The Craft of Writing

This course aims to enter “through the looking-glass” of humanity in order to provoke and challenge our basic preconceptions of reality and self, identity and other, and the ways in which our visions determine the seen and unseen. Using narrative as the means through which we might explore, we will take journeys into the radical unknown surrounding constellations of:

· the human and the animal…

· the human and the mind/body…

· the human and the machine…

…all the while interrogating questions of experience, representation, expression and understanding. At the same time, we will become conscious of the significance of the forms of these particular narratives themselves, and how the manner in which each story is told shapes and bends our reflections at hand. Such adventuring will combine more theoretical works, by such thinkers as Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Theodor Adorno and beyond, with the possibilities presented through the imaginings of Paul Auster, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad and much much more.

Throughout it all, we will aim to become more sensitive and inquisitive participants in the world of being, while developing still greater facility with our capacity as readers to cull and engage these insights in the form of our own writing – workshops will be held and advanced throughout the semester on this progression, as conceptually rigorous and textually situated as it will be!