Course syllabus

ENGL 769 Representing Imagining / 2017 U of Auckland (30 points)

Seminar: Monday 10-1, Arts 1 room 314

Associate Professor Lisa Samuels (l.samuels@auckland.ac.nz), Arts 1 room 631, office Tuesday 2-3 PM and by appt. Consultations are usually scheduled in advance: visitors are encouraged to knock on the door.

 

Course description

This graduate seminar will investigate styles of representation in imaginative writing. For our purposes, representation is language, paratext, and other signs reporting on, mimicking, replicating, and/or investigating as praxis the object-events we perceive, experience, co-create, and imagine. We will posit that every step aside from an object-event in “the real world” – whether written, imaged, blogged, spoken, or other – is a step of representation.

 

In literary criticism, “mimesis” designates art as an imitation of nature: sometimes, that art presumes the possibility and/or desirability of using styles that put us in mind of real world object-events. In this value, perfect mimesis happens when we cease to notice the representation, seeing “through” it with the sensation that we are in the “real.” The term “transparent” is sometimes used to indicate this mirroring mimesis. The term “opaque” is sometimes used to indicate signs, including writing, that demur from such transparency. Theoretically, we can posit absolute transparency and absolute opacity; practically, multiple mimetic styles can be posited and discussed.

 

How do writers and readers perform and recognize multiple representational forms and styles? How do we respond to recognizable representations and to “imagining what we don’t know” (LS). How does imaginative writing conjure and interrogate representation with apparently non-mimetic effects? Can representation collapse or vanish? If it can, what object-events or imaginative purposes – ecstatic, traumatic, and/or otherwise – position us in the unrecognizable and/or unspeakable?

 

Our texts range principally over the last 50 years, with texts and contexts from the last 100 years and more. Topics include genre and expectations, signs, originality and copying, discursive mixing, authenticity, wholeness and brokenness, beauty and ugliness, recognisability, translingualism, transculturalism, the page and the codex, identity testimony and imaginative testimony, the digitas, distributed centrality, and the economy of the imaginative subject.

 

Required readings

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (Claire Marie 1914; obtain any reprint or 2014 “corrected” edition [City Lights] or use free Project Gutenberg Plain Text version: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15396)

Laura Riding, Progress of Stories (1935; obtain 1994 Persea paperback)

Kamau Brathwaite, Mother Poem (1977); obtain revised version in Ancestors (New Directions 2001)

Ida West, Pride Against Prejudice: Reminiscences of a Tasmanian Aborigine (1984, 1987, 2004)

Alice Tawhai, Festival of Miracles (Huia 2005)

Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft

   Architecture (2003; Coach House, 2^nd edition 2011)

Jacques Roubaud, Mathematics (1997; Dalkey Archive 2012)

Erín Moure, Kapusta (Anansi 2015)

Other course readings as indicated (online and on Canvas and handouts)

 

Class requirements

Weekly seminar: everyone prepares materials in advance and participates in discussion. Some seminars will feature a student research presentation (see guidelines below). The schedule features Comment prompts that will also help focus discussion of the readings.

 

Each student will give brief written reading responses four times in the seminar, present one research report to the seminar, and write two research essays (3250-4000 words apiece). Percentage totals: participation (10%), four in-class printed and read aloud reading responses (400-500 words, 5% each: 20%), class presentation (300-500 word handout 5%, oral presentation 15%: 20%), and two essays (25% each: 50%).

 

Seminar Reading Responses

Four times during the semester, in weeks when you are not doing your class presentation, you will bring to the class 2 copies of a printed response to (some freely chosen part of) that week’s reading. Please hand one printout to me and read aloud the other printout to the seminar. Write openly without too much concern for style and plenty of concern for investigating your response. The object is to notice something particular about the reading(s) and to pose one clear question to be considered as a consequence of your response.

 

Technology policies

Though email is instantaneous, humans need time. I will ordinarily read messages within 48 hours and reply within 72; I extend the same timeline courtesy to you. Please do not use iPods, mobile phones, or other such devices during class time. If an emergency situation requires you to be contactable on a given day, let us know so that we can be ready for an interruption. You are welcome to use computers to take notes and check online materials in direct engagement with seminar discussion; please do not use your computer for things that take your attention from the seminar.

 

Disabilities Accommodation Statement

If you have a condition that impairs your ability to satisfy course criteria, please meet with me to discuss feasible instructional accommodation. Accommodation can be provided only for a documented disability. Please tell me about such circumstances by the second week of class or as soon as possible after a condition is diagnosed.

