DMS 484 Language Media Poetics

Glazier :: MW 3:00PM – 4:50PM :: CFA 232
REG# 16877

This course offers an immersion into language media in literature, performance, film, and digital media, with an emphasis on Beat literature and postmodern poetries. THIS MAY BE ONE OF THE BEST COURSES ON BEAT LITERATURE YOU WILL EVER FIND! The course centers on a variety of literary artists including Kerouac, Ginsberg, Creeley, Olson, Duncan, Burroughs, Bowles, Weiner, Bernstein, Andrews, Howe, Hejinian, Cortez, Bukowski, and Henry Miller, among others. These are writers and writers who explore different levels of literary and artistic explorations, sometimes the seamy underside, sometimes the ecstatic extremes, the visionary, the experimental, the marginalized, the sensory, spiritual, or down-and-out, sometimes the truly avant-garde. Students will undertake readings of texts by these writers, watch films, video, and other documentary resources about/related to them, explore New Media works that extend these experimental practices into the twenty-first century, and hear from current leading authors in the field. We will explore why these writers entered these margins of experience, what can be gained from engaging their illusions, inspirations, and exhaustions, and how these practices might inform what students do with language in their own practice, thinking, and media production. Course will develop student skills on reading/writing in all areas, including critical and creative practices useful to media project production and other creative and scholarly endeavors. These include reflections, responses, creative close reading approaches, and analysis by students, themselves as artists and engaged cultural participants. Whether applying for graduate school, entering the work force, devoting their energies to their own artwork, or simply enriching their undergraduate education, this course offers students, regardless of major, working both in and out of the creative arts a unique opportunity to engage these works. There are NO prerequisites for this class. Course requirements include reading, exams, a film journal, an oral presentation, and a final project. Attendance is crucial. For Media Study majors, this course fulfills advanced analysis or Media Study elective. Course text: TBA.