Instructor: Machado
Monday 1:25 PM – 4:15 PM
This seminar might be better titled something like “On (Not) Knowing How to Read and Write: Experiments in Non-Fiction.” Likely, it’ll interest itself in exploring/thwarting/re-inventing modes of attention that get—or ought to be—catalogued as “reading,” though such “reading” might not be of texts per se but of objects, events, images, weather phenomena, patterns, gestures, glitter, trash … What are the pleasures of reading? That’s a question we could ask. What threatens reading—what threatens the pleasure of reading? (What threatens it more than institutionalized (e)valuations of clarity, difficulty intention, authorship, and productivity?—That’s what I really want to ask.) Participants are required to compose a longform essayistic work, or a string of short essays, that read some thing(s), whatever reading means, or doesn’t. Such essays may even be considered “criticism” or “philosophy”: discursive and meditative modes are much favored in this room. But these essays must not be delivered in the standard “academic” mode. Possible, even probable, readings by: Etel Adnan, Roland Barthes, Susan Howe, Trisha Low, Fred Moten, poets (oh yes), Cristina Rivera Garza, Lisa Robertson, Julietta Singh …