30.452 Experimental Criticism: The Desire to Write

This course invites students to think about how we “critique” and “criticize.” What does it mean to write/think critically? More particularly, this course explores the limits of criticism and asks explicitly what it might mean to abandon some of the forms to which we have grown accustomed (i.e. the essay). Drawing on affect, feminist, and queer theories, students will read closely, creatively, critically, and carefully a range of authors, and we will consider how these authors write. Students will gain an appreciation of form, genre, and style. Topics to be considered include: écriture féminine, embodied writing, fluidity, “the desire to write,” performative and periperformative, affect and emotion, rectal poetics, etc. Authors may include: Roland Barthes, Ann Cvetkovich, Wayne Koestenbaum, Carol Mavor, Marcel Proust, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Susan Sontag, and others. This course is writing and reading intensive, students will produce short examples of experimental criticism on a weekly basis, as well as a longer term paper.

Cross-registered with (Gender and Women’s Studies) 36.452.

Prerequisite: 12 credit hours in English and Creative Writing