ClassInfo

This seminar will explore a range of literary and visual works that might be categorized as "experimental," innovative, hybrid, avant-garde, outside the convention of genre and technique. Exploring a range of literary and visual texts from the early 20^th century to the present, from Dada and the Oulipo group to contemporary visual and digital poetry, the seminar will consider the question of the concealed and the unconcealed: how does the eruption from silence into language, from the blank page into image, also mirror the process of psychoanalysis, in which the play of the concealed and the unconcealed, consciousness and the unconscious, collide in creative and new ways? How do tropes of concealment shape the various forms of writing that we will consider? How were experimental forms of writing a response to a new media landscape of technological innovation, and how does technology continue to shape the forms of this writing? While one focus of the seminar will be on 20th and 21^st century German language works (in English translation), we will also broaden our inquiry to include French, Portuguese, and Anglo-American works of literature. Throughout the seminar we will also explore experimental poetry as a form of new critical writing, as perhaps one way of
"doing theory." Forms of experimental poetry we will consider include constrained literature; lipograms; visual/poetry; electronic poetry; conceptual writing; found poetry; erasure poetry; word art; sound poetry; concrete poetry;
digital poetry/codework. Works by authors to include Heimrad Bäcker, Walter Benjamin, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Federman, Christian Hawkey, Benjamin Hollander, Adeena Karasick, Oskar Pastior, Georges Perec, Fernando Pessoa, Raymond Queneau, Annie Rogers, Kurt Schwitters, W.G. Sebald, Robert Smithson, Alan Sondheim, Gertrude Stein, Anja Utler, Robert Walser, Uljana Wolff, Unica Zürn. All readings available in English translation, and course conducted in English.