4 Sessions: Sundays, April 7, 14, 21, 28
4:00-5:00pm ET
Garth Greenwell

This seminar is taught by Garth Greenwell, the award-winning author of What Belongs to You, Cleanness, and the forthcoming Small Rain. Called "a stylist's stylist" by The New Yorker and "the finest writer of sex currently at work ... certainly the most exhilarating" by the Times Literary Supplement, he is currently a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU.

After the carefully controlled, intimate perfection of Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin undertook his most ambitious and perhaps greatest novel, Another Country (1962). A portrait of a group of bohemian friends, a profound exploration of race and sexuality, a brutal indictment of American reality and a pained, not-quite-despairful prayer to American hope, Baldwin’s third novel is one of the great achievements of mid-century American fiction. In this seminar, we’ll read the book as writers, considering Baldwin’s stylistic achievements and his very brilliant sex writing (more than in almost any other book I know, sex in Another Country is a tool for grappling with historical and political questions), but also the book’s dramatic (even theatrical) structure, its use of POV, its organization of time. Above all, I want to think about ambition: what it means for a mature but still young writer to set himself an impossible task, sacrificing perfection to urgency. Classes will be recorded, and a video will be sent to you if you are unable to attend a session.

Note: I will plan to offer about 45 minutes’ worth of comments each session, and then open the class to questions and comments from you. While the class is scheduled to end at 5pm ET, I will plan to stay until 5:30pm if we need more time for conversation.

Workshop Highlights:

Students will…

• consider questions of craft and style in one of the great novels in US literature

• gain familiarity with techniques of close reading, including analysis of style, crucial to any writer's education

• learn about Baldwin's career at its crucial midpoint, and consider the value of ambition, scope, and urgency weighed against ideals of aesthetic "perfection"

Reading Schedule:

It will be helpful if you can acquire the current Vintage edition, so that we all have the same page numbers.

4/7: Book 1, Chapter 1 (to p. 88)

4/14: Book 1, Chapters 2 and 3 (to p. 179)

4/21: Book 2, Chapters 1 – 3 (to p. 315)

4/28: Book 2, Chapter 4, Book 3 (to end)

All full scholarships have been claimed.