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 2023
Problems of Perspective
Over the course of this seminar, we will interrogate the function of perspective in establishing how a narrative, and the characters who inhabit it, not only see but also interpret the world, and how that perspective has been used to create distance, both real and imaginary, between an “us” and a foreign other. We will use our understanding of perspective to look critically at the world around us, and over the course of the semester will use a lab model to develop narratives that actively address and engage the world around us. We will focus on the ethics as well as the aesthetics of narration, paying close attention to the function of individual words and the narrative traditions that we are operating within and at times breaking from.
Toward (A) Moral Fiction
The novels in this course each grapple with ethical issues through fictive means. In navigating them, we will try to assess the way in which literature can create, complicate, or resolve ethical dilemmas—or appear to eschew morality altogether. We will also attend to craft, investigating how these author’s concerns are furthered by formal considerations. Students will read approximately one novel per week, occasionally supplemented by theoretical texts. Analytical and creative writing will allow students to find their own fictive paths to a social, ethical or political issue as they consider the liabilities of both didacticism and sensationalism, and explore the role of imagination in the expansiveness of fiction.
What is a Character?
We are often drawn to characters more than anything else in our encounters with books, plays, or movies. This happens despite our knowing that characters remain exactly what their name implies: trapped by printed letters, scriptedness, or the limits of a screen. Characters are always mediated, but they can also show us how concepts like humanity and personhood depend on and contend with the media humans use to share ideas. In this course, we will study the history of characters in western fiction to learn how archetypes, racial and gendered stereotypes, historical or geographical settings, and the capabilities of different media technologies shape our encounters with them. We will also explore different ways of “reading” characters by thinking about how computer algorithms might understand something as supposedly complex as an individual’s personality.
Dinaw Mengestu Spoke with WAMC’s The Best of Our Knowledge about the Center for Ethics and Writing
Recent Readings & Workshops
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A Reading and Workshop with Sally Wen Mao
Photo by Noah Bility On Thursday, December 7 at 10:30am, Sally Wen Mao will give a reading and lead a workshop for students in Weis Cinema. Among the wider student body, students from Professor Jenny Xie‘s class Contemporary Asian American and Asian Diasporic Poetics will be present. Sally Wen Mao is the author of the… Read more
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A Reading and Workshop with Nicole Sealey
On Monday, November 6 at 6pm in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium, Reem-Kayden Center (RKC), Nicole Sealey will read from her work. She will be introduced by poet and Bard College faculty member, Jenny Xie. The reading will be followed by a discussion moderated by Dawn Lundy Martin, Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. On Tuesday,… Read more
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Duriel E. Harris Workshop
On October 31, 2023, Duriel E. Harris attended Dawn Lundy Martin’s Studio in African American Poetry and Poetics course to talk about her book, No Dictionary of a Living Tongue, which students had read. She also gave a talk on poetry in relation to transformative justice, moral witnessing, and ethical responsibility. Duriel E. Harris is a… Read more