From Angst to Art: Preliminary Outline

Last night I worked on a preliminary outline for my seminar, "From Angst to Art." My first impulse, of course, was to give students the time and space to create their own work of art drawing from their personal experience with angst. But every college course needs its backbone, its scholarship.

I plan to devote the first 8 weeks to artists and authors whose work was in some way "confessional." The term "confessional" in itself is something we will have to talk about because it has a certain derogatory meaning in academia. Robert Lowell, whose poetry originated the so-called confessional movement, really disliked the term. I don't dislike it because it puts me in the mind of a church confessional, which is a beautiful idea to me. I'm sure the students will have their own ideas.

Part of the goal of this course is to bring the healing aspect of art out of the shadows and give it the respect it deserves. Not only does the concept deserve respect, but I think a course like this could remove constraints students may have placed on themselves regarding their own reasons for making art. Generally, creative writing teachers run from the "art as therapy" idea like the plague because they want to avoid the maudlin-but-it-really-happened syndrome. I'd like to confront the problems inherent in using personal angst as a springboard for art head on, and perhaps offer some insights into how to avoid being self-absorbed. I still need to give more thought to this, especially about the prose I want to bring into the mix, but this is what I have so far:

The class material will be divided into two parts, the mind and the body. Since the students will be sharing their intimate experiences, I plan to also share mine.

I. Depression, Dark Night of the Soul, Mental Illness, Mortality
A. St. John of the Cross

B. Confessional Poets
1. Examples of bad (maudlin) poetry
2. Theodore Roethke/Nijinsky
3. James Wright
4. John Berryman
5. Robert Lowell
6. Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck"

C. Painters
1. Edvard Munch
2. Van Gogh
3. Philip Guston

D. Stories
1. "Blue Velvis"
2. Secret of Hurricanes
3. John Gardner

E. Non-fiction
1. Rollo May
2. John Gardner
3. Ernest Becker
4. Writing as a Way of Healing, Louise DeSalvo


II. The body: injury, illness, mortality
A. Frida Kahlo
B. Sociologist A.W. Frank, Wounded Storyteller as well as various articles