Welcome to Prose After Cinema!
Course Objective:
This class seeks to uncover new writing techniques that have been made possible by prose’s changing relationship with cinema. Asking what it means to write “cinematic prose,” we will use weekly readings, writing exercises, and film screenings to explore our the ways we use our senses, imaginations, memories and desires to develop own writerly relationship with the “the movies.” By the end of the class you will have developed your own definition of cinematic prose. You will also have discovered a set of techniques derived from your own engagement with cinema. In that sense the class is more of an invention lab than a lecture course. In addition to reading and listening, you will be expected to produce writing and techniques of your own.
Topic I. Traditional Views of Cinema
Week 1. Introduction: What is Cinematic Prose?
T 10/7 Readings
Damon Smith. “What Makes A Novel Cinematic: The Hands of Bresson”
Various Authors, “Blog Excerpts”
Keith Johnstone, excerpt Impro “Originality”
Workshop Guidelines
Week 2. The Continuous Present & The Visual
W 10/8 Film: Thomas Anderson The Master (2012)
T 10/14: Readings
Patricia May, “A Space of Time that is Always Filled with Moving”
William James, excerpt Principles of Psychology
“Travel Writing Tips/Into a Camera”
Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”
Zakes Mda, excerpt The Madonna of Excelsior
David Foster Wallace “Forever Overhead”
Week 3. Basic Editing: Cutting Up Space and Time
W 10/15 Film: Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)
T 10/21 Readings
André Bazin. Cinema 1 “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema”
Michael Weiss, excerpt Shot-By-Shot, establishing shots, long shots, close-ups
Ralph Ellison, excerpt Juneteenth
Tolstoy, excerpt War and Peace
Kurt Vonnegut, excerpt Slaughter-house Five
Tobias Wolfe “Bullet In the Brain”
Topic II. Grammar’s Disciplinary Function
Week 4. The Bureaucrat-Compileur
W 10/22 Film: Francis Ford Coppola Apocalypse Now (1979)
T 10/28 Readings
Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay, excerpt The Emergence of Prose (grammar)
Juliana Spahr, The Transformation
Anthony Burgess, excerpt A Clockwork Orange
Jack Kerouac, excerpt Tristessa
Denis Johnson, excerpt Stars at Noon
David Foster Wallace, “Church Not Made With Hands”
Week 5. Realism, Fantasy, And NeoRealism
W 10/29 Film
Rupert Wyatt Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
T 11/4 Readings
Esma Kartal, “Defining Italian Neorealism”
Pier Pasolini, “The Cinema Of Poetry”
Tao Lin, excerpt Eee Eee
William Gibson, excerpt Spook Country
Topic IV: Determinacy And Indeterminacy:
The Senses, Memory, Imagination, and Desire
Week 6. Floating Signifiers
W 11/5 Film: Tom Stoppard Anna Karenina (2012)
T 11/11 Readings
a.
Sergei Eistenstein, excerpt The Psychology of Composition
Juri Lotman, excerpt The Semiotics of Cinema
Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman excerpt On Poetic Conceptualisms
Assia Djebar, excerpt So Vast the Prison
b.
William Burroughs, excerpt “Cut-ups”
William Burroughs, excerpt Naked Lunch
James Joyce, excerpt Ulysses
Hemingway, A Small, Well-Lighted Place For Books
Week 7. The Narrator and The Trace
W 11/12 Film
Roman Polanski Chinatown (1974)
T 11/18 Readings
Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay, excerpt The Emergence of Prose (the historian)
Nassim Taleb, excerpt The Black Swan
Marcel Proust, excerpt In Search of Lost Time
Marguerite Duras, excerpt Lol V. Stein
Kurt Vonnegut, excerpt Slaughter-house Five
Faulkner, excerpt Absalom, Absalom
Virginia Woolf, excerpt To the Lighthouse
Week 8. Unstable Landscapes
W 11/19 Film: Christopher Nolan Inception (2010)
T 11/25 Readings
Melanie Gillian, Crisis in the Credit System Episode 1
Bertolt Brecht, excerpt Collected Short Stories
Les Plesko, excerpt Slow Lie Detector
William Gibson, excerpt Spook Country
Week 9. Narration and Attention
W 11/26 Film: Christopher Miles The Maids (1975)
T 12/2 Readings
Manuel Puig, excerpt The Kiss of the Spiderwoman
Aimee Bender, excerpt The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Tisa Bryant, excerpt Unexplained Presence
Janice Lee “There is No Redemption: On Writing and Obsession”
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, excerpt Satantango
Week 10. Image and Text: The Projective Imagination
W 12/3 Film: Marguerite Duras Le Camion
T 12/9 Readings
Elaine Scary, excerpt Dreaming by the Book
Marguerite Duras, Interview with Michelle Porte
Comic-Making Worksheet
David Stromberg, excerpt Saddies
“3-D Movies”
Week 11. Rhythms And Patterns
W 12/10 Film: W 12/17 Melanie Gilligan Popular Unrest (2013)
T 12/16 Readings
Gilles Deleuze, excerpt Cinema 2
Helene Cixous and Michelle Foucault, excerpt White Ink
Gertrude Stein, excerpt The Making of the Americans
Ray Carver, “Fat”
Marguerite Duras, excerpt Blue Eyes, Black Hair
Week 12 Review And Class Presentations
T 12/23 Review and class presentations
Prose After Cinema 