Looking into Lit: An intro to literature department!
Hello! My name is Kat L’Esperance-Stokes (‘23) and I’ve studied literature at Bennington for the past three years. Most of my work is nonfiction and poetry as I look at the meaning of home and family. However, I also study anthropology meaning I haven’t taken as many literature courses as other lit students to make room for my SCT classes. Writing with me is Joey Gawtry (‘23) who is a literature and creative writing student at Bennington mostly focused on storytelling around human convergence and interaction. She transferred in my second term, and mostly uses poetry and some nonfiction as her creative mediums. And Sabine Wilson-Patrick (‘25) who’s a literature and film student at Bennington, focused mainly on creative nonfiction and playwriting. Her first semester at Bennington was primarily focused around building up on their writing skills and their second semester courses are starting to show more of what she’s really interested in focusing on long term.
to talk all about studying literature at Bennington. For each of us, our play revolves around literature and most of our coursework is in lit.
To start off, here’s a list of what we’ve taken during our time here at Bennington
I was the only one out of the three of us during that term and I was just a baby freshman so I took only one literature class:
The New York School of Poets: Studied both generations of the New York School of poets: a poetry style with a casual, lighthearted tone which often reads as nonfictional. The first generation (group of poets) started writing these poems as a way to impress each other.
Joey transferred to Bennington that term (if you have questions about transferring, you can reach out to her at [email protected]!). This is what classes looked between us!
The Devil: Studying different interpretations of the Devil in a literary sense. Taught by Phillip Williams and one of the largest classes at Bennington thanks to popular demand. This was a one time only class
The Self, The Soul, and Saint Augustine: Given that Saint Augustine is seen as one of the first confessional writer, the class looked at him as the start to personal essay and confessional poetry.
FLEABAG: A Workshop on Structure: An intensive, two weekend class that looked at the structure of both seasons of Fleabag.
The Ocean, The Creek, The Lake: Writing Water: A course in which we read several nonfiction books, such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, and Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams, and wrote our own stories about bodies of water. The teacher for this class, Akiko Busch, was one of my favorites at Bennington–I very much miss her.
The Courtly World: Lady Shonagon and Lady Murasaki: We read the Tale of Genji, the first novel ever written, and also The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagan, both portrayals of Heian era Japan and beautifully written. This was a class I took because it was one of the last literature classes with an open spot, but it ended up being one of my favorites–it was with Anna Maria Hong, who was excellent but does not teach at Bennington anymore.
Joey and I's start to sophomore year.
Recreating The Classics: In this, we looked over a few classical works like The Tempest and the Stranger and paired them with a retelling/recreation of them somehow. Either by extension of the original story or the story from an perspective of a different character. The final was writing our own recreation where I took characters and lines from The Tempest to make a poetry sequence.
Horror Fiction and Film: This class looked the history of horror by pairing books and film to cover various tropes in horror.
Reading and Writing: Autofiction: My first workshop class. Autofiction is a subgenre where the writer blurs true events and fiction while keeping to an emotional truth.
Fundamentals of Creative Writing: A basic creative writing class with reading and writing exercises every week in each of the 3 primary genres. Taught by the ingenious Jenny Boully, so, of course, an excellent experience (though Jenny is a poetry and nonfiction writer, so expect to not have a big focus on fiction if she is your Fundamentals teacher).
Shipwrecked: A study of different books in which characters have been literally and metaphorically shipwrecked, such as Robinson Crusoe and Concrete Island. We also completed several writing exercises about our own experiences with shipwreck.
The Jazz Age Revisited: A class in which we studied classic Jazz Age authors such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but mainly delved into the Black authors of that time such as Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer. Cane ended up being one of my favorite books of all time.
Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Childhood and Its Aftermaths: My first advanced course in creative writing, with Jenny Boully. We studied several texts, such as Heartberries by Terese Marie Mailhot and In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, that touched on traumatic experiences in and out of childhood in nonfiction texts. We also workshopped our own nonfiction pieces and discussed smaller short stories throughout the term.
My spring term, I decided to take a term off literature. Thanks to there being so many literature students, classes often fill up pretty quickly, especially Reading and Writing courses. Further, literature courses are a lot of work between constant reading and writing. I decided I wanted to spend a term studying SCT because I hadn’t really had the chance to do so being so focused on literature. However, Joey remained focused on literature and she took:
Reading and Writing Poetry: Refusals and Mythic Transformations: Another class with Jenny, this was my first advanced poetry course at Bennington. Instead of workshopping individual poems each week, we workshopped one long poem that went through many revisions and studied books such as Jane: A Murder and Autobiography of Red.
