Critical Social Inquiry 0292 - Poetics of the Unconscious

The course offers a sustained engagement with words and images, understood as constructions of the unconscious. We will work with words as images, and words with images. The unconscious is constructed in both psychoanalysis and art-making through associative processes: the convergence and divergence of elements (through repetition, variation, gaps, erasures, and contradictions) create emergent meanings that dissolve into nonsense, paradox, and questions. Students will create a poetics grounded in these processes. While a background in psychoanalysis, creative writing, or the visual arts is not a requirement for this class, those students are welcome. The goal is to learn a repertoire of strategies for reading the unconscious, as well as making new work with a conceptual sophistication grounded in visual sources and an original poetics. Students will be required to create a box of images and words, write a poetics based on psychoanalytic texts, and participate in classroom discussions and group collaborations.

Independent Work Writing and Research Students are expected to spend at least six to eight hours a week of preparation and work outside of class time.