Dear All,
[Classes are Weds 5-7pm, Sat 4-6pm. They are all in Sem II E3107]
Welcome to the the Winter 2011 Experiments In Texts course, Transgressive Art & Transgressive Bodies. I hope all of you are having a relaxing break. This correspondence is not only to welcome you and to invite you to interact with this blog throughout the quarter by sending me posts of your own, including announcements, art, writing, etc, or making comments via the comments function (optional, of course), but to layout some basic information such that Week 1 you’ll know what questions, if any, to ask in relation to how the course will function, what some of the expectations are, etc. Finally, this post also includes links to the Week 1 readings, due for the first day of class, Wednesday, Jan 5th, starting at 5pm. There are 3 readings and they are all very short. All 3 are “grounding” for us, which is to say they are canonical works often referred to by contemporary poets and artists, along with critical theorists and others interested in discourses on the body, gender, and, poetry, art, and identity, especially those works we’ll be looking at, so the below will give us a kind of working theoretical vocabulary (or at least start such a vocabulary for many of us).
There are three major components to this course: 1) your individual creative writing and art-making; 2) your collaborative creative writing and art-making (including end of quarter show, curated by the class divided into smaller groups); and 3) the readings we’ll study for two weeks at at time (generally) and which we’ll both seminar and lecture on. The readings will speak to your creative work, and your creative work will speak to the readings: via critique, complimentarity, similarity, and stark difference, among other relations. Though this course will deal with difficult, often controversial ideas and works of art, the act of play is fundamental to what we’ll be doing. We need to be able to partake in serious playfulness (or playful seriousness), itself a radical act in today’s functional and often stifling academic culture. Otherwise we will wither along with our creative experiments. Last, before you read the logistics outline below, I want to let you know that I understand this is a 4-credit course, so keeping workload in mind and reasonable is a priority of mine, as many of you have very full schedules. Anyway, here’s some basic info, starting with Week 1 reading links/info. I’ll save info about content of the course (like, what is this about?) for discussion on Day 1, and for later blog posts. Right now, logistics!
READINGS and BLOG (Includes occasional film, video, visual stills, music–I call all of these, often, “readings”): Almost all readings will be free/open-source and on the web or sent to you as a pdf attachment. All the free readings will be posted here and sent as as links in an email to you by Sunday evening of every week. Built in redundancy, each will be available in 2 locations, except for a couple pdfs that will be too long to re-post (paste) here and that aren’t available online. This is to make sure everyone has equal access to the readings. So, check the blog and your email every Sunday, or by Mon. afternoon, if possible. Because this blog will also be a clearinghouse for course announcements, public announcements, your work when you desire to share it publicly, etc. Sometimes, though not usually, I’ll refer you to my public blog, Experiments in Text (the name this course was based on), which is linked on the blogroll to the right here–> and is: http://davidwolach.blogspot.com
The readings for this week, here you go (enjoy! FYI: not all weeks will we be reading the work of dead white men!):
1) Karl Marx, excerpt of Capital on Commodity Fetishism, Chapter 1 HERE
2) Antonin Artaud, from Theater and Its Double, “The Theater of Cruelty” HERE
3) Michele Foucault, from Discipline and Punish, “Docile Bodies” (will be emailed to you. Sent to you as two pdfs–due to size of pdfs Evergreen allows to be emailed, even though this essay is only a few pages, the pdf will need be sent in two chunks, two emails...so keep an eye out for that!)
WEEKLY SCHEDULE:
We’ll proceed week by week–reading, writing, art-making–along a different “theme” (set of problems or “issues” in text arts and the politics of language) relating to the “the body” and “bodies,” social-political and artistic transgression.
WEDNESDAYS are lecture-discussion days, will involve large group discussion on the readings. Sometimes parts of Weds will also will be reserved for sharing creative work by you. I’ll let you know in advance if we do use a particular Weds for sharing work.
SATURDAYS are twofold: 1st hour will be small seminar discussion and 2nd hour (“language lab”) will generally be for working on your own creative writing/art-making experiments, etc. Eventually, by the last couple weeks, Saturdays will be devoted to collaboratively working on curating the final Week 10 show–that is, to small, fixed group brainstorming, collaborating, division of labor, and curating. We may decide that the show be in one place or we may decide to use multiple locations. We may decide to stay on campus or we may choose to move off campus. It’ll be up to us.
Every week we’ll work on our own individual or collaborative writings in addition to doing the small readings–some writings will come out of prompts set up by me, others will be reflection writings, while still other writings will be more open-ended–depending on the week. We’ll work to creatively respond to the readings–both the assigned readings as well as one-another’s writings/creative works (which should be treated with as much respect and critical attention as the assigned readings)–so that week after week there will be a constant back and forth between reading and writing/art-making, writing/art-making and thinking, writing and discussion, where we’ll be crucially truly co-learning from one another’s work and other interactions, replacing a more straightforward and less (I think) effective model of the writing workshop.
