Course Description
This course explores the praxis of reading and writing through explorations of text technologies from textile, to print, to digital, to genome––emphasizing nontraditional understandings of the textual object. Through investigation that is theoretical, applied, and creative in nature, we will examine the social and material conditions under which form has been imposed on matter to create graphic meaning. Informed by poststructuralism and feminist criticism, we will examine glyphs, women’s needlework, memorial engravings, the cultural circulation of tattoos, midcentury typewriter poems, as well as poetic production in twentieth- and twenty-first century media ecologies. Each week will combine theoretical, critical or philosophical readings with textual artifacts that test the conceptual and practical boundaries of textual production or otherwise draw attention to language and textuality. This course fulfills either a Technology & Media Studies or Literary & Cultural Studies credit.
An Interdisciplinary Approach This course combines the methods and research questions of Digital Humanities with a substantial archive of texts known as poetry and poetics. 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.
*Describe and analyze texts including but not limited to the field of poetry & poetics
*Demonstrate in written and oral forms evidence of original research.
* Identify cultural, social, & political meanings in natural language & programming code.
* Deploy concepts of intersectionality, eco or social justice to discuss the contingency of cultural assumptions about creativity and authorship
* Engage in poeisis aka critical making using software, hardware, and analog materials.
* Write reflectively about critical artifacts generated by the student her/him/theirself.
Possible Topics
Relationships between bodies and writing through exploration of text/textile/wearables
Race, Gender, and Sexuality in media
Media Ecology
Media Archeology
Texts vs Works
Memory and Writing
Reading and Writing
Textual knowledge communities and practice in Indigenous cultures
The textual human and the biotext
Textual production and dissemination
Reproducibility
Creativity and Originality