 

Student Services Online url

http://www.studentservices.auckland.ac.nz/en/sso-my-timetables-grades-course-history.html

 

 

Schedule (subject to change)

 

Week 1 (6 March)

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

Stein, “Composition as explanation” (1926)

Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” (2011)

Comment: how does Stein’s book perform/explore interelations among “Objects” “Food” and “Rooms”? Can we correlate “things, experience, and context” with “objects, food, and rooms”? Can we correlate bodies, phenomenological relationality, and cultural mores/permissions/exclusions with “objects, food, and rooms”?

 

 

Week 2 (13 March)

Laura Riding, Progress of Stories (1935; 1994): Introduction, “Schoolgirls,” “The Incurable Virtue,” and “Reality as Port Huntlady”

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (1873)

Comment: How do we position ourselves in relation to what’s asserted about truth and untruth in this week’s readings? Where do we begin reading, and how do we understand the implicit and explicit grounds and directions of linguistic representation in Riding’s work?

 

 

Week 3 (20 March)

Riding continued: “Miss Banquet,” “The Story Pig,” and “An Anonymous Book”

Charles Sanders Peirce, “Some consequences of four incapacities” (1868)

Comment: Peirce argues that the sign situation is the situation of the knower: the body is the sign of and in knowing. Consider what constitutes knowing and acting, and the consequences for identity, in Riding’s stories.

Presentation: _______________________________________________

 

Week 4 (27 March)  

Kamau Brathwaite, Mother Poem (1977), revised version in Ancestors (2001)

Brathwaite, “English in the Caribbean” (essay)

Comment on the representational signage of Brathwaite’s poetry from “ancient watercourses” to his SycoraX style. What relationality paradigm or energy is made evident in that representational signage?

Presentation: _______________________________________________

 

 

Week 5 (3 April)

William Poundstone, Project for Tachistoscope [Bottomless Pit] (2005)

<http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/poundstone__project_for_tachistoscope_bottomless_pit.html>

Adalaide Morris, “New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How to Write” (2006)

Comment on the semiotic relations of sound and space and movement in Project for Tachistoscope. How might we articulate a theory of moving text? Of new media and intermedia?

Presentation: _______________________________________________

 

 

Week 6 (10 April)

Ni_ka, Hallelujah (2004), <http://yaplog.jp/tipotipo/archive/236> & Electronic Literature <http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=hallelujah>

Qianxun Chen, Shan Shui (2014) <http://collection.eliterature.org/3/works/shan-shui/ShanshuiV2/index.html>

Lisa Samuels, “Soft text and the open line” (2017 essay)

Comment: how do we consider the visible and the invisible in the digitas? How do we develop a theory of soft text when comparing Poundstone’s work with those by Ni_ka and Chen?

Presentation: _______________________________________________

 

 

Research Essay 1 DUE Tuesday 25 April by 3 PM

*Intrasemester break 17-30 April*

 

 

Week 7 (1 May)

Ida West, Pride Against Prejudice: Reminiscences of a Tasmanian Aborigine (1984, 1987, 2004)

Deleuze and Guattari, “What Is A Minor Literature”

Comment: how do we consider differences and consanguinities between identity testimony and imaginative testimony?

Presentation: ______________________________________________

 

 

Week 8 (8 May)

Alice Tawhai, Festival of Miracles (2005)

Epeli Hau‘Ofa, “Our Sea of Islands” (1994)

Comment: Hau’ofa’s essay thinks about land and water in ontological and political terms. Consider the visible and the invisible, the traversable and the possessable, and cultural identity, anonymity, and type in Tawhai’s stories.

Presentation: _______________________________________________

 

 

Week 9 (15 May)

Lisa Robertson, Occasional works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003)

Comment: write a definition of the term “soft architecture.” What is at stake in Roberton’s baroque diction; how does it relate with “hard” and “soft” architecture? How are Robertson’s pieces “essays”?

Presentation: _______________________________________________

 

 

Week 10 (22 May)

Jacques Roubaud, Mathematics (1997; Dalkey Archive 2012)

Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable Volume One, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1992), excerpt

Comment: paraphrase de Certeau’s “ratios of fabrication” and relate it to the fictive-memory work in Roubaud.

Presentation: _______________________________________________

 

 

Week 11 (29 May)

Erín Moure, Kapusta (2015)

Comment: Consider the “open theatre” of Moure’s dramatic structure in terms of what can and cannot be performed on a stage. Consider the sayable and the unsayable, the visible and the invisible on the page and stage.

Presentation: _______________________________________________

 

 

Week 12 (5 June)

Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace <http://abtec.org/index.html>, project leader Jason Edward Lewis. Also see Lewis’ The World Was White http://www.poemm.net/projects/white.html.

Comment: We’re turning again to digital works, living letterforms or kinetic text informed by the opportunity for “distributed centrality” in the digitas. Consider again the difference between the seeable and the unseeable, what it means to “activate,” to read, in these works.

