Writer as Reader

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s award-winning novel about Nigerian immigrants, is more than a coming-to-America saga. The text reveals deeper social problems in the United States, including racial hierarchies, poverty, and the near-impossibilities of gaining citizenship. This workshop will write to read Adichie’s text through a social science lens, finding examples of W.E.B. Du Bois’ double consciousness and Robin DiAngelo’s theories of White fragility on display. Incorporating socio-political concepts and statistical data, we will explore the ways that Americanah reveals America’s woes.

Texts: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah; excerpts from W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk and Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility will be provided.

“Virtue? A fig! ‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners” (Othello 1.3). Despite its problematic portrayal of a dark-skinned man, Othello is one of Shakespeare’s most commonly taught plays. What draws us to this strange story—its poetry, its hero, its heroine, or the weirdly evil Iago? Many are drawn to the way the play explores the consequences—both physical and psychological—of being perceived as the Other. Surprising revelations result from inviting Shakespeare’s poetry into our bodies. This workshop pairs acting games with writing-to-learn practices, inviting a fully imaginative response to this disconcerting play and its characters.

Texts: William Shakespeare, Othello; selections from critical essays

This workshop will explore the development and the malleability of Shakespeare’s sonnets by putting them in conversation with sonnets by the contemporary poets Bernadette Mayer, Wanda Coleman and Gwendolyn Brooks. We will ask such questions as: What are the key variables of the sonnet form that repeat and change in contemporary incarnations? How do historical moments influence the form? How is our reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets informed by twenty-first-century perspectives? This workshop will focus on promoting student analysis and helping students take on the challenges that will deepen their knowledge of historical and contemporary sonnets.

Texts: William Shakespeare’s Sonnets (any edition); selected poems by Bernadette Mayer, Wanda Coleman, and Gwendolyn Brooks will be provided.

In the short story “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien offers a vision of war constructed around the weight, in pounds and ounces, of the lethal and mundane items carried by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong offers a different vision of the same war, constructed around the weight of memory carried by young Vietnamese American Little Dog’s mother and grandmother. Both texts speak to Vuong’s observation that the past is “…never a fixed and dormant landscape, but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.” Among the themes in this novel is the question of inheritance: What gets carried from one generation to the next? How do the experiences and memories of ancestors and descendants intersect and reshape history in the process? In this workshop, we’ll put these two texts into conversation, using writing-to-read practices and sociological thinking to explore the workings of memory, the revisioning of the past, and the shaping of identity.

Texts: Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried”

This workshop will employ writing and thinking practices to explore the role that secrets and silencing play in defining the “wilderness” of female knowledge in The Scarlet Letter. Incorporating excerpts from feminist texts by such writers as Rebecca Solnit and Roxane Gay, as well as letters from Hawthorne on the subject of that “damned mob of scribbling women,” we will consider Hester Prynne’s choices as a challenge to, and a product of, the patriarchal world of her Puritan village—a model that continues to resonate in American sexual politics. Participants will explore ways to frame critical analyses of this text that contextualize the world in which Hawthorne lived and the one he represents in the novel, while also providing a contemporary access point through which students can consider the legacy of Puritan ideology in contemporary culture.

Texts: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and selected letters; selected essays by Roxanne Gay and Rebecca Solnit

In 2020 the House of Representatives passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which if passed by the Senate will finally make lynching will finally make lynching a federal crime after some 120 years of unsuccessful attempts. The persistent fight for such a law in the United States highlights the continuing resonance and salience of Wells-Barnett’s political thought. Similarly, as Americans tangle with a range of incoherent and shifting ideas about contemporary society—wealth and poverty, the place of immigrants, social justice and activism—the life and work of Jane Addams provides examples both positive and negative for how to analyze and approach these still-burning problems. Sometimes allies, other times adversaries, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Jane Addams spoke, wrote, and acted for transformative societal change during a time when there was little tolerance for women having any public voice. Individually and in tandem, Wells-Barnett and Addams offer models for radical political critique and action. This workshop will use writing-to-learn practices to examine Wells’ and Addams’ ideas through their most widely-read texts, Southern Horrors and Twenty Years at Hull House. We will put them into dialogue with one another in an effort to make sense of them individually and to gain greater understanding of their historical context as well as our own. 
 
Texts: Ida B. Wells-Barnet, Southern Horrors; Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House