For its pedagogical interest, I want to document the 23 seminars and 1 proto-seminar that I taught at Wayne State University since 1995. The seminars build on a series of dialectical faultlines, from the first offerings on the avant-garde and social modernity; literary subjectivity and language; cultural studies and poetics; social form and literary agency; to the crisis of modernity and the subject. The arrival of the New Modernist Studies offered a disciplinary framework for this sequence, followed by twin historical critiques of the avant-garde and postmodernism. As the series developed, I tried to construct spaces that would unite critical thinking and poetry. The series provisionally concluded in 2018 after three seminars that pushed toward new approaches at a moment of increasing crisis in the university: “The Poetics of Value”; “After the End of History”; and “Questions of Unreason.” While it was not a foregone conclusion that this level of ambition could not continue, it is now now time to look back and imagine what the prospects of this pedagogical endeavor may have been, what they were as they unfolded, and what they still might be.

1. ENG 7004 / Fall 2018 / Theoretical Issues in Cultural Studies: “Questions of Unreason in Modern Cultures” (https://bit.ly/2vgHFYL)

This seminar will bring together several interrelated areas of inquiry: 1) critical and psychoanalytic theories that address the genesis and form of “unreason” in modern culture and public art, including Critical Theory after Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Authoritarian Personality and psychoanalytic theory from Freud to Žižek; 2) theories of language and the public sphere from Habermas to ideology criticism; 3) theories of populism, racism, xenophobia, fascism, and gender and class antagonism; 4) popular movements that are relevant to these theoretical approaches, from hyper-nationalism to fascism, populism, and authoritarianism; and 5) works of modernism and the avant-garde that reflect on, diagnose, or exemplify questions of public unreason, from surrealism to the present. [See https://bit.ly/2vgHFYL]

2. ENG 8004 / Winter 2018 / Seminar in Literature and Culture after 1870: “2049: Historicizing the Present After the End of History”

The release of Blade Runner 2049 offers a chilling register of the global present and its dark futurity. This seminar will take the questions explored by the film, in relation to its postmodern progenitor Blade Runner (1982/1992), and explore the historical present through a series of dystopian registers. These will include global capitalism, democracy, and authoritarianism; climate change and ecocide in the anthropocene; the man/machine interface in ever advancing forms of digital technology; new class formations and urbanization; gender, sexuality, and the decline of patriarchy; war and the fragmented body; and new forms literary and artistic representation and response, both mimetic and antimimetic.

3. ENG 7033 / Winter 2017 / Postmodernism and Postmodernity: “The Poetics of Value: Modernity, Crisis, and the Work of Art”

We are constantly reminded in public discourse that our “values” have deteriorated and that we are living in a state of “valuelessness” that requires drastic measures. This seminar will take up the relation of values as represented in works of art to underlying forms of value and valuation they depend on—from aesthetic to moral to political to economic. Putting the question of value to works of art and cultural production, we will read a wide range of genres and text—literary, visual, and cinematic—with major theorists of value from Kant to contemporary Marxism. The seminar will begin with questions of aesthetic and moral values and valuation but will look forward to the turn to political economy and critique of modernity that emerged after the financial crisis of 2008, broadening it to include the “making” of value in an economic sense as a question of poetics and the valuation of the work of art.

4. ENG 8001 / Fall 2015 / Seminar in Literary and Cultural Studies: “Global Modernity and the Transnational Imagination”

This seminar will take up the “transnational turn” that has challenged the division of literature and culture by national boundaries, focusing on literature and art roughly after 1945. The seminar will be structured around four distinct subtopics, each emphasizing a specific kind of transnationality. First, we will take up the relationship between modernism and transnationalism in the period between the war and, through the end of World War II[. . . .] We will then turn to the construction of a post–1945 canon of international modernism, reading selected New American writers [. . .] and literary and artistic responses to the destruction of European cities. The third unit tracks transnational responses to the rise of neoliberalism and globalization after 1968/73, focusing on literatures of liberation; Magic Realism; and novels of global displacement. Finally, the last two units investigate the rise of post?communist and non?European avant?gardes (global conceptualism; post?Soviet and global Chinese literature and art) and experiments in cultural and poetic translation. The use of these aesthetic strategies to comprehend nontotalizable and differential global horizons will be stressed. The course derives from research in critical theory; modernist studies; transnational American studies; exhibition history; diasporic avant?gardes; and poetics.

