Studies in Poetry (411-0-20)
Topic
The Poetics of Dissolution
Instructors
Ivy G Wilson Jr
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
Frantz Fanon has famously written that the conditions of modernity have rendered blackness increasingly illegible, fraught with contradictions that push it outside the realm of facile comprehension and explicability. Taking Fanon's polemic as a cue, this graduate seminar will look at a number of late twentieth-century textual and performance sites with radical instances of experimentation where articulations of blackness move into the interstitial space between meaning and non-meaning, coming into being precisely at the moment when the compositional logic of their anticipated forms are ruptured. The course will focus on three primary sites where black artists engage what might be called the poetics of dissolution to examine and critique the processes of racial formation: poetry (where the form of the line or stanza dissolves); music (where sonic interpolations puts additional, if not different, claims on the lyrical content), and visual culture (where the moves toward graphic mimesis are refused delineation). The material under consideration may include work by the poets Nathaniel Mackey, Douglas Kearney, and Harriet Mullen; sound alchemists King Tubby, Alice Coltrane, and MF Doom; and visual artists Glenn Ligon, Hank Willis Thomas, and Bethany Collins. Theoretical texts may include work by Emily Apter Barthes, Baudrillard, Fred Moten, and Saussure, as well as ethnomusicologists and linguistic anthropologists.
Teaching Method
Seminar
Evaluation Method
Research essay.
Class Materials (Required)
Darby English, How to Read a Work in Total Darkness
Douglas Kearney, The Black Automaton
Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement.
————. Splay Anthem.
Fred Moten. In the Break.
Christina Sharpe. Ordinary Notes.
Texts will be available at: TBA