Proseminar in the Humanities: Working with Found Objects/The Abandoned Copy Syllabus Graduate

Catalog description

This course for incoming MA students is intended to lay the groundwork for inter- and trans-disciplinary research in the humanities. In the first half of the semester students will be asked to contend with a trove of essays that the professor has culled from abandoned copy baskets in this institution. Given the apparent randomness of these readings, what can we possibly learn from this syllabus? What connections, serious or spurious, speculative, or absurd can we make? Will different arrangements of these materials yield new or unexpected (ap)proximities and throughlines, relations or resonances? Guided by readings in the history of the humanities that suggest comparatism, pattern seeking, and storytelling as methods of meaning-making common to humanistic inquiry, we practice here a type of creative forensics that is as familiar to historians as visual artists—finding traces (archives and scraps, ruins, relics and artifacts), and deciding, quite literally, what to make of them. This thought experiment stages an encounter with found objects, and underlines the ways in which research involves a kind of thrownness into a world of always ongoing conversations. In the second half of the semester we turn to the work of scholars and artists in the inter- and transdiscipinary field of Black Studies, including Saidiya Hartman, Frantz Fanon, Arthur Jafa, Betye Saar, the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Fred Moten, and Thelonious Monk, who model how to work with and against “the given.” These engagements with found objects (and their transformations) are meant to spur students thinking about their own projects, clarify theoretical interests and methodological commitments and structure future individualized graduate study.