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Summer Seminar
‘These fragile leaves’: Humanities at the Threshold of the Human
University of the Andes, ColombiaJune 8-21, 2016
Instructor: Edward S. Cutler, Brigham Young UniversityEmail: [email protected] Hours: TBD
Seminar Overview
An odd constellation has emerged upon the horizon of 21st-century critical thought. Its points of demarcation—object-oriented ontology (OOO), post-humanism, actor-network theory, distant-reading, genre studies, deep-time, fractal theory, the rhizome, the Anthropocene—outline what amounts to a radical post-historical turn, one that challenges received notions of what it means to be a human, part of a society, and situated within history.
Given that our species and its proximate ancestors existed on this planet for several millennia before literacy emerged, let alone anything resembling human expression, should “humanists” be content to account for our humanness within the relatively tiny sliver of time we designate as historical? Given that our species-existence now influences every aspect of the earthly life on a scale akin to the great forces of nature, do old binaries between nature and culture, subject and object still hold, or is our current geological era more aptly to be considered the Anthropocene, rather than the Holocene, as a better way to chart our species’ outsized relations to the geopolitical present and potential earthly futures? Should humanists regard the humanities far more broadly than they traditionally have, from the standpoint of our planetary imprint—the intricate lattice of global networks that generate a myriad of “unnatural” or hybridized bodies and things that bring a corresponding host of biological consequences--and not distinguish between the few productions we subjectively value and the vast, systemic byproducts we regard as mere waste?
This seminar will engage these and related questions in a heuristic, constructive fashion, to help clarify:
how you conceptualize and articulate the work you do as a humanist
how this work may benefit from and contribute to interdisciplinary perspectives, including those of the sciences
how humanistic study may contribute to a meaningful, sustainable planetary future
To help us focus and get a feel for the applicability of what I’m calling post-historical theory, we will discuss the critical readings in relation to a few primary texts that were among the first to cast human being against deeply geological, even cosmic, scales of time. Read in this light, we may discern certain limitations inherent in the subjective orientation of most philosophy and literature, but more than mere critique, I imagine our reading will pulse with newfound resonance and disclose unexamined linkages between poetics, prehistory, the forms of consciousness, the deeply material rhythms of time, and the contingencies of biological existence on our home planet.
Texts
Collins, Christopher. Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination. New York: Columbia UP, 2014.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2003 (reprint, paperback ed.).
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass, 1860. Iowa City, U of Iowa P, 2009.
Requirements & Assignments
Daily preparation, attendance, participation, and a critical response post to the Daily Reading Forum (25%)
Verbal-Image Paper (35%) Tracing Associations Paper (40%)
Assigned work may be completed in English or Spanish.
Reading Schedule
Wed June 8 Part One: Deep Time
‘the origin of all poems’: Leaves of Grass
Read Leaves of Grass, from “Walt Whitman” pp 23-30 [Borges translation: “Canto de Mi Mismo,” pp 20-34]
Read from Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, “Walt Whitman” pp 56-61
Due:
Post on Daily Reading Forum
Thu June 9 Image and Origin
Read from Collins, Paleopoetics, “The Idea of a Paleopoetics,”pp 1-27; “The World as We See It,” pp 82-105
Read Leaves of Grass, “There Was a Child Went Forth” pp 221-223; from “Song of Myself,” pp 58-76 [Borges trans. pp 82-116]
Due: Post on Daily Reading Forum
Fri June 10 Before Language: The Verbal Image
Read from Collins, Paleopoetics, “Human Communication: From Pre-Language to Protolanguage,” pp 106-140; “The Poetics of the Verbal Artifact,” pp 175-205
Read Leaves of Grass, “To the Sayers of Words,” pp 329-336
Due:
Post on Daily Reading Forum
Mon June 13 Part Two: Territories of Desire
The Orchid and the Wasp: Grass and Other Rhizomes
Read Leaves of Grass, “Salut au Monde!,” pp 243-258; from ‘Calamus’ section: “In Paths Untrodden,” “Scented Herbage of My Breast, pp 341-344, “States!,” pp 349-351; “The Prairie-grass Dividing,” p 368
Read from Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 1: “Introduction: Rhizome,” pp 1-28; Chapter 3: “587 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs,” pp 129-172
Due:
Verbal-Image Assignment
Post on Daily Reading Forum
Tue June 14 From the Middle, sans Subject and Object
Film day! (view in class): Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1965)
Read Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,
Due:
Post on Daily Reading Forum
Chapter 7: “Year Zero: Faciality,” pp 195-224
Wed Jun 15 Lines of Flight: The Nomad War Machine
Read Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 12: “Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine,” pp 409-492
Due:
Post on Daily Reading Forum
Thu Jun 16 Hips Don’t Lie: The Body Without Organs
Read Whitman, Leaves of Grass, “Leaves of Grass” [numbered poems 11-24],” pp 227-242; from “Calamus”: “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,”pp 344-346; “Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?” pp 358-359; “Who Is Now Reading This?” pp 361-362; “O LOVE!” pp 369-370
Read Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 6: “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs,” pp 149-166
Due:
Post on Daily Reading Forum
Fri Jun 17 Part Three: Gathering Things
Actor-Network TheoryRead Latour, Reassembling the Social, “Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations,” pp 1-16; “On the Difficulty of Being an ANT: An Interlude in the Form of a Dialog,” pp 141-156
Field Trip: Museo del Oro
Due:
Post on Daily Reading Forum
Mon Jun 20 The Enemy of Narrative: Collection and Assemblage
Read Latour, Reassembling the Social, Part II: “How to Render Associations Traceable Again,” pp 157-246
Due:
Post on Daily Reading Forum
Tue Jun 21 CodaHow the Humanities Matter: Matters of Concern
contra Matters of Critique
Read Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic
Due:
Tracing Associations Paper
Transformation of Archives” and examine the Walt Whitman Archive
Read Whitman, Leaves of Grass, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” pp 379-388
*Final Post on the Daily Reading Forum
*Your final post should be a 300-400 word reflection on future directions your own work might take as a result of your course of study in this seminar
