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Nathanaël

Associate Professor, Adjunct

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Bio

Adjunct Associate Professor, Low Res MFA. Books: Hatred of Translation; Pasolini's Our; La mort de ma sœur; L'heure limicole; The Middle Notebookes; N'existe; Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). Translations: Sun of Consciousness (Édouard Glissant); but it's a long way (Frédérique Guétat-Liviani); The Mausoleum of Lovers (Hervé Guibert); Murder (Danielle Collobert); The Obscene Madame D (Hilda Hilst); Poetic Intention (Édouard Glissant); Flowers of Spit (Catherine Mavrikakis). Awards: Centre National du Livre (France); PEN American Center (USA); Collège International de Traducteurs Littéraires (France); British Centre for Literary Translation (UK); Publishing Triangle Award (USA); Prix Alain-Grandbois (Qc); Chalmers Fellowship (Can). 

Publications

Hatred of Translation. Nightboat, 2019. D'un geste décidé. Fidel Anthelme X (Marseille), 2018. La mort de ma sœur. Dernier Télégramme (Limoges), 2018. Le cri du chrysanthème. Le Quartanier, 2018. Alula, de son nom de plume. L'Hexagone, 2018. Feder, a scenario. Nightboat Books, 2016. Laisse (rejet apparent). Mémoire d'encrier, 2016. L'heure limicole. Fidel Anthelme X (Marseille), 2016. The horses that come out of our heads. O'Clock Press, 2016. The Middle Notebookes. Nightboat Books, 2015 Asclepias: The Milkweeds. Nightboat Books, 2015. Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal. Nightboat Books, 2012.Carnet de somme. Le Quartanier, 2012. Carnet de deliberations. Le Quartanier, 2011.We Press Ourselves Plainly. Nightboat Books, 2010. Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). Nightboat Books, 2009. etc.

Translations

Sun of Consciousness (Soleil de la conscience) by Édouard Glissant. Nightboat, 2019. but it's a long way (mais ça fait loin) by Frédérique Guétat-Liviani. Nightboat, 2018. a body in spite (à corps défendant) by Alain Jugnon. Nightboat, 2017. A Spectacular Influence (Une spectaculaire influence) by Chantal Neveu. BookThug, 2015.The Mausoleum of Lovers (Le mausolée des amants) by Herve Guibert. Nightboat Books, 2014.Murder (Meurtre) by Danielle Collobert. Litmus Press, 2013.The Obscene Madame D (A obscena senhora D) by Hilda Hilst. With Rachel Gontijo Araujo. Nightboat Books / A Bolha Editora, 2012.Flowers of Spit (Fleurs de crachat) by Catherine Mavrikakis. BookThug, 2011.Poetic Intention (L'intention poétique) by Edouard Glissant. Nightboat Books, 2010.A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning (Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques) by Catherine Mavrikakis. Coach House Books, 2004.

Current Interests

Questions raised include translatability and mis-translation, language and the body, architecture and desire, photography in thought, ethics of encounter and the unexpected, subjective liminalities, and intimate representations of world-historical violence.

 

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

What are the most urgent issues in contemporary art now? This online course addresses the central themes and ideas shaping the production and distribution of art. Students will develop and manage their own blogs and participate in continuing online discussions. The final requirement will be a finished paper.

This formulation of Art Ideas will be attentive to the Caribbean archipelago as a place from which to perceive the world. Contesting continental presuppositions, we will be heedful of Antonio Benitez-Rojo¿s affirmation that ¿the culture of the Caribbean is aquatic, not terrestrial¿ and follow Aimé Césaire¿s famous injunction: ¿I shall command the islands to be.¿ We will move among texts and artworks in a kind of organic displacement, bearing in mind that the archipelago is in constant metamorphosis, an interchange between land and water, a seismic circumstance, a volcanic advent, an appellation of migrations, languages in flux ¿ in sum, a series of imbricated translations that overturn the idea of a single, stable vantage. A sense that, as Toni Morrison insists, ¿just as we watch other life, other life watches us.¿

Class Number

2313

Credits

3

Description

How is writing art? How is writing art connected to writing about art? How do various theories of poetics shape writing as art? This online course addresses the craft of writing in view of urgent issues of contemporary art. Students will develop and manage their own blogs and participate in continuing online discussions. The final requirement will be a finished body of writing. This seminar proposes a meeting with several authors whose writing, whatever form it takes (philosophy, film, poetry, photography...), is foremost a manner of listening. Giving pause to the scream so inscribed in occidental literary habits, this course suggests attending to muteness in various forms as a way to sensory knowledge, and further to something like a lost memory, of writing itself. Preferring ambiguity to certitude, questions to answers, perception as knowledge, in our work together, we will visit works that call upon wounded worlds, mute worlds, worlds without appeal, still capable of metamorphosis. With Frantz Fanon, Arlette Pacquit, Claude Cahun, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Kinugasa Teinosuke, Gao Xingjian.

Class Number

1860

Credits

3

Description

The written thesis is a significant portion of the requirements for graduation from the Low-Residency MFA Program. Its pedagogical value is equal to the significance of the thesis exhibition during the third summer residency and should be considered in tandem with the exhibition. In this course, students work with a faculty advisor to develop a written thesis that demonstrates a strong ability to synthesize conceptual relationships across disciplines in relation to the artist¿s practice. The submitted paper will combine theoretical frameworks to reconfigure concerns into a singular and powerful statement, and demonstrate the student's ability to address work across disciplines with confidence in writing and composition. ¿According to a Bambara proverb, `the people of the person are multiple in the person.¿¿ (Dénètem Touam Bona). The approach to writing encouraged in this section of Thesis Composition is oriented toward the multiverse, which according to Bona is ¿lodged at the heart of each human and holds at its core vegetal, animal, climactic, mineral elements that enter into combinations in perpetual movement.¿ ¿Multiple Forms¿ takes this combinatory seriously, and believes writing to be capable of accounting for such movement. As such the Theses composed under this rubric will be trans-genre, themselves translations of simultaneous forms, that need not be placed in competition with one another. Various forms of writing are able here to cohabit or to combine, to varying degrees of synchrony, and other forms of scoring (such as musical annotation or ideogrammatic drawing) will be welcome variants for the expression of a given set of questions. The disposition of forms is not merely decorative but a material aspect of the process of reflection ¿ if one considers that writing is thinking through, and with, the body. Prerequisite: Must be enrolled in the Low-Residency MFA Program.

Class Number

2019

Credits

3

Description

Guided Studies are intensive, self-driven courses of study that have a clear rationale for their configuration and articulate an expressed need in terms of a student's scholarly, material, and theoretical research. As a 3 credit course, a Guided Study constitutes 135 hours of study and production on the part of the student, including four meetings (virtual or otherwise) with a supervising faculty who has expertise in the research areas. On the Guided Study syllabus co-produced by the LRMFA student and supervising faculty, expected research accomplishments must be formulated, alongside a course description, learning objectives, evaluation criteria, a proposed timeline, a communication plan, and a suggested reading list or bibliography. Open to Low Residency MFA students only.

Class Number

2448

Credits

3