Steven Reinhart

This writing-intensive seminar will explore what psychoanalysis and aesthetics offer us in an attempt to feel our way around a gap, a hole, that both traditions posit at the center of human experience. Psychoanalysis, regarded from its inception as ?the talking cure,? has taken its impetus from precisely that which cannot be spoken. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the first psychoanalyst, organized this new practice of managing the unconscious stifling of desire under modern life around processes beyond speech such as the dream, hysterical symptom, repetition compulsion, trauma, and the return of the repressed?-all of which testify to a certain pressure that drives our being in language even as it escapes capture in words. Aesthetic experience, like psychoanalysis, finds its power in a play of representation that brings us to the edge of what we can represent, and, in so doing, pushes us into contact with the force exerted within and between us by the unrepresentable. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the foundational theorist of modern aesthetics, conceived of aesthetic experience?-of the experience of the beautiful and the sublime?-as a momentary seizure by the feeling of ourselves as beings who cohere around something that we can feel but cannot express, that we can neither rationally explain nor communicate to one another. We will begin with a series of texts in psychoanalysis and aesthetics, and then we will conclude by turning our attention to a series of artistic forms as we use the concepts we have studied to think about painting, film, literature, music, and voice. Using in-class writing exercises and three short paper assignments with drafts and revisions, we will try to collectively develop a style of reading, of writing, and of thinking together that is attentive to feeling and affect rather than exclusively concerned with meaning, understanding, or information. Our writing together will be both an opportunity to learn and refine technical dimensions of writing and also to take seriously writing as a creative space for going beyond technique and into aesthetic invention.

How can we think about a world today that exists within the long shadows of histories of colonial extraction, violence, and racism? How does history shape the languages and categories through which we feel, speak, think, and act? What is the nature of power, and what happens to power when the one who exercises it to dominate others disappears from direct view? What does it mean to be free, or to decolonize a world or a mind? These are the kinds of questions out of which 'postcolonial theory' developed. In this writing-intensive seminar, we will begin with foundational texts from Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. We will then draw out the resonances of these writers through anti-colonial, Black radical, Afropessimist, feminist, and Marxist traditions that challenge and extend postcolonial theory's interventions into our concepts of 'theory' and political struggle. In the process, as a group working together in a studio writing class, we will interweave discussion with writing exercises oriented around conceptual problems at the center of postcolonial theory, including the power of writing itself. From various freewriting exercises to formal essays that will go through multiple processes of revision, we will practice several different writing styles in order to consider the various meanings of freedom, domination, and the possibilities of subversion as a guiding principle for writing itself. FYS II develops college-level writing skills, prepares one for upper level Liberal Arts courses, and allows one to improve expressing their ideas in writing.