The Center for Experimental Humanities
New York University
Spring 2018
DRAP-GA 3026
Literature, media studies, history of art

At a time when digital techniques for saving and indexing allow us to consolidate endless memory in pocket-size devices, what memorial power remains in a sentence or paragraph? More than a course on memoir, this is an intensive introduction to the work of art as mnemonic device, or system to aid and deepen, and/or create, memory.

This course aims to familiarize students with varied creative texts that at once describe the art of memory and engage in acts of recollection, recovery, and memorialization. Readings and artworks selected for the syllabus frequently defy straightforward generic classification. They offer examples of the ways in which works of literature—along with sculpture, installations, film, and other forms of visual art—emerge out of authors’ careful thinking through of relationships between language and memory, as well as between images and memory.

To download a PDF of the syllabus, please click on the disk icon at above right

XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement
New York University
Spring 2019
CEH-GA 3042
Creative writing, expository writing, literature, media studies, history of art

This is a course on method and writing. In other words, it is a course on how we can develop working strategies that will allow us to produce fluent, complex texts—and how we can return to pieces we have already written in order to see them anew and, perhaps, to alter them. Method, etymologically speaking, has to do with the cultivation of a metaphorical road or way. Thus, this course will focus on techniques that are adjacent to the art of writing, if not always identical to it. This is not a workshop, in the sense in which that term is often used in relation to literary endeavors; that said, this is a workshop, radically speaking, in that it will provide you with a set of concrete practices, an improved conceptual vocabulary regarding research and revision, and models for researching and revising your own creative work.

To download a PDF of the syllabus, please click on the disk icon at above right