 

 

Research Essay 2 DUE Tuesday 13 June by 3 PM

ENGL 769 Class presentations

Logistics: Prepare a one-page handout with your name and email, the presentation date, a title indicating your focus, the title(s) of works you are engaging with, and one (or two maximum) passage(s) from our reading. This handout provides on-site reference and a take-away mnemonic. You may present in a normative academic manner, with a 10-minute (minimum) to 20-minute (maximum) talk and questions you pose for discussion. You may present in alternative ways so long as you do the critical work necessary to explain the relevance of your presentation style and to provide your peers with opportunities to engage. When you present, I take a back seat to the proceedings, commenting or questioning if/as necessary.

 

Substantives: Focus on one or two matters from/in the reading(s). These notes on class presentations cover a lot of ground: your presentation, however, should focus on a limited piece of ground.

 

Articulate representational types and strategies you perceive in the reading(s) and especially in the one (or two) focus passage(s). For example, what representational expectations are enacted? Is there a primary representational force in your focus excerpt? Is that force a version of normative mimesis (“transparent” language mimicking a situation that might obtain in the extra-textual world)? Is it a nameable alternate mimesis: performative, self-devouring, quantum, psychological, affective, allegorical, reflexive, traumatic, defamiliarizing? Is it a combination of approaches?

 

To help contextualize your presentation, use critical writing included in our course materials and find two other pertinent critical pieces. Include in your handout the bibliographic information for those two pieces.

 

When preparing to present, decide what sort of critical approach is important to you and how that approach engages with the reading(s) and topics. Often we realize our critical approach(es) only in the assembly of the presentation. Articulate your critical approach(es) as you polish your presentation materials.

 

Below are more analytic aspects you might take up for your presentation. The following list is suggestive only, not exhaustive or prescriptive.

 

1. PARAPHRASABILITY: To what extent can you paraphrase a text or a given portion of text? At what point(s) do(es) the ability to paraphrase seem to evaporate? Consider the consistency of representational assumptions or types at work and the relation of that consistency or inconsistency to your ability to paraphrase. What is a paraphrase, in the context of representing?

 

2. SYNTAX: Syntax, or word order in a grammatical system, is crucial to our sense of writing/genre style. What is the dominant syntax of the reading/an excerpt on which you are focusing? Is it hypotactic, paratactic, discursive, fragmented, consistent, interrupted? What does this syntax make happen, in relation to representation?

 

3. WORD/GRAPHEME/SOUND TYPE: What does the diction sound like? What representational messages are conveyed in the number of monosyllabic or polysyllabic words? What is the relative balance of nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, adjectives, and so on, and what are the effects of this relative balance? What do we do with graphemes or sounds that don’t resolve into “words” but seem like (or unlike) them?

 

4. SYMBOLS/SYMBOLIC ACTION: What are some of the symbols, allegories, and/or myths at work in a given passage, and how do they influence our ideas about how representation is functioning in that passage?

 

5. MOOD: The affective center is a name to give the predominant sense, feeling, or embodied mood of a work. That mood can range from a specific feeling (frustration, e.g.) to a generalized sense (a kind of neutral affect) to an ecstatic subjecthood focused in multiple strains of attention. What is the affective center of a given passage and how do we read it in terms of what is being represented?

 

6. POINT OF VIEW/TEXTUAL SUBJECTIVITY/ADDRESS: Some ideas about writing emphasize point of view as though a person (author, human-ish speaker, human-ish narrator) is talking. Some ideas emphasize the text’s attitudes as different from human ones (see e.g. A. C. Spearing’s introduction to Textual Subjectivity). What is going on in this text you are critically reading? What is the attitude of the language and/or graphic layout? To whom does the text seem to be addressed?

 

7. PAGE/SCREEN/CODEX/OBJECT INTERFACE: What are the relative effects of the layout (paragraph length, strophe styles, image-text ratios, etc)? What expectations are apparently raised or conveyed in its interface? We are trained to view some layouts as invisible: a prime example is the continuous paragraph layout of a normative novel in regularized chapters.

 

8. SENSITIVITY TO SWERVE/DEFORMANCE: What happens when you expand or contract or otherwise alter the set-up of a given piece? If you expand, filling in virtually all of the details you perceive as now occluded (in the representational style or described scene or psychic persona), how do your ideas about the text change? If you contract a given piece, deleting details such as adjectives, spacing, personal pronouns, described scenes, how do your ideas about the text change? Keep in mind our primary focus on representational aspects of imaginative writing.

 

9. GENRE: What is the genre of this week’s reading? How can you tell? How does it matter? What is the relation of genre to representation? What is the relation of this particular genre instance to our engagement with it?

