Skip to main content

The Displaced Person: A Syllabus

In an interview in our Fall issue, Robert Glück told Lucy Ives, “I think about the workshops I ran at Small Press Traffic in the seventies and eighties, how reading became a part of writing. We were reading our lives and living our fictions.” We asked Glück—whose free community workshops spearheaded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco—for a syllabus from one of his former classes. This one is from a course called The Displaced Person.

Here is my catalog description: This M.F.A.-level course in fiction explores—through readings, writing assignments, and critical essays—the many ways in which alienation defines the self, from Lacan’s mirror stage, where the self comes to be organized around an image outside of the body, to the various kinds of exile we experience by virtue of class, age, race, and sexuality, as well as the hatred of the other, the discontents of language, and the economies of pleasure that society seems to be founded on.

I assigned class presentations, creative responses based on my prompts, and brief critical responses—two observations supported by examples. Discrete observations allow students to express and get past initial resistance.

My class anthology was more of an environment than a set syllabus. I also taught books—Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik. I had a session on the Gnostics and imported Bruce Boone to talk about them.

Some of the readings:

“We Refugees,” Hannah Arendt; “Correspondence with Jacques Rivière,” “All writing is pigshit …,” “Fragments of a Journal in Hell,” and “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society,” Antonin Artaud; stories by Isaac Babel; Back Roads to Far Towns, Basho; Company, Samuel Beckett; “The Collector of Treasures” and other stories by Bessie Head; “Enrique Martín,” “Last Evenings on Earth,” and “Dance Card,” Roberto Bolaño; “The Gloomy Mood of Ah Mei on a Sunny Day,” “Raindrops in the Crevice between the Tiles,” “Soap Bubbles in the Dirty Water,” “The Fog,” and “Hut on the Mountain,” Can Xue; “The Dead Man,” “Madame Edwarda,” and “The Notion of Expenditure”, Georges Bataille; “The Idyll,” “The Madness of the Day,” and “Foucault/Blanchot,” Maurice Blanchot; “Sleep It Off, Lady,” Jean Rhys; “The Mirror Stage,” (this is quite a good cartoon explanation of Lacan’s theory) Jacques Lacan; Diary, Vaslav Nijinsky; excerpts from a day in the life of p., kari edwards; excerpt from Great Expectations, Kathy Acker; The Return of Painting, Leslie Scalapino; “On the Line,” Deleuze & Guattari; from Soft Architecture, Lisa Robertson; from Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva; from Ugly Man, “The Ash Gray Proclamation” Dennis Cooper; poems of Paul Celan; from The Lover, Marguerite Duras; from Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Thomas Bernhard; from The Bruise, Magdalena Zurawski; A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Danilo Kiš; “Robin,” “1969,” Eileen Myles; “Hashish in Marseilles,” “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin; “We Refugees,” Giorgio Agamben; from The Arab Apocalypse, Etel Adnan; “Splendor in the Wind,” Raúl Zuritas; “Thomas Gospel” and other gospels from the Gnostic Gospels. Other writings included works by Lydia Davis, Fanny Howe, Camille Roy, Darius James, Charles Baudelaire, Edmond Jabès, and Mehdi Charef.

Sample assignment:

Write a page or two of wisdom literature. By that I mean, what you think the truth is, however you want to put it. No parodies of the Bible please.

 

Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including the novel Margery Kempe and the long poem I, Boombox.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/JBZfWhL
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

  Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us.  —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Re-Covered: Living Through History

  A woman sips a cup of tea after her street is struck by a German bombing raid, 1940 Since the beginning of lockdown, I’ve sought refuge in sagas set during the Second World War. There is something deeply comforting about reading stories in which people are trying to live their lives against the backdrop of an intense global crisis, not least because it’s given me a much-needed sense of perspective. It’s so easy to become caught up in the myriad horrors of the contemporary moment, one sometimes forgets that the darkest days of the Second World War would have been just as depressing and desperate as the period we’re living through right now. Of the many books on the subject I read, Blitz Spirit: Voices of Britain Living Through Crisis, 1939–1945 —a brilliant new compendium of extracts from wartime diaries compiled from the Mass Observation Archive by the anthologist, editor, and literary agent Becky Brown—has stuck with me. Mass Observation (MO) was set up in 1937 by the anthr...
Post a Comment
Read more