A Three-Part Intensive with Alina Stefanescu
You are signing up for a 3-part session with Alina Stefanescu. The cost includes all three sessions. If you miss a session, a replay can be provided. The course link for each of the three sessions will be emailed to you.
October Session: Writing as Thinking
The music that is inside me. / The music that is in silence, in possibility / May it come and amaze me.
— Paul Valery, Notebook VI, 292 (1916) author’s translation
In this 2-hour session, we will explore Kafka’s notebooks, Paul Valery’s notebooks and essays, and excerpts from Norman Manea to reflect on the role of personal writing in creating a relationship with the reader. Subjects will include the shape of sound in sentences, embracing inconclusiveness, and analogies to music and composition as an extended metaphor and bridge between ideas. We will also look at Henri Lefebrve’s The Missing Pieces and the idea of “a history of what is no more and what never was.”
November Session: Sincerity in the Era of Fake News and Deep-Fakes (11/15; 12-2 PM EST)
How do we write sincerely given the challenges posed to “truth” by reproductions? We will look at examples of “real-fakes” in art and literature, complemented by excerpts from William Gass on sincerity and realism and Robert Walser’s “microscripts.” We will consider the adjacent concepts of written text vs. how texts get read and enclosure/disclosure as tools that notate the way the text is played or performed by the reader. This will serve us as we develop our essay subjects and begin to think about the effect of transitions in essays.
The Narrative Self as Beauty in Fragility (12/13; 12-2 PM EST)
This session will focus on the construction of authority in essays, with a focus on humility as an essential part of the text, bridging what we are learning and sharing. We will draw from Paul John Eakin on the conceptual self as the “version of ourselves that we display not only to others, but also to ourselves, whenever we have occasion to reflect on, or otherwise engage in self characterization.” Identity is the part of this conceptual self that involves self-characterization, as when I identify as a writer, a mother, a woman, a dog, owner, etc. We will consider the question of cultural sensitivity and solidarity in writing as well as the idea of cultural construction.