“But what [one] wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves,” asserts the painter Lily Briscoe (and Virginia Woolf’s proxy) in To the Lighthouse, “the thing itself before it has been made anything.” She invokes great art’s capacity to generate true emotion—pure, embodied feeling—in the viewer, and the struggle of the artist to produce work capable of such generation. As writers we wish to achieve the same effect on, and for, our readers: to kindle authentic emotion in the very moment, or perhaps even before the very moment, when intellectual understanding occurs.
This class will explore one of prose’s most overlooked means to achieving this end, which is attention to musicality: to how rhythm, cadence, phrase, repetition, theme and variation, and other elements of sound can direct the way our sentences bear and deliver meaning. We'll spend time getting to know the basic elements of literary musicality, analyzing closely how diverse writers such as Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Eliot Weinberger, Ocean Vuong, Woolf herself, and others marshal these elements to emotive effect in a way that deepens our closeness with them as readers. Then we’ll practice making use of these elements in our own work via writing exercises and mini-workshops in which we’ll both give and receive first-blush feedback. This class will be generative but also analysis-focused, with lots of targeted reading and listening; the goal is to equip writers with concrete technical tools for honing their prose at the level of the sentence and, most importantly, to help them recognize and nurture their own innate writerly musicality. Musical training or background not required.
