グローバル教養科目（Writing Games: Experimental Writing as Social Practice）

What does it mean to write creatively? Do we write to express ourselves, to tell our stories, or to make stories for others to escape into? Yes. But there exists a huge diversity of other reasons to write, and ways to explore that
diversity. This exploratory kind of writing has been called by many names: experimental, avant-garde, conceptual,
meta, marginal, minor.

“Writing Games” is a *creative writing course* where we will *learn by making.*

Rather than explore the history and practice of experimental and avant-garde writing mainly by listening to
lectures, analyzing readings, and organizing discussions – although these things will occur – we will “make” our
way into knowledge, understanding what past and present writers have done by recreating aspects of their work. We will encounter familiar (but often misunderstood) phenomena like Dada and Surrealism, but also follow seldom
traveled branches of the verbal arts, from magical incantations to performance art, and from metafiction to
interactive fiction.

In the process we will ask: why be experimental? Where is the line between “groundbreaking” and “pretentious”? What is experimental art’s relationship to everyday life and everyday problems? How can it reflect and/or enact
cultural and social change? How can writing experimentally help us see what we can’t yet see? If the limits of what we can say in words are the historical, social, and personal limits of our imagination, then we will explore the many ways that “experimental literature” attempts to defy these limits.