Department of English

World/Order

This is a writing course, concerned with orders of world that the writer refuses. It is about imagining “outside” and making peace with its impossibility, or virtuality. As such the course will be a formal experiment. For about the first half of the course, we will collaboratively read the texts I select. I will then turn the floor to you --- for worldbuilding. We’ll come to a consensus about several additional texts that provide a model for characterizing epistemological location and/or duration, or enact “world’s” formal fragmentation; these will guide independent weekly research and writing for the remainder of the course.

Possible Readings:

Gilles DeLeuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Michel Foucault, History of Madness (strongly suggest reading before our first meeting) 

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979)

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward A Global Idea of Race

Gayl Jones, Mosquito