Form and Figura, from Varro to Bergvall

Cost: $200

Instructor: Angela Carr

Contact: a.carr@tnsow.com

Duration: 1 week intensive (31 MAY – 4 JUNE, 12noon-4pm)

Capacity: 12 students

To come to an understanding of it by standing in it, by becoming it. Very gradually, this transforms a shoe into a foot, extends copyism into writing, and perhaps writing into being. This whole copying business was turning out to be a hands-down affair. This was an illuminating, if disturbing, development. — Caroline Bergvall

In this course, we will look at ideas of plastic conceptualisms and contemporary poetics. We will look at various takes on the meaning of “form,” starting with Varro, the early Latin linguist who conflated form with figura. Discussions will likely include but won’t be limited to theories of poetic practices referred to as procedural, conceptual, oulipo, foulipo, /n/oulipo, fluxus, etc. and polemics of form, originality and expression.

We will read Fig (2005) an exciting collection of performance and installation works by text-based artist Caroline Bergvall, a European poet whose ongoing interdisciplinary, multilingual practice began in the 80s in London. Bergvall is well known, for example, for “Via”, a text compiled from English translations, spanning 700 years, of the first few lines in Dante’s Inferno.

This is a writing class and in-class exercises will include manifesto writing, translation, procedural experimentation and collaboration.

Reading package:

Fig, Caroline Bergvall (Salt, 2005).

Coursework:

Everyone will be expected to have read Fig for the first day of the course. Each day of class will begin with discussion based on texts from that book. Other reading, in the form of selected texts, may be made available closer to the start date of the course. This is an intensive course, and time will be dedicated daily to both theoretical discussion and in-class writing.