The Writers House will be hosting a mini-course taught by Howard Fineman on political nonfiction. The University of Pennsylvania Current today features a story about this project. In it I am quoted as follows: "One of the most basic structural problems with the curriculum is the idea of the semester,” says Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English and one of the founders of the Writers House. “It often prevents us from engaging brilliant people in the extended Penn community who would be great teachers and mentors of our students but, because they are geographically far-flung and in the world of everyday practice, a semester-long course is impossible. So, I'm thrilled that through the Writers House we can create mini-courses and that someone like Howard Fineman can actually teach our students, despite his otherwise crazy schedule." Here is your link to the article.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
political writing
The Writers House will be hosting a mini-course taught by Howard Fineman on political nonfiction. The University of Pennsylvania Current today features a story about this project. In it I am quoted as follows: "One of the most basic structural problems with the curriculum is the idea of the semester,” says Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English and one of the founders of the Writers House. “It often prevents us from engaging brilliant people in the extended Penn community who would be great teachers and mentors of our students but, because they are geographically far-flung and in the world of everyday practice, a semester-long course is impossible. So, I'm thrilled that through the Writers House we can create mini-courses and that someone like Howard Fineman can actually teach our students, despite his otherwise crazy schedule." Here is your link to the article.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
