form: class1
What is form? Simply, it is the shape something can take. When we use the word combined with language, the types of shapes we speak of are limited by that content... but the limitation still leaves us with a number of possibilities we could not attend to in our lifetimes. In his seminal biological text "The Origin of the Species," Charles Darwin wrote this about the expansion of formal potential in life:
...whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Language is the same. Which is an oversimplification, of course, but also not. When we talk about the shapes of language, we might be talking about its shape in the mouth, or its pattern as sound waves when spoken. We could be speaking of linguistic variation, different language families and their global interpolation, or we could be speaking of words themselves and their look on the page--their graphic representation, their fonts, their accumulation and flow within sentences. We might be speaking of sentence length and syntactical structure, the organization of those forms into songs or narratives, poetry or prose. We could be speaking about genre, and not just fiction and non-fiction but text vs. email vs. grail-mail vs. office memo vs. law vs. constitution vs. manifesto vs. suicide note. And as Darwin said, all these forms evolved and became specialized even as the the world turns and human nature still insists on war and sex and care-taking and cycles of trauma.
So, with all this to choose from, you might be asking what *we* will be talking about when we talk about form. And the answer is: we can talk about all of it. It is all welcome. The architecture of your spoken lives is available to you as material. Please bring it all to class. Please put all of it in your creative and more analytical (but still creative) work. Let your language be porous even as we work to be rigorous. I have had to make choices about the forms I wd introduce and the texts I wd use to introduce them. About *how* to formally teach this class which is at its heart, about making choices... and in 10 weeks, the choices I made will inevitably turn out to be inadequate. I will fail you in illuminating all the potential there is for your work, for your w/reading and for your w/riting. But I hope the pieces I ask you to begin creating and the ways in which I ask you to interact with the texts of the class... I hope these will at least gesture towards the infinite and the beautiful. Because, despite everything, I believe in the infinite and the beautiful and that writing is one way we can make our way towards them.
There is the set-up of the class which I need to be utterly clear in communicating. This class is hard. It requires that you w/read deeply 4-6 discrete pieces each week. Most are not terribly long, but they require your time. As does the w/riting. You have w/riting due nearly every class period... and it alternates between laboratory pieces, where you begin to engage with the strategies and micro-genres that we read each week, and deepwreads, which take the wreadings you did and bring them into meaningful conversation with a peer's laboratory work... to decipher for yourself the potentials of each week's focus.
If you do not do the work and do it on time you will fail the class. I have taught far too many classes lately where students have chosen to disengage for a myriad of reasons, some beyond their control but many not. I have made a choice with this one: it will not be possible to pass without commitment. If you do commit to the work however, you will find that my generosity (and the generosity of your fellow students) is abundant.
NOW- I want to take a few minutes to talk about the first thing you will be doing for this class: w/reading. You cannot w/rite well without approaching w/reading as a complex combination of several skills. Comprehension is only one of these. Focus is another. Attending to/truly listening for echoes of authorial intent is another. Contextualization is another. Understanding the relationship of technical choices and content is yet another, and it is the one that we will cast into relief in this class. To do that, you must put to the side the process of evaluation, the thumbs-up/thumbs-down knee-jerk response that you initially have towards *any* text, and that generationZ has been taught to make primary... a decision you make before you give material your attention and time. This has been a coping mechanism to deal with the onslaught of information coming your way. But it is also the biggest obstacle to becoming an excellent w/reader and w/riter. Whether you "like" something or not is - to put it bluntly - the absolutely least interesting, most general, and most dismissive thing you can say about a piece of literature or art. Even if it's the best thing you have ever read. And if your approval/disapproval is the *first* thing you speak about a thing, chances are you may not even know why you are saying it, which makes saying it an analytical crime. We will *not* be saying it. We will not be praising or dogging pieces in this class. We will be w/reading them... which is something else altogether.
To be clear - putting statements of evaluation to the side is emphatically *not* a process of dismissing your lived and bodily overall sense of a text. Not at all - instead, we will start with locating what it is in the text that stirs that holistic feeling. To provide language for this, we will look to a French literary theorist named Roland Barthes, who produced a book in 1980 still taught in basic photography classes. Yes. Photography. The book was called Camera Lucida - and I recommend it highly. For our purpose, there is a pair of terms Barthes introduced in the text that will help us tease out the cultural/political/intentional "meaning" of an image: the studium, from the personal catching-point in the image... the location in the image that connects with an individual and makes that work catch fire in the imagination: the punctum. I'm going to quote Barthes on this - because his words convey the idea in more wholeness than my paraphrase cd... even in translation.
There is another element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me - is poignant to me).
When we read a piece in this class--any piece-- I want you to actively search for *your* punctum... the point in the text that hurts you/wounds you/ignites you. Then try to relate that point back to the shape of the text, how it uses its strategies to do what it does (whatever that may be). Try to understand your punctum (the deepest point of connection between you and the text) may NOT be universal... and that the inverse may also be true... that the thing that distances you most from the text may, in fact, be another reader's punctum.
Our discussions each week will work to reinforce this essential knowledge. We are all individual readers with individual understandings of a text. Hearing other people's understandings enriches our own. W/reading in community is not a competition. We are world-building-- i.e. Minecraft NOT Fortnite.
