Annotation
WRITING AS EXPERIMENT: WRITERS ON WRITING
David Vichnar, PhD (Consultations: by appointment, 219b)
Optional M.A. Course, Special Programme in Critical & Cultural Theory
Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (Tue 15.50-17.20 pm, Room 34)
The course will explore a range of 20th-century writers, Anglophone and Francophone, for whom writing presented not only a practical activity but also a theoretical “problem”. In turn, they wrote essays, manifestos, criticism, and theory in which they subjected “writing” to scrutiny while also giving voice to their “experimental” programmes.
Departing from an introductory lecture on “writing & the experience of/as experiment,” the course will consider the many intersections between writing / poetics / ideology and politics in the experimentalism of Kathy Acker, Antonin Artaud, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, André Breton, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, William S. Burroughs, Michel Butor, Hélène Cixous, B.S. Johnson, James Joyce, Kenneth Goldsmith, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Gertrude Stein, Philippe Sollers, David Foster Wallace, and Virginia Woolf.
MOODLE LINK TO SYLLABUS & ALL READINGS: https://dl1.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=14013