Reading Poetry: A Basic Course: A class with my current advisor, Michael Dumanis, which taught me the mechanics of how to read poetry, what to look for, and terminology such as line break and sonnet. This was one of the larger classes I’ve taken at Bennington, with what I believe was 35 or so students. It was definitely more of a lecture course in which we went through an extensive packet of poetry dating through time, and did not do our own writing exercises.
The start of the current academic year! Joey and I became upperclassmen and Sabine came in and begun their journey at Bennington.
Muriel Spark and the Vanishing Novel: Taught by Benjamin Anastas, we read through all of Muriel Spark’s novels. She’s known for writing short, concise works with very little emotionality in it’s delivery.
The Problem With Sylvia Plath: A short, seven week course taught by Mark Wunderlick where we read through her published works, went over her life and legacy, and did our best to separate her and her life experiences from her work to see how it stands on their own.
On Sustaining a Practice of Literary Documentation: This course looked over docupoetics which is a subgenre of poetry and prose that involves adding onto a primary document(s) to comment on/create a new piece of work. They’re usually very experimental and pushes what makes a piece poetry.
Screenwriting: I took this Sabine! It was an introductory course to screenwriting where after reading script we wrote 30 pages of a film screenplay.
Kalon and Chaos: The Secret History and its References: In this class, we studied texts like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History along with Plato’s Symposium to contextualize Greek references in modern literature. I loved the chance to study The Secret History at Hampden College–I mean, Bennington College–and enjoy the mythology of it all. It was goofy at times, but fun and also very educational.
Screenwriting: The Story Studio: This was another big class, with around the same number of students (30-40). We each read a new screenplay every few weeks, talked about the mechanics of screenwriting, and workshopped our own screenplays. Taught by one of Bennington’s *coolest* professors, Manuel Gonzales.
Reading and Writing Poetry: Image and Detail: This was my favorite class I’ve taken thusfar at Bennington–if you’re at all interested in writing poetry, please take a poetry workshop with Michael Dumanis! We all wrote and read new poems every week, our prompts ranging from Elizabeth Bishop mimetics to ekphrastic poems based on works of our choosing after visiting a local museum.
On top of taking screenwriting, Sabine also took Scriptorium:Beauty. The Scriptorium classes are taught by Camille Guthrie and are designed to help strength your writing skills. Every scriptorium class revolves around a theme. Beauty, Love and Happiness, and The Body to name a few!
And this is the current term! We don’t have much to say about these classes yet because we’re in the middle of them now, but you can reach out to any of us regarding these classes or anything else regarding literature at Bennington! Joey’s email: [email protected] Sabine’s: [email protected] mine: [email protected]
The Prose Poem (Joey and I are in this together!)
The Russian Modernist Poets
Beastly and Beautiful: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
Reading and writing fiction
Playwriting as Civic Inquiry
Coming of Age: Gender and Genre
If you’ve read this far, thank you! Before we wrap up, Joey has a couple more bits of important information about literature at Bennington:
It is one of the largest departments with many faculty. With literature classes, some are competitive and some are not: in literature 2000’s many students will not be primarily or even secondarily literature students. Some classes I’ve taken that weren’t as competitive were the Courtly World, which studies The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book in my freshman year, and The Jazz Age Revisited, which studied primarily Black authors during the Jazz age, as well as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some I have taken that were more competitive and composed of mostly literature students were The Ocean, The Creek, The Lake, which was about writing about bodies of water and their significance, and Persona Poetry in this upcoming semester.
Creative writing, specifically, is a competitive discipline. The only 2000 course that is for creative writing, Fundamentals of Creative Writing, typically requires an ‘exception’ which you can get from your advisor if this is a course of study you plan to pursue. That’s the typical jump-off point for upper level creative writing classes, but it is definitely not required. The 4000-level writing courses are among the most competitive on campus, sometimes earning upwards of 80 applications for 15 spots. Don’t be intimidated: some are not as competitive as that, but they definitely require a well-honed supplement of writing or relevance to your specific plan. There are three types of creative writing courses, Reading and Writing Poetry, RW Fiction, and RW Nonfiction. Most terms, they will have both fiction and poetry, nonfiction is rarer. These are ‘workshop’ classes, in which you are usually expected to do a significant amount of reading as well as writing every week.
