This tentative/draft syllabus updated January 22, 2026.
Instructor: Nick Montfort, in@mkcinckm.com
Class meets in 14N-325, Tuesdays 7pm–10pm
Office hours / open studio by Zoom (URL provided in class) 9am–10am Thursdays
With some exceptions: Not on 2/12, 3/26, 4/30.
On 4/2 office hours / open studio will likely be both in person (14E-316) and on Zoom.
Students study and use innovative compositional techniques, focusing on new writing methods. Using approaches ranging from poetics to computer science, students undertake critical and creative writing, with writing experiments culminating in print or digital projects. Students read, listen to, and create different types of work, including sound poetry, cut-ups, constrained and Oulipian writing, uncreative writing, false translations, artists' books, and digital projects ranging from video games to computer-generated books. Digital art and literature, analyzed and discussed in the contexts of history, culture, and computing platforms, are covered, as well as avant-garde writing methods, situated in their historical contexts. Topics vary by year; may be repeated for credit with permission of the instructor. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.
This Spring 2025 offering has an experimental emphasis and will allow students to engage with 20th and 21st Century avant gardes by using their writing techniques with attention to what they meant historically and could mean now. Computational writing as understood in our context is a species of experimental writing. Part of our work will involve using computation — programs we write, not closed, proprietary systems — to generate texts.
The Mundus
N. H. Pritchard (1939–1996)
Ed. Paul Stephens
Primary Information, 2024
You need to have a copy of the printed (paperback) edition
Wash Day
Arwa Michelle Mboya (SM MAS ’20)
Counterpath, 2023
Books are only one way we support our learning and our writing in class. We also have downloadable resources such as The Seeker, a PDF. Links to short writings will be provided throughout the semester; in a few cases we will even have handouts of such writing. There is plenty of code available for you online, from the very small-scale programs in Memory Slam 2.0 up into open/free software LLMs that you can (optionally) install. You will be shown short videos and provided with in-class readings and links to other projects.
20% - Preparation for and participation in class. This is a workshop class in which discussing your work and that of your fellow students is the core activity. The physical presence of your material being in the classroom is essential; you also have to have the items you need to participate, ranging from a laptop to required books. Participation requires reading aloud and otherwise presenting the experimental writing you have done; giving short presentations about the historical, cultural, social, and national contexts of different avant-garde movements; engaging in discussion that is informed by having completed the assigned reading; and doing writing (we undertake in-class writing exercises). Missing a class, with an unexcused absence, will reduce your overall grade by 10%, which will lower your final grade by one letter grade. Grade reduction for unexcused absences is not capped. If you miss four classes and your absences are unexcused, your grade will be reduced 40%. (Note: Absences for circumstances out of your control, such as health problems and family emergencies, are absolutely excused, as are absences for religious observance. You still will have to keep up in the course, so as soon as is practical, contact me and one or more other students to be able to keep up.) Presence and lack of participation (for instance, due to being unprepared) will result in a lesser grade reduction for each class. Last but not least, you are not allowed in enroll in 21W.764 / CMS.609 / CMS.846 if you are enrolled in another subject that meets at any overlapping time. Absences because you need to go to another class or an exam for another class are unexcused.
40% - Completion of the nanoprojects, short weekly assignments, in a way that shows an understanding of the computational principle, constraint, prompt, or concept and which works toward some innovation. Each assignment will be valued equally. Nanoprojects must be delivered in two ways for full credit: Emailed to me in a zipfile by 12 noon on the day of the class (yes, seven hours before class) and brought with you on your computer, ready for presentation.
40% - The kiloproject. This will be a bookwork which can (if you like) be computational. The framework for the project (form, concept, material) should be innovative and appropriate to the author’s goals. The scope should be suitable for a project that is the culmination of a semester of writing work. The writing (process and output) should be innovative. Some aspect of the completed project should be awesome. ¶ Any approach is all right to use, but if you take a computational approach, remember that we are investigating computing techniques rather than particular corporate products and services. So any system you use must be free/open; for an LLM (which you are not encouraged to use!) that would include GPT-J, GPT-Neo, and Mistral — and any such system used must be “pure” and without guardrails or an instruct layer, so you deal with the essential LLM and not elaborations.
Readings from & responses to experimental writing.
