PROCESS WRITING & WRITING PROCESS

The act of writing is often mythologized, romanticized, or dismissed as peripheral to the text itself.  This course will address the process as a primary lens for looking at art, focusing on literature that explicitly investigates the experience of its creation.  Readings will include writings by visual artists who produce documents of performances, surrealists who use “automatic” methods to reveal the unconscious, poets who seek to capture states of enlightenment or intoxication, and novelists who employ extreme conditions to achieve unexpected results.  For the class, students will experiment with their environment, lifestyle, and methods to increase their awareness of how everything they do can affect what appears on the page.