2024-2025 FROM CONFLUENCE TO CONFLUENCE ~ Grant Watson's seminar: Queer Forms
SEMINAR 1: DECEMBER 7 & 8 2024
The seminar at Nida will introduce queer experimental writing through the preface to Tyler Bradway’s book, in which he develops the notion of ‘bad reading’ to explore a relationship to text beyond or alongside academic protocols. Bradway shifts attention from the reader to the form the experimental writing takes. Asking what collage, quotation, narrative disjunction, or repetition might produce for the reader? The importance of reading and writing as creative practice (and life practice) will be explored through filmed interviews with the psychotherapist Suely Rolnik and artist Latipa (née Michelle Dizon). A second set of readings will include Robert Glück’s short essay ‘Long Note on New Narrative’ from ‘Communal Nude’ and excerpts from his novel ‘About Ed.’ Students will be invited to select passages from the latter to discuss. A key element of this seminar will be the dissertation writing workshop in which everyone is given the opportunity to share material. At Nida we will also be joined by DAI graduate Valeria Moro who will discuss her experience of dissertation writing and how she considers taking this forward.
Schedule
Saturday 7
AM - Introduction, GW presentation, reading Tyler Bradway.
PM – filmed interviews, movement, conversation with Valeria Moro
Sunday 8
AM – Reading Robert Glück, excerpts selected by students
PM – Dissertation workshop, movement, film, seminar forward planning
Readings
1. Preface (pp v – xiii) Bradway, T. (2017) Queer Experimental Literature, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
2. Long Note on New Narrative (pp 13 – 25) - Glück, R. (2016) Communal Nude Collected Essays, South Pasadena: Semiotext(e)
3. Pages 51 – 152 - Glück, R. (2023) About Ed, New York: New York Review of Books
4. Dissertation excerpts - Ariell Zéphyr, Anna Buyvid
SEMINAR 2: January 10, 11 & 12 2025
The January seminar at Nida will focus on the writer Kathy Acker through a selection of essays from her book ‘Bodies of Work’ and a text by Tyler Bradway from ‘Queer Experimental Literature.’ The seminar will address questions provoked by Acker in relation to contemporary practice concerning writing and resistance. What kind of subversive space did Acker carve out for herself as a writer? How did the reception of critical theory and the commodification of the avant-garde change her work? What did she want from the ‘languages of the body?’ The seminar will discuss Acker’s ideas about art and play as well as queer abjection and the figure of the pirate. It will include close readings of Bradway’s ‘Languages of the Body: Becoming Unreadable in Postmodernity,’ and Acker’s essays ‘Critical Languages’ (1990) ‘Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body’ (1992) and ‘Seeing Gender’ (1995). Reflecting the importance of affect in queer experimental literature we will read Rosemary Hennessy’s ‘The Materiality of Affect’ where the author explores how affect is colonised by capital and how it can become the basis for solidarity and resistance. Annette Rodriguez Fiorillo, Bel McLaughlin and Mia Tamme will share excerpts from their dissertations, and Leo Hugendubel and Patrick Freriksen shorter texts for the writing workshop.
Readings
Acker, K. (1997) Bodies of Work, London: Serpents Tail.
Bradway, T. (2017) Queer Experimental Literature, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hennessy, R. (2013) Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labour Organising on the Mexican Frontera, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Schedule
Friday
10:30 – 11:00
Recap on previous seminar
11:00 – 13:00
Reading – Tyler Bradway
13:00 – 14:30
Lunch break
14:30 – 16:30
Dissertation presentations
17:00 – 18:00
Kathy Acker documentary
Saturday 11
10:00 – 13:00
Reading – Kathy Acker
13:00 – 14.30
Lunch break
14:30 – 18:00
Dissertation Presentations
Sunday 12
10:00 – 13:00
Reading – Affect
13:00 – 14:30
Lunch break
14:30 – 18:30
Film (tbc)
17:00 – 18:00
Planning next seminar
