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, 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. Students will be required to write a poetics based on psychoanalytic texts, create a palimpsest presentation of images and words, and participate in all classroom activities and discussions, as well as small group collaborations outside of class.

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.