WRITING/ART-MAKING (Text Arts, i.e., mixed-media, etc):
Individual Writings/Creative Work: usually will be responding to the readings (and other forms of art) in some (even if highly interpretational) way, and/or to peer writing, and not co-authored or anchored in one fixed collaboration. Individual writings, until final projects, will be extra short (emphasis on pushing yourself over quantity or volume), often about trying out new forms and not necessarily making “finished” work. There will be some short critical writing to do, some poetry, some mixed-genre work, etc. We’ll play with several forms during the quarter.
Collaborative Writings/Creative Work: This is any writing we do that demands collaborative writing from weeks 1-4, where during class and outside class we’ll often get a chance to form temporary (rotating) groups, or work in pairs, on some specific and small-scale writing. This will also include Weeks 5-10, during which we’ll form small, but now fixed groups of 4, where the function of these fixed/steady groups will primarily be peer critique and collaborative writing and art-making (collaborating on a multi-media piece, for example), wherein weeks 7 onwards, once you’ve gotten to know one another via some smaller peer critique and collaborative work, your group will be collaborating on coming up with its contribution(s) to the end-of-quarter show (reading, live performance, and other text-arts media). So, peer critique on everyone’s individual writings in fixed groups from the end of week 4/beginning of 5, and the same group after that (weeks 7-10) curating one part of the end-of-quarter show. How each fixed group collaborates the final 3 weeks will be up to the group: collaborations can be direct, i.e., all can work on one part of one piece, or the collaborations can be looser, for example 4 separate pieces but each read and worked on by the group in some way, the “everyone helps each other with their own works” kind of collaboration and curation. We’ll discuss this, the final show, further in class and as time goes on, and in time all your questions will be answered (unless you have to answer them by just doing, which is sometimes, luckily, the case).
Syllabus: I’ll hand out a syllabus (summary of readings and where you can find them, along with short week by week descriptions of themes to be covered). I try to keep these handouts as simplified as possible (not totally filled in), because I find giving you a total week to week rundown is often unnecessary information for the first week of classes, overloading everyone, and I also find it hampers your drive or ability to choose to alter the week by you yourself suggesting to the group things to do and read, look at etc. You helping make the syllabus, to some degree, makes for a more generative, spontaneous pedagogy and writing environment. But I will give you a short handout with a list of places you can find the requisite readings, along with mini-descriptions themes we’ll eventually cover. What’s important to know now is the arc of the quarter, which is, to finally summarize the above:
Weeks 1-end of 4: individual writing work, readings, and rotating in small groups for peer “critique” (peer review) and collaborative experimentation.
Weeks 5-9: individual writing experiments continue, but now collaborative groups are fixed (rotation ends), so that people can get to know one another and be better readers of one another’s work–hence peer review of writing/art-making becomes a more reliable process after week 5. After week 6, collaborative groups spend weeks 7, 8, and 9 (and before that if they desire) thinking and talking about, and eventually working towards, what they want their contribution(s) to the end of quarter show to look like, collaborating to make that work come to life by week 10.
Week 10: collaborative groups put together final touches and curate their portion of the end of quarter show, to take place some place or places and at some time or times, Saturday of Week 10.
Covenant: Due, more than anything, for my desire to see us be on equal footing–due to a Marxist-anarchist pedagogical ethos–I tend not to draw up course covenants. I believe we should, if you desire, draw up the covenant together and do so in a way that ensures that how we treat one another is due less to an official document and more out of desire or duty, a sense of ethical and political commitment. That said, it should go without saying that treating anyone differently on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, age, religion, and so forth, won’t be tolerated. We need lovingly stand up for one another in this regard and not be afraid to speak our minds. So, listening is also key, along with honesty–honesty. And if listening and honesty are key in this regard, so is not allowing ourselves to complacently believe that peace and social/economic justice has to do with tolerance. It isn’t just to tolerate another’s racism, for example, is it? Trying to see from someone else’s perspective is important, then, such that we give ourselves, as a student last quarter said regarding to listening to one another, a few moments of silent thinking before speaking during, especially heated, discussions. Finally, if we are to come up with a group covenant, it should leave enough room for us to learn from one another, room to make honest and loving mistakes–to allow those to be moments for exchange, not for simple punishment or retrobution. Anyway, I’d like for us to discuss respect and love for one another–how we might get there, and what, if anything you might want to do viz. a formal covenant. I’m open to ideas.
I’m really looking forward to learning from and with you this quarter. See you Wednesday! In Solidarity,
David Wolach