Course No: 350:508
Index #: 17954
Distribution Requirement: B
Thursdays - 10:20 AM
MU 207
Workshop: Critical Making, Historical Reconstruction, and the Book
Silver, Sean
What modes of engagement count as research? What kinds of knowledge are scholarship? How can thinking incorporate doing? And to what extent is criticism inherently productive? This seminar explores these questions, offering a survey of developments in what is variously called "the practice turn," "historical reconstruction," "fabulation," and "critical making." These emerging approaches to literature and the arts sometimes risk things like bad taste—in the literal and metaphorical senses—but also errors and mistakes, cuts or burns, and sometimes a bit of property damage. They encroach on territories which once seemed déclassé to the high mode of criticism, since they involve getting our hands dirty in an embodied sense. But they have in common attempts to intervene by making a difference: in texts, in fields, or in our understanding of the world and its entailments.
We will begin on familiar territory-- with recent developments in the theorization of close reading as itself a productive practice or extended investigation in critical making; by week two, we will be looking at "critical fabulation" and the analytical potentials of historical fiction. Then we will spiral out into more radical analytical engagement, studying experiments in the book arts, like Jen Bervin's Nets or John Phillips's Humument, Emily Dickinson's book-binding (called "fascicles"), or the mode of criticism called "deformation"—where deliberate, rule-based modifications of text yield insights about that text's principles of construction. Weeks 5-8 focus on historical reconstruction as a research methodology. These approaches attempt risky recoveries of knowledge through the syntheses (or resyntheses) of inks, colors, foods, and strange cultural rituals like whist. We will take books apart and put them together; we will secure and demonstrate our understanding of a book or a printed page or a cultural condition by doing them, in the print studio, laboratory, or kitchen. Weeks nine through twelve will involve us in more puzzling predicaments, including investigations in logography and recreational linguistics, distributed poetry, "puzzle poetics," and maybe even the strategic use of a lasercutter or 3D printer.
Authors will include Laurence Sterne, Italo Calvino, Solomon Northup (?), and Jane Austen; poets will include Emily Dickinson, Raymond Queneau, Harryette Mullen, and maybe someone like Jo Hammill (Gutter Words) or Ranjit Bhatnagar (Encomials). Critics will include Jonathan Kramnick, Sadiya Hartman, Randall McLeod (the experimental bibliographer), Donna Haraway, Lisa Samuels, Jerome McGann, and Brad Pasanek. A number of guest speakers working in book history, historical reconstruction, and more radical experiments in critical deformation will attend. This course will take advantage of resources at the Scarlet Letterpress and the Rutgers Makerspace (Livingston).
Final projects will be developed collaboratively between student and instructor. A student might choose to compose an essay of a traditional sort, offering an overview of an emerging theoretical trend or critical approach, or applying one of those approaches to a text. Or they might attempt a more radical critical intervention, like preparing an historical dinner or a marathon "day in the scriptorium," undertaking an algorithmic deformation, producing a multi-sensory book, or reconstructing some event or process leading to a novel reading of a text—and then writing it up, possibly for a public-facing venue. Or they might find a middle route: targeting a traditional essay inspired by a practical intervention. Students will also be asked to lead one or more class happenings based on the week's readings, which could be a reconstruction, a language game, a book-arts skill-share, or something else. And there will be room to incorporate student interests into the curriculum, as the class unfolds.