Surrealist writing games/techniques introduced and employed in class. These will be the basis for one nanoproject; all nanoprojects assigned will be listed here.
You don’t have to submit your work to contests or publications to learn about writing or to be a writer. For those who are interested, I am listing a few opportunities related to MIT where you can submit work that could be relevant to computational and experimental writing. I only include opportunities where there is no cost to submit work. A list will appear below and may be filled in during the semester.
Plagiarism—use of another's intellectual work without acknowledgement—is a serious offense. It is the policy of the CMS/W Faculty that students who plagiarize will receive an F in the subject, and that the instructor will forward the case to the Committee on Discipline. Full acknowledgement for all information obtained from sources outside the classroom must be clearly stated in all written work submitted. All ideas, arguments, and direct phrasings taken from someone else's work must be identified and properly footnoted. Quotations from other sources must be clearly marked as distinct from the student's own work. For further guidance on the proper forms of attribution, consult the style guides available in the Writing and Communication Center (E39-115) and the MIT Website on Plagiarism.
I used an experimental writing technique called appropriation when I directly ripped off the previous paragraph from another source and included it in this page, without quotation marks around it and without telling you where it came from, as if it were my own writing. Why isn’t what I did plagiarism? For some reason it is considered perfectly ethical to appropriate text on a syllabus at MIT. In fact, instructors are told to do so! Be mindful that syllabus-writing and certain experimental writing practices, appropriate in a contemporary poetry context, may not be appropriate for scholarly writing and may not embody academic integrity in a traditional sense. As we will discuss this semester, this does not mean that experimental writers should operate without any sort of ethics or integrity. We won’t ignore the academic concept of plagiarism in this class; we will understand how appropriating text and, in certain cases, not explicitly stating one’s sources, is a method of conceptualist experimental writing that has a point to it.
The Writing and Communication Center offers free one-on-one professional advice from communication experts with advanced degrees and publishing experience. The WCC can help you further develop your oral communication skills and learn about all types of academic and professional writing. You can learn more about the WCC consultations at http://cmsw.mit.edu/writing-and-communication-center and register with the online scheduler to make appointments through https://mit.mywconline.com. Please note that appointments at the WCC tend to fill up quickly.
Information Systems & Technology (IS&T). As an enrolled MIT student you can access a variety of proprietary software at no cost, and, given my advocacy, use, and production of free software, I’ll discourage you from using such — use free/libre/open source software instead! IS&T also loans laptops to students: https://ist.mit.edu/loaner-equipment. If you have any technical questions about hardware, software, or anything IT-related, you can contact IS&T 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at: https://ist.mit.edu/help.
The Engaging Cluster. MIT’s ORCD (Office of Research Computing and Data) adminsiters the Engaging Cluster, which provides high-performance computing for all members of the MIT community. While students do not have to install a model such as GPT-J or GPT-NeoX, much less fine-tune such a model, it can be done using Engaging.
Laptop/Device Best Practices. You should have your computers/tablets/phones closed (if closeable) or turned face down (if not) and at the ready. When we (as a class) come up with a question that can be answered using cybernetic enhancement, I may ask you to consult these devices of yours. We augment our intellect in various ways during our class sessions, using networked computation, using books, looking at a screen, listening to recordings, and so on. For the most part, we will be augmenting our intellect by discussing topics with each other, doing, sharing writing exercises (usually undertaken on paper), and otherwise attending to the people in the classroom community. This requires close attention to me and your fellow students, so keep your digital devices closed/face down until we determine that one or more of us will consult a resource. I may ask that we write together using a shared text editor; I'll provide some advance warning if this is planned.
Citation Best Practices. There is useful information from the MIT Libraries about citation. However, this is specialized to how scholars rather than creative writers would and should cite. Our emphasis is on process rather than product, so consider the purposes of citation, and methods of citation, that may be appropriate to your writing methods. If you are coding, describe how you were assisted and what resources you consulted, whether this means describing your use of Codepilot or your finding a code snippet on Stack Overflow. You can include any way you received help in specific commit messages, for instance, if you are doing a project you have under version control. If you found an experimental writing technique either explained or exemplified, cite what you have based your work on. Although in general it’s fine to use a conceptual writing technique such as appropriation without citation — it would be quotation if you did that — for the purposes of your workshop you should explain your use of that technique. By citing your process, you help others in class learn about how they can enhance their writing processes.