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Additional Information about the course

An Interdisciplinary Approach 

This course combines historicist and materialist methods and research questions with a substantial archive of poetry and poetics texts. Although poets offer many definitions of poetry, a persistent emphasis is placed on the concept of a poem as language which is aware of itself as language. Since poetry is attentive to its material instantiation and takes as its central issue its transmission through writing and reading, we orient ourselves with these texts.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course students will be able to:

*Generate theoretically informed interpretations of texts.

*Analyze texts in relationship to the media ecologies in which they were composed & circulated.

*Demonstrate in written and oral forms evidence of original research.

* Identify cultural, social, & political meanings in technologies of cultural transmission including the following: scribal, print, visual, fiber-based, hardware, and software interfaces.

* Discuss the contingency of cultural assumptions about creativity, originality, and authorship

*Critique the metaphors  how textual media imply bodies

* Engage in poeisis aka “critical making” (don’t worry, we’ll talk about this term!)  using software, hardware, and analog materials.

* Write reflectively about critical artifacts generated by the student her/him/theirself.

Topics

Relationships between bodies and writing through exploration of text/textile/wearables

Textuality

Materiality

Disciplinary movement in Textual Criticism, Poetics, Comparative Media Textualities, Digital Humanities, Media Studies, Bibliography, and Book History

Media Ecology

Media Archeology

Interface and Ideology

Memory and Writing

Print Culture and Digital Culture

Textual knowledge communities and practices in Indigenous cultures

Textual production and dissemination

Creativity, Originality, and Reproducibility