This class is about how poems, short stories, and novels come into being, often over many drafts and in dialogue with other texts and contexts. And this class is also about how literary works are remade and reimagined by other writers, as well as by artists working in other media. We will look at manuscripts held at archives and libraries around the city, including the NYPL, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Morgan Library, and take advantage of performances and exhibitions during the semester. Works we may consider range from iconic texts such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (from original manuscripts to Michael Cunningham’s rewrite The Hours) and James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk (from manuscripts to a film version he drafted to a recent film adaptation), to the messy poetry manuscripts of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Marianne Moore (and the works their poems have inspired), and short story drafts by Toni Morrison and Jhumpa Lahiri. Assignments may include transcribing and writing about manuscripts, short essays about a writer’s process or how a text was reimagined by another artist, and close readings of individual texts. Students will also have the option to do a creative assignment that reinterprets or reimagines a text from the class.