ENGLISH 769
Representing Imagining
Please note: this is archived course information from 2017 for ENGLISH 769.
Description
This graduate seminar will investigate styles of representation in imaginative writing. For our purposes, representation is language, paratext and other creative graphemes reporting on, mimicking, replicating and/or investigating as praxis the object-events we perceive, experience, co-create and imagine in the world. We will posit that every step aside from an object-event in “the real world” – whether written, imaged, blogged with multimedia, spoken, or other – is a step of representation.
How do writers and readers perform and recognise multiple mimetic forms and styles? How do we respond to recognisable representations and to “imagining what we don’t know”? How does imaginative writing conjure and interrogate representation with apparently non-mimetic effects? Can representation collapse or vanish? If it can, what object-events or imaginative purposes – ecstatic, traumatic and/or otherwise – position us in the unrecognisable and/or unspeakable?
Our texts and contexts range principally over the last 100 years. Topics include genre and expectations, ideologies of originality and copying, discursive mixing, reference, signs, authenticity, wholeness and brokenness, beauty and ugliness, recognisability, translingualism, the page, the codex and the digitas, and the economy of the imaginative subject.
Each student will post four times with a student dialogue group, present one research report to the seminar and write two research essays.
Availability 2017
Semester 1
Lecturer(s)
Coordinator(s) Professor Lisa Samuels
Reading/Texts
Laura Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough (1928; reprint California 2001)
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925; reprint Dalkey Archive 1995)
Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003; Coach House, 2nd edition 2011)
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (1982; California, 2nd edition 2009)
Jacques Roubaud, Mathematics (1997; Dalkey Archive 2012)
Additional course readings (on CECIL and course packs), including Georges Bataille, Michel de Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari, Kamau Brathwaite, Réda Bensmaïa, Alan Halsey, Caroline Bergvall and Leslie Scalapino.
Points
ENGLISH 769: 30 points
