Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses, Lydia Davis’s The Cows, W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. In the spring, we will continue to write through the problem of the person in time and space, reading prose that meditates on the ordinary and the daily, as well as concepts of carework and community—Marlen Haushofer’s speculative novel The Wall, Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue, T. Fleischmann’s Time is a Thing a Body Moves Through, Renee Gladman’s Calamities, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. This course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

As opposed to an emphasis on the big or break-through, why not celebrate the small, the minor, the ordinary? Perhaps in those spaces the radical and poetic can co-exist…prose works that are about attention and care. In this craft class, we will consider smaller forms—the fragment, brief essay, flash, report, note, fait divers, crônicas, journal entry, calamity, feuilleton, short talk, lecture, pillow book, miniature, portrait, the sketch or vignette, the little virtue or labor. Writers that we will read may include Kate Briggs, Lauren Elkin, Mieko Kanai, Fleur Jaeggy, Renee Gladman, Natalia Ginzburg, Lydia Davis, Robert Walser, Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, Sophie Calle, Anne Carson, Amina Cain, Barbara Browning, Sei Shōnagon, Rivka Galchen, Claire-Louise Bennett, Barbara Browning, Etel Adnan, T Fleischmann, and Moyra Davey. Students will read and write small forms weekly.

What is compression? It is both form and technique. To compress is a verb. We will consider stand-alone, smaller forms—the fragment, brief essay, flash, report, note, fait divers, crônicas, journal entry, calamity, feuilleton, short talk, lecture, pillow book, portrait, miniature, novella.—as well as examining the cellular in a larger work—paragraph, sentence, list, or page. We will discuss the movement of compression in writing—as speed, tightening, shortening, lightening, quickening, a way of collapsing time. We will also problematize compression when thinking through the contemporary—the tweet, the post, the lyric vs. the can’t be. Writers and thinkers that we will read will necessarily cross genres and languages; some possibilities include Fleur Jaeggy, Annie Ernaux, Natalie Léger, Bhanu Kapil, Renee Gladman, Lydia Davis, Mary Ruefle, Teju Cole, WG Sebald, Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart, Anne Carson, Brian Evenson, Sei Shōnagon, and Moyra Davey. Students will read and write compressed forms weekly.

What can we think about when thinking about writing real people, whether it's about someone we know or someone from history? It seems like the right moment in the contemporary to think seriously about the ethics and aesthetics of both the autoportrait and the portrait of others, which can range from a consideration of character to that of biography. What if there were other forms of literature that weren’t reduced to nonfiction versus fiction? What if we thought of texts as being friendships, or autopsies, or elegies, or investigations? In this prose craft class, we will read texts (mostly novels and essays) that are often about the self, as well as looking outwards, to a consideration of others. We’ll be thinking through innovative literary works that might include Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Sophie Calle’s Address Book, Anne Carson’s Nox, Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First, César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Édouard Levé’s Suicide, and Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia.

In this workshop, I promise to take seriously your overall project—your obsessions, the marrow of life from which you hope to draw, your values and longings toward literature—and help shape and focus those desires into a concrete text or texts that you will work toward during the semester. Sometimes the overall project is unwieldy, especially drawing from nonfiction. I will try to have you focus on an object, on thinking of writing as revising and revising again and revising some more. We will study texts in a generative way, in workshop and individually in conference, that will hopefully inspire you and give you permission. I will also encourage you to think of writing as thinking and of the role of research in writing nonfiction—even when drawing from memoir—and to come up with your own ludic bibliography. Our approach to nonfiction will be aleatory and experimental, a space of incubation and play. We will think about the cellular beginnings of your works of prose, from title to sentence to paragraph to page. The goal is to write constantly, to read each other’s work constantly, and to generate and finish at least one piece of writing over the course of the semester, beginning with shorter attempts. I will be reading only in conference the writing on which you are working specifically for this class. This course is also open to fiction writers and poets, as long as you wish to engage with the forms and tradition of nonfiction.

“That’s how I see the world now,” Anna Kavan remarked to her publisher, Peter Owen, about her turn to speculative and science fiction as a way to respond to personal and global devastation. In this workshop, we will read and write the poetic and philosophical speculative works of literature in which one enters landscapes of unreality or other realities as a way to write an individual often alienated in society—often rewriting and revising fairytales and myths, dream spheres of the human and the animal. We will think about form, language, mood and atmosphere, and concepts like the uncanny, the unreal, and the defamiliarized space while writing and sharing your own work. While writing, we will be thinking about theories of the speculative, with an adventurous reading list that could encompass stories and novels by Franz Kafka, Antoine Volodine, Leonora Carrington, Sofia Samatar, Carmen Maria Machado, Kanai Mieko, Angela Carter, Clarice Lispector, WG Sebald, Renee Gladman, Cristina Rivera Garza, Anne Carson, and more. We could also look at other art forms to think about the mood and atmospheric feelings of the speculative, everything from the paintings of Paula Rego to the television series BoJack Horseman to the films of Chris Marker.

