Eng: Atlantic 18th Century (fall, 07)
Eng: New Media and Literature (fall, 07)
Cathy Davidson on "Why We Can't Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies" (and a thoughtful and infomed response to Wikipedia-clasm and the fear of collaborative authority)
Recent and past courses:
A blog for students of New Media and Lit, Sp 2006
The Early Modern Cyborg: Automatons, Machines, and the Limits of the Human
Other courses, Hollins University:
Writing the Body 1630-1750
Contemporary Literature and Media of Exile
17th/18th-Century Dramatic Lit and Performance Theory
Milton
Literary Theory and History
Feminist Theory
Queer Writing/Lesbian Literature
Queer Theory, Media, and Film (graduate)
Writing Science: Genre/Species
TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND THE UNIVERSITY AS AN EXPERIMENTAL SITE :
Transdisciplinarity -- a concept both overly idealized and undervalued -- is a theory-practice that both strengthens and invigorates disciplinary perspectives while challenging the boundaries and limits to what counts as knowledge. Transdisciplinary efforts within the academy offer the potential for new publics to form within the university -- spaces that disrupt the predictable recantations of 'things we know we know' and 'places we like to go' (including who we break bread with at lunch). The university should be a place that maintains an active and productive struggle between memory and experimentation: past knowledge and the traces of historical consciousness should be in creative (and at times testy) play with the idea of the avant-garde (the trendy, tedious, and transformational aspects of the latter concept intended and retained). Traditional, historical,and canonical knowledges require performances and rhetoric to re-animate their affective presence. Experimentation requires performances and rhetoric to inhabit memory. Spaces outside the university should mix freely with those within the university.
Knowledge can become transformative when it simultaneously inhabits creative, cognitive, performative/affective, and historical spaces. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is over-determined.
Transversality , developed by Bryan Reynolds, is a theorypractice that I (and my students) have found productive and liberating in writing, performing, making, and communicating (http://www.bryanreynolds.com/). Some features: Intellectual and creative production as "investigative-expansive" versus "dissective-cohesive"; expanding "subjective territory" through one's work and production; "becomings" -- including what you're not . (See my office door in Swannanoa Hall for an image of the "transversal snail" presented to me by former students of my queer theory class.)
Some of my students at Hollins and their transversal enterprises (just a small sample, and does not include the amazing work by students in off-line environments; stay tuned at this site for a link to the new journal Haptic to see more student work at Hollins in new media!):
"Apple" (http://www1.hollins.edu/classes/eng335/jarzabskil/milton.htm)
"Skull Headed Lady"http://www1.hollins.edu/classes/dance/website/Student%20Web%20sites/danielle%20web/home.htm)
:"She is Part Thailand..." (http://www1.hollins.edu/classes/dance/website/Student%20Web%20sites/alysha/HOME.HTM)