RADICAL COMPOSITIONS

The course will examine literary experiments in prose and poetics by twentieth century and contemporary writers. These explorations in narrative, documentary poetics, visual graphics, textual assemblage, archival fabulation, and autotheory are critical to writing the experiences of the undocumented, the colonized, the blackened, the subaltern, the queer, the interstitial, and the disposable and to unlearning our ways of thinking and writing.  Topics range from documenting the undocumented to histories of colonial war and bombing, from autofiction to fourth person narration.

This is a combination seminar-workshop course invites its participants to study and to produce works of radical composition. How do critical questions shape and engender new modalities of writing? How have writers radically challenged notions of genre, disciplinary frames, representational possibilities, and reading practices? What techniques have they deployed or disregarded and what other mediums have they drawn from to produce these works? How have these works produced radical new forms of knowledge, documentation, or the book-as-object?