In this all-level winter program in experimental creative writing, sound art and psychoanalysis, we will study the sounds and markings of internal thought and affect in the forms we find them in the world, as externally expressed. We will employ several modes of theoretical, critical, and creative inquiry and expression, listening for and bringing forth our internal processes in both creative and critical products.

 In our work together, we will ask how do the sounds and markings of language and the language of sound shape our creative and critical output. In our writing and sound collage work, we will explore how collecting, shaping and re-shaping found language and sound might bring the surprise of self-recognition, strike a familiar chord. We will ask how working within the constraints of found or overheard material might disrupt our ability to fully articulate who we imagine ourselves to be. In an attempt to produce creative work differently, our creative writing and sound art will take up experimental procedures, e.g., using source texts and sounds as material to manipulate, distort, transform and otherwise “translate” using combinatorial play, re-structuring or de-structuring. Our psychoanalytic, literary, sonic and poetic interlocutors will likely include Kristeva, Lacan, Žižek, Michel Chion, Gertrude Stein, John Cage and Emily Dickinson.

Throughout the quarter, we will closely read psychoanalytic texts as well as texts in critical, literary and sound theory. We will engage these works in seminars, small groups, lectures, and reading sessions. Our work in this program will also include a substantial art and writing studio component. Students will spend the quarter working on one sustained creative writing project and one sustained sound art project. To those ends, students will receive ample training in sound technology and guidance in working with source texts and sounds.