Reading as writers: Lunch talk with Pierre Ducrozet

At the end of this semester of teaching in the Department of French and Italian, I would like to offer a synthesis of what I have sought to develop in my seminar and writing workshop. My intention has been to teach students how to read anew as writers: to embark on a journey through modern and contemporary literature by exploring practices, techniques, and formal experiments, so that we might, in turn, venture forth with our own.

The reading course and the writing workshop form two sides of the same coin. Together, they are designed to give us a wide palette of tools and to foster a prose that is fluid, malleable, and inventive. By experimenting with voice, gesture, and rhythm, we learn—reciprocally, and I include myself—to read differently, from the smallest detail to the architecture of the whole. And in doing so, we discover that writing and reading advance together, each deepening the other.