This course is designed to excite analytical and thoughtful discussions on important texts and to excite a chronic and incurable exercise in literary arrangement. We may begin to declare that writing is not a prison sentence. However, if writing were a prison sentence, watching Le Trou, The Shawshank Redemption, and Cool Hand Luke will permit us to see the clear resemblance between prison sentence and writing. Jacques Becker, in his Le Trou, studies the boundary of tools and the materiality of sound in masterminding a prison escape. Eventually, the writer like the prisoner faces a wall. Writing is a leap of faith: the wall that chains us to the abyss of thought will also liberate. Ultimately, the task of a writer is to write even when there is a wall and to use the tools available to knock that barrier down. Writing, no doubt, is a solitary act, a way into ennui and back, but no spirit, conscious of its journey into the wilderness, is ever left dangling forever on a cliff without descending into a crowd of daffodils. There is also another kind of prison we will face in the course of this class: the prison of the voice. We will learn to liberate, shape, define, and lead our voice through the immersion of sound, film, poetry, narrative splendors, and other visual singularities. I hope you will achieve this apotheosis, in the arc of this six week journey, the apotheosis of writing and living: to convert text from ex-nihil to pro-nihil.