Levan Institute Series: “On Writing”—Paragraphs

About

This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “On Writing” series, conversations aiming to answer questions about how writing matters, now. This conversation will feature Angelica Jade Bastién (writer, essayist, and film critic) and Anahid Nersessian (UCLA), hosted by Sarah Mesle (USC). Organized in partnership with the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture. Registration is required. REGISTER

Description: Prose comes in sentences, and these sentences — almost always — come clustered together into that mysterious unit: “the paragraph.” In elementary school, most of us use a simple spell that can turn a sequence of sentences into a cohesive idea: start with a topic sentence, follow it with a piece of evidence, and wave the magic wand of analysis. Sometimes, the magic works, and the reader finds themselves with a fascinating, cohesive, idea. But for many of us, paragraph magic is more elusive. How much evidence? What counts as analysis? How might the magic of a paragraph be altered by the size of a font, piece of paper, or iPhone screen? What makes a good paragraph in a magazine, an essay, a substack, or an article? In this event, journalist Angelica Jade Bastien will compare paragraph notes with Anahid Nersessian, author and professor of English at UCLA.

Angelica Jade Bastién is a writer, film critic, and essayist. She has been on staff at New York Magazine since 2017. She has previously written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, the Criterion Collection and many other publications. She has appeared on podcasts including Blank Check, New York Times’s Cannonball, KCRW’s the Sam Sanders Show, and We Hate Movies. In 2022, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award. She can be found on her Substack newsletter, Madwomen & Muses. Her website is angelicabastien.com. Originally from the South, Bastién now lives in Chicago.

Anahid Nersessian was born and raised in New York City. She is the author of three books—Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse (Verso, 2022; U of Chicago P, 2021), The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago, 2020), and Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard UP, 2015). Her fourth book, How to Have Sex in a Poem, will be published in 2027 by FSG. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, New Left Review, n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Bidoun, Poetry Magazine, Mousse, e-flux, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a professor in the Department of English at UCLA.

Open to attendants outside of USC. Registration before the event is required. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit (link below)