The main reading for each session is set by the visitor, and will be posted below by week, along with short, additional readings intended to provide some background and define terms. Each Friday by noon, two members of the class will post 300-500 word responses to the most recent seminar on our “Discussion” page. As our final project develops, specific assignments toward that work will appear below as well.
Week 1 (Sept. 7)
An introduction to the class’s protocols and tendencies, and to each other. No assigned reading.
Week 2 (Sept. 14)
For our own purposes (meaning our first hour of discussion as a class), let’s all take a look at this ultra-concise “reader” that gathers some reflections on the concept of “knowledge” across various disciplines. And I am throwing in this thing (which I mentioned) on the terminology around disciplinarity and its alternatives. Just skim! Finally, the main readings are here below, as links. Jeff Dolven has given us the following for his visit:
Peters, from “Speaking into the Air”
and a piece by Jeff himself (NB: not the main reading; for perusal)
Week 3 (Sept. 21)
This week, for our time together, let’s move from our collation of “Knowledge” texts to a comparably selective/concise collection of readings on EXPERIENCE — a favorite category of mine. Jeff and I taught a whole Graduate Seminar on this topic some years back, which took shape in a final project that was part of the 31st Ljubljana Biennial (we were able to bring the whole class along that summer…). On the topic of experience vs. knowledge (just to warm up the discussion for Wednesday), I will offer you this from Truth and Method: “…the dialectical illusion of experience perfected and replaced by knowledge is the unattainable ideal of the Enlightenment.” That is a quote worth unpacking, in my view (see the Bloomsbury edition at p. 368 if you want to follow up). MEANWHILE, our guest, Professor Elizabeth Davis, has given us the following as the reading for her visit:
Holmes and Marcus, “Refunctioning Ethnography”
her own writings on the “artifactual” (NB: to peruse & NOT FOR CIRC.)
Week 4 (Sept. 28)
Picking up on our discussions of “Knowledge” and “Experience,” and pivoting to some very practical implications/applications of all of this (since we have been touching these university-administrative matters in every session now), I propose that we look, for our initial hour at the AAUP‘s “In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education” and Judith Butler’s response, “A Dissenting View from the Humanities on the AAUP’s Statement on Knowledge.” And I am delighted that we will have the immensely gifted visual artist Martha Friedman with us (who has run the Visual Arts program at the Lewis Center, and is otherwise engaged in studio teaching), together with Mitra Abbaspour, the Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton Art Museum. Our readings are as follows:
Bozicnik, Campt, and Holmes, Essays in Castoffs
Week 5 (Oct. 5)
There was consensus that folks wanted more on Interdisciplinarity “proper,” and so let’s try this excerpt from Jerry Jacobs’ book In Defense of Disciplines, and also Julie Thompson Klein and Robert Frodeman’s “Interdisciplining Humanities: A Historical Overview.” Marshall Brown will be joining us from Architecture, and the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. He has asked us to read:
Sylvia Lavin, from Kissing Architecture
and his own text from The Architecture of Collage
Week 6 (Oct. 26)
We have Eddie Glaude coming this week, and you will find a pair of his texts here below. I suggest we also take a look at this piece by Wendy Brown on neoliberalism and the universities. This is a topic that has come up several times now, and it is a text that was read in last year’s 583, so I think we should go for it. Professor Glaude will be joining us for the last hour of the seminar, and this will give us some time at the front end to discuss the emerging final project stuff (I hear you all got together and are thinking about footnotes….)
“Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person (1969)” from Civil Wars by June Jordan
Week 7 (Nov. 2)
We agreed that we were going to hold this session without a guest, so we can focus on reading/discussing some of the themes that have emerged across our own conversations up to this point — and so we can firm up the final project. It is time! To that end, I would like to ask everyone to come to our class with a concrete proposal for a final project (something you think, given our discussions to this point, we might plausibly collaborate to achieve). You may do this individually, or you may collaborate, as you like, in a self-organizing way. Everyone (i.e., every proposal) will have five minutes or so to present, and some time for Q & A. Please write something up for these, and bring your write-up to our session on paper. Think of it as a written assignment. They may be short. One page is fine. Longer is OK too. You are free to show images or give us links in the course of these presentations.
Meanwhile, picking up on our WEEK 5 reflections on “non-knowing,” and in the context of the emerging shared-doc thematization of citation practices, I have gathered a set of three short readings for us:
Robert Procter, “Agnotology” (2008) — the introduction to the edited volume that got mentioned two weeks back.
Yves Citton, “The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Knowledge and Authority” (2010) — the eponymous Rancière book is difficult to excerpt, and I admire Citton; this précis is of real value, and will get us all on the same page about the claims of the original, while also providing, I think, some valuable context.
Stevens and Williams, “The Footnote, in Theory” from Critical Inquiry (2006) — summarizes the Grafton argument, but gets a bit away from the history of history, by looking at contemporary citation practices. Depending on how the final project takes shape, we may dig in on Grafton’s stuff more directly. Let’s use this now to warm up reflection on this theme.
Week 8 (Nov. 9)
We have Professor Hare joining us from Comparative Literature this week, and he has asked us to read Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (in translation from the original Japanese, one of the languages in which Professor Hare works). This is a slightly longer primary text than we have been reading, so do leave time for it (and I will omit any additional reading on our project; though I think we should start to collect examples of what we are pointing toward doing). I have included, above, a link to the archive.org copy, which can be borrowed online. That is the edition he has recommended (the 1977 translation by Harper and Seidensticker). I do own this copy, and can make a pdf for anyone who requests it of me via email; but otherwise, I am going to assume you can sort out workable access). In addition, Professor Hare has asked us to take a look at the following piece of his own work:
Week 9 (Nov. 16)
I am delighted that we were able to secure an hour with Professor Anthony Grafton for this session — given the direction of the final project, I can hardly imagine a scholar better positioned to contextualize our interest in traditions of commentary and annotation (both within and beyond the worlds of scholarship). Don’t forget that we will gather (and end) an hour early this week, to accommodate Professor Grafton’s schedule. He has suggested that we look at the two texts below. While, in general, we privilege the text not by our visitor, this week, I suggest we center our attention on the “Commentary” essay. But do spend time with the Pope! For our own “library,” I want to draw your attention to a book that shaped my own thinking about annotation and citation. I am not going to assign it, but you should familiarize yourself with it: Genette’s Paratexts (originally published in 1987 in French, and translated into English a decade later). Please peruse, examine, etc.
Grafton, on “Commentary” from The Classical Tradition
Pope, an extract from the Dunciad
