Instr:                 Lisa Samules
Office:              CRT 506,     229-5910
e-mail:              lsamuels@uwm.edu
Office hours:    by appointment.

Course Information:                      W        4:30-7:10pm    CRT 284

Course Description

This course will explore avant-garde poetics from Gertrude Stein to the year 2000. "Avant-garde poetics" tend to be written by practicing artists who want to investigate the purposes and possibilities of verbal art. The works these writer-critics produce tend to operate outside the rhetorical mainstream of academic scholarship and criticism although they may well be produced within the structures of that mainstream's academies and publishing venues.

The stature and quantity of such poetics (both new works and reprints of older books such as Stein's How to Write) have increased in the past twenty years as the
number of texts and contexts have expanded in the western academy. One of our designs will be to investigate just how "outside" these avant-garde works are, how for example they stand outside of (or not) the common split between theory and practice that we often witness in the present Anglo-American academy. If these texts are neither "objective" scholar-criticism nor, exactly, socio-political/cultural/philosophical/linguistic theory, then how do they function? What does it mean for a
poetics to be embedded in or presented as a work of art? The course will investigate poetics within the context of cultural struggles for interpretive control over meaning, art, language production, and what it means to "make sense." How might one develop the idea that a maker must be separate from a critic, that "subjectivity" is the opposite of "objectivity"?