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Course Description

Summary

In this seminar, we join in consideration of our consciousness in the act of creation on and off the page, as a means and expression of revolution. We explore what a revolution in reading as writing and writing as reading means, in experience, for each of us; rather than relegating our understanding of consciousness to total mystery, the object of this class is to directly and indiscriminately read, and transcribe, our contents—thoughts, feelings, our experiences of fear, love, and so on—and to learn from what we write. The revolution, the reading of ourselves, or, as Gertrude Stein calls it, listening while talking to one's self, is about how we relate to our own attention. In turn, we hope to understand how inward, individual revolution communicates with the masses and the struggles of the human being at large. We will start small and build toward reading our every thought and feeling over the course of the semester. Our first weeks focus on basic meditations coupled with foundational readings by Simone Weil, J. Krishnamurti and Corita Kent; then our exercises become more specific to the core texts and literature, which range in an interdisciplinary fashion from poetry to philosophy, religious and political writings, including work by Clarice Lispector, Etty Hillesum, Brandon Shimoda, Gertrude Stein, and Helen Keller, among others. At both middle and end of term, students will turn in written records of their practices along with reflections on the central questions and aims of the course.