School of Arts and Humanities
P.O. Box 830688
Jonsson Center 3.1
Richardson, TX 75083-0688
UTD is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action University
[Last updated: January 12, 2004]
Creativity:
Writing & Translation
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University
of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities P.O. Box 830688 Jonsson Center 3.1 Richardson, TX 75083-0688 UTD is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action University [Last updated: January 12, 2004] |
The School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas offers both PhD and Master of Arts degrees with emphasis in creative writing and translation. Students, after consultation with the faculty, may choose to write creative theses and dissertations. The decision not to offer a DA or MFA is conscientious: The School of Arts and Humanities is dedicated to interdisciplinary studies. Students are encouraged to cross standard academic boundaries and explore the humanities from literary, historical, philosophical and dramatic perspectives and from creative and practical directions. Courses include seminars stressing the interpretation and criticism of specific works and issues, and ensemble laboratories and studio workshops in which creation, performance, and application become integral components of the learning process. For administrative purposes, the School of Arts and Humanities is loosely divided into three divisions: Aesthetic Studies, History of Ideas, and Studies in Literature. MA and PhD students divide their course work among these divisions, building a personal area or focus of concentration. Theory and practice play important roles in all three areas. For example, in many classes (The Literature of Fantasy and The History of the Novel), students are given the option of producing scholarly and critical work or a combination of creative and academic projects. Students in the Master's and Doctoral programs have published poetry and fiction in a variety of journals, including Story, The Seattle Review, Tennessee Review, Calyx, Borderlands, Concho River Review, Trans/forms, West Wind Review, Pinehurst Journal, Next Phase, Blue Mesa Review, Cafe Bellas Artes, The Licking River Review, Venue, and Rag Mag. Students have also had plays produced nationally at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and the University of Nebraska and locally at the Deep Ellum Theater, Swiss Avenue Theater, and many other sites in Dallas. |
Sample Writing Courses |
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Students are strongly recommended to
pursue their writing interests in as many different
genres as possible. Courses are offered in fiction
writing, poetry writing, playwriting, script writing,
biography, rhetoric, and translation. Students who enroll
in writing courses are encouraged to take classes in
translation, and vice versa students interested in
translation should take classes in creative writing as
well. Courses are taught by practicing writers. The following course descriptions are representative samples of the courses available at UTD. |
Short Stories: Practice and Theory |
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| Short stories open a window of discovery
for readers and writers alike. Writers undoubtedly
discover things about themselves as they write, but they
must contain themselves within the grammar of their
stories if readers are to discover any ”truth”
in what they read. This course is designed to help
writers write fiction filled with discovery, not only for
themselves but also for their readers. In the workshop setting, students will be expected to craft, sentence by sentence, stories that become unique, even surprising. Accordingly, as students write and rewrite their stories, they will be encouraged to write each sentence so that it (1) plays an integral part in the story, (2) is derived directly from the previous sentence, and (3) affects the reader. Additionally, students will learn to slow the telling of their stories by developing a defined stance. Rather than concentrating on relating the ”news” of the story, they will work on establishing (via language) their authority as writers in their stories. Special emphasis will be placed upon developing strong narrative voices. The first half of the course will focus on technical aspects of writing (dialogue, characterization, point of view, etc.). In the second half, using Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction and Sontag's I, etcetera, students will be encouraged to particularize their stories, individualize the narrator, combine showing with telling, establish urgency in the voice, and be experimental. Required Readings: Carol Bly, The Passionate, Accurate Story; Wayne Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction; Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior; Susan Sontag, I, etcetera; and Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own |
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The Art of the Novel |
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| The greatness of a novel, according to
John Gardner, is measured in emotional and intellectual
significance. But there is no prescription that
guarantees significance—the meaning begins with the
authors, their eye for the unique, their love of
language, their demonic compulsiveness and dependence
upon each and every word choice made from the first to
the last sentence. Writing is not only an imaginative
task: authors have the critical task of writing and
revising their novels in accordance with the narrative
techniques available. Where are these techniques to be
found? In other novels. ”Historically,” Harold
Bloom argues, “we know how poets become poets, and
fiction writers become fiction writers. They read. They
read their predecessors and they learn what is to be
learned.” Students in this course will read closely the novels of Maso, Erdrich, Ford, Goyen, McCarthy, and West, focusing especially on the techniques employed to bring the characters alive, to make the characters both multidimensional and multivalent. During the course of the semester, students will do character studies in preparation for writing the novel, will outline the entire novel, and will write the first three chapters (or 80 to 100 pages) of the novel. Students will be asked to make their narratives, and their characters, unique, maybe even strange; for, as Coleridge said, there can be no great art without a certain strangeness. Required Readings: Carole Maso, The Art Lover; Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine; Richard Ford, Wildlife; E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel; William Goyen, In a Farther Country; Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses; Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel; and Dorothy West, The Wedding |
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Poetry Workshop |
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Writing and reading poetry are closely linked. Poets
must acquaint themselves with the national and
international climate of their times to begin formulating
their own poetic voice. Poets should also interact with
those who read their poems. Thus, this Seminar/Workshop
will be open both to students who write and students who
want to learn how to interpret a poem through the eyes of
those who create poems. The various techniques of poetic
thinking and writing will be studied, and the emphasis of
the discussions will focus on ”how a poem is
made” and “how the poem comes to mean.”
