Greetings!

Hello, and welcome to the Spring 2012 blog for Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction. This semester, the course is focused on collage, appropriation, cut-ups, mashups, and remixes.  The collage impulse has taken many forms across the spectrum of artistic practice over the past century, from the pre-World War I "paintings" of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and the Surrealist games of André Breton to the photography of Cindy Sherman, the music of John Cage and the Beatles, and the remixes and mashups of DJ Spooky and DJ Food, among many others. During this same period, writers from John Dos Passos to William S. Burroughs to Gretchen Henderson have been employing a variety of collage techniques in fictions, ranging from cut-ups of published texts to juxtapositions of writing and images. In its time, the Internet has contributed significantly to this impulse through its innovation of hyperlinks and applications such as YouTube, Photoshop, iMovie, and Facebook. Despite its most common attributions to the periods of Modernism and Postmodernism, however, we might think of collage (specifically in terms of the creative combination of symbolic text and image) as having a much longer history, dating back to some of the earliest narratives we know, including cave painting, Egyptian murals, and Mesoamerican codexes. At the very least, as artists considering the form of our own contemporary collage works, we should include these ancient narratives as part of our formal and stylistic considerations.

The first readings on our list are two essays by Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" and "From Work to Text." Looking forward to your comments on these and our subsequent works!