5. ENG 6800 / Fall 2014 / Advanced Creative Writing: “Poetry and Poetics”

This course will develop an approach to teaching poetics—writing on the “making” of the work—based on my two recently published, co-authored anthologies, A Guide to Poetics Journal and Poetics Journal Digital Archive[. . . .] These resources may be supplemented by other collections, for instance The Poetics of the New American Poetry; Diasporic AvantGardes; Poetry and Culture Studies; Poetry After Cultural Studies; Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry; The Lyric Theory Reader; and The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry. [. . .] In this class, poetics will be explored as a kind of writing, often with critical, theoretical, or cultural stakes, but one that returns immediately to poetry and creative practice.

6. ENG 7033 / Winter 2014 / Postmodernism and Postmodernity: “Forms of the Present in American Literature and Art After 1945”

This seminar will seek to frame the current debate between presentism and historicism (to be defined) through reading a series of works of literature, art, and film in the American post–1945 period that claim to present the “present” as an aesthetic, ontological, political, and gendered necessity. The manner in which claims to the “present” are made in any given work of literature or art—the form of the present, its organization of temporality but also its account of the time in which it is constructed—will be key to our discussion, as will be the relation between aesthetic and cultural practices that mutually inform each other. Fredric Jameson’s claim that the postmodern creates a “depthless present” marked by the loss of history, the simulacrum, the waning of affect, and a crisis of subjectivity will be our point of departure, as we critically and historically rethink Jameson’s one-size-fits-all account of post-1945 culture as a postmodern “dominant.” We will continue, not simply assuming postmodernism but redefining what it means in terms of its representation of the present, through a series of historical moments.

7. ENG 8001 / Fall 2012 / Seminar in Literary and Cultural Studies: “Assembling Culture: Archives, Documents, Exhibitions”

This seminar will address several goals: first, to encourage and facilitate students’ first encounters with a selection of literary, historical, media, or digital archives, and to view exhibitions of visual art and museum collections as primary texts. Second, the seminar would address the nature of material culture and documentary texts and images as encountered in these forms of cultural assemblage, seen in relation to the use of documents and the status of historical and scientific fact in works of literature and visual art. Third, we would theorize the archive, document, and exhibition through a series of approaches: literary and visual theory; literary texts using documents (modernist and Objectivist poets); writing using chance procedures and digital and conceptual writing ; the history of Documenta (the German exhibition, which emphasizes conceptual, photographic, video, and conceptual approaches); and the turn in art history to document and study historically significant exhibitions. Each seminar will take up a separate facet of this interwoven set of topics; students are required to visit one archive to pursue an aspect of their own research and to visit and study one art exhibition. The Reuther Library, Detroit Public Library, Special Collections at the University of Michigan and the Lockwood Collection at SUNY Buffalo will be excellent resources for archival experiences; the DIA, MOCAD, and other regional museums will be resources for exhibitions.

8. ENG 8004 / Fall 2011 / Seminar in Literature and Culture After 1870: “Approaching Modernity: Modernism, Historicism, and “The Present'”

This seminar will approach the question “What is modernity?” through a reading of texts at the intersection of literary and aesthetic modernism, modern and postmodern theories of history (emphasizing the relation of narrative to “event”), and aesthetic and philosophical discourses of the “the present.” In reading modernism between historicism and presentism (as a radical focus on either the “new” in history or the present moment, the “now”), we will depart from the formal organization of modernist texts in two directions: toward understanding how modernism not only “includes history”—after Ezra Pound’s famous definition of the modern epic as “a poem including history”—but is subject to historical discourses; and how modernism’s privileging of the “eternal moment” may be read in a tension with its historicism, and is likewise a response to cultural contexts. The seminar will address these twin concerns, of historicism and “the present,” by looking at multiple genres, from the modern epic to the novel to the lyric poem to hybrid or documentary works.

9. ENG 7032 / Fall 2010 / Modernism and Modernity: “Poetics of Unreason: Desire and Destruction in Modern Literatures and Cultures”

This seminar will address the poetics and politics of “unreason” in twentieth-century modernity. We will begin by charting the politics of two diametrically opposed modern movements—the literary avant-garde and fascism; develop specific historical frameworks for both movements in World War I, the Weimar period and the rise of fascism in Germany, the Popular Front in France, the Holocaust, conditions of exile and emigration, and the “Stunde Null” of the early postwar period; and conclude with a series of theoretical accounts, from Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis to the Frankfurt School’s “dialectic of Enlightenment” to more recent accounts, that seek to understand the trauma of mid-century modernity. The seminar will offer core content in transnational modernism, organized around the relation of left intellectual responses to war and fascism; the liberatory and authoritarian aspects of modern aesthetic and political movements; and the politics of gender and sexuality in relation to these historical events.

10. ENG 7010 / Winter 2010 / History of Critical Theory: “From Example to Sample: Literary Theory as Cultural Practice”

This seminar questions the assumption that literary and cultural theory may be understood apart from the works of art or the cultures that produced them—that “theory” is in some way autonomous. Rather, we will develop ways of understanding theory in relation to specific works of art or culture as “examples”—from the autonomous work to practices of “sampling.” We will frame our discussion with a series of basic works of literary theory— from Aristotle, Kant, and Schiller to Benjamin, Adorno, and Deleuze and Guattari—in relation to their use of examples, from the time of writing or later periods. How may the Poetics be read in terms of contemporary dramatic performance? How can we understand Kant in terms of modernist poetry? How may we read Schiller’s notion of aesthetic education in terms of postmodern aesthetic practices? The seminar will look at the relation betweenn aesthetics and politics through a series of specific literary examples and/or practices of cultural sampling, from the romantic to the modern, postmodern, and the global/digital contemporary periods.

11. ENG 8004 / Fall 2008 / Seminar in Literature and Culture after 1870: “Regions of the Modern: Critical Regionalism and Spatial Form”

“Space is the place,” as Sun Ra famously claimed. In modernism, there has been a longstanding understanding of the “spatial form” of the autonomous work (Joseph Frank), while Fredric Jameson has theorized the “spatial turn” of postmodern culture, moving away from the autonomous work toward the sites in which it is produced and consumed. Recent work by critical geographers and the emerging discourses of globalization theory indicate that there is much more to it than that, however. This seminar will investigate the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic deployments of “space” as a category in modernist and postmodern literature, art, and culture. We will construct a theoretical framework anchored in modernist studies and globalization theory, and including gender and diaspora theory; for reading texts that map spaces of modernity onto aesthetic forms and philosophical projects.

12. ENG 7036 / Fall 2007 / [Title of course t/k]: “Research in Poetics” 2

This seminar will address the emerging field of “poetics,” as it was and as it will be. We will begin with the long tradition of writing in poetics and continue with a discussion of revisionist pressures on the traditional model; new reading strategies and theoretical debates; new media influences; and the current proliferation of innovative writing in poetics. “Poetics” is thus both method and object of our research: it is a mode in which the “making” of the work is explicated and a genre of writing itself that produces new meanings—as part of the agency of the work.

13. ENG 7010 / Fall 2006 / Introduction to Graduate Study [no subtitle]

This will be a rigorous, structured, but hopefully open and user-friendly, seminar meant to prepare incoming Ph.D. students for current debates in the professional fields in which dissertations are written, jobs advertised, conferences organized, and journals published. The seminar will be structured around four overarching themes that bear on current field-specific arguments: the status of the “author” after the revolution that declared “the death of the author”; the development of Critical Theory in relation to Cultural Studies, New Modernist Studies, and debates on Humanism; the range of identity politics, from race to class to gender, assumed in contemporary theory and their advantages and defects; and finally the question of “universals” in a historical period caught between radical particularism and global horizons. At the end of the class, the preceding sentence will have become entirely transparent, and we will have spent quite a bit of time defining what is meant by each of the critical or historical terms within it.

14. ENG 8050 / Winter 2006 / Seminar in Critical Problems: “Rethinking the Avant-Garde: Aesthetics, Negativity, and History”

This seminar will triangulate artwork, theory, and history toward a revisionist account of the “avant-garde” as a cultural moment that is continually being reinvented in modern societies. The avant-garde, in this account, may turn out to be less an end in itself than, to borrow a term from ecology, a kind of “indicator species” to larger cultural logics within a social whole. [. . .] The importance of history for this new account of critical theory cannot be understated; we will look at ways that nonteleological histories after Benjamin intersect with historical moments not defined by the paradigm of rupture that gave the avant-garde its original historical value. Our discussion, then, will encompass both revisionist critique and the persistent question of the negative in twentieth-century literature, visual art, and culture, taking as its point of departure the ways in which avant-gardes and their critical theorists imaginatively transformed the violence and rupture of modernity into new forms that are both critically and aesthetically exemplary, while placing these forms under critical pressure.

15. ENG 7300 / Winter 2005 / Topics in Twentieth-Century American Literature: “Historicizing Postmodernism”

This seminar will historicize the postmodern condition via a series of examples from postwar American literature and visual art (with postmodern music, especially jazz) in four distinct historical periods: 1945 to 60; 1960 to 75; 1975 to 1989; and after 1989. Each example—poem, novel, work of visual art, nonaesthetic text—will be seen in theoretical framework from postmodern literary and cultural theory. We will begin with the cultural politics of high modernism in (Eliot’s Four Quartets) and Fredric Jameson’s A Singular Modernity (along with key positions in the Frankfurt School)[, . . .] ending our discussions with “the end of history,” postmodern feminism and globalization theory, and the relation of signification to meaning in postmodern digital culture.

16. ENG 6800 / Fall 2004 / Advanced Creative Writing: “Poetics Seminar”

This seminar will investigate new kinds of creative writing between poetry and poetics, focusing on language-centered, conceptual, performance, political, interarts, and media possibilities. Students will encounter a wide range of poetry and poetics, including language-centered and post-language contemporary poetry; writing that addresses social and political concerns from the 1930s and 1960s; writing that uses conceptual strategies and documentary materials; and writing that works with the technical possibilities of new media and performance. A major concern will be the question of “social language” in experimental poetry and poetics; we will be looking for prior examples of the use of language taken from sources outside personal experience and shaping them to creative ends. We will also investigate the recent development of new media and poetics blogs. Our collective exploration of new possibilities in creative writing will thus bridge the gap between poetry/poetics and larger aesthetic, philosophical, and social/cultural issues.

17. ENG 7300 / Fall 2003 / Topics in Twentieth-Century American Literature: “Poetics of Democracy”

The word “democracy” has recently been used in questionable ways, generally as a kind of placeholder for whatAmericans possess and other people lack. But what is real democracy, and how might it be pursued? This seminar will develop a theory of democracy based on founding literary and cultural documents from the Enlightenment to the present, and show how poetry from the romantics to the postmoderns has become a site for reflection on and advocacy of democracy in its unfulfilled potential. [. . .] Theoretical frameworks will be constructed by means of a series of oppositions—between ideals of civil society and general will in Rousseau and the critique of hegemonic power in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe; between Ju?rgen Habermas’s public sphere and de Tocqueville’s observations of the deformed result in America; between concepts of representation and recent anti-representational critiques. Poetic texts will include Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Williams’s Paterson ; the postwar liberal poetics of Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, and Allen Ginsberg; radical critiques of liberal poetics by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and the Language School; and the work a range of younger writers, from Rodrigo Toscano and Edwin Torres to Brenda Coultas and Brian Kim Stefans. Readings in theory will address the private person and the public sphere, nationality and exclusion, identity and nonidentity, and America and global democracy. In the course of the seminar, we will address two fundamental questions: “What is democracy?” and “How does poetry pursue it?” as a specific concern of the genre.

18. ENG 8050 / Winter 2003 / Seminar in Critical Problems: “Reading Strategies for Difficult Texts”

“How to read” is the question of methodology for this seminar. In it, we will employ a series of reading strategies to elucidate the “difficult text.” What is a “difficult text”? It could be a work of high modernism that foregrounds structural complexity, or it could be Ground Zero. It could be a work that presents violence or sexuality in a way that is, in fact, hard to deal with. The difficult text could be generically unstable, existing in multiple versions and standing in need of an editorial theory to decide between alternatives. It could demand a choice between interpretive approaches that produce mutually exclusive readings. Race, class, and gender create additional difficulties for reading as they introduce competing interpretations. Reading the difficult text mayinvolve recovering a difficult or unavailable history, or it may depend on the nature of its technological mediation. Already the “difficult text” may mean: modernism and the avant-garde; texts foregrounding violence or sexuality; texts situated between competing theoretical approaches or interpretive communities: texts that are generically unstable or editorially undecided; texts that depend on an unavailable or painful historical context; and texts demanding an account of new technologies.

19. ENG 7050 / Fall 2001 / Topics in Literary Theory: “The New Modernist Studies: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics”

This seminar will address questions such as: What is modernism; what was modernism; and what will it be? How has recent scholarship changed our understanding of literary modernism in bringing forward new texts to read? We will begin by identifying some “old” approaches to modernism, after Baudelaire and Poe, and will then take up a series of revisionist accounts of works from the American 1920s: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; William Carlos Williams’s Spring & All; and Gertrude Stein’s Geography and Plays. The next four weeks will be spent on James Joyce’s Ulysses and a range of recent critical and historical discussions[. . . .] We will then will pause to discuss research methodology, contrasting textualist (Jerome McGann) and culturalist (Michael North) approaches to modernist scholarship,, seeing the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis as a synthesis of the two directions. We will also look at articles published in the journal Modernism/Modernity to see where modernist studies is going, and discuss recent theories of the avant-garde (Janet Lyon). The last three weeks will be spent on revisionist topics in modernism: the relation of the Harlem Renaissance to modernism; representations of gender and sexuality in modernist texts; and the turn from modernism to postmodernism. [. . .] You might want to begin reading Ulysses over the summer, and why not? It’s something you’ve always wanted to do.

21. ENG 7050 / Fall 1999 / Topics in Literary Theory: “Modernity and the Crisis of the Subject”

How do works of literature and art address the often-described crisis of the subject in the modern era? We will read a number of key texts in literary theory, and a series of representative literary works, as a part of an overarching critique of the central problem of modernity: the relation of the transformative and/or destructive effects of capitalist social relations to the integrity of the subject and the necessity for considering social modes of “subject formation.”

22. ENG 7050 / Fall 1998 / Studies in Criticism: “Cultural Poetics II: Social Form and Literary Agency”

This seminar will continue to investigate the nature of the “literary” in an age of cultural studies. Our approach will be to consider the “agency” of literary and cultural production in relation to larger and encompassing social forms. What kind of “action” does the work of literature or cultural production perform, and how do questions of social context define or limit what the work can accomplish? Picking up where last semester’s “Cultural Poetics” seminar left off, this course will be especially concerned with questions of representation and imitation; identity and nonidentity; ideology and the “political unconscious”; and the legacies of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and Foucauldian traditions.

23. ENG 7050 / Winter 1998 / Studies in Criticism: “Cultural Poetics”

A seminar on method, cultural poetics, and the nature of the “literary” in an age of cultural studies. The course will consider a wide range of investigations conducted at the border of literature as a form of cultural production, and will include 1) an overview of Cultural Studies from Matthew Arnold to Homi Bhabha; 2) an account of the relation of textual to contextual approaches to literature from the Barthes and Derrida to the New Historicism; and 3) in-depth class discussion of possible syntheses of literary and cultural studies. We will discuss a range of studies from, e.g., Theodor Adorno’s The Stars Down to Earth to Tricia Rose’s Black Noise to Margaret Cohen’s Profane Illumination and Kathleen Stewart’s A Space on the Side of the Road. We will also read texts that challenge the literary boundaries, from Paul Celan’s poetry to Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to C. L. R. James’s writings on cricket, along with a discussion of the nature of “literariness” in Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.

23. ENG 741 / Fall 1996 / Seminar in Modern American Literature: “Subject and Language in Twentieth-Century American Literature”

The seminar will address what may be called the “horizon of language” in American modernism and postmodernism. How does “linguistic subjectivity” in literature intersect with the contexts in which American modernism and postmodernism were produced? How does the “horizon of language” in literature involve questions of ideology and the social construction of subjectivity, national languages, race and gender, public vs. private languages? Each seminar will focus on a different approach to the “horizon of language” in literature in relation to critical approaches and creative possibilities suggested by it. In so doing, I wnat to move from purely formal approaches to the “material texts” of modernism and postmodernism toward a poetics of intersubjective and cultural dialogue.

24. ENG 579 / Winter 1995 / [Undergraduate proto-seminar] “Social Texts of the Avant-Garde”

This course will discuss Russian/Soviet, French, and American modernist avant-gardes as instigators and theorists of cultural, historical, and political change. We will consider how modernist avant-gardes, in different nations, contributed to social modernity, not only in terms of their critical negativity and countercultural politics. This course should provide an introduction to major avant-garde movements and their influences, as well as opportunities for more in-depth discussion. We will begin with two weeks devoted to comparing major figures of the three avant-garde movements: Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky in Russia; André Breton in France; William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein in America. We will then devote three four-week units to longer prose works, as well as developments in visual art and mass culture, from three major national avant-gardes in order to extend the meanings of the avant-garde toward social modernity.