The Poetry Workshop will become a forum for the
discussion of the creative and critical perspective that
goes into the making, and the interpretation of poems. During the workshop, considerable time will be spent on a detailed discussion of poetic structures introduced by contemporary American and international poets and on the discussion of students' poems to illustrate the various steps that lead to the preparation of a final draft of a poem. Students will also be introduced to the scene of literary journals publishing poetry in the United States and the procedures for submitting poems for publication. Readings will include selections from poets such as Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Hilde Domin, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Robert Hass, Margaret Atwood, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Rafael Alberti, Melo Neto, Alain Bosquet, Yannis Ritsos, and others. Some critical works dealing with the craft of poetry will be examined as to their usefulness for the writing and reading of contemporary poetry. Required readings: Stuart Friebert and David Young, A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics; Joe David Bellamy, Editor, American Poetry Observed; William Packard, Editor, The Poet's Craft; Richard Eberhart, Of Poetry, and Poets; and Poetry & Poetics, Special Issue of Antaeus, Nums. 30/31 |
Writing in the Poetic Tradition |
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This course will take its inspiration from the
classical poets—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare,
Milton, Goethe, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and
others—and will treat poetry as the way in which a
whole culture articulates its universe and psyche to
itself and to others at the deepest and broadest levels.
In the course, the students will examine the linkages
between poetry, science, and philosophy (e.g., chaos
theory, brain science, cosmological physics, and
contemporary anthropology). The students will also
reexamine the classical ideal of poetic truth and see if
it is still relevant. The class will follow the traditional poets' practice and study the essential elements of poetry: meter, story, image, symbol, idea, voice, and trope. Students will pursue this study both as readers and writers (and will examine the relationship between reading and writing poetry). In addition, students will explore translation as a way of descending into the “underworld” of a poem and encountering there the true shade of the poet's meaning. The work for the course will include discussion of a wide range of old and new poetry, and close reading and appreciation of poetry written by the students in class. New movements in contemporary poetry will be explored and critiqued (and perhaps initiated!). Required Readings: Virgil, The Aeneid; Shakespeare, Sonnets; T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays; Ezra Pound, Cantos; and Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems |
Creativity: Playwriting |
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| Plays are written to be acted. On the stage, the
reality of the writer's vision is translated into the
reality of the performance. Three basic premises underlie
this course: 1. Words are images. They give us glimpses of the real or of the imagined. 2. Words are sounds. Speech, its repetition and variation, its rhythms and syllabic turns, enables the pleasure of sound, the desire for meaning. 3. Words dissolve, when given over to performance. This is the effect a playwright seeks in theater. This course will undertake the writing of playscripts with an emphasis on discovering the fragile relationship of the written script with its performance potential. A variety of writing exercises will be assigned so that the student experiences this sensitivity. Other writing exercises will enable the student to explore the variety of “trusted” techniques when scripting for live performance. A continuous project throughout the semester will be the development of a playscript by each student in the context of enactment. The students will act out each scene in the play and the script's survival will be tested though its intended medium—performance. Required Readings: Antonin Artaud, The Theater, and its Double and The Peyote Dance; Anton Chekhov, Letters of Anton Chekhov (Karlinsky, ed.) and Short Plays (Hingley, ed.); and Sam Shepard, Seven Plays |
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Reading and Writing Biography and Autobiography |
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| Biography is a narrative art form based on fact. It
combines critical, scholarly, and imaginative
perspectives to bring an individual to life by way of the
printed page. Currently enjoying great popularity in the
U.S., biography offers us reassurance that individuals
can make a difference, opportunity for a kind of intimacy
with another that is too frequently lacking in many
lives, and moral perspective that can give us direction.
