WE WILL READ MANY GREAT WORKS OF LITERARY ART THAT PRETEND TO BE DIARIES OR JOURNALS. WE’LL DISCUSS THESE WORKS. AT THE END OF THE QUARTER, WE’LL DISCUSS YOUR OWN ATTEMPTS AT THE FORM.

Not a great person’s diaries, and not a writer’s casual diaries.

Beginning of writing was a kind of listing, bills, manuals, instruction manuals, accounts.

Heraclitus, Fragments; Epictetus, Discourses; Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.

Very close to the beginning of writing.

Contemporary social media: Compression, concision, velocity of contemporary.

Diaries are a way to go back in time, future to new writing.

Elif Batuman: I prefer my writer-friends’ emails to the books they write.

Walter Benjamin: All great works of literature invent a genre or dissolve one.

Coetzee: A great writer alters the face of an art form to say what only he/she could say.

Naipaul: If you want to write seriously, you have to be willing to break the forms.

Kafka:A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea within us.

Samuel Johnson a book can either allow readers to escape existence or teach them how to endure existence.

These books do the latter: solve the problem of being alive.

Wallace: literature builds a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness. These books foreground that very question. They are about nothing else.

Pretends to be unfinished, improvisational/Artifice is hidden/postmodern with a human face/Meta/so meta it pretends to be real SIMON GRAY, THE SMOKING DIARIES

The real story. RICHARD BURTON, DIARIES; ALEXSANDER WAT, MY CENTURY

Nietzsche: I want to say in 10 sentences what others say in a whole book, what others don’t say in a whole book. The aphorists:  PASCAL, PENSÉES, MONTAIGNE, ESSAIS; ROCHEFOUCAULD, MAXIMS; EMERSON, ESSAYS; NIETZSCHE, ECCE HOMO; PESSOA, THE BOOK OF DISQUIET; JAMES RICHARDSON, VECTORS; DONALD PATTERSON, BEST THOUGHT, WORST THOUGHT; SARAH MANGUSO, ONGOINGNESS, THE GUARDIANS, 300 ARGUMENTS

Crisis/crux/cataclysm. Sallie Tisdale: What are you afraid of writing about? That’s your real subject. ALPHONSE DAUDET, IN THE LAND OF PAIN; FITZGERALD, THE CRACK-UP; CLAUDIA RANKINE, CITIZEN

Eliot/These fragments I have shored against  my ruins. Emerson/the way to write is to throw your body at the target when all your arrows are spent. MAYA GONZALEZ/TAO LIN, SELECTED TWEETS; MARGO JEFFERSON, NEGROLAND

Motifs/leitmotifs/braids/tracks/fictional/hybrid/nonfictional/boundary-jumping JEAN TOOMER, CANE; AMY FUSSELMAN, THE PHARMACIST’S MATE

Process/experiment/adventure ANNE CARSON, JUST FOR THE THRILL; JOE WENDEROTH, LETTERS TO WENDY’S; MELANIE THERNSTROM, THE DEAD GIRL; JEAN STAFFORD, A MOTHER IN HISTORY

Workbook CHEEVER, JOURNALS

Juxtapositional art/notational art/neural/pseudo-disjointed art/gaps/shooting the gaps MAGGIE NELSON, BLUETS

Reading and writing CYRIL CONNOLLY, THE UNQUIET GRAVE; VONNEGUT, FIRST CHAPTER OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE; DAVID MARKSON, THIS IS NOT A NOVEL, READER’S BLOCK, VANISHING POINT, THE LAST NOVEL; JULIAN BARNES, FLAUBERT’S PARROT; ROLAND BARTHES, S/Z

Undergirding trope HILTON ALS, WHITE GIRLS

Rotates out toward a larger metaphor BARRY HANNAH, BOOMERANG; HEIDI JULAVITS, THE FOLDED CLOCK

Parts/whole WENDY WALTERS, MULTIPLY/DIVIDE

Ship hoves into view (omfg) ANNIE ERNAUX, THINGS SEEN

Retrospective redefinition MARY GAITSKILL, LOST CAT

 

Required Texts:

SARAH MANGUSO, ONGOINGNESS

ALPHONSE DAUDET, IN THE LAND OF PAIN

MAYA GONZALEZ/TAO LIN, SELECTED TWEETS

AMY FUSSELMAN, THE PHARMACIST’S MATE/8

JOE WENDEROTH, LETTERS TO WENDY’S

MAGGIE NELSON, BLUETS 

CYRIL CONNOLLY, THE UNQUIET GRAVE

DAVID MARKSON, THIS IS NOT A NOVEL 

HEIDI JULAVITS, THE FOLDED CLOCK

WENDY WALTERS, MULTIPLY/DIVIDE

ANNIE ERNAUX, THINGS SEEN