Seminar for Writers
Class Information
Instructor: Gray, Erin
CRN: 62298
Time: M 3:10-6:00pm
Location: SHREM-1001
Breadth: Later American
Focus: Genre, ID, Interdiscipline, Method, Theory
Description
Excising portions of a preexisting text to generate a new work of art has long been central to poiesis. So, too, has it been integral to the creative action involved in thinking Being beyond containment. In this hybrid, creative/critical seminar, we study poetry, fiction, non-fiction prose, music, and visual art produced through decompositional techniques such as the copy, the cut-up, the collage, the sample, the redaction, the blackout, and the cut-and-paste. We read appropriation-based creative texts alongside works of theory and criticism which query the role of expropriation in constituting modern circuits of value, subjects of knowledge, and systems of power. Our goal will be to think together about the relationship of these operations to the mediation of knowledge, political practice, and ethical becoming in an era of protracted war and catastrophic systems collapse.
Students will have a hand in shaping the reading list on the first day of class. Alongside the literary grifts below, we may read excerpts from Tom Phillips?s A Humument (1966), Mohamedou Ould Slahi?s Guantanamo Diary (2015), Solmaz Sharif?s Look (2016), Jen Bervin?s Nets: The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (2004), and Jordan Able?s Injun (2016). Because writers working in this vein have been influenced by discourses of conceptualism largely generated by visual artists, we may also study visual works like Jenny Holzer?s Redaction Paintings (2005), Steve McQueen?s End Credits (2011), Sadie Barnette?s Dear 1968? (2017), Alexandra Bell, Counternarratives (2017), and Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts? Redaction Paintings (2018). Students will also tangle with critical and theoretical works by Karl Marx & Sylvia Federici, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida & Fred Moten, Walter Benjamin & Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan & Frantz Fanon, and Christina Sharpe.
The seminar is open to MFA, PhD, and adventurous undergraduate students. We will spend roughly 2/3 of the class discussing and closely reading assigned texts. The remainder of the seminar will be devoted to generously engaging each other?s decompositional projects, whether they be literary, critical, autoethnographic, cinematic, or some other (in)form(e) altogether.
Grading
Students' grades will be based on engaged participation in seminar and the completion of weekly discussion questions, one discussion facilitation, a recap of a previous seminar discussion, and a final appropriation-based project (critical andor creative).
Texts
The ms of my kin , Janet Holmes
Great Expectations, Kathy Acker
The O Mission Repo, Travis Macdonald
The Place of Scraps, Jordan Abel
Voyage of the Sable Venus, Robin Coste Lewis
Voyager, Srikanth Reddy
Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip