This course will focus on how to analyze the stages of composition of a given text or set of texts, using the techniques of French critique génétique. This approach focuses more on process than on final product, paying particular attention to notes and outlines (avant-textes) and to early drafts, showing how a text gets made not only from what is put in but also what is taken out. A set of tools developed initially for the study of complex literary archives like those of Flaubert, Joyce, Proust and Woolf, it has been applied to the study of writers¿ papers in many fields and in a variety of languages. My own work in this area has been primarily on the dispersed archive of Jorge Luis Borges, but I have worked on a variety of other Latin American writers¿ papers. There are books devoted to applications of genetic criticism to music and theatre, and to filmscripts and film archives, as well as to the study of the papers of major thinkers in a wide variety of fields. The attached illustration, for instance, is from a manuscript by the sociologist Max Weber, showing how he works from a typescript, rewriting on the page of the typescript but also adding manuscript sheets as he goes forward. A similar process can be observed in Marcel Proust¿s manuscripts, which famously include obsessive rewriting, with extra sheets of paper added when he ran out of space.