 

 

ENGL 769 Essays

Essay organization and style

You may structure your essays according to a normative Anglo-American-Australasian academic model of continuous paragraphs. If you do so, your handling of paragraph focus, paragraph order, transition, and argument development will be assessed accordingly. If you compose with an alternate approach, the internal logic of that approach must be evident and will form the basis for an assessment of its effectiveness in relation to your essay material. For example, you may choose to formulate a dialog between two interlocutors presenting differing viewpoints on a text and topic. You may set forward a series of enumerated points in regards to a topic and texts. In the first case the logic of the dialectic, and in the second case the logic of the sub-topics (the enumerated points), will be assessed in relation to your essay material.

 

Make sure your organizational approach coincides with your big picture imperative: as you formulate you initial topical urges and ask yourself “so what?” questions, be sure that your speculative (and then developed) essay organization bears a cogent relation to your “so what?” answer(s).

 

Lisa’s three levels of criticality

Detail: the level of close attention. A critical writer who specializes in detail reading shows a strong ability to move patiently through a sample of relevant work and demonstrate clearly how aspects of that sample are relevant to the analytic, evaluative, or scholarly questions of the essay topic. The aspects attended to in such detail work might include (but are not limited to) diction, syntax, grammar, images, symbols, close point of view, page area, line length, language sounds, material, paratext(s), local structure, formal genre features, typography, screen restriction, codework, haptics, and more.

 

Middle ground: the level of context, comparison, overall production. A critical writer who specializes in middle ground work can elucidate relevant details about the production of a particular work or type of work. Such a writer has strength in perceiving how cultural or technical circumstances can give rise to and can be perceived in certain kinds of work. A middle ground critical sensibility often finds interesting stories to tell about cultural movements/circumstances or bibliographic/other technological aspects of a work or type of production. Middle ground work can also involve comparatives or generalisations across one whole work (how verbs are used, how paragraphs function, how interfaces are set up, etc) and/or between one work and another for a particular writer or situated genre, and/or the ability to generalize about genre and/or techne shifts in a time and place and/or for a particular writer or collaborative enterprise.

 

Big picture: the overall effect of your engagement with the text(s) at hand in the context of the essay topic. In research essays, big picture thinking is particularly important at two moments: in brainstorming, in early stages of formulating your research essay, you can imagine what your “big picture” implications might be – you can hypothesize without deciding exactly, you can have a fuzzy big picture. Later, when you are drafting your essay having decided your approach and execution, your big picture should become state-able. This state-able big picture is sometimes called a thesis, although your big picture implications may not be as singular as a thesis might be said to be. Whatever your essay organization, when you come to the end of your full essay draft, you should be able to state your big picture implications.

 

This process is why you should write introductions LAST, after you have shaped the essay as a whole and begun to get big picture clarity. In revision, the big picture is probably the zone in which a cool head and readiness to describe the implications of your work is most important. The delight of open critical thinking is turned to the stage of a single critical production and its performed boundaries, and you are able to (re)shape your detail work and middle ground work in accordance with increased big picture clarity.

 

Essay assessment rubric

A/A+ work. Successfully engages all three levels of criticality, with at least two of these levels particularly well engaged. Demonstrates with flair a workable critical approach and a workable comprehension of how the selected imaginative text(s) function with regard to that approach. Essay organization is optimal for the material.

A- work. Engages at least two levels of criticality particularly well, but does not really develop the third. Demonstrates solidly a workable critical approach and a workable comprehension of how the selected imaginative text(s) function with regard to that approach. Essay organization is very good for the material.

B+ work. Engages at least two levels of criticality but not as effectively. Demonstrates to some extent a workable critical approach and a workable comprehension of how the selected imaginative text(s) function with regard to that approach. Essay organization is good for the material.

B work. Engages at least one level of criticality very well but falters in the other two. Demonstrates, but not strongly, a workable critical approach and/or a workable comprehension of how the selected imaginative text(s) function with regard to that approach. Essay organization is functional for the material.

B- work. Does not engage very effectively with any level of criticality, but makes good effort to do so with at least one level. Does not manage a successful demonstration of a workable critical approach OR does not demonstrate a workable comprehension of how the selected imaginative text(s) function with regard to that approach. Essay organization is in an unstable relation to the material.

C+ work. Does not engage effectively with any level of criticality, but has some interesting material and effort brought to bear on that material without having managed to launch a focused version of an essay. Essay organization is somewhat problematic for the material.

C work. Neither engages with a level of criticality nor has figured out how to achieve a reflective stance with any of the material assembled for the essay. Essay organization is quite problematic for the material. This level of work still presents an effort to engage with the assignment at graduate level.

Below C work. This level of work does not present a graduate-level effort to engage with the assignment or materials.