The Critical Thinking Seminars are a 200 level course required for the completion of the Creative Writing minor. However, an alternative option to the CTS is the Forms of Literature course offered by the English department.
Critical Thinking Seminar: The Rasas
What is a rasa? We discuss a rasa (love, laughter, anger, compassion, disgust, horror, heroism, wonder, peace) every week, tracing its life and career in literature, music, art and cinema. Students are expected to write in or about three rasas of their choice.
The Spoken and the Sung: Exploring Orality”
In this course, we will be looking at the world of storytelling beyond the textual and written, and specifically at those that are “spoken” and “sung”. It is crafted around the belief that to be a good writer one must be a good listener. Oral storytelling traditions, old as language itself, still live on, despite colonial encounters, and their dismissal of these “fickle” traditions for script. We will touch on the oral and landscape, memory, history, identity, and complex knowledge system, all of which feed into the focus of this course: forms of storytelling. From the Indian epics to the songlines in Australia, dastangoi to Bob Dylan, oral creation myths to modern-day stand-up comedy, spoken poetry to podcasts—the course seeks to ask what can we learn from the oral, the unwritten, as practitioners of creative writing? How can our creative practice be enlarged and enriched by attuning ourselves to the “sound” of stories?
sumana.roy@ashoka.edu.in