Welcome to ENGL 297, Creative Documentary

Jack Christian & Luke Bloomfield

Wed. 4:40-7:10, Rm.101 Bartlett Hall

Spring 2009

Email: Jack (wchristi@english.umass.edu)

Luke (lbloomfi@english.umass.edu)

ENGL 297 - CREATIVE DOCUMENTARY:

To Render the World in Writing

OVERVIEW

James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) opened a whole, huge space for considering and pursuing documentary writing that owes more to what we will term the documentary impulse than it does to the genre of the documentary. Whereas the genre of documentary has grown in the last 60 years or so out of newspaper, magazine, radio, and tv journalism, the documentary impulse seems present in a huge array of literary and other art that is not bound, as journalism is, to the supposedly objective representation of the “facts.” In some ways, the documentary impulse may be considered a method for documenting the huge array of experiences that are, for various reasons, problematic to journalism, and to journalism’s conception of a knowable, objective reality.

That Agee – a journalist – grappled with these ideas is clear from the first pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and for this reason his and Walker Evans’ text seems a valuable foundation for our consideration of What May Be Documented and how Art and Artistic structures become necessary – (and may be the only/best means) for this sort of documentation. Our goals then, in this class, circumvent attempts to define what it and is not documentary art. Instead, we will look at a variety of texts for what they may teach us about representing oftentimes hidden phenomena in the world around us.

UNDERPINNINGS

*Over the course of the semester, we will seek to find and to cross-over the limits of the loose term “documentary writing,” both in terms of style and subject-matter.

*Our texts will include poetry, video, and photography alongside more traditional journalistic texts.

*We will ask how alternate modes of reporting might proceed, and how that reporting might be expressed in written form.

*We will construct and deconstruct the documentary subject, hoping to find new territory

for the documentary project.

*We will pay special attention to the role of the imagination in this sort of work, especially insofar as Wallace Stevens and others have contended the “imagination is the only clue to reality.”

ASSIGNMENTS

Each week students will be responsible for completing a variety of tasks:

1) An assigned piece of documentary writing (or, photography, video, etc.) Collaboration is encouraged, as is the production of hybrid texts.

2) Reading and briefly responding to the primary and secondary texts for the course

(responses to reading will be used to make class discussion better. Responses will be posted to the 297Project blog, described below)

3) Posting a new documentary text to the 297Project blog and explaining in a few sentences what/why you chose your particular text

*Note about writing assignments: It’s our hope that as the semester progresses, students will, individually or in groups, select an on-going topic / subject matter to consider and focus on as the semester progresses.

BLOG

We have created a Web-Log for this class for all of us to share:

297project.blogspot.com login: 297project@gmail.com pass: documentary

To begin with, you will post reading responses there as well as links to other documentary texts. You will also publish final versions of your own documentary writing there: The class is broken into four units, and each student will post at least one piece of writing (or other creation) per unit – 4 units, 4 blog posts, (at least.)

This is Your blog. We have some ideas of how to use it – but what else can we do with it?

CLASS OBLIGATIONS

Your attendance and the completion of all writing and reading and assignments is expected.

Missing more than 2 classes (this includes arriving late and leaving early) will put you in jeopardy of not passing the class. The same is true for failure to complete writing and reading assignments.

If you know you will be missing class, or encounter other difficulty, it’s always a good idea to talk with one of us, in advance if possible. We want to be flexile in meeting your needs and are likely to be open to creative options for completing course work.

*Our work this semester will be on display at the Annual Celebration of Writing, to be held May 13. You are all invited and encouraged to attend.

REQUIRED TEXTS

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – James Agee

God of Small Things ­– Arundhati Roy

One Big Self – C.D. Wright

Here, Bullet ­– Brian Turner

Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Dave Eggers

Empire of Signs – Roland Barthes