Experiments in Text: Reclaiming Public Spaces

Description

In this course, we will focus on creating "landscapes of dissent" through creative writing while examining other art forms that are concerned with the reclamation of public, lived spaces in the wake of increasing privatization and corporatization. We'll ask whether art and poetry can, as poet and critic Thom Donovan writes, "provide experiments in the practical organization against anti-democratic social hierarchies and the expropriation of labor, land, and natural resources?" We'll respond to this and similar questions by building individual text arts portfolios and by collaborating in small groups on more sustained text arts projects that seek to experiment, dissent and intervene.  We will interrogate the 'artistic' and 'poetic' in relation to the 'political,' stretching our understanding of both activism and creative writing. We will do this both by making our own creative works and by looking at the examples provided by other contemporary writers, visual artists, and scholars.