Professor: Brian Trapp

4.00 credits

CRN 16103: Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:50pm @ PET 107

In this seminar/creative nonfiction workshop, you’ll (1) explore how creative nonfiction authors write the body in contemporary literature and (2) write and workshop your own embodied creative nonfiction. You’ll explore how embodiment intersects with identity in its many forms: race, ability, gender, and sexuality. You’ll investigate what it means to live in a body and how writers represent the body’s pleasures, pains, absurdities, and contradictions. We’ll read critical theory, contemporary creative nonfiction, and hybrid works about diverse forms of embodiment by exciting authors such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jess Row, Roxane Gay, Kiese Laymon, Jia Tolentino, Maggie Nelson, Hannah Gadsby, Eva Kittay, Jillian Weise, and Claudia Rankine. In the second half of the class, you workshop your own creative nonfiction essays that explore your personal embodied identity. The workshop component challenges you to create a constructive creative community, as you hone your critical skills to help make you and your classmates’ work more artful and profound. This class will give you a new perspective on what it means to live with a vulnerable human body.