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English 111.301
Experimental Writing: Uncreative Writing
Kenneth Goldsmith profile

R 1:30-4:30

It's clear that long-cherished notions of creativity are under attack, eroded by file-sharing, media culture, widespread sampling, and digital replication. How does writing respond to this new environment? This workshop will rise to that challenge by employing strategies of appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, plundering, as compositional methods. Along the way, we'll trace the rich history of forgery, frauds, hoaxes, avatars, and impersonations spanning the arts, with a particular emphasis on how they employ language. We'll see how the modernist notions of chance, procedure, repetition, and the aesthetics of boredom dovetail with popular culture to usurp conventional notions of time, place, and identity, all as expressed linguistically.

updated 2007-01-12
 
 
 
 


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Photo caption: Francis Daniel Pastorius, Beehive manuscript, 1696-1865, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
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