[I wrote this piece to amuse myself during the end-of-semester revision process, during which, as one instructor noted, we spend so much time rewriting the same material that “mild nausea” sets in every time we resume work. The following is probably only funny for MFA students. Still, I wouldn’t rule out future messages from Dr. Zeitgeist.]
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Dr. Wilhelm Zeitgeist, the instructor for this fall’s added nonfiction literature class, The Poesy of Prosody, asked me to pass along the reading list for those of you who’d like to get started over the summer. Dr. Zeitgeist informs me that most of these essays can be found in the anthology, “We Wrote These While You Were Watching TV,” Hall and Oates, eds. (1999), Full Court Press, copies of which are widely available on eBay from the seller “usuryboy” for well under $300 (not including shipping and handling).
Djuna Barnes, “How It feels to be Forcibly Workshopped”
Gretel Ehrlich, “The Solace of Double-Spacing”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Get a Grip, It’s Just an MFA”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Stop Me, I Just Shredded My First Draft”
William Gass, “The Doomed in their Revising”
William James, “The Moral Equivalent of Deadlines”
John McPhee, “Do Not Pass Go. Pay Tuition”
George Orwell, “Flogging a Dead Metaphor”
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Craft… I Put Them Somewhere”
Gertrude Stein, “What are masterpieces and why do we keep rereading them?”
Henry David Thoreau, “Where I Revised, and How I Revised it”
Mark Twain, “Corn Pone Revisions”
E.B. White, “Once More to the Workshop”
Edmund Wilson, “The Old Grey Monitor”
Tom Wolfe, “Putting Teacher On”
Dr. Zeitgeist said to tell you that he will be unavailable for questions until shortly before the fall semester begins, as this summer he will be a guest instructor at the acclaimed Wannsee Workshop, where he will be co-teaching a section of “Novellas, Long Personal Essays, and Epic Poetry: The Tradition of Unpublishable Texts.”
Posted on this day, other years:
MFA Spring 2006: I Fell In to a Burning Ring of Fire…
Thought those of you following this blog might get your own little taste of schadenfreude by considering my student workload this spring, which comes on top of my full-time job where I am manager, supervisor, editor in chief, accountant, trainer,…