28th April 2022, 2-4pm
How can experimental criticism invite us to argue without ego, to undo the links between intelligence and arrogance, knowledge and domination—beyond the desire to be the smartest person in the room? “Criticism” might imply control, mastery, detachment, and a general attitude of knowing it all. An experiment, by contrast, asks us to be vulnerable to thought—to surprise ourselves and even say the wrong thing. We choose the experiment because we have a point to make, and making it unpredictably is part of the point. Experimental Criticism is a writing-intensive workshop using interpretive forms such as the index and monologue to animate our objects of attention in unexpected ways. Participants will be asked to bring an object of study, in any medium or genre, as a point of departure for a series of writing exercises. We will approach various techniques for reading/observing/listening to help us change our practice at the level of word and sentence, in search of a critical language that is both innovative and focused. Exercises will reference and take inspiration from the writing of Renee Gladman, Bernadette Mayer, Helen Mirra, Fred Moten, and Rachel Pollack.
Anahid Nersessian was born and raised in New York City. She attended Yale University as an undergraduate and got her Ph.D in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. After spending three years at Columbia University, she moved to Los Angeles, where she is a professor in the English Department at UCLA on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples. She is the author of three books, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (Chicago, 2021; Verso, 2022), The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago, 2020), and Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard, 2015), and has published widely in top scholarly journals as well as in The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, New Left Review, and n+1. She founded and co-edits the Thinking Literature series at the University of Chicago Press.