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 send 300-500 word responses to the most recent seminar to CW and KN, who will post these on our “Discussion” page. As our final project develops, specific assignments toward that work will appear below as well.
September 2: Introduction
September 9: For the first half of class, we’ll spend some time discussing the reading in this “Experience” Packet, a selection of experience-related texts by Emerson, Benjamin, Williams, Agamben, Robinson, Anzaldúa, and hooks. We will work on this packet next week as well.
Our guests Jeff Dolven (English) and Florian Fuchs (German) have asked us to read a nice batch of texts, including: Erasmus’ De Ratione Studii (1514), Locke’s “Of Study” (1677), Locke’s “New Method of a Common-Place Book”(1686) alongside excerpts from their own texts Jeff’s Scenes of Instruction (2007) and Florian’s Civic Storytelling (2023). Plus, a bit of bonus material: “Clipping, Copying, and Thinking,” a recording of a conversation between Ann Blair and Kenneth Goldsmith hosted at Cabinet Magazine in 2011.
September 16: “Experience” packet continued.
We won’t have a visitor during the second half of class so instead will begin brainstorming about possible directions for the final collaborative project.
September 23: “Knowledge” reading packet
Our guest Lisa Margulis (Music) has asked us to read: 1) the intro to her edited volume The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future and 2) another piece she co-authored called “Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition“.
September 30: “Knowledge,” continued
October 7: “University” reading packet
Final project planning; no guest
October 14: FALL BREAK
October 21: “University,” continued
Robert Pogue Harrison (Stanford, French and Italian)
October 28:
November 4:
Our guest Paize Keulemans (East Asian Studies) has asked us to read an excerpt from Alex Galloway’s Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture and his own article “(Early) Modern Forms of Chinese Literary Play”.
November 11: Final project planning; no guest
November 18:
November 25: Final project planning; no guest
December 2: FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATION
