Poetics of Identity -- Spring 2012

Poetics of Identity
textual – aesthetic – social – technological

English 795
Comparative Literature 795

What is identity and why is there so much of it?

Spring 2013
Mondays at 12
FBH 222
Charles Bernstein

discussion list
(class members please subscibe)
email posts via web or patapoetics ---@---sas.upenn.edu

beginning of syllabus

An investigation of the multiple senses of identity for poetry, poetics, and literary scholarship. Starting with a preliminary look at conceptions of idenity in Poe, Hawthorne and Freud, the seminar will frame its considerations in terms of the frame analysis of Erving Goffman, Geroge Lakoff, and John Berger. Poetics of translation will be addressed via Yunte Huang and Walter Benjamin, as well as Pound and Zukofsky. The relation of language, ideology, gender, and identity will be considered through readings of Basil Bernstein on class codes in speech, as well as Luce Irigaray, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Nicole Brossard. Textual scholarship and the identity of the poem will be taken up via a study of Emily Dickinson’s holographs vs printed version of her poems, paying special attention to Susan Howe’s advocacy of “sumptuary values.” The status of the object of art (whether its identity is intrinsic, extrinsic, or in-between) will be taken up via Duchamp, and, in the background, Michael Fried, Robert Smithson, and Samuel Delany on Hart Crane. Another background issue is Jewish secular/ethnic identity. Two seminars will be spent on Gertrude Stein and the play of identity. There will also be case studies of poets, including Robert Grenier (class visit), Larry Eigner, Melvin Tolson, Langston Hughes, Audre Lord, Adrienne Rich, David Antin, Tan Lin, Lyn Hejinian, and Caroline Bergvall.
Some of the themes in this seminar will have been explored in other inter-related seminars: take a look at the syllabi. Also this seminar pursues some threads from "Objectivist Blues" in Attack of the Difficult Poems, itself a continuation of "The Poetics of the Americas" in My Way.

Silence remaind & every one resumd his Human Majesty
And many conversed on these things as they labourd at the furrow
Saying: It is better to prevent misery, than to release from misery
It is better to prevent error, than to forgive the criminal!
Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones!
And those who are in misery cannot remain so long,
If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth ...

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer;
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars,
And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power:
The Infinite alone resides in Definite and Determinate Identity.
Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually,
On Circumcision, not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion!

Blake, "Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion," copy E, object 55 (Bentley 55, Erdman 55, Keynes 55) [55, ll. 48–53, 60–6]

I knew
About the split identity
Of the People’s Poet—
The bifacial nature of his poetry:
The racial ballad in the public domain
And the private poem in the modern vein.
–– Melvin Tolson, Harlem Gallery

2. (Jan. 28) Frame Analysis

Fliegende Blatter (October 23, 1892, p. 147), basis for Joseph Jastrow's study.

George Lakoff, Moral Politics via on-line markets. (cp.: Wiki); or excerpts of key sections for this discussion: pdf. Please note the section on academic disciplinary and gender (pp.296-309)
respondent: Allison
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (1974) via on-line markets
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972) on-line markets or pdf (class only)
Wittgenstein: Duck/rabbit aspect blindness and "seeing as" from pt 2 (now called "Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment" from Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe: pdf

A Few Key Points:
Berger: three frames for social interpretations/interrogations of the art work: significance of reproduction (which can be extended to the "textual condition"), significance of the economic role (who owns the work, who consumes it and why, how it circulates); gender/class/race/ethnic/national narrative in the form or reception.
Goffman: what the "event" is (including the art "object") is determined by the frame (often there is more discussion about an event than the event itself; the discussion brings the event into focus); new frames often push out other frames and some frames stick (e.g. "stigma"); frames are cued or keyed; what is out-of-frame is often most significant. Frames are related to ideology (in Althusser's sense) and also "metaphors we live by" and categories: that through which we perceive/value. Compare also Wittgenstein's "seeing as" in Part II of Philosophical Investigations and especially his notion of "aspect blindness" (duck/rabbit).

Extensions: negations of frame (negative dialectics) versus conflict between frames (Blake's contraries) vs dialog (dialectic) among frames vs serial frame (serial poetry).
Does the text frame the interpretation or the interpretation frame the text? Or is a text a work without a frame?
Critic as artist/artist as critic: both critisism and art may engender new frames or context existing frames, or both. (Cf: "Frame Lock" in My Way: Speeches and Poems)
See also:
Ways of Seeing BBC version on YouTube:
1- "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": Episode 1 1/4 ; Episode 1 2/4 ; Episode 1 3/4 ; Episode 1 4/4
2- "The Female Nude": Episode 2 1/4; Episode 2 2/4: ?; Episode 2 3/4; :Episode 2 4/4
3. "Oil Painting": Episode 3 1/4; Episode 3 2/4; :Episode 3 3/4; Episode 3 4/4
4. "Advertising" Episode 4 1/3; Episode 4 2/3; Episode 4 3/3
Further Reading:
George Lakoff: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things; Philosophy in the Flesh; Metaphors We Live By, Moral Politics
Goffman: Stigma, Interaction Ritual, Asylums, Forms of Talk, Gender Advertisements, etc.
Louis Althusser: "Ideological State Apparatus"
Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory; see esp. Jameson's discussion of Adorno in part two of The Political Unconscious.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Sergei Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram", "A Dialectical Approach to Film Form" in Film Form
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye

Extensions

Object Staus: Medium and Identity of the Work of Art
Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood"
Charles Bernstein, "Artifice of Absorption" in A Poetics
Hart Crane, "The Bridge"
Samuel Delany on Hart Crane in Longer Views (pdf); Delany intro and interview by Josh Lukin
Robert Smithson, Collected Writings
Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero

Frauds to the right of us, frauds to the left of us
Ern Malley and Angry Penguins (& wiki): the complete poems
"Fraud’s Phantoms: A Brief Yet Unreliable Account of Fighting Fraud with Fraud (No Pun on Freud Intended), with Special Reference to the Poetics of Ressentiment" in Attack of the Difficult Poems

3. (Feb. 4) Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibility — fascicles, fragments, sumptuary value

Doubt which has the wisest man undone (Amherst)

4/5.(Feb. 11 and 18) Gertrude Stein and the Play of Identity
respondents: Caleb and Adebe (Feb. 11) and Racquel (Feb. 18)

Note: John Ashbery Feb. 11 at 7pm. Reservations necessary and may be in limited supply. EMAIL: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu

She do the identity in voices.
[in first session we won't get beyomd 1923]

on delire:
Jean Starobinski, Les mots sous les mots (1971): on Saussure and hyopgrams
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass: Saussure/Strabbonski: pdf (Penn only): Introduction (with special attention to Wolfson) and conclusion pp. 198-201

11. (April 8) Lary Eigner & Robert Grenier
Robert Grenier and Stephen Ratcliffe read at Kelly Writers House at 6pm on April 8
(Grenier class visit)
Eigner, vol. 3 of Collected: to be distributed in class
Grenier Eigner intro
Ben Frieldlander's intro at Gale
•

Robert Grenier
•Grenier at PennSound: Start with the two Close Listening Radio shows
•Sentences (complete) from Whale Cloth Press. In 2003, twenty-five years after its publication of the original edition of 500 boxed 5" x 8" index cards, Whale Cloth Press has made available a web-based version of this work. Before viewing: read the NOTE on the web version of this poem. Also see: image of the original box.
•"Rough" translations from Drawing/Poems, 2004
•A conversation with Charles Bernstein (Jacket, 2008)

Note that Stephen Ratcliffe (poet who wrote a book on Campion and teaches at Mills) will join us for the seminar. See his work on/with Grenier at Grenier's EPC and PennSound page.
Respondent: Ashley, Thomas

Note: special event on Tuesday, April 16, at 7pm at the Kelly Writers House:
Book launch for Recalculating, my new book of poems from the University of Chicago Press.