In an interview in our Fall problem, Robert Glück advised Lucy Ives, “I take into consideration the workshops I ran at Small Press Visitors within the seventies and eighties, how studying grew to become part of writing. We had been studying our lives and dwelling our fictions.” We requested Glück—whose free neighborhood workshops spearheaded the New Narrative motion in San Francisco—for a syllabus from certainly one of his former lessons. This one is from a course referred to as The Displaced Particular person.
Right here is my catalog description: This M.F.A.-level course in fiction explores—by way of readings, writing assignments, and demanding essays—the various methods by which alienation defines the self, from Lacan’s mirror stage, the place the self involves be organized round a picture outdoors of the physique, to the varied sorts of exile we expertise by advantage of sophistication, age, race, and sexuality, in addition to the hatred of the opposite, the discontents of language, and the economies of delight that society appears to be based on.
I assigned class shows, inventive responses based mostly on my prompts, and temporary essential responses—two observations supported by examples. Discrete observations permit college students to precise and get previous preliminary resistance.
My class anthology was extra of an atmosphere than a set syllabus. I additionally taught books—Jane Bowles’s Two Critical Women, Philip Ok. Dick’s Ubik. I had a session on the Gnostics and imported Bruce Boone to speak about them.
A number 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; tales by Isaac Babel; Again Roads to Far Cities, Basho; Firm, Samuel Beckett; “The Collector of Treasures” and different tales by Bessie Head; “Enrique Martín,” “Final Evenings on Earth,” and “Dance Card,” Roberto Bolaño; “The Gloomy Temper of Ah Mei on a Sunny Day,” “Raindrops within the Crevice between the Tiles,” “Cleaning soap Bubbles within the Soiled Water,” “The Fog,” and “Hut on the Mountain,” Can Xue; “The Lifeless Man,” “Madame Edwarda,” and “The Notion of Expenditure”, Georges Bataille; “The Idyll,” “The Insanity of the Day,” and “Foucault/Blanchot,” Maurice Blanchot; “Sleep It Off, Woman,” Jean Rhys; “The Mirror Stage,” (that is fairly a superb cartoon clarification of Lacan’s idea) Jacques Lacan; Diary, Vaslav Nijinsky; excerpts from a day within the lifetime of p., kari edwards; excerpt from Nice Expectations, Kathy Acker; The Return of Portray, Leslie Scalapino; “On the Line,” Deleuze & Guattari; from Smooth Structure, Lisa Robertson; from Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva; from Ugly Man, “The Ash Grey 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; “Cannabis in Marseilles,” “The Work of Artwork within the Age of Mechanical Copy,” and “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin; “We Refugees,” Giorgio Agamben; from The Arab Apocalypse, Etel Adnan; “Splendor within the Wind,” Raúl Zuritas; “Thomas Gospel” and different gospels from the Gnostic Gospels. Different writings included works by Lydia Davis, Fanny Howe, Camille Roy, Darius James, Charles Baudelaire, Edmond Jabès, and Mehdi Charef.
Pattern project:
Write a web page or two of knowledge literature. By that I imply, what you suppose the reality is, nevertheless you need to put it. No parodies of the Bible please.
Robert Glück is the creator of 9 books of poetry and prose, together with the novel Margery Kempe and the lengthy poem I, Boombox.
