Department of English

Unsettling the Word:  The Attack of the Difficult Poems (The Aversive Poetics of Estrangement, Disburbance, Expropriation, Abnormality, and the Pataqueerical)

Seminar visits by Johanna Drucker on both the word made visible and aesthetic complicity; Jerome McGann on textual conditions; Michael Davidson on disability; Marjoie Perloff on Uncreative Genius; and Al Filreis on radio, pedagogy, and PennSound. Approaches clinical and unclinical to cornucopia of abnormal texts, from Poe and Dickinson, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, to Stein and Zukofsky, Eigner and Weiner, Scalapino, Brossard, Howe, and Bök, with special reference to Jarry, Russian Futurism, Dada, and Wittgenstein. Conception/syllabus in formation, check back here for updates. More info and updates/changes at http://writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/syllabi/unsettling.html.