This yearlong lecture series will be an ecological and historical meditation and interrogation on how we, as humans, have looked at the nonhuman—the animal—and, as we wonder, how the animal has looked back at us. In the fall, we will engage with the site of the zoo historically, including the origins of the medieval Wunderkammer and its evolution into the zoological garden and natural history diorama, and into the contemporary zoo and online animal cam. We will consider these melancholy and ambivalent psychic spaces with complex and violent histories through narratives of captivity and freedom. In dialogue with John Berger’s essay, “Why Look at Animals?”—as well as theories by Donna Haraway, Saidiya Hartman, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and others—we will ask: Why are zoos so sad? Also, when we are there, are the animals watching us in turn? When we are not there to visit them, do the animals actually miss us, as narratives during the pandemic have suggested? Besides readings from philosophy, political theory, affect theory, and cognitive studies, we will discuss literature that stems from the site of the zoo and enclosed space: poems, essays, stories, and novels by David Wojnarowicz, Lydia Davis, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thalia Field, Yoko Tawada, W. G. Sebald, Clarice Lispector, Judith Schalansky, Bhanu Kapil, and Helen Macdonald. We will also be thinking about films and photography that document looking at the animal by Chris Marker, Peter Hujar, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Masahisa Fukase, and others. In the spring, we will intensify our focus on literatures and consciousness of the animal, thinking through the animal as subject, friend, and parable. We will discuss the strangeness of children’s books that are about teaching animals to children, counterpointed by our alienation and longing toward the animals‘ inner lives. We will engage with not only Alice in Wonderland but also Kanai Mieko’s “Rabbits,” Franz Kafka and BoJack Horseman, and the painter Paula Rego’s fairytales that conjure up Disney. We will read the novels Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, and Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin. The entire year will be a bestiary, populated with polar bears, buffalo, crows, panthers, cows, beluga whales, coyotes, cats, dogs, elephants, horses, parrots, rabbits, bees, and large monkeys. By class time each Thursday, students will submit weekly responses to the reading, as well as questions for the weekly one-hour discussion each Friday. The final each semester will be a 12- to 18-page essay.

In 2005, the philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia,” or melancholy and anxiety caused by climate change, a word that’s broken up into three elements: “solas” comes from the English “solace,” which comes from the Latin “solari,” meaning comfort in the face of distress. But the term also references “desolation,” from the Latin solus and desolare, connoting abandonment and loneliness. Then there is “algia,” from the Greek root -algia, meaning suffering or pain. In this yearlong writing seminar and workshop, we will read beautiful and devastating meditations on history and nature in an attempt to write through our melancholy, loneliness, and distress with climate change. These essays about ecology will be, in many ways, elegies to the pastoral and will think through the specificities of landscape, time, and our relationships and kinships with the nonhuman. Students will keep specific notebooks and conduct fieldwork about paying attention to plants, animals, weather, and place, culminating in their own essays, memoirs, and experimental prose pieces. The project is for our reading and writing to somehow counter, but also work through, despair with radical hope and imagination.

At the turn of the century, the philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” to refer to the distress caused by climate change. In this yearlong FYS writing seminar and workshop, we will attempt, in a collective way, to write through our loneliness, anxiety, and melancholy with climate change. Students will submit regular, weekly, notebook-like responses about paying attention to plants, animals, weather, and place, culminating in writing through their encounters with the outside world. These responses will be catalyzed by reading ecological meditations that function, in many ways, as elegies that think through landscape, time, and our kinship with the nonhuman. The project is for our reading and writing to somehow counter, but also work through, despair with radical hope and imagination. The final conference project for each semester will be a finished piece of writing that has been critiqued in several drafts over conference, collaborative small groups, and a full-group workshop over the semester. The class will alternate biweekly individual conferences with biweekly small-group activities, including writing workshops, screenings, and field trips.

There is such an alive quality to reading a writer’s notebook—a laboratory of interrupted and ongoing consciousness, whose very irregularities or imperfections give it a wildness unmatched by more plotted or studied works. In this writing seminar, we will read and think through first-person or documentary texts that take on some quality of the notebook, scrapbook, sketchbook, or diary—these forms enthralled to the fragment, the list, the aphorism, the rhythms of the daily, the problem of the person in time and space, and the process of creation. We will read writers' notebooks and other strange and less easily categorizable forms that borrow from the notebook but exist as essay, novel, meditation, poem, trance journal, or pillow book. The syllabus might include notebooks and other experiments from Sei Shonagon, Anne Carson, Sophie Calle, Susan Sontag, Bhanu Kapil, John Cage, David Wojnarowicz, Sarah Manguso, Renee Gladman, Hervé Guibert, Roland Barthes, Moyra Davey, T. Fleischmann, Franz Kafka, and Derek Jarman. You will be keeping a notebook over the course of the semester, and we will be workshopping after midterm more formalized pieces inspired by and taken from the notebook. Open to anyone willing to read and write wildly and seriously.