Aims and -Isms

For this seminar, we will focus on texts with charged design elements (experiments with fonts, typefaces, arrangement, simultaneity, synesthesia, space, time, and automation, to name a few) that were published between the 1870s and 1970s. These texts correspond with various “-isms” from the period: Symbolism, Cubism, Nowism, Futurism, Dada, Minimalism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Realism, Surrealism, Thingism, Concretism, Verticalism, Plasticism, and more. Early in the seminar, we will survey the aesthetics and politics of these -isms, and you will be asked to research one -ism in particular for a majority of the term. This research will involve bibliography and close reading together with deliberate alterations of an –ism to foreground what made that -ism compelling, or not so compelling, in the first place.

Our aim, then, will not be to "prove" anything about literature and culture, or to build tools, reveal networks, learn some code, or create whiz-bang visualizations, either. It will be to design and make texts differently, to better understand their significance by not only refusing to take them at face value (a hermeneutic impulse) but also prototyping what else they could be (a design impulse).

A Low-Tech Approach to Digital Studies

No experience with digital studies is required for this seminar. Assumed technical competence: you know how to send an email. Please note, too, that this course involves a low-tech approach to digital studies, with an emphasis on art, design, aesthetics, and tactile media over computation, networks, distant reading, and big data. You will not be required to do any programming.