"Any interruption," Lydia Davis has claimed of the fragmentary text, "either of our expectations or of the smooth surface of the work itself. . . keeps returning the reader not only to the real world but to a consciousness of his or her own mind at work." In this course-designed for students in the final semester of their Division 2, who have taken at least two writing workshops-we will read and write literary nonfiction (memoir, the personal essay, cultural criticism, etc.) that uses the fragment as form, as process, as metaphor.