Its close relative, autobiography, simultaneously employs
reticent revelation and loud concealment to construct a
rhetorical version of a self whose mask often slips to
reveal the vulnerable person behind it. This course will employ selected reading and extensive research and writing to lead prospective biographers toward mastery of their genre. Students will learn how to select suitable subjects, find obvious and hidden material about them, conduct preliminary research using both archives and interviews, and prepare a draft proposal to do the biography for submission to agents and publishers. The course is meant for prospective biographers, but a theoretical and critical paper about biography or autobiography may be substituted for the draft proposal with the permission of the instructor. Required Readings: Gillian Hambscombe and Virgina L. Smyers, Writing for Their Lives: The Modernist Women, 1910-1940; Park Honan, Authro Lives; Steven B. Oates, Biography as High Adventure; Richard Elmann, James Joyce; and Brenda Maddox, Nora |
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Translation Workshop |
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The craft of translation fosters critical and
creative thinking, and it can be considered a model for
introducing students to the practice of interdisciplinary
research. At all times the question will be asked: what
sources of information and what disciplines have to be
engaged to do justice to the interpretation of a text? The distinctive features of the Translation Workshop are its fusing of critical analysis with creative writing, its emphasis on the process by which we come to understand the making, and the interpretation of a work of art. Learning the art and craft of translation will be of intrinsic interest to those students who are re-creating works from one language into another and for those who are involved in creating their own works. The interaction of translators, creative writers, and poets in the workshop will open up the dialogue about how writers reflect their critical and creative thinking through the medium of words. The translator learns from the writer how to refine the expressions of linguistic subtleties, and the writer learns from the translator what the power and semantic resonances are within the possibilities of language. Translators and writers need to learn how to reconstruct through the process of interpretation the complex interactions inherent in a literary text. Translators give form to their interpretations of a text in the new language, and writers explore the horizon of their visions within the inherent possibilities of the word. Students will discuss the drafts of their own translations or poems during the workshops. In addition, readings will include texts on the craft and theory of translation and the practice of interpretation. Required readings: Edwin Honig, The Poet's Other Voice: Conversations on Literary Translation; Schulte/ Biguenet, The Craft of Translation; Schulte/ Biguenet, Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida; John Felstiner, Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu; The World of Translation, PEN American Center, New York, with a new introduction by Gregory Rabassa; William Arrowsmith & Roger Shattuck, The Craft, and Context of Translation; and articles from Translation Review |
PublicationsThe School of Arts and Humanities encourages students to become involved in two journals produced at the University of Texas at Dallas. Students work directly with editors as research assistants and in classroom settings. They assist both research for and the editing of the journals. Student internships are also available with the journals and with Dallas publishing houses (and at several local theaters and art venues). |
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Translation Review |
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Translation Review is the official publication of the American Literary Translators Association. It is devoted to the critical evaluation of literary translations from all languages into English. It specifically addresses critical and theoretical aspects of transplanting a literary text from one culture into another, and its pages provide a forum for translators to discuss the creative process involved in the transplantation of literary texts from foreign languages into English, for translators and scholars to investigate the subtle nature of linguistic, semantic, cultural, historical, and anthropological considerations underlying translation activities, for critics to establish a meaningful vocabulary to evaluate the quality of literary works appearing in translation, and for the general reader to be continuously informed about translations of literary works published in book, journal, and anthology format. |
Sojourn |
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Sojourn is an interdisciplinary arts journal that is published once a semester by the students at the University of Texas at Dallas. The journal contains poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction, and graphic arts. Sojourn sponsors a yearly, juried competition for fiction, non-fiction, and poetry; and it also sponsors regular readings by the contributors to the journal. It looks for work that is experimental, especially in the realms of sensibility; and it is dedicated to fostering student writing and publishing at UTD. |
The Center for Translation Studies |
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The Center for Translation Studies was founded in 1980 to promote cross-cultural communication through literary translation, to disseminate information on new developments in literary translation theory and practice on an international scale, to intensify research in the rapidly expanding field of translation studies, and to establish that the methodologies derived from the art and craft of translation can serve as a model for revitalizing literary criticism, for improving literacy, for shaping interdisciplinary studies within the arts and humanities, and for building bridges between the humanities and the sciences. UTD has emerged as a focal point for the development of research in the field of translation studies and translation criticism and for the coordination of professional interaction among translators, translation theorists, humanists, and artists. The Center continues to serve as a point of contact for translators throughout the world, and it continues to make innovative contributions to the evolving research on translation practice, theory, and human communication, and how this research can foster improvements in teaching the humanities. |
