Cultivating rigorous aesthetic practices with ethical representation.
An initiative of Bard College’s Written Arts Program
What is the Center for Ethics and Writing?
The Center for Ethics and Writing, an initiative of Bard College’s Written Arts Program, reimagines the study of literature and writing as both an academic and social practice, one that asks students to translate the skills they develop in the classroom as critical readers and writers to some of the most pressing and divisive social issues of the moment.
Course Highlights
Fall 2024
Imagination Under Seige
This is a course centered on imagination. What is imagination? How does it differ from but remain connected to memory, desire, creativity, and political agency? And how has it been conceptualized, theorized, and instrumentalized across the centuries? What happens to our imagination and capacity for creativity during socio-political crises? Do circumstances like wars, authoritarianism, exile or different forms of confinement ignite or stifle our creative drive? Can we work when we are living in fear and under threat? What does violence —political, environmental, racial, and gender-based— do to our bodies and minds and how do we document that and write about it? These are some of the questions that will be addressed during this workshop. We will be thinking about how imagination can be used as a powerful political instrument –one that is mindful of the intersection of our aesthetic and ethical concerns– and how it can also be shaped to be an end in itself. We will be looking at work emerging from several disciplines, such as soundscapes, architecture, dance, as well as forms of protest and collective organizing.
The Ekphrastic Poem
The ekphrastic poem—one provoked by or in response a work of art—can hold rich interior and surface tensions, deriving energy from the friction between two modes of experience: the visual and the verbal. As such, it can be a vibrant site of experimentation and play, liminality and subversion. What are the possibilities of ekphrasis outside of mirroring an artwork? How can the ekphrastic reorient us to a piece of art by exceeding its frame to probe its material, historical, and social contexts? How can an ekphrastic poem break down the distance between spectator and artwork and invite us to question our manner of looking? As a class, we’ll discuss an invigorating range of ekphrastic poems that emerge from different approaches to artwork. Readings will include selections from the work of Robin Coste Lewis, Jeffrey Yang, Anne Carson, Eduardo C. Corral, W.H. Auden, Forrest Gander, Albert Goldbarth, Cole Swensen, Dean Rader, Ama Codjoe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jorie Graham, Ann Lauterbach, and Brian Teare. Students will write into their own (repeated) encounters with self-selected artworks and art forms and visit local museums and site-specific artworks.
Documentary Fiction
How do fiction writers interact with archives? This course understands the archive not as a static repository of the past, but as a space for imaginative speculation. We will be thinking both about fictions created by the historical archives that support official narratives, and about ways of using fiction, non-fiction and poetry to interact with archives creatively. If some archives are often historically bound to power, perhaps fiction can act as a destabilizing force, throwing official narratives off balance and offering alternatives to how we can imagine possible futures. In this course we will be examining works –literary, acoustic, visual, and others– that have worked with archives and offer insight into the relationship between document and fiction. Among others, we will be looking at work by Svetlana Alexievich, Layli Long Soldier, Zoe Leonard, Alice Oswald, Arlette Farge, Ecologies of Migrant Care, among others. We will also be working directly with a selection of archives –National Archives, newspaper and magazine archives, museum archives, oral history archives, manuscript versions, among others– thinking (and practicing!) ways to intervene, question and interact with them.
Dinaw Mengestu Spoke with WAMC’s The Best of Our Knowledge about the Center for Ethics and Writing
News & Events
-
Introducing D.M. Aderibigbe: Fellow with the Center for Ethics and Writing
The Center for Ethics and Writing is proud to introduce its latest fellow, poet D.M. Aderibigbe. Aderibigbe will teach poetry courses at Bard College’s Annandale campus during this fellowship, and will give a reading in Spring 2026. D.M. Aderibigbe is from Lagos, Nigeria. He’s the author of 82nd Division (Akashic Books, 2025), winner of the Read more
-
On Writing Everything: Amitava Kumar’s Takes on the World
On Monday, March 31 at 5:30pm in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium, Reem-Kayden Center (RKC), Amitava Kumar will discuss and read from his work. Introduced and moderated by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program Dinaw Mengestu, this event is free and open to the public. Amitava Kumar is Read more
-
Literary Radicals: How Literature and Politics Have Shaped Our World
On Monday, March 24 at 5:30 pm in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium, Reem-Kayden Center (RKC), Joel Whitney will read from his work. Introduced and moderated by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program Dinaw Mengestu, and follwed by a Q&A, the reading is Read more