Topic Holes and Surfaces: Marking the Material Relations of Objects & Tracing their Hidden…

Catalog description

This course will train students in writing with and about visual representations, providing them, along the way, with a hands-on introduction to the growing field of creative-critical writing, the kind of thinking that may begin in the classroom but whose research is produced for the public. In our investigations of a writing that crosses lines of artistic production and critical theory, so called artistic and scholarly practices, students will read and discuss texts across genres and media, with a focus on work produced by Indigenous, Black, Latina/o, migrant, and queer creators. Part imaginative creative writing workshop and place-based research and learning project, students will build on their in-class writing and seminar discussions, inviting them to think about the inner lives and life spans of objects, and the spaces, shared practices, materials, and persons associated and often obscured by those objects, alongside their past and future movements. The arc of the course will thus emphasize a sustained and collaborative interaction with the subjects and themes of our early seminars, giving students the opportunity to experientially and imaginatively engage with the topics of material cultures and visual representations through 1) readings and discussion; 2) generative writing workshops; and 3) archival research in the South Street Seaport Museum in connection with digital research opportunities through the New York Public Library.