Master of Arts |
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TOTAL: 30 Semester
Hours Students enrolling in the master's program must complete one core course, HUMA 5300, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Arts and Humanities. This course should be taken during the first semester of enrollment. In addition to HUMA 5300, students must take 27 semester hours of organized courses. Eighteen of these hours must be divided among Aesthetic Studies (6 hours), History of Ideas (6 hours), and Studies in Literature (6 hours). The remaining 9 hours may be taken as the student wishes in any of the three areas. All master's students must complete a portfolio of significant work as part of their graduation requirements. The work is done under the supervision and consultation of the faculty. It may be creative in any of the above fields (e.g., fiction, poetry, biography, drama, translation, etc.), but it must contain a strong theoretical element. Students must also demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language by passing an approved language examination. |
Doctor of Philosophy |
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| TOTAL:
90 hours (30 hours of which must be derived from a Master
of Arts equivalent) Doctoral students must take 42 semester hours of organized graduate classes. Eighteen of these hours must be divided between Aesthetic Studies (6 hours), History of Ideas (6 hours), and Studies in Literature (6 hours). The remaining 24 hours may be taken in one or more of the three areas. Students must demonstrate advanced use of a foreign language in two additional independent study courses (or, with the advisors approval, one such course and HUSL 7321: The Art & Craft of Translation). Students must also pass a sequence of qualifying examinations consisting of four written sections and one oral section. Doctoral dissertations (which may be creative) are written under the supervision of four faculty members. Once students have successfully completed their qualifying examinations, and have submitted and had approved by the Graduate Studies Committee their doctoral proposal, the students must complete 18 hours of dissertation credit. |
FacultyStudents are encouraged to take classes from as many of the different Arts and Humanities faculty members as possible. The following faculty will be of special interest to students considering creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas. |
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| Alex Argyros aargyros@utdallas.edu 972-883-2781 |
Ph.D. Cornell. Books: Crimes of Narration and A Blessed Rage: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos. Poetry: over forty-eight poems in eighteen journals. |
| Fred Curchack curchack@utdallas.edu 972-883-2684 |
MA Queens College, CUNY. Wrote, directed, designed, performed 70 original plays including: “Abel and Cain: A Biblical Debacle”; “What Fools These Mortals Be”; “Family Values: A Closet Drama”; “HEAVEN-or-The Big Talk Show”; “Stuff As Dreams Are Made On.” |
| Juan Hernández juan@utdallas.edu 972-883-6401 |
PhD Texas Christian University. Books: Poetas de los Angeles; Poetry from Chile, Poesia de Jalisco; Endless Life, Pancho Confusions and Other Poems. Director of the Center for US Mexico Affairs. |
| Dennis Kratz dkratz@utdallas.edu 972-883-2984 |
Ph.D. Harvard. Books: The Romances of Alexander, Waltharius and Roudlieb, and Mocking Epic. Co-Editor of Translation Review. Co-Director of the Translation Center. Dean, School of Arts & Humanities |
| Robert Nelsen nelsen@utdallas.edu 972-883-2149 |
Ph.D. University of Chicago. Short stories published in TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, Quarterly West, Other Voices, Chariton Review, and many other literary journals. Contributing Editor of Common Knowledge. Director of Creative Writing. |
| Venus Opal Reese opal@utdallas.edu 972-883-2013 |
Ph.D. Stanford. Playwright, 14th Annual National Black Theatre Festival, Winston-Salem,
NC. Redemption: a Collision of History and Memory in Four Breaths; 2003
Playwright/Director/Performer, The Hair Monologues, the Moore Theatre, Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas, Seattle, WA; 2002 Collaborator, Tydeus/Chorus, Will Power's The Seven, PS122, Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, NY; 2001 Playwright, Redemption: A Collision of History and Memory in Four Breaths Bay Area Playwrights? Festival, San Francisco, CA |
| Tim Redman redman@utdallas.edu 972-883-2775 |
Ph.D. University of Chicago. Books: Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism and Citizen Ezra Pound (forthcoming). |
| R. Clay Reynolds clayr@utdallas.edu 972-883-2763 |
Ph.D., University of Tulsa. Books: Threading the Needle, Ars Poetic, The Tent Maker, Monuments, Players, Twenty Questions: Answers for the Aspiring Writer, Franklin's Crossing, Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook, Agatite, Stage Left: The Development of the American Social Theater in the Thirties, The Vigil. |
| Rainer Schulte schulte@utdallas.edu 972-883-2092 |
Ph.D. University of Michigan. Books: The Modern Tradition: Continental Short Stories, The Suicide at the Piano, Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writing, The Other Side of the World, Contemporary Writing from the Continents, The Craft of Translation, and Theories of Translation. Editor of Translation Review. Director of the Center for Translation Studies. |
| Frederick Turner fturner@utdallas.edu 972-883-2777 |
B.Litt. Oxford. Books: Shakespeare and the Nature of Time, Between Two Lives, A Double Shadow, The New World, Natural Classicism, Rebirth of Value, Genesis, Beauty, April Wind, and Tempest, Flute, and Oz. Former Editor of Kenyon Review. Over one hundred poems published in major journals and magazines. |
Financial AidFinancial aid in the form of loans, grants, and scholarships is available. The total amount of aid the students receive depends on the level of financial need, submission of appropriate financial information and applications, academic records, and the availability of funds. Teaching Assistantships are also available on a limited basis. These assistantships normally involve half-time employment and are awarded on the basis of merit. Students holding assistantships must be enrolled for a minimum of 9 hours per semester. |
| For further information about this program, please contact: Robert Nelsen or Rainer Schulte. | |