How do we imagine new possibilities for being in the world, new ways of thinking and feeling, new ways of organizing social and political life, new ways of expressing ourselves? Sometimes, it takes the monstrous. We will understand the “monstrous” as the play of the avant-garde, the disruptions of unusual action, the shock of the incomprehensible to open our minds and unlearn what might be getting in the way of positive change. In this sense, artists, writers, and thinkers have built monsters and created new possibilities in part by drawing from the past; building on their own unique set of influences, projects, antecedents, and sources to launch new projects and equip themselves with the intellectual and imaginative capacity to take meaningful action in the present. As the American poet William Carlos Williams asks us: “What would happen in a world . . . lit by the imagination?”  

In this program, we will examine literary and political threads of rebellion, of radical rethinking and disruption: those that use formal experimentation and novel collaborations, those that cross mediums and genres, those that flow between art and politics, and those that allow us to rethink the way things are. We’ll trace a broad, weird, and powerful legacy of projects and schools of political and aesthetic thought (text-based but also beyond the page) that have changed the world and are changing the world right now.  

Though we’ll read many authors, core readings by Kafka and Beckett will provide anchors throughout both quarters, connecting literary disruptions of narrative and form with our sensibility for the “Kafkaesque” and the “Beckettian” in art, politics, and social life.  

In the fall, in addition to reading contemporary writers whose work manifests the monstrous and constitute emergent, experimental, and rigorous calls to action, we will also explore the work of contemporary social practice artists whose material and infrastructural interventions use the methods of collaborative public art to intervene in politics and put them in conversation with literary works that emerge out of and speak to communities in resistance.  

In the winter, we’ll continue our study of the intersection of the aesthetic and political imagination, integrating the Dadaist, Surrealist, and Situationist reactions to the deadening cultural frameworks inherited from the 19th century. We’ll follow their strategies into the punk aesthetic of the 70s and 80s and the indigenous Zapatista rebellion in Mexico in 1994. 

Through the fall and winter, you will work deeply and collaboratively with several major and ancillary texts, responding in a variety of ways, including critical and creative writing and imaginative projects and actions that synthesize and celebrate your thinking. Lectures will emphasize contextualization and close study of our readings, political and social developments, thematic connections, and reading and writing skills. Workshops will support students in developing research skills and practicing critical and creative writing. Seminars will be a forum for rich discussions of texts and preparation for essays and other critical work.

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:

FALL

4- Literary Arts and Studies: Modern and Contemporary

4- Cultural Theory & Aesthetics

4- Writing: Inquiry, Research, and Essay

2- Creative Writing

2- Political Philosophy

4- Literary Arts and Studies: Modern and Contemporary

4- Cultural Theory & Aesthetics

4- Writing: Inquiry, Research, and Essay

2- Creative Writing

2- Political Philosophy