Sylvia Wynter and the Question of Litera

The work of Sylvia Wynter presents readers with a multi-disciplinary corpus, spanning plays, critical essays, interviews, a novel, poetry, and dance. In addition to her overarching critique of the idea of “Man”, Wynter’s work invites us to rethink disciplinarity, genre, and how critical practice is defined. If we take seriously the creative component of Wynter’s work, the generative capacity and urgency of poesis, how then might we envision the contours and stakes of a “literary method” in the context of her work?  By what means might we read her work, the kind of knowledge it produces by means of the literary, and the alternatives it offers us for thinking through the question of literary method? What, in short, does reading literature do? Does it reproduce complicity with or challenge the kinds of structures Wynter critiques?

Beginning with her essay “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’” this seminar takes seriously the question of normative forces at work under the rubric of aesthetics to better understand elements at work (poetics, performatives, epistemologies, concepts) and the philosophic, anthropo-centric, ecologic, and racialized topographies that appear. The seminar is divided into three parts: the aesthetic, the performative, and the poetic.

Above all, this course aims to generate readings of Wynter’s work and its complex attentions to multiple threads and tensions that constitute and animate modern knowledge.