COURSE INFORMATION:

Students enroll in the following two courses:

ENGL 339: The Travel Memoir - Writing In and Of Place (3 cr.) - There is perhaps no more exciting, baffling, apprehensive and ultimately regarding educational experience than travel, and there is no better way to understand that experience than to write about it. This creative nonfiction workshop will seek through writing about our travel experiences in Italy - good and bad, wise and foolish, enlightening and murky - to come to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a human being far from home. Students will keep journals of their travels, and write two full-length essays as well as short exercises for class; books we'll read include Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe by Bill Bryson, A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle, and Best American Travel Essays 2009. For Creative Writing Concentrators, this course will be counted as the advanced 300-level creative writing elective; for English majors, this course can be counted as a 300-level elective credit; and for non-English majors, we recommend that you speak to your academic advisor regarding how this course will be counted.

ENGL 375: Futurism - Technologically-Advanced Dangerous Poetry for Young People (3 cr.) - "The Future Starts Slow" is not just a title of an awesome song by The Kills, it is also the guiding principle of this course which starts at the turn of the 20th Century in Italy and still influences us at the turn of the 21st Century in America. F.T. Marinetti proclaims in The Manifesto of Futurism (1909) that poetry should be concerned with, among many things, "sing[ing] the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness," "the beauty of speed," and that "except in struggle, there is no more beauty." Two World Wars, a series of iPhones, and a century later, there are no Futurists in sight! But poetry's hard to kill, and many contemporary poets work within and without Futurism in innovative and entertaining ways. We'll look at a smattering of poets over the last two centuries, and might even play a little with cyberpunks in Japan and Afrofuturists in America. For Creative Writing Concentrators, this course will be counted as the advanced 300-level creative writing elective; for English majors, this course can be counted as a 300-level elective credit; for non-English majors, we recommend that you speak to your academic advisor regarding how this course will be counted.


PROGRAM INFORMATION:

The artistic ties the city of Charleston has with the town of Spoleto are of inestimable value, and the purpose of this program is to bring students to our sister city to write and study literature, and to meet with artists and writers living there, so that they may be inspired to continue their education with an even greater sense of the importance of art and of writing. Students and faculty will be staying at a villa compound just outside Spoleto, where we will share meals, hold readings, and spend quiet time writing and reading. One special group dinner each week will feature intensive and lively discussions of the craft of writing. In addition, we will be going on one three-day excursion to Florence, where students will take guided tours of such important artistic and historical sites such as the Uffizi Gallery, the Duomo, and the Galleria dell’Academmia; one evening will be spend in salon with an area painter, writer, and historian.


PROGRAM DIRECTORS:

Mr. Bret Lott
Department of English
lottb@cofc.edu
843-953-5664

Mr. Lott is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at the College of Charleston. The author of fourteen books, including two New York Times bestsellers, Lott’s work has been translated into six languages. He has traveled extensively, having lived in Ireland, Israel (where he served as Fulbright Senior American Scholar and Writer-in-Residence at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv), and France, where he taught creative writing at CofC’s Annot Campus. Since 2010 he has been director of the Spoleto Summer Study Abroad program.

Mr. Gary Jackson
Department of English
jacksonga1@cofc.edu
843-953-5650

Mr. Jackson is the author of the poetry collection Missing You, Metropolis, which received the 2009 Cabe Canem Poetry Prize. He was features on 2013's "New American Poets" by the Poetry Society of America, and his poems have appeared in Callaloo, Tin House, 32 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. He's also published in Shattered: The Asian-American Comics Anthology, and is the recipient of both a Cave Canem and Bread Loaf Fellowship.